The KAIZEN team of SEKISUI Alveo from the plant in Bad Sobernheim scored with their presentation “Increasing OP Ratio in lamination process”. SEKISUI Alveo develops, produces and sells high-performance polyolefin foams for adhesive coatings, automotive, constructions as well as industrial and consumer goods.
The SEKISUI Alveo team took part at the KAIZEN activity because they noticed a decrease of the OP ratio in lamination due to smaller lot sizes and an increased product complexity. In compliance with the SEKISUI Alveo Group policy they expected a reduction in costs and a raise of capacity by an increase of the OP ratio. Through a questionnaire of the 13 most relevant equipment modification activities and data collection at a selected work centre they found out that the set-up time of the required spreader rolls had the biggest impact on the OP ratio.
To examine the problems they prepared an action plan and performed a cause analysis leading to the conclusion that the root causes for the additional time expenditures were manual handling and measurement as well as the necessity of special tools. As a result, the KAIZEN team decided to tackle the problem through a new design of the spreader roll installation. This measure minimized the time for installation, because the need of reinstallation was eliminated. In addition, it allowed an easy adjustment by stepless positioning and decreased the operator effort as well as the failure chances through the implementation of a display and hand wheel.
Overall, the implementation of the new spreader roll installation at one position in a chosen work centre led to a saving of 30 working hours and an increase of the OP ratio by 1,8% resulting into a calculational additional sales of 60.000 Euro. Moreover, the workplace safety was improved. In the future, the team plans to transfer the new design to all lamination rolls at their plant and to utilize data collection and analysis for next set-up time reduction projects. The KAIZEN team did a great job and was rightly honoured.
Learn more about KAIZEN: KAIZEN 2016: Continuous improvement through exchange
