Driving Down Time and Cost

The production cycle for many manufacturers, including box manufacturers, has been significantly shortened over the past several years, driven to a large degree by technology and consumer demand for faster and faster turnaround for all the various types of interactions and transactions they take part in daily. With Amazon providing two-day shipping at no cost through their Prime program, and other retailers following suit, companies of all kinds are finding that whatever customers are ordering online and through their smartphones, they want it now!

“Before we had a computer in our pocket, people just purchased from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.,” says Leslie Pickering, co-owner of Quadrant5 Consulting, a firm that works with manufacturers in the corrugated and folding carton industries to help them streamline their processes. “Purchasing 24 hours puts an enormous pressure on manufacturing cycles. There are greater demands in terms of shorter lengths of turnaround. All manufacturing facilities are under cost pressures, which create difficulties for them because the cost of power, labor, and equipment is all going up.”

For box plants, says Pickering, the ability to make quick changeovers is a must. Driving down setup time and increasing speed to market can help manufacturers save a lot of money, he says. “Quick changeovers allow them to have more flexible schedules—the more flexibility in the schedule, the more profit they can make.”

Mike Nunn, vice president of operations at Ideon Packaging, agrees that there is ample opportunity for box manufacturers to make improvements that can directly impact their bottom lines. Nunn, who is Lean Black Belt-certified, uses tools such as kaizen and PDCA (plan, do, check, act) to drive measurable improvements. Taking steps to reduce setup times, says Nunn, can be a low-cost way to find hidden capacity in your operations. He notes that the first time he performed a kaizen on a flexo, he was able to demonstrate savings of 70 percent. That’s a significant time—and cost—reduction.

“Quick changeovers allow [manufacturers] to have more flexible schedules—the more flexibility in the schedule, the more profit they can make.”

— Les Pickering, co-owner, Quadrant5 Consulting

Here we take a look at 10 best-practice ideas for reducing setup time and improving time to market:

1. Upgrade equipment. Advances in boxmaking technology mean that manufacturers have access to better and faster equipment fueled by software advances that can both boost speed and reduce or eliminate the need to shut equipment down to change orders. But, notes Pickering, the equipment side of the equation is relatively easy, assuming the purchases can be made within budget and provide payback in a reasonable amount of time. Where the challenges most often lie is with the “human element,” he says.

2. Engage and involve your operators. There’s power in your people—they have knowledge, experience, and insights that you can leverage to help make improvements that can drive time out of the setup process. Don’t overlook that knowledge. By engaging your team in whatever changes you wish to make, you’ll boost the odds that they will be on board with those changes. In addition, get them involved in ongoing monitoring and measuring. Are the changes you’ve implemented having the desired impact? If not, reconvene to discuss additional steps and opportunities for improvement. Create a culture of continuous improvement, in which operators know that they should be making suggestions regularly and coming together at specific times to consider whether new practices or processes should be implemented. “It’s a great opportunity to pull a team together,” says Nunn. “Pull together all of the stakeholders and ask them about the setup and where their challenges are; truly understand the process from their view, and not necessarily the management view.”

3. Formalize changeover processes. Most companies don’t have these, Pickering says. Instead they rely on their operators to “figure it out.” The problem with this, he says, is that “if you don’t have a formal way, you can’t train for it, and if you don’t have a standard process, you have variability.” And, what happens when a high-performing operator leaves for another company or retires? Their knowledge is lost, which impacts the production process and turnaround times. Documenting changeover processes that are derived based on the best-practice experiences of operators can be an important way to reduce variability and changeover times.

4. Ensure an environment that supports the performance of the process. The area around the equipment, or the industrial environment, needs to be visually easy to see to support the processes—that means, says Pickering, that there is nothing in the area that is not needed. “It’s really back to a bare-bones skeleton,” he says. And, it ensures that the tools or equipment that operators need will always be where they expect them to be. “If you’re the lead operator and I’m the assistant, and you say to me, ‘Go get me that 6-millimeter wrench,’ and if that wrench isn’t where it’s supposed to be, now I have to go and find it.” That takes time—unnecessary time that slows down the process and increases costs. Some seemingly minor things can have major impacts here, says Nunn. For instance: having tools on shadow boards close to the machines where they’re used. A simple step, yet one that can reap huge dividends.

5. Re-reference the machines. Whenever an operator does a setup, says Pickering, they need to have confidence that if they need to print 2¾ inches from the lead edge, that the machine will go to that position every time. Re-referencing the machines on a regular basis—at least monthly—can help to ensure that level of confidence.

6. Break down—and document—internal and external changeover tasks. Internal elements are those that require going into the machine as it’s stopped to perform some kind of action—changing a plate, for example. These actions can be taken only when a piece of equipment is down or not running. External elements are actions that can be taken while the machine is running—cleaning a print plate, for example. If any of these actions are not operating as efficiently as possible, says Pickering, setup times will be impacted. That requires a solid understanding of exactly what sorts of activities (internal and external) are taking place, whether there are opportunities to expedite them, and then documenting those actions so they are performed consistently with minimal to no variability.

This is, says Nunn, perhaps the biggest action item that manufacturers can undertake to achieve operational impacts. “Identify everything that needs to be done in a task, and separate into internal and external actions.”

“Pull together all of the stakeholders and ask them about the setup and where their challenges are; truly understand the process from their view, and not necessarily the management view.”

— Mike Nunn, vice president of operations, Ideon Packaging

7. Think lean. Nunn’s experience in lean manufacturing stresses an ongoing focus on ensuring that only value-added tasks take place in any production process. “Do all of the tasks add value, or are they nonvalue-added?” he asks. In the lean environment, there is a focus on identifying various forms of waste that can be part of any process and then eliminating, or at least significantly reducing, those items. This isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a one-time activity, he notes. “It’s repeating a PDCA process of let’s identify waste and eliminate or reduce it to shrink the amount of time it takes to produce the setup.”

8. Don’t overlook electronic information flow. It’s not just the production process itself that should be considered when seeking to reduce setup time, Nunn notes. Consider electronic information flow as well. A combination of paper and electronic systems may offer the best options for data flow, he says. For instance, paper tickets can be lost and waste time in trying to determine who has the ticket. Automating these tickets can ensure that information is available and readily accessible when and where it needs to be.

9. Adopt a “pit-stop” mentality. Nunn points to auto racing as a good example of how efficiencies can be introduced to significantly minimize the amount of time taken to perform a specific task. A pit crew can change out four tires and fill a tank of gas in less than three seconds. Having dedicated setup people can help achieve these efficiencies. Nunn says he’s a big believer in the SWARM (sudden, work, aligned, rapid, measured; see “Setup Reduction,” BoxScore, July/August 2018) mindset—he wrote a piece last year for AICC on the concept and how it can be used to reduce setup time.

10. Do the math! Crunching the numbers can yield valuable information and provide a baseline or reference point to calculate the value of making specific changes. How many changeovers did your machine perform over the past year? How long did it take to perform the changeovers? If you could reduce that time by 50 percent, what would the dollar impact be?

Boxmakers, says Pickering, need to think more as if they’re performing a ballet than playing hockey. “I want it to be a choreographed changeover,” he says. “It should be like ballet—that’s the only way.”

How could taking time to consider some of the best practices above help you to drive time and cost out of your production processes? There’s no time like the present to gather your team members and begin considering opportunities for improvement.

Lin Grensing-Pophal is a writer based in Wisconsin. She is a frequent contributor to BoxScore.