AskLDI Case Studies – Manufacturing Sector Medical Equipment

Our business was the manufacture of medical equipment. The output from the manufacturing area was not at expected levels and the product variation was high. More sales were not realized since the customers could purchase more products then we could manufacture. The business situation is very positive and all extra production can be sold immediately.

Our Teams goal was to increase the manufacturing output by 20% and reduce the variation to 3.5%

I was given the task to lead this initiative based on my Practitioner enrolment to achieve my certification.  We used a global team of internal stakeholders from Sales, Customer Service, Design, Quality and Production personnel.

I had to train my Team on the PDCA approach, and use the tools and techniques gained from my training. This would ensure sustainability and expand the process on a global level

We used the Process mapping tool and created a current state, and future state map. We found 11 opportunities to reach the future state VSM with a 90 day execution plan. One of those opportunities was the pacing output from the bottle necks (two machines working in parallel) so the workload would be more balanced. This enabled the following steps could focus on production and not on moving big batches of product to the next process.

By reaching the future state Process map, the results in the production step (after the bottle necks) increased their utilization from 32% to over 85%.

The product variation was achieved at 3.5%