CASE STUDY

Meeting customer demands and exceeding customer expectations for quality and delivery are paramount at SEPCO. With these goals in mind, the company recently invested in a new Italian-made machine, known to employees and customers as ‘Sophia”. In addition to positioning the company to better serve existing customers, Sophia’s high-speed capabilities would enable the company to seize new market opportunities and customers particularly for small batch jobs. However, set-up times approaching 3 hours prevented the company from achieving its goals. The equipment capacity was underutilized and the return on its new asset was not where it needed to be.

To address the situation, SEPCO’s President and Owner, Dan Ignasiak, knew he needed to engage a small team in an improvement and Coaching Kata event. Dan had visited a manufacturer located in Michigan, a world-class machining company that SEPCO benchmarks from, who implemented Kata with impressive results. Dan turned to the NWIRC who offers Kata training and implementation assistance by a certified coach. With the assistance of the NWIRC, the SEPCO team set the overall challenge – a perfect set up in 30 minutes.

NWIRC’s Tom Weible, TWI Certified in kata, coached SEPCO’s core team to apply improvement kata working towards their overall challenge. Team members participated as learners in repetitive coaching sessions designed to help master the improvement kata to 1) assess current conditions based on data, 2) establish target conditions that are in alignment with the challenge; 3) identify and evaluate obstacles; 4) select an improvement path, 5) establish expectations; 6) implement experiments, 6) measure results, and 7) learn from the experiences.

The team’s improvement experiments were centered around their current condition of equipment set-up time at nearly three-hours- with an improved time targeted for each new experiment and the review of outcomes. Through multiple rounds of learning, experiments, and short coaching sessions, the employees were the drivers of this process improvement with measurable results.