Page 33 - MetalForming May 2012

Roll Forming Corporation\Workforce Development
www.metalformingmagazine.com MetalForming/May 2012
Plant manager Tony Carriss notes that what the operators add to their hour-by-hour charts often turn into CI team projects, “so our employees know we’re listening to their concerns and actively addressing issues on the floor.”
team projects,” says Carriss, “so our employees know we’re listening to their concerns and actively address- ing issues on the floor.”
When CI projects generate addi- tional revenue for the company, or result in savings, RFC’s operators can make a direct correlation between their HBH charts, the CI projects they create and the size of their quarterly STEPS bonus. Many such projects deal with increasing rollforming-line speed and minimizing downtime resulting from maintenance issues or changeovers. Carriss cites several examples where CI projects have resulted in increased line speed by as much as 80 to 100 percent, by addressing issues such as machine lubrication and end-of-line parts handling.
Process Ownership Builds a Sense of Pride
Roll operator and team coordina- tor Ronnie Poynter acknowledges the jump in CI-team effectiveness as a result of his participation in the Lead- ership Academy. Hired in 1995 almost right out of high school as a trainee
roll operator, Poynter has progressed to step four—certified roll operator— in the five-step process (trainee, apprentice, qualified, certified and master) to becoming a master roll operator. And, he’s close to climbing that final step up the ladder.
Poynter works at RFC’s plant three, housing nine rollforming lines man- ufacturing products primarily for the office-furniture industry. He recalls that when management first intro- duced the CI program to employees some 10 yr. ago, “we were all curious to understand how it would impact us on the floor. But once we learned that it’s our ideas driving it and we really own the processes, continu- ous improvement became engrained in the company’s culture.”
Asked to note some of the bigger CI projects from his team, Poynter describes a scarfing process installed inline on one of his roll lines to peel off weld beads. The process created large amounts of spiral slugs that landed randomly all over the floor. “This created a huge maintenance and cleanup issue—time consum- ing and unsafe,” Poynter recalls. Reengineering the process—with the help of RFC engineer Keith Woods and a modest investment to upgrade the scarfing unit—now directs the offal neatly into a hopper on one side of the machine. The company is sav- ing more than $1500/yr. in mainte- nance costs, and operator safety has been greatly enhanced. Further, Poynter passed the process improve- ment over to another RFC plant where the scarfing offal is even more problematic, because waste materi- al is thicker and heavier.
McIntosh, who oversees two CI teams in plant three, shares suc- cesses from a team responsible for robotic welding. As part volumes generally have dropped for the plant, and setups per shift have increased, the team needed to focus on reduc- ing setup time. “The frontline oper- ators worked with our toolroom and maintenance department to develop a fixturing solution that is saving us
$3000/yr.,” McIntosh says. “While this might not seem significant, the team does this regularly. Manage- ment expects each CI team to devel- op at least one project per quarter; this particular team probably exe- cutes two or three projects each quarter.”
Prioritizing the Project Portfolio
CI facilitator Patty Sweasy—also the firm’s safety and training facilita- tor—paints for us the big CI picture at RFC. “We’re yielding anywhere from $350,000 to $500,000 in savings every quarter from our CI projects,” she says. Each CI project is documented by the teams and any savings result- ing from the project are reported to Sweasy.
“Come the new year, we ask the CI teams to use one CI meeting to focus only on ideas that will immediately result in cost savings,” Sweasy says. Teams brainstorm ideas and those ideas the team deems worthy of completion are added to the team project list. Then they are prioritized
Asked to note one of the bigger CI projects from his CI team, roll operator and team coordinator Ronnie Poynter describes a scarfing process installed inline on one of his roll lines to peel off weld beads. Reengineering the process now directs scrap neatly into a hopper, saving the company more than $1500/yr. in maintenance costs while also enhancing operator safety.