The Way to Lean Production for the Medium/small-sized Manufacture Enterprise Shanghai Sida Company The abstract: According to the problems existing Sida Company, such as long production period, too many semi finished products, slow response etc., in present case, we discuss how to import the value stream-based lean production system into the medium/small-sized manufacture enterprise Shanghai Sida Company, and seek the strategy realizing lean production target by valuestream- status mapping analysis and value-stream- future mapping description. This could provide reference for the other medium/small-sized enterprises in improving production status. Key words: Lean Production; Value Stream; Project Management 0 Preface Xiao Bo works in a foreign-funded company-Hansen Company. When people is talking about Hansen Company，we have to say something about its parent company UDC. As the industry leader, UDC is the world's top 500 company, and has maintained the world's leading technology. Its three global R & D, production and service bases are located in the United States, France and Shanghai, China, which work together to build their products and services to meet the needs of customers around the world. Hansen Company buys hundreds of millions of yuan a year in materials and parts. Its suppliers mainly concentrated in eastern China and some are scattered in the Pearl River Delta and elsewhere in Asia. In order to meet the needs of customers, Hansen, in the process from raw materials to final products, plans、organizes、coordinates and controls the logistics, information flow, value flow and work flow, and seeks to establish strategy and Partnership between supply, production, sales and customers to minimize internal friction and waste, to optimize the overall efficiency of the supply chain. Sida is an important part of Hansen's supply chain, which provides the core components for Hansen’s products. Sida was born with the rapid growth of its core customer Hansen's business. At the beginning of its establishment in 2002, it guaranteed the Sida company's 1 million yuan purchase quota and gradually transfer its core components worm and gear to Sida company. In 2006, the company began to completely interrupt the pattern of multiple purchases, and all the worm and gear were exclusively supplied by Sida. Obviously, the deviation of any factor of the price, delivery and quality of Star's products will have a serious impact on Hansen's reputation. In recent years, with the expansion of the company's business scale, Sida company, which is an important supplier of Hansen company, has problems such as the delivery period cannot meet the requirements of Hansen company, and the product quality is fluctuating. Therefore, Xiao Bo and his colleagues were sent by Hansen company to Sida company to solve the production problems. 1 Corporate Background 1.1 Company products and sales The main customers of Sida are Hansen and Mork, which are concentrated in the production and processing of worm and gear. Due to the strong demand from the market in recent years, China's machinery processing industry is developing at a high speed, the market is broad, and production and sales are booming. In this industry context, Sida company has achieved rapid development. In the past eight years since the company cooperated with Hansen, the company's business volume has been following Hansen's growth rate of around 30%. 1.2 Company structure and personnel composition Sida Company is a private enterprise Its organizational structure is set up according to its functions. The general manager is the core of the company. The production manager is responsible for the overall production and operation within the factory. The manager representative is responsible for the quality system construction of the company. Maintenance; at the same time, the Ministry of Business, Administration, Finance, Technology, Production. As of the beginning of 2009, the company has a total of 60 employees, the factory direct production staff accounted for 70% of the total staff, of which more than 80% of engineering and technical personnel have more than five years of work experience. Taking into account the production safety at night and the reliability of product quality, the factory set up two shifts of white and middle shifts and disabled night shifts, with 8 hours of work time per shift. 1.3 Introduction to production and operation Depending on the equipment, the manufacturing team consists of six teams including the number of cars, the general milling group, the hobbing group, the grinding group, the machining center, and the auxiliary group. The company's production organization is based on assembly line production and batch production. Each process is produced according to the production instruction order issued by the planning department. In order to reduce the time required to replace the fixtures due to the switching of different products, the production volume of each batch is relatively large. For products that are cross-regional or cross-shift, the semi-finished products will be put into storage after the completion of the pre-process workshop or the team, and the restocking list will be used for the production of the post-process workshop or the team, until all the finished products are processed and completed, and the production plan can be ended 2 Xiao Bo's investigation After receiving the task, Xiao Bo and two colleagues set out to investigate the production of Star. They were looking for someone to have a meeting, observe and measure on the spot, and they were busy, and they worked for five days. 2.1Delivery period cannot meet customer requirements The on-time delivery rate for volume product customers averaged only 89% in 2008. The production management system of the enterprise is imperfect, and factors related to production, such as materials and manpower, which are often unbalanced with production requirements, and then delay production time and ultimately leads to delayed delivery 2.2low yield It is manifested in the following two aspects: ● Production preparation time: According to incomplete statistics, the first part of Star's current major product important process debugging is more than one hour, which is 5~20 times of single product processing time. ● Product quality index (total output per product / total output): Star's overall product quality index is 89.15%, of which the finished product output rate is 93.31%, and the scrap rate is 4.16%, which means that 4.16% of the products are directly scrapped, and the other 2.53% of the products are subject to a certain degree of scrapping according to whether the customer concessions. The overall scrap rate is over 5%. 2.3 Long production cycle and large inventory Star has adopted a push-to-mass mass production model, and the production cycle has been extended by large quantities, resulting in long delivery times and delivery delays. The flow of different processes for different types of products is independent of each other. Each batch of products must go through these processes in turn, and each process has a waiting time at the beginning of the transfer production, so this affects the production cycle. 2.4Chaos at the production site Although the company's production site had implemented “5S management”, an environment that enhances the environment of the enterprise, which consists of SEIRI, SEITON, SEISO, SEIKETSU and SHITSUKE,. The management model, but only for a long time, after the staff saw no one to inspect, supervise, do not do the same, did not persist, and eventually halfway. So often some residual materials, to-be repaired, scrap, etc. stayed at the scene, It occupies both the place and the production. 2.5 Production information cannot be shared in time At Star, many production information cannot be shared. The next process often fails to know the production of the previous process, such as the specific completion time, quality, quantity and other packaging requirements. When the customer's request changes, because the change of production information can not be timely informed by the relevant producers, some of the products in the process are not urgently needed by the customer, and the products urgently needed by the customer cannot be put into production immediately. 2.6 extensive production process management The arrangement of Sida's production process is basically based on the three orders of orderdistribution production, and the problems of connecting, interconnecting and restricting each important management element within the enterprise are not considered. The production process is often only a simple mechanical push operation, lacking scientific and data analysis such as production demand, production capacity, production time, production coordination, production forecasting, and production monitoring. 3 Xiao Bo’s view “In terms of cost reduction, it is necessary to reduce labor costs and eliminate waste in logistics activities. Rework due to unqualified quality, backlog of semi-finished products and finished products due to blind production, etc., all cause waste in logistics activities. Therefore, it is necessary to use total quality management to improve the production quality of the products; to use pull-type kanban to eliminate over-production. In addition, to reduce labor costs, it is necessary to reduce unnecessary supervision, fully trust employees, and play the collaboration of employees Spirit. How to maximize sales revenue? Xiao Bo went on to say: “Product quality and delivery time must be guaranteed, and quality and guaranteed on-time delivery can be improved by implementing total quality management and concurrent engineering.” 4 development of lean production 4.1 Method selection and target determination Xiao Bo and his team decided to implement Star's lean manufacturing advancement in accordance with the continuous improvement method of UDC's operating system. All activities necessary to produce a particular product, and classify these activities into three categories. ● Value-added steps that directly create value, such as product assembly and part processing activities; ● Other steps that are inevitable under existing technology and production conditions, although they do not create value; ●Do not create value non-value added steps; such as the back and forth handling of parts, resulting in overproduction of products; 4.2 Drawing the current status of the value stream Xiao Bo’s Group first sorted out all the major products of Star Company. From the statistical results, the worm gear business is the core business of Star Company, accounting for 77.2% of its business. After a group discussion, it was determined that all worm gear products were the subject of lean production improvement. 4.3 Analysis of the current value of the value stream - looking for waste points The team members know that the significance of drawing a map of the value stream is to discover the waste that exists in the factory's production process, and then to find out the improved solution and implement it by analyzing the reasons. That is, by implementing lean production to eliminate waste in the value stream of products. They look for quality, equipment, materials and personnel. 4.4 Analysis of the Status Quo of Value Streams--Root Analysis Through the unremitting efforts of the team and Star employees, a thorough root cause analysis was carried out in conjunction with the current state diagram of the value stream. The analysis found that the main reasons for the poor value flow are as follows (1) The customer's consignment strategy results in high finished goods inventory; (2) The habitual mass production method leads to high in-process inventory; (3) Non-fast switching tooling results in too long changeover time and low production efficiency; (4) Failure to implement 5S management leads to chaotic on-site management and low efficiency; (5) Failure to implement full production maintenance results in low equipment efficiency; (6) There is a bottleneck in the equipment, resulting in poor process flow, prolonged production cycle, and further increase in inventory. (7) No standard operation guides production and switching, resulting in unstable quality and extended switching time; 4.5 Drawing the value stream future status map After depicting and analyzing the current status map of the value stream, the following is a picture of the future state of the value stream. How to portray the future of value stream? Xiao Bo has used his experience in learning lean manufacturing at UDC, which is a necessary rule for planning future value streams. Guideline 1: Production by customer beats Guideline 2: Finished product strategy; Guideline 3: Continuous flow Guideline 4: Pulling the system; Guideline 5: Single Point Plan (Planning Point) Guideline 6: Single piece spacing; Guideline 7: Planning cycle 5. Ending The team led by Xiao Bo draws a picture of the value of the company's value stream, based on which to find waste points and analyze the root cause of waste. Then they design a lean future value stream, and the next step is to find a solution or strategy to achieve the goal of lean production.
