Lean Training Boosts Office and Line Performance at Metal Craft
Our Client
Metal Craft Machine & Engineering of Elk River, MN, is a family-owned and operated custom-manufacturer. They make parts for medical and technology companies, with expertise in manufacturing parts for orthopedic uses.
The company offers a variety of machining and engineering services. These include CNC and manual turning, Swiss-type machining, gun drilling, honing, wire EDM, hole popping, finishing, heat treating, laser marking, passivation and Inspection.
In 1996, Metal Craft acquired Riverside Machining & Engineering in Chippewa Falls, WI. Riveside manufactures parts for the medical, computer and aerospace industries. Together, the companies have revenues of about $18 million a year, and employ about 140 people.
Our client’s problem
As a custom manufacturer, Metal Craft employees work on many different jobs in a week. Most of the jobs are small orders—from one custom part to 200. The company’s parts library includes more than 600 individual parts. Employees need to shift from one operation to another quickly and efficiently.
The company needed to improve order processing and ensure orders moved through the manufacturing floor expeditiously. In 2006, the company received funding from the City of Elk River to take advantage of lean training and lean implementation programs from Enterprise Minnesota.
Enterprise Minnesota’s Solution? Management Training
Company employees participated in Lean 101 training. After this initial training, several lean projects were initiated on the floor and in the office.
Metal Craft's Results
Project One - A Lean Office project involved a value-stream map of the order processing area. The map showed processing an order required seven distinct steps, and following all of them sometimes took as much as three weeks from the time the order was place until it reached the manufacturing floor.
To improve work flow, steps in the ordering process were adjusted and rearranged; the amount of time an order was held in any step was reduced to less than a day. As a result, orders typically reach the floor in a week or less—a significant improvement in customer service.
Project Two - Another lean project was implemented in the company’s inspection department. Because so many products Metal Craft manufactures are medical, inspection is a vital step. The lean project team discovered that inspections employees were sometimes overwhelmed with work. Products could sit in the queue waiting to be inspected for two or three days.
Cross-training employees from other areas increased the number of people able to conduct inspections. This reduced the amount of time parts remain in the inspections area. The company’s goal is to have no part wait in the queue more than six hours.
Project Three - This project aimed to reduce set-up time. The company formed a Set-Up Reduction committee. They developed lists of all of the parts needed for any job. The parts checklist allows employees to gather parts for the next job while they are running their current project. The effort has reduced bottlenecks, improved work flow, and reduced queue times.