Reducing Product Reworks, Defects and Costs

A Tier 2 supplier of wings, with revenues of more than $3 billion, contracted with Competitive Business Solutions (CBS) in 2017. The client took over production from a Tier 1 supplier that was reducing its manufacturing footprint. The plant had seen significant turnover in both its leadership and labor along with prolonged inattention to capital improvements and routine maintenance. These circumstances seriously threatened the client’s ability to meet customer demands for delivery, cost, and quality.

Competitive Business Solutions (CBS) conducted a value stream mapping session to evaluate the program from a value-based perspective. From that perspective, CBS created a Continuous Improvement roadmap and a Project Improvement Team, or PIT, that laid out a comprehensive process to take on these issues. The team identified 577 action items necessary to improve plant operations and addressed them through full-scale Kaizen events, “Point Kaizen Events” focusing on single workstations, and “Just Do Its”—quick-hit fixes of issues with obvious causes and simple remedies. The number of actions grew to a total of 1035 as more were added through kaizen events and rapid response actions. Among two especially troublesome areas the PIT identified were employee training and maintenance of the plan’s CNC machine tools—or, more accurately, the near absence of both.

Competitive Business Solutions helped the client save 6 million dollars annually. Program on-time delivery was increased from 77% to 100%. CBS reduced the client’s labor hours by 14%, a total of 1,900 hours, and reduced quality defects by 43% CBS also improved CNC equipment uptime 30% and implemented program basic skills training. At the time of departure, CBS had trained 42% of the workforce.