Anchor Manufacturing Group Wins Productivity Award
Tuesday, November 6, 2018
For more information, please contact Christie Carmigiano
CLEVELAND, OH—November 6, 2018—Anchor Manufacturing Group, Inc., Cleveland, OH, has received the 2018 Zierick Manufacturing Corporation Productivity Award as part of the Precision Metalforming Association (PMA) Awards of Excellence in Metalforming. The manufacturer specializes in appearance and decorative stampings, high-strength aluminum and steel, stainless-steel exhaust products, and safety-critical parts. Anchor won the award for productivity gains realized from its whiteboard tracking and walkabout program.
Anchor’s whiteboard tracking contains three functional tiers. The first layer, hourly-tracking boards, is implemented on new-project-launch work centers; work centers that need improvement; and high-volume, high-revenue work centers. Hourly boards show specific information such as the currently running part number, expected hourly and cumulative rate each hour, the actual hourly and cumulative rate each hour, the amount of scrap and rework each hour, and downtime minutes and reasons each hour. Supervisors must sign off on the whiteboard each hour, guaranteeing that they know what is going on at each work center and allowing them to react immediately to any problems.
The second tier, level-one boards, also is implemented on new-project-launch work centers; work centers that need improvement; and high-volume, high-revenue work centers. These boards provide a slightly bigger picture than the hourly tracking boards, as they track daily and monthly data.
The third tier, level-two boards, provides high-level measurement and analysis. These boards are used departmentally and they also track items such as safety-related incidents, quality issues, premium freight costs and more.
The walkabout brings everything together in Anchor’s productivity program. This daily walk begins at work centers containing hourly tracking and level-one boards, and ends at the level-two board meeting area. This walk engages members from each discipline throughout the plant and involves reviewing the most recent information from all whiteboards. It makes everyone aware of what is happening at each work center, in each department or work-center category, and plant-wide. The walkabout is not just about presenting information, but also about ensuring that things are heading in the right direction, establishing future action plans, and ensuring that there is full transparency into issues, and that these issues are being owned and resolved.
As a result of Anchor’s whiteboard tracking and walkabout program, the company has realized a projected annual savings of $668,000 from plant-wide scrap reduction and productivity increases. Anchor went from a plant-wide scrap rate of 2.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2017 to a rate of 1.7 percent at the end of the second quarter of 2018. During this same period, Anchor went from plant-wide direct-labor-earned hours to hours worked of 71.3 percent to 74.6 percent, resulting in a 4.5 percent increase in labor efficiency. Additional program benefits include increased departmental cohesiveness and improved employee awareness and morale.
The Productivity Award is one of eight Awards of Excellence in Metalforming, presented annually by PMA. Sponsored by Zierick Manufacturing Corp., Mount Kisco, NY, the award recognizes outstanding achievement by a manufacturing company in the development and implementation of programs, processes and use of assets that lead to significant improvements in productivity.
PMA is the full-service trade association representing the $137-billion metalforming industry of North America—the industry that creates precision metal products using stamping, fabricating, spinning, slide forming and roll forming technologies, and other value-added processes. Its nearly 800 member companies also include suppliers of equipment, materials and services to the industry. PMA leads innovative member companies toward superior competitiveness and profitability through advocacy, networking, statistics, the PMA Educational Foundation, FABTECH and METALFORM Mexico tradeshows, and MetalForming and 3D Metal Printing magazines.