LEAN MANUFACTURING
shop fl oor again. It helped, but didn’t do everything they needed so Carter explored further expansion. This coincided with the recession, but Carter knew their
lean production methods had already boosted sales-per-em- ployee by about 50% and increased profi ts, so he confi dently searched for a large building to house all their operations. They ended up buying a 53,000 ft2
(4924 m2) bottling plant
that was mostly warehouse, so they had to install all-new electrical power and transformers, material handling systems, cranes, lighting, and other features to turn it into a manufac- turing facility. But this gave them the opportunity to redo their entire lean process organization. “We put together a large magnetic board representing every machine on the fl oor and restarted the process of reorganizing the whole factory again,” says Carter. “I think we achieved the highest possible level of organization. For example, the machines with 12' (3.7-m) bar feeders are the closest to the receiving area in order to reduce material han- dling. The machines that are farthest from the receiving area are those that produce completed parts in one setup.” They store the 12' bars on cantilevered roll-out racks. So when they do have to move a big bar, they can lift the bar with a crane rather than a forklift. It’s easier, faster, and safer. In other departments they’ve standardized on 4' (1.2-m) bars, which they get pre-cut to length. This allowed them to
implement handy carts to push that stock around the fl oor easily, rather than use forklifts or cranes.
“The Guys Came Up with Rable Turret Law...” When Rable created their “process families” and tooled up the machines, they also established a standard turret set- up for their lathes so an operator wouldn’t have to reengineer from job to job. Under “Rable Turret Law,” no matter what type of cell you’re in, each turret position gets a specifi c tool. That means programs can all be consistent and tool-change time is reduced.
“Once they had cells established and had a better understanding of their volumes, they also explored multitasking machines.”
On a related note, Carter points out that because each cell machines families of part, “it also means that each cell has a lot of tooling that they use all the time. So what we’ve started to do is to pull those standard tools out of our tool- room and into each cell. Like a lot shops, we had been doing advanced staging for upcoming jobs in the toolroom, but that’s a lot of double-handling, which is much less effi cient.”
Cells with dual-spindle lathes and mills. Rable’s skilled operators typically manage three to four such machines at a time. 102
AdvancedManufacturing.org | February 2015
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