Person

Three Floors, Three Stopwatches, What Actually Changed

PH Priscilla Han

Consulting case studies usually hide the numbers and inflate the result. These do not. Three engagements from the last two years, what we found, what it cost the client to fix, and what we got wrong along the way. Names of the companies are left out because that was the agreement, but the numbers are the real ones from the reports. If you run a plant and want the full method for any of these, ask me and I will send it, including the spreadsheets.

01 A Nine Station Bakery Packaging Line

Family owned bakery, 140 people, two shifts. They were about to spend 180,000 dollars on a sealer they did not need.

What we found

The constraint was a tray loading station, not the sealer, and it only became the constraint in the second half of the shift.

Element level timing across both shifts, 40 cycles per station, four times a day. Station 3 tray loading averaged 11.2 seconds in hour one and 20.1 seconds in hour six. The operator reached across a live conveyor to a case pallet on her off side, twisting roughly 90 degrees, 380 times a shift. The sealer averaged 13.4 seconds all day and never varied, which is exactly why everybody blamed it. A machine that runs at a steady rate is visible. A person who slows down as she tires is not, unless somebody stands there in hour six.

What changed and what it cost

Moved the case pallet 40 inches and added a spring lift table. Line went from 34 to 51 pieces per minute. Total spend was 2,100 dollars.

The pallet move was free. The spring lift table that keeps the top case at elbow height was 2,100 dollars delivered. We rebalanced two elements from station 3 onto station 2, which had 6 seconds of idle every cycle. Output went from 34 pieces per minute averaged over the shift to 51. More to the point, the hour six rate now matches the hour one rate within four percent. Where I was wrong: my first proposal added a second person at station 3. The shift lead told me flatly that the aisle was too narrow for two and she was right. I had measured the task and not the aisle.
02 A Stamping Cell That Walked Six Miles a Day

Tier two automotive supplier, 90 people. Nobody had drawn the layout since the presses were installed in 1998.

The spaghetti diagram

One operator walked 5.9 miles per shift between two presses, a deburr bench, a gage station and a rack that had been placed to suit a forklift route.

We taped a floor plan to a clipboard and drew every trip for a full shift, three times. The pattern was not random. Every trip was rational given where things sat. The layout had accreted over 25 years, one reasonable decision at a time, and no one had ever looked at the whole of it. The worst single item was a check gage kept in the quality office, 140 feet away, because that is where gages live. Every fifth part went to it.

The rebuild

U shaped cell, gage brought to the point of use with a duplicate calibrated unit, deburr bench rotated 90 degrees. Walking down 62 percent.

Total capital was a second calibrated check gage at 4,400 dollars, a bench rotation, and two days of millwright time to move a conveyor. The forklift route changed, which took three meetings and was harder than the engineering. Walking distance went from 5.9 miles to 2.2 per shift. Cycle time improved 14 percent, but the number the operators cared about was that they stopped finishing the day with their feet hurting, and that is the number that made the change stick.

The part that failed

A shadow board for tooling that we installed and that nobody used. Six months later it held two items and a coffee cup.

I designed it, the maintenance lead built it, it was beautiful. It failed because I put it where the layout drawing said there was space, not where the operators stood when they needed a tool. Nobody told me because it was clearly Somebody's Project. I now ask one question before installing anything: if this were in the wrong place, who here would tell me, and would they? If the honest answer is no, the design is not finished.
03 How We Price and Why We Publish

Flat fees, quoted before the first day. Methods published so the plant can repeat the study without paying us again.

The fee

9,000 to 22,000 for a four to six week engagement, set by shift count and headcount, not by hours we choose to spend.

An hourly meter changes what a consultant does. It rewards the long study and punishes the engineer who sees it in three days. So we quote flat, from two variables the client can check themselves: how many shifts and how many people. The half day walkthrough for shops under 60 people is free and comes with a one page written note. About a third of those turn into engagements, a third get a note saying we do not think they need us yet, and a third we refer elsewhere.

The complete time study and balance charting method we use, with the spreadsheet templates, free to download and use without us.

🔗Our study method, written up in fullshopfloorsystems.coop↗