FerroStamping, Inc.

A Job Redesign Case

Ferro-Stamping, Inc.

Introduction

A medium sized metals machining Company Has several multipurpose machine tools such as drills, stamping presses, grinders, and other metal processing tools. FSI is Job-Shop operator, Produces customized components for several hundred customers through smaller or larger order sizes.

Ferro-Stamping, Inc.

Findings

Every time there is a product change on machine, Operator spends from 15 min to 3 hours setting up the machine which involve changing dies, changing drills settings, lubricating the machine, cleaning the machine and various other things related to machine.

Working at full capacity, FSI found it difficult to make a profit and was beginning to have trouble delivering products on time.

Ferro-Stamping, Inc.

Roger

Hendrick,

the

Vice

President

of

Marketing, believed that prices could not be

raised significantly without a loss of customer.

Company looked in for Michael Jones, the VP of Operations, to reduce costs and improve

delivery.

He decided to hire an experienced operations consultant Ms. Ann Dolay, to be his chief of staff

with primary responsibility for studying current

operations and recommending improvements.

Ferro-Stamping, Inc.

Problems
After

a intensive study, Ms. Dolay decided

that the stamping department was one of

the biggest problem areas.

Various analysis was done by Ms. Dolay as follows:

Ferro-Stamping, Inc.

Department-level Analysis

Materials in system was being handled too often.

Was handled by an operator who loaded it

and removed it from machine, but he sat idle until it was moved to other department.

Ms. Dolay felt that there is an always a large amount of WIP inventory on the floor.

Ferro-Stamping, Inc.

Redesigning the Press Operators Job

Coprocessing to reduce idle and semi idle time. Improvements was to get the operators to perform some of the machine setup work for the next job while the current job was running.

(converting semi-idle time into active work time)

An additional semi idle time was used to remove

scrap from the press and transport it to scrap

collection area.
(it reduced the semi idle time from 29% to less than 10%)

Ferro-Stamping, Inc.

Stamping Press Operator Analysis

Ms. Dolay performed a Time and Motion Study of an operator and then converted it into several workmachine charts. He analysis shows that:

Stamping press operators were fully utilized only 66% of

the time; 29% of the time they were semi-idle while monitoring machine operator, and

5% of the time they were completely idle for materials to

be delivered or waiting for maintenance workers when the machine broke.

Ferro-Stamping, Inc.

Transportation

should be done in idle and

semi-idle time
Operators

in each department would be

responsible for transporting their output to

the next production department.

Each

operator was provided with 2 hand

trucks instead of one to manage input and output of material.

Ferro-Stamping, Inc.

Micro Motion, Methods and Ergonomics Analysis

Significant

improvement

in

worker

productivity and an efficient increase in

stamping capacity.
Ms.

Dolay was still troubled by the low

press utilization.

Ferro-Stamping, Inc.

Ms.

Dolay attacked these problem in

following ways.

Setup Improvements Scrap Removal

Maintenance

Final Analysis

Ferro-Stamping, Inc.

Questions

After these changes, the two press operators were busy nearly 100% of the time, while the

presses were still idle approximately 35% of the

time. Explain how you could increase production capacity further without buying a another press.

Ferro-Stamping, Inc.

Suppose you added another employee to the

stamping department who would be primarily a helper. What task would you have this person

do to increase the total output of the

department, not simply give the two operator more free time?

Ferro-Stamping, Inc.

Thank You