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Breakaway Lean® - Case Study by David Barber, General Manager - Omnex Canada

Omnex Canada Inc. would like to share with you a real life success story of an implementation of the Omnex Breakaway Lean® trademarked approach to implementing Lean.

Over six months Omnex worked diligently with a large automotive Tier One supplier with remarkable breakthroughs. At the end of eight initial bi-monthly Lean/Kaizen manufacturing events, the following improvements were documented:

1. Work In Process decreased by over 25%
2. Changeover time reduced by 46%
3. Number of checking steps down by 43%
4. Overall distance traveled reduced by 30%
5. Handling (touch points) reduced by 11%
6. Cycle time improved by 6%
7. Several safety risks eliminated
8. Significant floor space reduction

Other improvements occurred in the 5S housekeeping program, reduction of spare parts and storage containers, and a true establishment of additional key baseline for the number of value added tasks, the true value add time, and the amount of resources used for the original state (Monday morning), current state (Friday afternoon), and the document future state (parked continual improvement actions).

This organization-wide cultural transformation extended to non-manufacturing processes as well. Many additional weekly Kaizen events were also repeated on supporting transaction processes such as sales quoting, product and process design, scheduling, and engineering change notice processes. Similar remarkable improvements to the overall flow of information, increase in value added time, and significant reduction in the number of errors occurring, were captured and implemented to achieve an improved future state.

Over 300 employees were directly involved in this transformation. Each member of this Lean/Kaizen team will remain the key contributors of the upcoming series of Kaizen events and activities. The new empowered process owners will work with their interrelated process teams to strive to achieve the "ultimate" future state for the entire organization.

To find out more about Omnex's workshops and consulting services in Breakaway Lean®, Excelerated Six Sigma® or Unified Lean/Six Sigma™ please contact:

CALL OR EMAIL
Omnex Business Development
(734)761-4940
info@omnex.com