Increasing Output: Energy Metering
Output increased by > 70% and scrap costs reduced by > 50% in 9 months
Industry
Energy Management – Landis+Gyr, Smart Gas Metering
Project Length
9 months - 3 consultants
Objective
To assess potential and find ways to increase output and quality rapidly, without further capital expenditure.
Results
Output was increased by > 70%
Unit scrap costs were more than halved
> £3M of cost over-runs were recovered
Order backlog with existing customers was cleared
"The critical improvements Chartwell delivered brought our planned deliveries back on track and prepared us for the unprecedented ramp in demand our customers have requested over the next five years." - Steve Cunningham, SVP Infrastructure Programmes EMEA
Why was Chartwell brought on board?
The UK leader in Smart Gas Metering required a four-fold increase in output over a 2 year period. The client had already improved significantly and had a capital plan in place, but this would still be insufficient to meet demand during the upcoming two years.
Key Workstreams
Overall Strategy
- The site had 10 sub-processes, with multiple assets in each sub-process group. to reach the required production level, every sub-process required improvement. The bottlenecks were also highly mix dependent. A strategy was created with the operations, supply chain and other key stakeholder areas to ensure the optimal sequence for improving the assets was followed.
- The programme required the engagement of more than 500 people in a manually intensive process and several key suppliers, who were also capacity constrained.
Cell-by-cell improvement
- Local teams worked on a huge range of issues, including:
- Cycle time,
- Repetitive downtime,
- Material “flow” issues,
- Quality issues
- The result of these improvements at the bottleneck cell was to reduce cycle time by 33%, and all other cells also required improvement to avoid becoming "new" bottlenecks
- Combined with other improvement initiatives to decrease downtime, the output was increased by over 70%.
Lasting Improvement Structures
- The client team were coached during the project period to rapidly improve efficiency and material yield. Alongside these skills, further processes and systems were built to ensure that the teams continued to improve after Chartwell support for the project ended
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