The case study for Group 8's project came from an article in LEAN SYSTEMS Applications and

Case Studies in Manufacturing, Service, and Healthcare titled Motor Grader Assembly

Line Modification. The article highlights a company located in Arkansas, Global Grader

Company (GGC), manufacturing construction and mining equipment particularly motor

graders, as shown in the following figure.

Their current capacity for their enclosure assembly module are 5 motor graders per day in an 8-

hour shift utilizing three work zones and a single miscellaneous work table for custom

orders. Their reputation in the heavy construction equipment market had gone international

reflected by their increased global sales. Thus to meet greater demand, GGC proceeded to

plan to increase their production capacity to 10 fully tested, enclosure modules per 8-hour

day by utilizing seven work stations and one miscellaneous custom work table. The added

factory space needed for the increase in work zones will be by renovating their current

location adding two more 20 ft by 20 ft bays. GGC acknowledged Lean practices for their

expansion management. The company assigned their manufacturing engineering team with

aid by an outside consultation firm, "Global Lean" Team to design the expansion.

There was a 40 business day time table for the final process breakdown analysis and layout
proposal and 6 weeks for $80k in factory renovations. The Global Lean Team advised GGC

to operate two shifts per day and build a 5 business day inventory prior to remodeling the

factory. The expectation was to increase the current 80% efficiency level. Efficiency is defined

as a percentage computed by the quotient of "work content" and the product of "number of

workstations and required cycle time." The end result was GGC operation efficiency level

increased nearly to 100%. The new operation required three less assembly workers in which

they were transferred to other departments in the company.

Lean metrics that were planned to be utilized were the comparison of current versus future

value stream maps, cycle time versus takt time including identification of value-added and

non-value-added activities, process breakdown and line balancing, current and future layout, and

project schedule. In IE 6310, after the Power Point presentation in class on July 25th,

Dr. Oduntan appreciated this case study in respect he commented that line balancing is a

Lean topic he wished the syllabus tended to. John Nicholas defined Line Balancing as the

assignment of tasks to workstations in a way such that there are three requirements. Firstly,

the output of the sequence of workstations meets demand, in other words, the cycle time of

the slowest workstation in the line must not exceed the required takt time (takt time is the rate of

"daily time available" per "required daily quantity"); secondly, assignment of tasks to

work stations meets precedence requirements; and thirdly, the resultant number of

workstations or operations in the line is the minimum possible given the required cycle time

and precedence relationships.

Project Plan:

The Global Lean Team will analyze those proposed breakdowns and will deliver a process
Breakdown validation and final layout design that has an efficiency above the initial 80%

provided by the ME team. Since the current enclosure assembly line is constrained, the

Global Lean Team has proposed to have GGC running in two shifts to keep up with daily

production needs and to start building enough enclosure module inventories to provide an

opening of 5 business days to execute the new layout implementation.

Lean Metrics Defined :

The following Lean metrics will be used to assess the benefits from this project:

• current versus future value stream maps

• cycle time versus takt time (41 minutes)—including identification of value-added and

non-value-added activities

• process breakdown and line balancing

• current and future layout and

• project schedule.

Measure:

The goal of the Measure phase was to learn about the current process and to
fully understand both how it works and how well it works. This entails three key tasks:
creating a detailed process map, gathering baseline data, and sum-marizing and analyzing
the data. The process map was created first so that information gleaned from it can guide
the data collection process.

Due to the nature of this process, a Six Sigma value stream map was cre-ated using direct
input from the GCC representative who participated in the project.
Process Base Line:
The entire process of the enclosure assembly consists of 629 steps. We identi-fied the
value-added steps and the non-value-added steps. There were steps that were necessary
but still non-value-added.
 DIAGRAM
Current State VSM:
The value stream map shown in Figure 17.5 helped in identifying the Takt
time and cycle time and to make a comparative study of the available time for the entire
process. It also aided in balancing the entire process in the later stages. The value stream
map contains all seven zones along with the suboperation.
Analysis:
The goal of the Define–Measure–Analyze–Improve–Control (DMAIC) Ana-lyze phase is
to identify potential root causes for the process problems being addressed and then
confirm actual root causes with data.
Process Gaps and source of Variation:
As for our project, the process gaps were identifying the
value-added and the non-value-added activities. The current space was three work zones
and a single miscellaneous work table. To satisfy our goal of creating seven work zones
and one miscellaneous table, we analyzed various problem areas.
Cause and Effect:
The most popular is a fishbone diagram or Ishikawa diagram, which uses a display
resembling the bones of a fish to categorize potential causes and illustrate the levels of
causation. In some cases, sufficient data is available from the Measure phase to con-duct
cause and effect analyses during the Analyze phase.