Cost Effective Lean Manufacturing
To be competitive, your products must be competitively priced. You’re competing with companies around the globe, though. So how do you manufacture a product that is high-quality and priced in an appropriate range? Lean manufacturing can provide the answer you’re looking for.
At American Precision Die Casting, we focus on three key components of Lean Manufacturing:
- Quality
- Delivery
- Cost
It is our belief that to operate with integrity means employing good, common sense business practices such as careful stewardship of assets, elimination of inefficiency, and commitment to quality. We think big and act small, relentlessly working to reduce our operational costs by eliminating waste and promoting economy of action in every process.
As for delivery, we have structured our company to put forth every effort that enables us to ensure the customer gets what they want when they want it. Delays are costly for you and can cause downtime and even the loss of a customer. We have systems in place to make sure your parts are delivered to you on time.
Lean Manufacturing Initiatives
We are very much committed to ensuring that service and product quality exceed customer expectations. Incorporating standardization throughout our operational process and embracing the use of lean manufacturing initiatives, we are able to consistently meet our own high standards of production.
Our lean manufacturing initiatives include:
- SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Dies)
- Cost Reduction & Process Improvement
- Manufacturing Design Reviews
- Cell Manufacturing
- Automated Robotic Cells
- Reduced Lead-times/Just-In-Time delivery
- Kanban Development to Control/Reduce Inventory & Related Cost
- Value Stream Mapping Used to Identify Waste & NonValue Activity
- DOE (Design of Experiment)
- Visual Factory
- 5S Methodology
Initiatives in Action
Many of our initiatives such as the concept of SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Dies) help us to reduce the amount of time required to set-up die cast tooling and produce components. We reduce downtime and increase output. SMED and other initiatives are further supported by Kanban Systems. Kanban Systems help us help the customer to control and reduce their inventory and other production related costs.
Tools such as 5S Methodology and creating a visual factory provides a foundation from which to continually build and improve upon safety and housekeeping practices at every operational level throughout our plant. By embracing a 5S Methodology system, we are able to reduce waste and optimize productivity by maintaining an orderly workplace. The visual factory initiative serves to communicate standards effectively to employees: by having easy access to visual feedback and representations of standards and goals, so that every person at APDC is aware of objectives, our performance, and the results. We all know what we need to work on and in which areas we are excelling.
Having performance evaluation information readily available serves to keep all of us performing at our best, reducing waste and resulting in economy of production.
