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GSPK Circuits Ltd. Promotes Lean Manufacturing with Profitable Results
December 31, 1969 |Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
By Dianne Latham
GSPK Circuits Ltd. is a PCB manufacturer offering full design, technical support, and project and supply-chain management right through to logistics support. The company employs 84 people at its GSPK Technology Park-based plant. GSPK Circuits focuses on technical solutions for low- to medium-volume manufacturing in the automotive, security, power, telecommunications, defense and medical industries.
In the latter half of the 1990s, GSPK Circuits Ltd. identified a need for better working practices and consequently began using lean manufacturing principles. Today, the company advocates this concept.
"Back in 1997, the company needed to improve manufacturing processes and innovate to compete effectively," says Operations Director Martyn Gibson.
At that time managers investigated lean manufacturing and considered it to be the best way to move forward. "We chose lean manufacturing because it is a philosophy and not a system or technique and because it offers the scope to develop the company and its processes continually," Gibson added. "More importantly, it focuses the minds of everyone."
When considering radical change within a company, a great deal of thought must precede any action. Change happens through people, and GSPK Circuits had to plan how they were best going to educate and motivate their staff to implement this change.
Lean manufacturing makes it possible to specify value from the customer viewpoint by identifying the value stream in areas such as physical flow, information flow and new product introduction. The lean process is designed to reduce lead times by eliminating waste in these value streams by incorporating better, more streamlined performance within an organization from the top down. The key concept is to speed up manufacturing while incorporating quality without incurring costs in the process. This adds value and removes non-value adding activities.
Specifically at GSPK Circuits Ltd., incorporating lean manufacturing enables the company to make value flow throughout while avoiding slow batch and queue and one-piece flow practices. The company is now able to produce at the rate demanded, avoiding over-production while seeking continuous improvement throughout the process.
Key characteristics of lean production-oriented companies include being customer- and profit-driven and team-based with a wider allocation of employee responsibility. Lead time and cost reduction, production procedures, new product development, and flexibility are all part of lean manufacturing. Regular meetings and personnel appraisals should be ongoing practice.
Incorporating LeanIn GSPK Circuits Ltd.'s case, the lean manufacturing concept was introduced first to the directors and management team when Sid Joynson of the Sid Joynson Partnership visited the Technology Park in 1997. The company objective and vision then, which remains the same today, was to "create a world-class manufacturing and service company."
Incorporating lean manufacturing processes has to be accepted and embraced from the top of the hierarchy down. In addition, a strategy covering how to achieve this needs to be formulated.
The company went to great lengths to discover how lean manufacturing worked and how best to incorporate it. Time was spent speaking to advocates of the concept such as Mike Studley of Siebe. GSPK soon learned that incorporating lean manufacturing was going to be arduous. Each individual within the company needed to understand what it was and then want to do it.
Training schedules, videos and seminars for staff were developed and an education commenced. Getting this right was paramount to the success of incorporating lean manufacturing.
The key to any company's success is how quickly it can deliver products and services to the market. A strategy was formulated and in 1998 efforts were made to learn about the Theory of Constraints. The first Team Board was set up in the Final Inspection department.
By this time, customers were starting to become interested in the positive changes GSPK had made. Company representatives visited A.C.T in the Northeast (part of the Invensys Group) to learn how to incorporate Kaizen across the factory. Subsequent to that, GSPK Circuits Ltd. became Invensys' approved lean supplier.
One of the company's first goals was to compress lead times. As a result, GSPK launched the Project 24initiative. The aim of this was to process each order from receipt through to shipment of product within 24 hours. This was a tall order because at the time the average lead time was 23 days and the inventory figure was US $2 million (1.3 million pounds).
Time was spent with Philip Barden, Ph.D., program director from the Harrogate Management Centre, whose accolades include working with the government in scenario planning and risk management. Regular Kaizen events were run to re-evaluate individual parts of the process -- primarily looking at the space the company occupied with the objective to cut out waste and so speed up production for increased efficiency.
"A real sense of excitement drove Project 24," says Barden. "The entire staff saw the impact of continuous improvement on operational efficiency and recognized the enormous performance changes that could be achieved. Even more important, there was a recognition that this was not simply adopting new techniques, but also embracing a new philosophy of manufacturing."
In 1999, the company continued to run Kaizen events on a project-by-project basis to continue educating people and eliminating waste within processes, WIP and walking distance between machinery. When the company realized that their relevant departments were dotted all over the GSPK Technology Park rather than concentrated in one area, wasting time, steps were taken to rectify this. Even today further plans are afoot to condense the shop floor area from two buildings into one, further increasing efficiencies and reducing lead times and WIP.
In July 1999, Gibson arranged to visit the Lean Enterprise Research Centre at Cardiff's Business School to meet with the co-director, professor Peter Hines to discuss the reasons behind and the strategy for the re-organization of the offices.
The company realized that they needed to run a Kaizen event for the office departments and their associated procedures. This process helped management discover that every order traveled one mile and took 27 hours to process. Management decided to consolidate the associated staff into one working area. As a result of this move, an order now travels 50 yards and takes six hours to process.
The company continues to evaluate and improve with customer care at the forefront. More recent changes have included:
- The specification of all new equipment has 25 to 50 percent extra capacity than is needed for future developments.
- A virtual factory policy has been adopted.
- WIP rules have been put in place.
- Inventory is in place.
- Lead times have been reduced.
Having initiated and incorporated the new company philosophy and practices, positive changes have enabled GSPK Circuits Ltd. to have the confidence in their customer-focused ability to offer firm commitments. They now offer their clients and potential clients the opportunity of incorporating lean manufacturing into their own everyday activities. As a result, the company is positive the steps they have taken to help gain competitive advantage will stand them in good stead for the future.
"One of the problems the company faced in the earlier days, which has since been addressed, was controlling WIP," says Gibson. Today, lean processes have enabled employees to become multi-functional through cross training to control WIP. The incorporation of a capacity-marked trolley system enables employees to monitor bottlenecks. If a bottleneck appears, employees move down the process to help clear the problem. People change the success or failure of a company. To try and introduce a sea change into an organization, like lean manufacturing, means that the employees must buy into it. Fortunately for GSPK Circuits Ltd., Chairman Graham Keddie OBE had seen best practice factories and had become an evangelist for lean manufacturing and the benefits it could bring. "It has taken the company a great deal of hard work, effort and dedication to incorporate this technique throughout the workforce but the rewards have been astounding," says Gibson. .GSPK Circuits Ltd. offers an extensive technical support service including concept to production, project management, technical consultancy and supply chain management through to circuit board manufacture, assembly and test.
For further information please contact Dianne Latham on tel: 01423 865641, fax: 01423 866398or e-mail dianne.Latham@gspkcorporateservices.ltd.uk