D&S Manufacturing, a Black River Falls custom metal fabricator and contract manufacturer, was confronting a variety of issues common to job shops that make small volumes of many different parts: too much work in queue, too many high-priority orders, inventory back-up and late shipments. So when D&S was nominated by one of their OEMs, Oshkosh Corp., to participate in Accelerate, they immediately took advantage of the opportunity. Accelerate is an innovative performance improvement initiative that supports suppliers as they work on Lean and other improvement methods.

With the help of WMEP, D&S created a Value Stream Map for one of their parts. But unlike traditional VSM’s, the D&S map pointed not only to common problems on the shop floor, but to business processes that needed revision. “We found that many of the problems related to overbooking capacity,” said Mike Dougherty, D&S president. “We were taking in more work than we had the capacity to produce.”

An analysis revealed that some products were being sold below cost, so they were eliminated from the product line. “We found we had low-margin products consuming large amounts of capacity, and that just didn’t make sense,” said Dougherty. “These products were not a good fit with the company’s core competencies and they were re-sourced in a collaborative effort with the customers.”

D&S also examined how the company was releasing work orders to the floor. “There were way too many work orders in process,” said Dougherty. Those orders were creating bottlenecks and confusion about priorities. The company identified specific operations that were “pacesetters,” that affected the speed of operations in the entire shop. Work orders were released to match the capacity of the pacesetting operations, rather than initial operations. This change “really cleared up all the clutter,” said Dougherty.

As a result of Accelerate, D&S realized:

30% reduction in MCT
26% reduction in late shipments
32% reduction in customer defects
50% reduction in the number of open work orders