Company: Marley Plumbing & Drainage
Sector: Process Industries – Manufacturing and Packaging
Key Tools or Services; Lean Thinking / VSM
Results:
In order to address these key issues, the team led throughout by PICME developed the following lean implementation plan covering the following themes;
- Reduce Changeover time to allow for small batch manufacture
- To develop and implement a pull based production system which would enable a reduction in working capital
- Roll out the approach to other key value stream across the business.
Project Overview
The first stage of the Marley Plumbing and Drainage lean implementation programme was to identify where waste could be removed from the overall production system and then to develop an ongoing lean implementation plan for improvement.
Utilising Picme’s unique hands on approach to knowledge transfer, the lean implementation team at Lenham undertook a Value Stream Mapping activity for a number of specific value streams.
The key findings of the VSM activity were the plant operated with;
- High levels of finished goods stock and work in progress
- Excessive product lead times
- Large production batch quantities
- Unpredictable planning process
- Opportunity to improve OTIF performance