On the factory floor -- where immediacy should matter the most -- real-time communication has too often been ignored in the endless iterations of lean projects and efficiency programs.
Nation Pizza and Foods
For the past 65 years, Ill.-based Nation Pizza and Food has slowly climbed to the top of the prepared food industry using a passive, last-century paging system to keep its facilities running.
As it expands into its new 190,000-square-foot plant -- with 600 employees across its six production lines throwing off two million products a day -- that 20th century system has fallen far short of the company's 21st century demands.
"One of the issues Nation Pizza and Food was facing was not being able to get that fast response time, to alert the correct person with the skill set necessary to address the problem and get the production equipment back on line," said June Ruby, director of manufacturing solutions group at Motorola Solutions (IW 500/123).
Furthermore, adds, Julian Bauer, process improvement supervisor at Nation, "Many times you would hear several pages for the same downtime issues over and over again... The response time could be up to ten minutes."
Taking this from a process improvement perspective, the efficiency problem is easy to spot.
To remedy it, the company equipped its key production staff with wireless devices -- Motorola MOTOTRBO radios -- to bring communication up to speed.
With the radios, allowing two-way communication through the noise filter, bypassing both the sound and silence issues of the old system in a single step.
"Now operators can initiate a call from a machine to tell a mechanic exactly where to go, what tools to bring,” Motorola's Ruby said. “They can plan ahead before making that trip out to the production room."
This alone has allowed the company to trim an enormous chunk of unexplored waste from it's facility, which amounted to an impressive 10% increase in overall plant efficiency, according to COO Mike Alagna.
