Workflow Improvements
To get great results, involve the whole team.
As the business has grown over the years, staff and equipment have been added to Structural Wood’s shop to meet immediate needs. Equipment was installed wherever it fit in to meet customer demand, but without a larger work-flow vision. Last winter, leadership decided to take their seasonal slow-down to learn and implement some Lean principles. They engaged CITEC to develop a program that taught foundational tools and immediately went out onto the shop floor to use the concepts to improve productivity. The results were that the team developed an understanding that there was lack of flow between the sawing operation and the truss assembly operation.
The team used the tools they learned in their Lean Foundations training to develop a strategy and then implement a floor plan redesign. The saw (the constraint) was relocated to optimize the flow of the WIP to the assembly operation.
The results:
- A 15 percent efficiency improvement
- There is now enough cleared floor space for a new truss machine in the same shop floor footprint
- 3-4 new jobs will be added
- This project was team-driven and Structural Wood staff maintain the knowledge, skills, and corporate culture to drive improvement projects on their own moving forward.
Mike McGee, owner, says, "CITEC has been an integral part of our success from our inception. Through the years they have provided support to us in several ways. The latest project really helped boost us into making some of the changes we have been talking about for years. It also helped empower our employees as they were able to make changes to their jobs, and see the benefits first hand. We will continue to work with CITEC as we are expecting large growth over the next several years."
