14/04/2011

Best practices for mold manufacturers

Best practices for mold manufacturers

By Clare Goldsberry Published: April 10th, 2011

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Care to learn what the top mold manufacturers do to be successful? A few shared their secrets at the recent AMBA Annual Convention. Successful mold manufacturers make continual improvement a part of their business practices. A few shared their best practices in the Best Practices for Moldmakers session at the recent annual convention of the American Mold Builders Association. Andy Baker, Project Manager for Byrne Tool & Die Inc. - Byrne Tool is a 16-person mold shop in Rockford, MI, that has become more successful and profitable by implementing Lean processes. In fact, Baker said that the company has reduced its lead times on molds by 25%. "It's nothing new that we've created. We just implemented what we've learned," he said. "Good is the enemy of better. We need to improve the process through Lean manufacturing and the people through organizational development." Implementing Lean requires "commitment and strategic focus" to align the work with your goals, Baker told attendees. Byrne's strategy focused on several aspects: working together to eliminate waste throughout the organization; better organizational development; improved product development; customer intimacy; and being "global" - "We're your local partner with global value," Baker said. Simple things can also have a powerful impact on business. For example, just having a clean shop was a big plus for one potential customer. "We won new business strictly because our shop was clean when the potential customer came in for a plant tour," said Baker. Byrne Tool practices 5S: Sort - removed any un-needed items; Straighten - A place for everything; Shine - conduct a cleanup campaign; Standardize - maintain and monitor; and Sustain - make it a habit. The company also improved its manufacturing cycle efficiency. "Value add activity is when you're making chips," said Baker. "Non-value add is everything else. Lean focuses on the entire process." Some of the Lean practices really didn't cost a lot of money, such as organizing tools by having a box for every tool, which eliminated double ordering of tools. "Start with the end in mind," advised Baker. "Use creativity over capital." Steve Kimm, operations manager for M.S.I. Mold Builders - Located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, M.S.I. Mold Builders began implementing Lean a number of years ago. So, how does a company know when it's making progress on its efforts? You have to measure your progress. Get the metrics, said Kimm. Measuring provides a fact-based basis to understand improvements. It can also be used to benchmark for your competitiveness in the market. M.S.I. measures several areas of the business: 1) Sales per equivalent employee 2) Sales for the month per equivalent employee 3) Value add per equivalent employee Kimm said that value add is a measurement which factors in outsourcing of work that can help a company determine whether they should make or buy certain components, which impacts sales. "You did more sales but did you do more value add?" Kimm asked the attendees. M.S.I. also measures EDM errors per hours worked; number of welds per hours work; sales per square foot; and labor and material as a percentage of sales. "As the manufacturing process matures, labor becomes increasingly less," he added. "Metrics lets you know whether you're winning or losing. Metrics is fact-based and takes out the subjectivity, eliminating finger pointing."

Michael Bohning, President of Creative Blow Mold Tooling - When Michael Bohning purchased this Lee's Summit, MO, maker of extrusion blow molds for HDPE bottles, motor oil, gas cans, juice and other types of products in 2006, no one at the company knew anything about Lean manufacturing. Bohning, who has an accounting background and also worked as a management consultant, knew the benefits of improving operations and making the 35-person company more profitable, and became determined to use his experience to make Creative Blow Mold Tooling a better company.

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14/04/2011 Best practices for mold manufacturers With help from the Missouri Manufacturing Extension Partnership program, Bohning began educating Creative's employees about Lean manufacturing. The first initiative was Value Stream Mapping - "looking end-to-end how products move through the manufacturing process," he explained. The process involved several steps:
1. 2. 3. 4. Establish a multi-functional team Pick a product family and measuring the critical path to getting the mold built Identify the bottlenecks in the process and their cause Reorganized the shop to facilitate work cells

The biggest bang for the buck was in set-ups. The company videotaped examples of various set-ups and broke down each step of the set up. One set-up took 90 steps and several hours. "Having the video made it easy for the team to pick out steps that can be eliminated," said Bohning. "We identified wasteful steps and compressed the time it took to do a set-up by 20-25%" Bohning also implemented standardization and 5S, goal setting and metrics. One of the company's goals is to meet delivery dates. When dates were missed, no one seemed to know the answer to the question "Why?" By sharing information, the company was able to pinpoint why dates were missed, and improve the company's efficiency. When it comes to problem solving, Bohning said that the old method involved: Ignore it - and hope we don't do it again Management dictated a solution Playing the blame game - finger pointing Silo'd thinking - we've tried that before. "There was typically no documentation in the problem, a potential solution or implementation," Bohning said. "Improvements took weeks or months." With the new method - Kaizan - problems were addressed differently: Encourage people to surface issues and ideas as they come up Multi-disciplinary teams created to work together on problems Management facilitates a process of analysis, trials, and implementation of decisions and new processes Document issues, analysis, decisions and new procedures Close-out meetings (post-mortems) after each major tool build to evaluate the process. "We need to know what we did right and what we did wrong while it was fresh in our minds," explained Bohning. "Then when we build the next molds, we'll be successful. It's about communication."

As a result of all its efforts, Creative was able to take a mold build from 12 weeks down to 4-5 weeks, "and the employees began to see the value of what we were doing," said Bohning. "Never accept the status quo - continually improve."

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