Transportation – Rail Refurbishment Company
Performance Transformation
Business Challenge
Significantly accelerate production ramp-up whilst reducing product cost
Significantly accelerate production ramp-up whilst reducing product cost
Background
- Our client had secured a substantial contract to refurbish 100 train sets for the Victoria, Northern and Piccadilly lines.
- Set #1 had taken four times the contracted man-hours and 8 months to complete. Performance for sets #2 and #3 was forecast to be no better.
Approach
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Our approach comprised three distinct, complementary strands:
- “Produceability Studies” : focused on Design for Manufacture & Installation.
- Production Scheduling & Execution: established a one week takt time, with eight production stages.
- Lean Techniques: included lineside visual controls, lineside material supply and daily production meetings.
Key Achievements & Value Delivered
- Response times dramatically reduced – standard products delivered within 48 hours of order.
- 300% increase in overall stock-turns.
Rail Infrastructure Maintainer – Track Renewals Lean Transformation
Business Challenge
- Consistent historic volume losses and, looking ahead, a significant capacity challenge with yet more cost pressures, meant that High Output Track Renewals needed a step change in efficiency.
Background
- Due to the heavy utilisation of the network, particularly during the day, the Track Renewals capability could only realistically be deployed at night and at weekends. Initial analysis indicated that in an eight hour midweek ‘Possession’, extensive set-up and set-down times resulted in an average 40 minute production window on track replacement (TRS) and c.60 minutes on ballast cleaning (BCS).
Approach
- Working with depot-based multi-disciplined teams in the planning and execution activity, over 100 improvement opportunities were identified, scoped and deployed.
- Improvements focused on “stage gate” production planning, set-up time reduction, improved tools management, and a “Formula 1 Pit Stop” approach to team organisation, training and preparation.
- Simple ‘quick reference guides’, based on the identified best practices, were provided to the teams to ensure sutainability.
Key Achievements & Value Delivered
- sustained 20% reduction in set-up and set-down times has resulted in the production window being more than doubled for TRS and c.50% increase for BCS.
“We’ve used lots of different consultancies before, but none of them have been able to deliver any sustainable improvement. Ingersoll have done what they said they would do, and then some. Working with these guys has been one of the best experiences of my career.”
Client Business Improvement Manager
Rail Infrastructure Maintainer – Track Renewals Lean Transformation Production Team Analytical Capability
Business Challenge
- To significantly improve operational performance in Track Renewals by better leveraging Management Information.
- The Leadership Team recognised that they needed a more rigorous approach to quickly identifying and understanding the root cause of production losses, “lost shifts”, and underperformance.
- Accountability was difficult to determine, and there was little confidence that root causes were being adequately addressed and eliminated.
- Existing business reviews had become ‘mechanistic’ with little or no real benefit being yielded.
Approach
- A robust Production Loss Management capability was introduced, involving daily analysis/actioning and weekly reporting & control reviews.
- A more strategic review of Production Loss data led to a more comprehensive overhaul of production reporting and root cause analysis centring on Production and Plant teams.
Key Achievements & Value Delivered
- A 12% increase in ‘Plan versus Actual’ Production volume to 84% was achieved.
- Further to this, actions resulting from the introduction of the root cause analysis process were assigned – these involved all parts of the organisation and covered Development and Planning activity up to 3 years in advance of Production activity.
‘Typically we gather a vast amount of data, but do little with it. This rigorous approach to Production Loss Reporting and Actioning has led directly to improved production performance. It is now recognised that losses are not purely down to the production team- much of the loss occurs during the development and planning stages.’
Senior Operations Manager
