Situation
A Vice President of Operations for a US-based electronics manufacturer found his team struggling to identify opportunities to improve their business. Turf wars were common, as were racks of components waiting for rework and retesting.
Critical issue
Bright, motivated engineers worked independently to optimize their domain. In doing so, they competed with each other for resources, missed common problems that spanned their areas of responsibility, and were unable to prioritize the most important issues for the entire organization.
Reason
The organization lacked timely, accurate, unbiased visibility into the performance of the entire manufacturing floor.
Vision
The VP envisioned a single standard to aggregate, contextualize, analyze, and visualize manufacturing performance in real time.
Hertzler Systems provided
Hertzler Systems provided that single standard.
Results
In ten months the organization improved First Pass Yield by over 12% and reduced or eliminated racks of rework. This significantly reduced WIP and improved order to cash cycle times.
Having a single standard increased the team’s capacity to focus on the critical performance issues. According to one engineer, “We’ve always tried to focus, but we’ve never been able to get the resolution we needed. In the past we could see we had one failure type at one station. If I wanted more information, it would take weeks, and then it was just from one station.
“If I wanted data, I had to go mine it myself. People would be reasonably questioning my political motives for the conclusions I’d draw. Now we have one standard, It’s Hertzler, and anyone can get the same data. It takes the politics out of the situation. That’s a huge cultural shift.”
