A Story of Kaizen
Why is this an important issue?
Current Situation
- We have 70 days of tensile testing inventory.
- Because testing is not complete orders are not closed.
- Product is shipped to the customer before the test are complete.
We studied the tensile testing process
Prepping the sample consists of 5 steps
We Mapped the Value Stream
- The process had 69 days of inventory
- The process had 78 min of value added time
- The bottle neck was the surface grinder used to prepare the samples
We developed a new process
We replaced the surface grinder with a mill and eliminated the tensile testing backlog
Results
Inventory was reduced from 70 days to 3 days