Total results of the session were very good, considering, that the used method is new for the organization. Due to this, part of the focus and time went to the learn-ing of the new way of dolearn-ing. Execution didn‘t fully go accordlearn-ing to the plan, which is also understandable, because this was the first time for most of the people. The original plan was to implement more already during the session, but now too much time was spent to create implementation plans. This would have been prevented with more detailed preparation work. Also some teams prepared their presentations to the closure meeting in different format, than it was re-quested. Use of standard format is important, because it helps audience to get bet-ter overview of the results, helps management in decision making and helps ses-sion facilitator to collect overview of the whole sesses-sion results.
Spare part picking team created required solutions to support one day delivery time. Needed changes to roles and responsibilities were agreed to enable, that picking service is available also during the evening shift. Implementation owner for this action was agreed and the schedule for implementation is by the end of March 2013. Lay-out change, which secures sufficient floor space and self places for spare part, was agreed. Implementation owner from the internal material
logis-tics team was agreed and the implementation schedule for this change is by the end of January 2013. Current spare part picking process is manually handled and it was clearly stated by the team, that to support one day delivery time, the devel-opment to SAP system is necessary. Requirements for the new SAP transaction are defined and the development work is started. The schedule for the release of this new feature is in June 2013. This SAP transaction development is the most important issue from spare part picking team.
Team software loading and testing, generated two development proposals and several ideas, how to reduce testing time. Most of the ideas to reduce testing time were decided to implement and the owner and schedule were also agreed. Based on the schedules, all actions will be implemented by the end of March 2013. The total potential to reduce testing time could be close to five minutes per product.
Final results can be validated after actions are implemented, but there is a large potential for reduction. Team also decided to follow up the progress of the imple-mentation plan on monthly basis and meetings were scheduled into calendars al-ready during the session. Team proposed that repairing person from production should be nominated. The idea is that this person can be trained to investigate identified problems in testing system or in the product quality. With good training and instructions this person could solve the most of the problems and at least all simple issues. This enables faster problem solving and will release time of PE person to some other activities like to testing system development. Management decided to implement this proposal. The other proposal of the team was to im-prove material flow of the production line by connecting the testing cables already in the assembling phase. Currently, these are connected in the testing phase and this takes time around 30 seconds. Testing phase is a bottleneck, so it makes more sense to connect these in the assembling phase, where is more time for this activi-ty. The second set of testing cables is needed, that the connection in the assem-bling phase is possible. According the PE representative, the second set of testing cables is already available and can be taken into use, if necessary. Management team decided to put this proposal on hold until the results and decisions of line
balancing team are implemented. This can change the requirements so much, that it is better to validate the situation again later.
Team delivery information reporting identified a long list of issues, which they agreed to solve mainly by the end of March 2013 at the latest. The original topic for the team was to find a solution for the challenges with the delivery information reporting. The reason for reporting problems is, that finished product is not avail-able in customer stock in SAP and due to this the reporting cannot be completed.
The baseline data of the errors with the root causes was taken in advance, but dur-ing the session it came clear, that the data is not useful for this specific purpose.
Due to this, it was decided to collect new set of data over the one month period.
This data will be collected by production and after analysis further actions will be agreed separately. During the session, it was noticed, that all spare part kits do not come automatically into production work queue. All necessary actions to cor-rect this problem were agreed and those will be implemented by the end of March 2013.
Team line balancing designed a new out to the production line. The new lay-out shown in picture 21 enables smooth material flow withlay-out waiting time or buffers before testing stations. In the new lay-out one operator can run the assem-bling and testing phases instead of two operators. At the moment it is difficult to say, how much time is needed to assembling and picking, if one person is doing it instead of two. The new lay-out enables rather well the arrangements for support activities if needed. This new lay-out was presented to all employees during the November 2012 and some of the employees participated also in the development during the session. The execution of change was designed in December 2012 and implementation is going to be in January 2013.
Picture 21. The new lay-out of production line created during the Action Work-Out.
Comparison of designed new working structure and current structure can be seen in picture 22. The new structure is giving rough idea of the future situation, but fine-tuning related to the working times, used in operation 2, can be done after the changes are implemented.
Picture 22. Current working structure with working times compared to the new structure designed during the Action Work-Out.
The Action Work-Out results of each team are presented in appendix 2.
In the end of the session the participants decided together to reduce lead-time from 4 days to 3 days starting from 1.1.2013. Team was confident, that this change can be done without any changes into current process. Current state analy-sis, implemented actions and the wide range of knowledge of participants gave the needed confidence to make this decision.
When the discussion about the next step was on the table, team was confident, that by implementing all actions agreed in the session, two days delivery time can be implemented. Schedule for all actions with owner, with the implementation sche-dule and with follow up procedure were agreed. According to the action plan, all agreed tasks will be implemented by the end of March 2013. Based on this, the decision was to reduce the delivery time to two days in the beginning of the April 2013.