Shoe production
Production of orthopedic shoe insoles. The orthopedic insoles can cause a change in muscle activity through specifically placed elements under the sole of the foot and thus influence posture and movement. Insoles are among the most frequently prescribed aids in the statutory health insurance system. It is therefore not surprising that the GKV-Spitzenverband repeatedly scrutinizes product group 08, insoles, very closely.
The customer decided to introduce various lean approaches from the Toyota Production System into production with our support.
The problem:
Pricing pressure, coupled with productivity losses over the past 2 years and on-time delivery below competitors, led to a continuous deterioration of the company's results.
Our client expected us to use lean approaches and work with production to quantify the main causes of productivity losses in 5 production areas within 5 weeks and to deliver corresponding demonstrable solutions.
The challenge:
With more than 20,000 different deposits with different BOM structures and more than 30 routings, the main cause for the productivity losses of the last 2 years is to be localized and corresponding measurable improvement measures are to be defined in cooperation with production and rolled out in production.
The lack of use of Industry 4.0 digitization tools in accordance with VDI 5600 for production planning and control additionally made it more difficult to trace the ACTUAL situation more easily.
Solution
With a Lean Value Stream, Material Flow and Bottleneck Analysis (TOC) for the production areas "Punching", "Gluing", "Forming", "Grinding" and "Packaging", we were able to localize the main causes for the productivity losses in cooperation with the team leader and the employees of the mentioned production areas.
All activities within these five production areas were recorded and evaluated using Lean Work Balance Boards and Lean Arrow diagrams.
The Result
The following measures have resulted in a productivity gain of approx. 70 min per employee per shift:
