Table of Contents
Executive Summary 2
1 Mission Statement: 2
2 Client Background 2
4 Problem Statement 4
5 Goals: 4
7 Constraints: 4
7.1 Ease of use: 4
7.2 Limited Space Available: 5
7.3 Cost: 5
7.3.1 Door Work Center Savings: 5
7.3.2 Productivity Savings: 5
7.3.3 Implementation Cost: 5
7.4 Ease of Implementation: 5
8 Project Organization: 6
8.1 Team Management: 6
8.2 Team Rules: 6
9 Design Concepts: 6
10 Design Evaluation: 7
10.1 Area Layout Designs: 7
10.2 New Employee Training Plan 11
11 Conclusion: 12
Works Cited 13
12 Appendix 14
Executive Summary
Andersen Corporation contacted Streamline Engineering to provide recommendations for improvement in the Screw Pack Center in their door plant. The production lines building the doors have been continually improved while the screw Pack Center, the area where the hardware and screws for the doors are packaged, has received very little attention. The lack of improvement to the Screw Pack Center has created a situation where the increased production from the door lines is leading to a lack of correct screw packs available. This lack is causing the door production lines to be shut down while waiting for screw packs to be made. This situation is costing Andersen valuable time and money due to the inefficiencies in the process and they are looking for a solution.
Streamline Engineering is going to provide this solution by evaluating the current design of the Screw Pack Center. The cost of the current downtime is estimated to be approximately $17,800 per year. There are requirements such as productivity and product mix that needed to be met. There were also constraints such as ease of use, space available, costs, implementation, and adaptability that needed to be kept in mind. After evaluating the made-to-demand system currently in use by the Screw Pack Center it has been determined that an internal supermarket system would possibly be a good alternative to pursue. The area layout, product and material flows, and distance traveled by the workers are all taken into account and a design is suggested that would minimize any unproductive time.
1 Mission Statement:
Streamline Engineering will work with Andersen Corporation to provide recommendations for improvement in Andersen’s door plant Screw Pack Center. Currently the Screw Pack Center is having problems meeting the production needs of the Door Line Work Centers. The Screw Pack Center is at the heart of the Door Line, since it services seven cost centers. To meet this demand, focus will be given on optimizing productivity, material flow, efficiency, personnel utilization, and equipment utilization, while reducing waste.
2 Client Background
The privately owned business was founded in 1903 by Danish immigrant Hans Andersen and his family in Hudson, Wisconsin, where logs arrived via the St. Croix River. Today, Andersen Corporation is an international enterprise employing over 9,000 people atmore than20locations with headquarters in Bayport, Minnesota, a 2.8 million-square-foot facility that covers 65 acres. Andersen annually manufactures more than six million wood windows and doors, with sales worldwide. (www.andersenwindows.com)
3 Work Center Description
The current layout of the Screw Pack Center is shown at the top of the next page in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Current Screw Pack Center Layout
The Screw Pack Center services seven cost centers. These cost centers are WC81 (gliding door frame assembly), WC83 (gliding door frame auxiliary line), WC51 and WC52 (main Frenchwood hinge assembly lines), WC54 (Frenchwood hinge auxiliary line), WC91 (Frenchwood Outswing assembly), and WC70 (sidelights and transom
assembly). Each of these cost centers needs to receive the correct screw packs each hour to avoid shutting down the line. Based on 2006 estimates, these seven Work Centers were conservatively down for an average of 750 minutes for the year because they were waiting for screw packs. Table 1 at the top of the next page expands this cost out to a total downtime cost for the Door Plant Business Unit. Six lines are normally in operation, and the number of employees given for each line is an average.
Table 1: Line Downtime Costs Per Year
Line / Number of Employees / Average Hourly Wage / Cost Per Hour / Cost Per YearGliding Door / 8 / $25.83 / $206.64 / $2,583.00
Inswing Hinge 1 / 8 / $25.83 / $206.64 / $2,583.00
Inswing Hinge 2 / 8 / $25.83 / $206.64 / $2,583.00
Inswing Hinge 3 / 8 / $25.83 / $206.64 / $2,583.00
Outswing Hinge / 17 / $25.83 / $439.11 / $5,488.88
Sidelight / 6 / $25.83 / $154.98 / $1,937.25
Total / $17,758.13
The Screw Pack Center is staffed by two to three regular employees year round. The work center is also staffed by employees who are returning to work after an injury. It is ideal for this work hardening due to the light duty nature of the job. This makes it difficult to have highly effective employees at every station because a worker may only be in the work center for a week or so. The Screw Pack Center can also be staffed with temporary employees during the busier times of the year. Currently temporary workers or workers on light duty make one type of high volume screw pack for an entire day. This often leads to shortages of some screw packs and an overabundance of others.
4 Problem Statement
Analyze the current Screw Pack Center and recommend improvements resulting in optimized productivity, material flow, efficiency, personnel utilization, and equipment utilization, while reducing waste. Present the recommendations to the Andersen management and engineering teams and provide feedback for future activities.
5 Goals:
Provide Andersen Corporation with a design layout of the Screw Pack Center that will decrease the distance of material flow, productivity, and efficiency. An analysis will be conducted on the current layout and possible future layouts to analyze the distance that the raw materials and completed packs have to move in the Center. To improve productivity a new employee plan will be developed so that new or temporary workers will be able to be more effective members of the Screw Pack Center team.
6 Requirements
6.1 Production
Any recommendation has to be able to produce the required amount of screw packs per hour to keep up with the production of each door assembly line. These amounts are listed below in Table 2.
Table 2: Production Requirements
Work Center / Production per HourGliding Door / 90
Inswing Hinge / 35
Outswing Hinge / 10
Sidelight / 15
Total / 150
6.2 Product Mix
There are 15 types of screw packs that are made on the hinged side of the Screw Pack Center. In 2006, this amounted to 414765 total screw packs or an average of
7 Constraints:
This project deals with several constraints which need to be addressed.
7.1 Ease of use:
Andersen uses this work center as a work hardening location for displaced workers; workers who are returning from injury leave or some related extended absence. It plays an important role in re-acclimating workers to the eight hour workday. This feature is one that must be maintained with the redesign. It is extremely important that the Screw Pack Center be setup to allow minimal training necessary for temporary workers to be able to perform their task effectively.
7.2 Limited Space Available:
The current Screw Pack Center footprint is constrained to the current area. Without completely relocating the Screw Pack Center these dimensions are limited by surrounding equipment, walls, and walkways. A complete relocating is not out of the question however and has been kept in mind during the redesign. Maintaining the current location, if possible, would make for the smoothest transition with the redesign therefore is desirable. A CAD drawing of the current layout is shown further along in this report.
7.3 Cost:
7.3.1 Door Work Center Savings:
There is currently an average of 750 minutes per year of downtime in each cost center due to waiting for correct screw packs. This is a substantial cost to the corporation since during the downtime no product is being produced while production expenses such as labor are still running. The amount per production line this downtime costs in labor alone, not to mention lost production, varies from around $154 per hour up to as much as $440 per hour. As seen in Table 1, this amounts to approximately $17,700 per year. This lack of ready screw packs and resultant stoppage in production could be minimized or possibly eliminated with a better design of the Screw Pack Center.
7.3.2 Productivity Savings:
Developing a system that minimizes material handling, setup, and order filling time would improve productivity and reduce cost. Making the Screw Pack Center more efficient would enable the workers to spend more quality time producing screw packs and less time traveling around collecting necessary items and moving things around. If the center can be designed to allow the materials to flow smoothly through the process each worker’s output per unit time will increase.
7.3.3 Implementation Cost:
The implementation cost needs to be justified against Door Work Center Savings and the Productivity Savings. If the project ends up costing more to implement than it will save once in operation it does not pay to go through with it. A design must be found that will ultimately save money and therefore should not be too expensive to follow through with. Solutions will be weighed against one another to determine which is the best route to follow.
7.4 Ease of Implementation:
The Screw Pack Center is the heart of the door plant. Seven cost centers receive screw packs so any downtime in this center would be costly, as described in the Door Work Center Savings section above. If the screw pack center were to shut down there would either have to be enough packs prepared ahead of time to meet the plant demand during the downtime, or else the lines would need to be shut down. The implementation of the setup should be as short as possible to minimize this downtime and resultant workload.
7.5 Adaptability:
The setup must be able to adapt to changing workloads based on seasonal demands. The spring and summer product demands are much higher than the fall and winter demands due to the increase in the amount of construction done during the warm seasons. The Screw Pack Center must be able to adapt to the increased workloads around the months of June to November while also being able to meet the smaller workloads of the May to December time period efficiently. It must also be able to effectively handle the load of the most commonly used screw packs and the special order screw packs that are produced only occasionally in fairly small numbers.
8 Project Organization:
8.1 Team Management:
At the beginning of the project a timeline with goals, objectives, and milestones was created. The timeline is attached in the appendix of this document. This created an excellent outline to keep track of the progress of the project by comparing where progress is at to where it is desired to be. This has been tracked through a Gantt chart throughout the project. Every two weeks, goals are set for the following two weeks. This gives our project constant short term and long term goals.
8.2 Team Rules:
All team members need to contribute, show up to scheduled appointments, and treat this project as their first project as an engineer. Streamline Engineering as a team has followed the National Society of Professional Engineers’ Code of Ethics throughout the entire course of the project.
9 Design Concepts:
The design concepts for the handling of materials have been developed with engineering fundamentals and research from the Principles of Material Handling Handbook1:
1. Arrange an operational sequence for the package handlers to follow for time and effort savings.
2. Provide detailed CAD drawings of the Screw Pack Center layout to optimize the flow of the screw packs from bulk screw boxes to finished packs ready for the assembly line.
3. Simplify handling by reducing unnecessary movement of bulk screw containers and door attachment accessories.
4. Move finished screw packs in a smooth and direct path to their final storage containers.
Streamline Engineering is focusing on these base points when developing the Screw Pack Center layout. In conjunction with the aforementioned design concepts, Streamline Engineering is providing CAD layouts of the new work area alternatives. The improved Screw Pack Center will allow a new worker to come in at any time for work hardening and be able to operate efficiently and timely in supplying the gliding door and swinging door assembly lines with the proper hardware to prevent the current line shut down issues. Our vision is to help make small changes to improve the ergonomics and flow of material. In addition, we are researching the possibility of implementing a kanban system in the Screw Pack Center to aid in the stocking of screw packs to prevent further line stoppages as well.
10 Design Evaluation:
10.1 Area Layout Designs:
There are four alternatives that were developed from the design concepts. The criteria which they are evaluated are from the constraints listed above. Figures 1-4 show the possible layouts of the Screw Pack Center. Figure 1 on the top of the next page is the current setup of the Screw Pack Center.