General Cable Corp.
Lincoln, R.I.
Employees: 211, union
Total Square Footage: 384,000
Primary Product/Market: Rubber cord products
Start-Up Date: 1974
Achievements: ISO 9001:2008 and TS 16949 certification; 99.2% first-pass yield for all finished products in 2010; 85% reduction in OSHA days-away-from-work incident rate over the past three years; 50% reduction in cycle time for a typical finished product over the past three years
General Cable Corp.'s Lincoln, R.I., plant was designed to manufacture and warehouse wire and cable products. For a company that makes wire and cable products, such a facility might seem ... well, ideal.
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But in this age of lean manufacturing, a production flow that was efficient in 1974 -- when the former Carol Cable Co. built the facility -- isn't so ideal. "If you were looking at the flow of a factory 15 years ago, the flow of this factory was very good," plant manager Mike Brown explains. "Meaning, incoming raw materials came in at one end of the building and finished product shipped out to our customers from the other end of the building. The process started with compounding, which fed our foundation lines [wire], and then the product moved to cabling, jacketing, packaging and finally shipping. Good flow."
The problem, Brown says, is the old batch-and-queue flow created "a significant amount of WIP between processes and limited the communication of issues found downstream, i.e., quality problems, safety concerns, etc."
While there was too much WIP in the old batch-and-queue format -- 1 foot of completed wire traveled more than 2,700 feet through the plant -- the physical layout of the plant discouraged camaraderie among the operators, notes human resources manager Mary Igoe.
