Lean manufacturing is normally associated with long-run, repetitive manufacturing. But while the production facility of Redmond, Wash.-based Data I/O is geared towards small quantities of highly variable products, they still managed to make significant lean improvements.

Data I/O Corp. manufactures equipment and software required to add data and firmware to semiconductor devices. Data I/O's FlashCORE technology is the choice of leading manufacturers of wireless devices, handsets, television/set top boxes, digital cameras, automotive electronics, appliances and industrial products. This requires close collaboration with customers and by definition, a manufacturing environment characterized by small volumes of a large variety of complex products.

"Our customers might order several or just a few memory devices," Data I/O Production Manager Dwayne Jones said. "They need to program those blank devices with an operating system. Our machinery allows them to take that information and put it into that device. We have hardware as well as software, algorithms and other tools that allow them to do that. Some items, like an adapter, may be delivered only once. Our highest quantity for an item might consist of hundreds."

Plant Floor, IT Solution

According to Jones, the company made a breakthrough in their ongoing lean journey after attending an Association for Manufacturing Excellence seminar in 2008 and gaining insights into the 5S method... Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize and Sustain. The use of visual signals on the shop floor and deployment of inventory near where it will be used have also become important parts of Data I/O's lean processes.

"We have some boards on the outside of our production cells that show when we have orders or work orders due for servicing and when we are short parts. We have a kanban system in place and we have cards for all of our inventory," Jones said. "Our inventory isn't locked up in a cage somewhere. It is out on the floor at the point of use. Before we had the inventory coming in through receiving and then through QA, into a store, it would be picked as a kit and put into an assembly and then maybe go back into store. There were several handoffs involved and it was very inefficient."

Data I/O has also eliminated non-value-added work from the front office value stream by consolidating on an enterprise-wide application, according to Jones.

"Before we implemented IFS Applications in the beginning of 2006 we had been using at least two systems. We had a system for our inventory -- what location it was in, how much it cost, and we used it for bills of materials. Then we had another system that was more engineering that had a bill of materials as well. That system had drawings, manufacturing assembly instructions and specs for all of the components attached, but it didn't have any costs. At any given time I would have both of them up on my screen at the same time. We had a configuration management department that would maintain the batch update between the two. And then we went to IFS and all of that data came together. That made things run much smoother -- assembly instructions, documentation, spec sheets, bill of materials, everything was released directly from engineering into production. We didn't have to go through this convoluted process of transferring things into a manufacturing system versus an engineering system.

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