AskLDI Case Studies – Medical Equipment Production Kaizen

We are a $400 million medical equipment business company and our plant that produces products for the USA market.

The production line was losing parts that dropped on the floor. Our conveyor belts develop static electricity that makes the parts tick and not drop. Where they should. Various activities had been taking place to try to reduce the static, but it wasn’t given the desired result. We lost approx. $2000/week of products.

Using a Kaizen process, the team started to gather data to see where we had the biggest loss and we added video to the data collection to see what actually happened when they didn’t drop as they should. We tasked a couple of team members to read up on static electricity and ways to reduce or eradicate it. We studied the process for 4 days 24 hours per day and counted all parts in all defined areas. We made a graphical way of organizing the data. First the data was hard to understand since we didn’t know enough of static electricity. The two members who studied it came back with some knowledge and we learned about a type of equipment that is call ionizer and the effect they could have.

We set up a trial plan to establish some practical knowledge of the ionizer and was lucky enough to borrow one. Using a logging sheet and learning from the data we could see that with the correct angle of the ionizer we could completely eliminate the loss.

We mounted an ionizer and set up visual markings so it would be kept in the correct angle. We developed One Point Lessons and trained all operators to ensure the ionizer was set in the correct position in the beginning of every shift.

A detailed execution plan was finalized with sign off by the Management Team.   

This even didn’t take more than 2 weeks including the 4-day s of data collection and saved an annual amount of $100000.

We keep logging the loss of parts using our daily meeting system, Performance Control.