We are a commercial sheetfed printer with approximately 55 employees. Our 5S effort began in our mailing department as it was deemed the least organized functional area (a good "island of excellence" opportunity). It is currently sustaining quite well and we believe cycle times and error rates have been reduced (although more time spanned data must be gathered to quantify this accurately)[See attached images]. The pressroom is currently nearing completion. Finishing/Bindery will follow, pending purchase of some new equipment, and a complete redesign of the material flow will transpire concurrently.
MailBefore.jpg
Mailing before...
MailAfter.jpg
Mailing after...
Our TPM meetings and implementation focuses upon a renewed effort to schedule maintenance per shift, day, week, etc. and document these activities. Our expected outcome is improved reliability and throughput as measured by OEE data we are currently collecting. We are beginning a SMED/Quick Changeover Kaizen next week using a Spaghetti Mapping exercise (we expect to learn and establish benchmarks rather than significantly improve MR times - this is our first quick changeover effort).
Our Kaizen events to date include a Sales/CSR initiative which resulted in the redefinition of the roles to a more pre-sale/post-sale purity and the physical relocation of the CSRs (now called Customer Assitance Team [CAT]) to a more prepress/production centric co-location. We are in the process of applying a cellular manufacturing approach to our preproduction group by concatenating Preflight, Planning, Prepress and Data Processing (now called P3D team) to allow for concurrent processing in pursuit of reduced cycle time to value (Proof) outcomes. We are currently conducting a Kaizen event to Poke Yoke our job ticket with internal customers (production users) defining the desired process information presentation on the ticket. We have introduced a series of process improvement, quality alert, maintenance request, etc. forms with a weekly Continuous Improvement meeting as the reviewing body. We are beginning an additional weekly meeting involving influencial production associates representing each production functional area to review management's response to the above, assist in team building and provide positive information flow. We currently distribute a monthly newsletter we call "Lean Times" to inform all regarding projects and current progress.
Our ideal state involves a pull-based kanban production system with finishing process step defined product categories being flowed into a FIFO supermarket. Pull signals as product lines are depleted by finishing would determine the press scheduling. All current efforts have some relationship to this ultimate ideal state outcome. One of the problems we have is that as much training on the topic as we conduct, few comprehend the goal.
OK, that isn't close to everything, but should provide a good overview of our efforts.
