T J International Ltd

Manufacturer of Litho & Digital Books

Background

TJ International is currently operating in Padstow, Cornwall. The company is an offset lithographic and digital printer and book manufacturer. An opportunity was highlighted which would facilitate in providing scope for product and process development from the Muller Martini bindery line. Other opportunities that were recognised were a greater process friendly environment linked into planned preventative maintenance.

Scope

The scope of work was to improve productivity by 20%, calculate and report Overall Equipment Effectiveness, evaluating Speed, Defects and Downtime, critically assess areas for improvement, reduce machine set-up times, improve workspace organisation and introduce autonomous maintenance.

Method

An initial deep drive into the current data gathering methods established that whilst the data was being captured it was evident that further improvements in collecting meaningful data would start to expose the true causes of excessive breakdowns and the cost of poor quality.

Liaising and working with manufacturing team members from both shifts across the Muller Martini line and backed up by senior departmental heads, a structured data capture programme was drawn up, discussed with all relevant personnel, trialled, and improvements fed back. It was then implemented and rolled out across all work stations.

The next area of focus was work place organisation. Again working with manufacturing team members from the Muller Martini line a planned 5S programme was rolled out. The first activity was to conduct a teach point on the principals of 5S. Then a practical activity was conducted on a specific area of the Muller Martini machine.
The follow on exercise was a Total Preventative Maintenance activity, that not only dove-tailed with the 5S activity previously deployed but now facilitated in identifying machine breakdown concerns. Again a teach point was rolled out to the manufacturing team members and engineering personnel. Then a practical activity was undertaken.

Options and Recommendations

There is a need for the Directors and Senior Management to formulate a long-term strategy which incorporates the recent work undertaken. This coupled with a robust self sustaining individual development plan in continuous improvement, would further maximise the full potential of the staff and create a formalised organisational structure which would be sufficiently robust to react to an increase in growth opportunities, whilst assisting the company in retaining its Investors In People award. These would be the following:

 5S and Visual Management (shop floor and office)
 Seven Wastes (shop floor and office)
 Quick Problem Solving and Teams (shop floor and office)
 Kaizen (shop floor and office)
 Standardised Work (shop floor and office)
 Error-proofing (shop floor and office)
 Total Productive Maintenance (shop floor)
 Quick Changeovers (shop floor)
 Kanban (shop floor)
 Constraints Management (shop floor and office)

Further Actions

A further development would be to reduce set-up times for machine changeovers. This would facilitate in greater customer responsiveness, highlighting and facilitating in the reduction of seven wastes and be further complemented by standardising the set-up improvement activity. Installing a kanban system for end papers would further reduce inventory and obsolete stock holding. Set aside areas for non-conforming products would further establish best business practice.

Lessons Learnt

The lessons learned from this work place deployment are that it is critical to obtain the buy-in from departmental heads. Machines will need to be set aside in order to fully facilitate in understanding the root cause of the concern. This may mean night working or weekend working if the machines are fully utilised across both day shifts.
Clear obtainable goals and objectives needs to be established and then implemented for all areas of the organisation.

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