Lean Manufacturing Case Study: 
Automotive Company
Date: January 2014                            Sector: Automotive                          Turnover: €50m                            Employees: 650

1. The Lean Improvement Team

Futurestate Solutions, Plant Manager, Production Manager, Quality Manager, HR Manager, Logistics Manager, Engineering Manager, Project Manager, Finance Manager, Shift Leaders x6, Improvement Engineers x3, Process Engineers x4, Quality Engineers x8, Maintenance Engineers x4, Technical Engineers x12, Operators x40.




2. Objectives

  • Move from push to pull in manufacturing
  • Maintain a hands on approach to change
  • Make changes sustainable

3. Major Issues

  • Plant not profitable
  • Scrap rates too high
  • Lack of discipline
  • No teamwork
  • Poor morale
  • Previous attempts with lean manufacturing have not been sustained
  • No improvement plan

4. Solutions

Strategic Planning, Teamwork, Employee Survey, Management Team Interviews, 360 Assessments, Risk Assessment,  Improvement Plan, Cross Functional Improvement Teams, Value Stream Mapping, SMED, 5S, Waste Elimination, New Layout, Kanban, Visual Management, Quality Control, Problem Solving.

5. New Methods

  • Policy Deployment
  • Cross Functional Teamwork
  • Improvement Planning & Monitoring
  • Visual Management
  • Production Planning
  • Daily Shop Floor Production Meetings
  • Kanban
  • SMED
  • Cellular Manufacturing
  • Problem Solving
  • Operator Defect Training

6. The Results

  • Moved from loss making to profit making
  • Yearly savings in excess of €500K
  • Avg. change over times reduced by 25%
  • Continuous reduction in cycle times
  • Scrap and defects reduction
  • Introduced Kanban to control WIP
  • WIP reduced from 5 to 2 days
  • New Visual Management introduced to improve Daily Management and Operational Performance
  • Senior Team trained in Lean Leadership Principles
  • Cross functional teams trained in Lean, Kanban, 5S, SMED and Problem Solving

7. Lessons Learned

  • Involving people in making decisions about their own environment is the only way to make change sustainable
  • Lean is not a set of tools to be trained in an office 
  • Making costs visible and understandable helped to gain buy in and sustain improvements
  • Cross Functional Teams need to be established to break down 'silo' working
  • Making the transition from a 'top down' culture to 'bottom up' will need coaching skills
  •  Lean is best deployed as a strategy for competitive advantage.

8. Future Opportunities

  • More problem solving carried out line side with operators will cascade responsibility and ownership
  • Problem solving linked to 5S activity will enable 'bottom up' improvements
  • Better data capture on machine downtime will accelerate improvement
  • Management Team developing coaching skills will assist with cascading objectives, responsibility and authority
9. Ongoing Support

Mentoring of improvement team to help sustain the gains from lean implementation. Roll out of similar improvement activity across the other 5 plants in the group.