 Valve manufacturer Dynamic Fluid Control (DFC) has recommissioned its Saunders factory after extensive overhaul and upgrading. The upgrade, which took 18 months to complete, is part of a broader programme being conducted across four factories under the guidance of industrial engineering services specialist Consiliarii.
DFC’s investment in the over- haul has totalled R26-million, resulting in customer benefits that include shortened lead times and more accurate delivery forecast dates.
“The investment in factory overhauls sends a clear signal of commitment to developing and delivering leading valve products to markets worldwide,” DFC MD Henry Smith says.
He adds that the Consiliarii programme will see DFC’s Vent-O-Mat factory recommissioned early next year, followed by the Vosa and Biman facilities during 2009.
Smith says that the decision to upgrade the factories had been taken in response to increasing demand from the mining indus- try, and because of increased spending on water infrastructure across South Africa.
“DFC wanted to increase capa-city and upgrade the company’s materials handling and materials flow processes. “These had become clumsy because of the incorporation of several company acquisitions into DFC’s Benoni facility over a number of years, all of which had been allocated space in a random fashion,” Smith explains.
He says that it was time to look at the entire site and allocate space intelligently, while also looking at materials flow issues.
“The challenge was to work with Consiliarii to do this, while DFC maintained production levels and carried out the recommended machine upgrades,” Smith says.
Consiliarii’s recommendations for the four DFC factories were tabled in mid-2006.
They were based on the identification of discrete manufacturing processes, and the examination and measurement of each of these processes, using the four key aspects of efficiency, use, quality and overall equipment effectiveness.
Consiliarii MD Anthony Harris explains that, at Saunders, the rollout of the upgrade had been difficult to define in advance.
“It became a progressive and ongoing procedure as more information came to light and impacted on data already gathered. “There were many variables, which Consiliarii did not have at the start. For example, the company did not know how long it would take to machine a Saunders casting from beginning to end using a horizontal machining centre, which Consiliarii considered installing. So certain assumptions had to be made,” Harris explains.
He says that the aim of the upgrade programme was to move the Saunders factory beyond the jobbing-shop paradigm, which had been using batch production to achieve the best volume efficiencies out of each particular process, but which wasted time by requiring continuous visits to the completed batch to draw components for valve assembly.
“For a product range as extensive as that of Saunders, the batch manufacturing approach of the jobbing shop created the problem of large numbers of changeovers as the many components passed through the various machines. “The manufacturing time for a particular product was anything up to six weeks as a direct result of this,” Harris says.
He explains that Consiliarii wanted to reduce the interval between start of manufacture and despatch to as short a time as possible, because the company knew that if it could get to the point where manufacture of a product began in the morning and was completed in the afternoon, then manufacturing volumes would automatically increase.
As the programme developed across the four factories, DFC took decisions to either replace or upgrade its machinery, based on the examinations, projections and recommendations developed by Consiliarii.
In the Saunders factory, new CNC lathes and horizontal and vertical CNC machining centres were installed. Vertical boring mills were automated by conver-sion to CNC operation.
Inspection by Consiliarii of DFC’s overall facility revealed valve components that were travelling kilo- metres, both within the factories and between them, as they were moved between machining, welding, painting and powder coating processes, and queued for process time.
The company identified and listed all individual operations, then rearranged factory layout to make distances between them as short as possible.
In the Saunders factory, bottlenecks were carefully identified, analysed and then eliminated so that completed components could arrive at the assembly tables in the right quantities to allow completed valves to be despatched at the rate of one every seven minutes.
Work in progress was slashed, production volumes were increased, and space was saved.
Machinery relocation during this procedure was extensive, with Vent-O-Mat production being moved in entirety from one building into another.
Smith explains that the programme evolved into three main phases over time.
“The first involved upgrading the technology and addressing the materials. DFC decided what equipment to buy, what to upgrade and where to place it. “During this phase, the company made decisions such as the necessity for two powder coating facilities instead of just one, and the need to combine the fluidised bed coating facility with normal electro- static spray process. “The second phase involved the upgrading of individual workstations, and taking decisions such as whether or not to use the kanban system. This phase is currently under way in all factories except Saunders, which is complete. The third phase, which is still to come, will be productivity measurement using Consiliarii’s clockworks programme.”
Clockworks is Consiliarii’s time-based productivity measurement and improvement programme. When implemented, DFC management will have access to manufacturing process data and overall equipment effectiveness by machine, product type and operator.
Standards will be developed and defined for each manufacturing process, and data captured on the shop floor for central storage and access by management in formats that will be personalised according to individual needs and responsibilities.
Smith says that the few upgrade tasks still outstanding in the Saunders factory would happen over time.
“All machinery upgrade, installation and repositioning are complete, as is the bulk of the retooling. The new factory is now, for all practical purposes, commissioned, and the exercise will from now on become one of ongoing and indefinite upgrading,” Smith says.
He points out that DFC has carried out the exercise to compress its lead times, facilitate easier planning, drive stocks down, and increase the company’s due-date performance.
“The resulting new procedures have given DFC an edge in the market in terms of lead times, but only time will tell how good DFC is actually going to get.
Meanwhile, DFC has increased its capacity, upgraded its workflow, and the com- pany is now able to accurately forecast for its customers when they will get their orders,” Smith concludes.
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