Downtime in a shop was 3 hours a day due to late starting at the shift start and early stopping at the shift end. This is 14 % of the total available time. It was completely eliminated after LEANworx CNC monitoring was installed.
About the LEANworx user
Automobile parts manufacturer with 39 CNC machines connected to LEANworx. Machines are turning centers, VMCs, HMCs. Works 3 shifts of 8 hours each: 6 AM-2PM, 2PM-10PM, 10PM-6AM.
Before LEANworx
Before CNC monitoring was implemented, in every shift the production started late and ended early. The highest downtimes were at the end of the 2nd shift, and start and end of the 3rd shift. The average downtime was 1 hour per shift, effectively reducing the production capacity by a factor of 1/8.
After LEANworx
After CNC monitoring was started, the downtime dropped by about 25 % on its own, without any action, 2 days after LEANwox was connected to all machines. In 3 weeks the downtime reduced to less than 5 minutes per shift. Production quantities increased proportionately, by 12 %.
How did the transformation happen ?
LEANworx has a special feature for machine downtime tracking at the start and end of every shift, and shows this as a separate report. Each day’s report was emailed to the shop head the next morning.
After a couple of weeks of quiet observation, the report from the CNC monitoring for the previous day was printed every day, for all machines.. This was put on the shop notice board every morning. Everybody now knew everybody else’s shift change downtime. It became difficult for people to continue with what was basically poor work ethics.
Here is a report from a machine being monitored by LEANworx, that shows downtime at shift change for a machine that works 3 shifts of 8 hours each, with meal and tea breaks totalling 50 minutes in each shift. The report shows a total downtime of 18 hours for 3 shifts over 6 days, which means 3 hours per day. That’s a HUGE 14% of the available time. Also, notice that 14.5 hours of the 18, or 80%, are in just shift 2 and 3.
Firm and machine names have been changed to protect the identity of the firm.
