The purpose of this blog is to know which things we should keep in mind when our production equipment presents a chronic failure that causes micro stoppages.
We start from the fact that, for us, an improvement only comes after we've establishing and checked the basic conditions that the equipment must have. I will here describe both concepts.
They're correct operating conditions of the equipment which we call the 4M's:
That is, we must keep on each:
We run "improvements" when it's hard to maintain any of the M's mentioned above, that is, when the equipment continually fails these basic conditions, or when there are changes in the products.
As an example, I will mention an improvement done in our equipment with which we place the guarantee band on the bottles.
1. Analysis of the need- In this equipment, it was complicated to adjust the output discs since if one parameter was moved, 3 other ones had to be moved as well, or if the material changed, the same situation happened. This made it difficult for operators to make the adjustments.
2. Analysis of the parameters of each of the 4 M's- The options were to work on:
3. Based on the results of these analyses, we decide which option was the best to improve in terms of cost-benefit
According to cost-benefit, the option that implied a lower expense was to start working on Operation (and not method) because:
Yet, after evaluating the results of the training, we witnessed that the operation improved, but when we changed operators, the problem arose again, so, having this "rotation of employees" justification, the second most viable option had to be: to modify the equipment.
4. We redesigned the M involved
After analyzing the parts of the equipment involved, as well as the operation principle of each of them and the possible options that could do the job of these devices, we got rid of adjustments with the following improvements:
I hope this article has been helpful for you in terms of learning about how improvements are implemented in Sauza.
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