| A £70 million turnover flooring materials business with 2 manufacturing sites |
| The business was producing insufficient output to meet customer demand leading to client dissatisfaction and potential loss. |
| At the first site Newton worked with the shop floor teams to increase the speed of the lines through aggressive challenge of existing processes. |
| These machines were seen to be highly efficient with 90% up time and 96% A-grade quality. Therefore efficiency improvement had not been considered a practical possibility. |
| Newton increased machine speed through a set of trials which challenged each contributing factor to the speed and prioritised them on their impact. Engineering fixes, programming fixes, process optimisation and ingredient changes then resulted in an 18% speed increase across the site. |
| The second site had a more complex process with high frequency, low duration, stop start and quality problems. By solving these problems and improving line control and product flow the team achieved a 41% increase in output. |
| To achieve sustainability of the efficiency improvements, the team developed the management systems and structure to ensure the key problems are continually solved by all levels of the organisation. All the managers and technicians were trained in improvement tools and problem solving. The role of Improvement Manager was created who championed the project and went on to own the entire improvement process. |
| The business has now increased output capacity without any additional capital expenditure to the extent that it can not only meet existing demand, but is able to produce and market additional niche products. |
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“We (production) have been under pressure from sales to deliver for a long time. It’s nice that the ball is now on the other foot.”
- Manufacturing Director |
| For more information on our work in this industry please contact info@newtonconsulting.co.uk |
