TOYO SEAT: Lean Six Sigma Mentoring Increases Throughput, Decreases Overtime
Words are not enough to express the support we received from The Center’s business solutions managers, trainers and office staff. The support was still available to us even after the training and exercises were complete. The training helped us to realize our inefficiencies through data collection and enabled us to have a better understanding of performance as we feed forward our new practices not only in our Michigan plant, but in our Kentucky and Tennessee plants as well. Job well done!
-- Kim Connell, C.I. Advisor
Toyo Seat USA Corp (www.toyoseat.com) builds seat frames, latches, racks, risers and swivels for nearly every Tier I automotive seating supplier. Toyo Seat offers a range of services to customers, including manufacturing, sales, purchasing, product development and program management. Toyo Seat employs 210 at their U.S. headquarters in Imlay City, Michigan.
Challenge
Toyo Seat's highest volume production cell experienced increased labor demand to meet higher releases annually. Combined with increased complexity in production due to enhancements made to the seat frame part, product flow through the cell consequently became increasingly unbalanced leading to higher overtime and scrap without any sustainable increase in production.
Solution
Toyo Seat management came to the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center (The Center) – Northeast for an Operational Assessment on performance metrics including yield, uptime, throughput and labor cost per part. From these metrics, The Center determined the three areas with the most opportunity for improvement to be overtime, downtime and scrap.
At The Center's recommendation, Toyo Seat engaged in Lean Six Sigma mentoring. In conjunction with production cell team members and mid-level management, The Center developed an A3 Plan of Action using the data-driven DMAIC model (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) to improve cycle times within the cell.
Results
- Overtime costs reduced by $40,600 annually
- Cycle times reduced by 20%
- Monthly cost savings of $8,450