Excess inventory, long lead times and late shipments were creating headaches for the Redgranite facility of Milsco Manufacturing Co., a seating manufacturer.

Then John Deere, a Milsco OEM, nominated the Redgranite plant to participate in Accelerate, an innovative performance improvement initiative that supports suppliers as they work on Lean and other improvement methods. Milsco agreed, and with the help of WMEP, began creating a Value Stream Map (VSM) for a new seat they were making for Deere.

“We identified the steps in our process with excess inventory,” said Jay Ondra, Milsco focus factory manager for off road seating. Additionally, they discovered that up to 95% of the process time was non-value-added.

As a result, they implemented a variety of Lean projects to reduce MCT including 5S, Changeover Reduction, Kanban and Layout Optimization. They added a new glue line, created FIFO lanes and developed a new scheduling system. They also performed a capacity analysis of customer demand vs. tooling. This led to the purchase of additional tool inserts, which allowed them to put different customer logos on their seats. The inserts also allowed them to complete more seats per shift for specific customers.

Other improvements included operations synchronizing to reduce WIP and material handling, and a production line reconfiguration that eliminated changeovers that were stopping production.

“They’ve done a phenomenal amount of stuff in the last two years to make that plant run better,” said Dick Welsch, WMEP manufacturing specialist and portfolio manager for Milsco.