Minimizing Material Handling
"The mindset here is we try to identify and eliminate nonvalue-added [activities]," explains Philbrick. Lean manufacturing tools such as value-stream mapping, kanban and 5S help. The director of operations outlines efforts made to consolidate the manufacturing footprint, minimizing both material handling as well as the time it takes to perform operations within workstations.
Where nonvalue-added actions can't be eliminated, the manufacturer considers automation. For example, several years ago, Otis Technology performed a few calculations and concluded that manufacturing operations lost about 90 hours of productive time per day to employees walking around in search of, retrieving or waiting on materials to do their jobs. It averaged to about one hour per person per day, Philbrick says.
Keeping a day's worth of production materials stored at workstations didn't resolve the issue because that amount of inventory still resulted in the need to do some searching, plus it added clutter to the equation.
The introduction of the ADAM robots drove big gains in this area. When an employee needs materials, he—or more likely, she (85% of production-floor workers are female)—simply presses a call button at the workstation, which alerts the robot of the need for assistance. Once the operator presents the ADAM with its task, the robot autonomously navigates to the required destination to retrieve materials and deliver them where required.
As a result, Otis Technology now keeps a more manageable hour's worth of inventory at the workstations. And because the robots deliver bins at approximately waist-level, they have helped reduce ergonomics issues related to workers bending and carrying weights. Equally importantly, the robots relieve employees so they can perform value-adding activities.
