Crane Army Increases Efficiency with Visibility in Mind

Photo By Hayley Smith | A Crane Army Ammunition Activity employee compares production goals and rates on kiosks at the CAAA machine and tooling shop. The kiosks are part of an organizational initiative to increase efficiency and help raise awareness of productivity and detect errors in the system. (U.S. Army photo by Hayley Smith, Crane Army Ammunition Activity).  

CRANE, IN, UNITED STATES

09.18.2018

Story by Hayley Smith 

Crane Army Ammunition Activity

CRANE, Ind. – Efficiency is a top priority as Crane Army Ammunition Activity strives to remain relevant to the Warfighter. CAAA needs its entire workforce working hard on this team effort to increase efficiency. Recently, employees at the CAAA machine and tooling shop made significant breakthroughs on increasing efficiency while maintaining product quality.

The machine and tooling shop construct parts for specific projects and various customers including CAAA, other Army installations, the Navy and additional entities. The major long-running endeavor is producing canisters for use in manufacturing illumination and infrared candles at Crane Army’s pyrotechnics facility. The machine and tooling shop is the premier provider of this item.

The workers at the shop face demanding production goals. To better meet and exceed these targets, Kevin Doerner, plant support director, posts production targets for each machine cycle period of the day on kiosks next to the machines.

“Visibility increases production and efficiency,” Doerner said. “Anybody at any time can walk out on the floor and know exactly what the operator is doing. That keeps everybody on the same page.”

Setting the production goals for the entire shop is not as simple as determining how long it takes to make a single part. Each job has its own limitations and specifications, and operators typically have other tasks besides making parts in order to keep the machine and tooling shop running. Doerner and his employees adopted a data and visibility-driven approach.

“We studied time cycles and production rates for each machine to set new production targets,” Jonathan Miller, planner at the machine and tooling shop, said.

Instead of using generic rates, setting new production targets allow for max rates and parts per day to meet more specific goals and timelines.

The high production targets can seem daunting, but the machine shop team breaks down the target goals based on the time periods. They found that it is much easier for them to reach multiple small goals rather than one large one, even though at the end of the day the team is still producing the same number of units.

“It’s a mental game,” Miller said. “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Same concept. If your goal is 200 units a day, that can seem impossible, and a lot of times people won’t even try. On the other hand, making 79 units in a specific time period seems much more achievable.”

The target goals are dynamic throughout the length of the project and adapt to the needs of the entire machine and tooling operation. Setting the rate for a machine without accounting for any incidents or occurrences that can happen through the course of a day is a recipe for failure. No job works in a vacuum.

“Every day we chart cycle times for the machine in question as well as other tasks or issues that would pull an operator away from the machine to capture the best target rate for that particular day,” Miller said.

“As we go through the day, after we set the rate we assign each time period a target and operators record their actual production rate next to the target along with a reason why any parts were rejected. “

This data is used to find ways to improve the process, not identify operators not hitting the target. Consistently recording rates and the causes of delays in a visible location shows how to make the process better.

“When you have visibility, efficiency usually goes up automatically,” Doerner said. “If there’s a problem hitting the target at a machine, it’s not the operator’s fault, it’s showing that there’s something we need to fix. It’s not identifying an operator’s error, it’s identifying a process error and highlights where we can make improvements. If we see the same step cause downtime multiple times, we know it’s a bigger issue- it’s a process deficiency.”

Doerner and his team have improved several processes already with smart investments in equipment upgrades. The newest additions are a robotic welder and a robotic lathe, a machining center used to cut steel and aluminum. The implementation of these automated instruments will not decrease the number of operators needed to run a job, but will allow the project to be completed much faster and pose much less risk to worker safety.

“The robots do the heavy lifting,” Doerner said. “Previously operators would have to lift each 10-20 pound metal part up onto the machine top all day, leading to severe operator fatigue. Sometimes by the end of the day operators could hardly walk, and along with the exhaustion there are a lot of drop and trip hazards, so we purchased the robotic lathe to take the weight off the operator.”

The work at the machine shop fits well into the overall values at Crane Army, especially Col. Michael Garlington’s priorities of safety, quality and efficiency.

“We’re addressing efficiency through these kiosk production boards and reporting production rates four times a day,” Doerner said. “For safety, we’re installing robotic machines to reduce hazards. And we’re doing all this without sacrificing the quality of our products.”

The results of these upgrades and process changes speak for themselves. Production data shows that projects run on machines paired with kiosks are completed 40 percent more efficiently than similar projects without kiosks.

Crane Army Ammunition Activity produces and provides conventional munitions requirements in support of U.S. Army and Joint Force readiness. It is one of 14 installations of the Joint Munitions Command and one of 23 organic industrial base installations under the U.S. Army Materiel Command, which include arsenals, depots, activities and ammunition plants.

• Date Taken: 09.18.2018
• Date Posted: 09.18.2018 11:33
• Story ID: 293302
• Location: CRANE, IN, US
• Hometown: CRANE, IN, US