Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) improvement of printed circuit board production through systematic elimination of 68% flow-stoppers in just two months using Fault Tree Analysis (FTA).
Situation:
The global technology leader in specialty materials for automotive, wireless and mobile applications was struggling to cope with the production of high-tech printed circuit boards at its German plant. Demand was rising faster than new equipment could be brought on line. Customers, employees and investors were dissatisfied.
Problem:
Excessive process variability and persistent quality issues kept engineers and managers in constant firefighting mode. Instabilities and breakdowns pushed people, machines and management to their limits, while the root causes of non-performance remained unresolved. The throughput problem had to be addressed quickly to keep up with customer demand.
Solution:
Quality Kaizen Blitz over a five-day work week. Day-one: Gemba walk to observe products, processes, people, problems. Day-two: assembly of cross-functional team from manufacturing, engineering, planning and quality for material and information flow analysis (MIFA) to understand performance and barriers. Day-three: Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) to identify cause-effect relationships of operational losses. Day-four: development of 26 countermeasures to address non-availability and non-quality. Day-five: alignment on project organization, roadmap, dashboard, governance to ensure rapid implementation.
Impact:
Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) in bottleneck increased from 69% to 90%, reducing operational losses from 31 to 10 points (-68%). This initial throughput gain was so motivating that the team expanded the scope and scale of the program to tackle a larger part of the value chain, addressing the multi-plant network. Within just two months, deliveries caught up with demand and the management team happily reported green figures to corporate.
Facts & Figures
- Industry: Engineered Materials
- Revenue: USD 800 million
- Employees: 2,200 global
- Scope: German plant
- Engagement: 2 months
- Support: 8 days total
- Role: Efficiency Expert
- Bottleneck Losses: -68%
- Plant Output: +7%
Client Feedback
"We got excellent results. You can see a significant performance gain, which is triggering positive reactions here (management team onsite). Value-driver trees are updated and used for prioritization. Finally, the bottlenecks have been eliminated to the point where we are emptying the intermediary-goods storage."