Case Study Lean Administration: Makigami Process Analysis

Initial situation and goals of the project

In a supplier company for the mechanical engineering industry, where primarily special and individual production is carried out, the administrative workload was enormous. Within the support activities for production, long lead times and a low on-time delivery rate of approx. 65 % were identified. Additionally, numerous interfaces meant that important information was often difficult to obtain. Because of these reasons, the company decided to have its administrative processes analysed and optimised by an external Lean Consultancy with the help of the Makigami-Process- Analysis.

Approach

First of all, a project group formed with participants of all relevant areas. These included work preparation, sales, procurement, design and accounts. In the next step, the actual situation was noted and analysed. Here the entire administrative process with all individual process steps was critically scrutinised and marked as either value-adding or not-value-adding. During this analysis, which consisted of more one hundred process steps it became clear that, on the one hand, numerous interfaces obstructed the flow of information and, on the other hand, it was detected that a bottleneck had been created due to inappropriate work distribution, which had a significant negative impact on lead times. Based on these findings the process of activities and the work distribution was adjusted. Numerous activities that were classified as non-value-adding were eliminated.

Results

Because of the newly designed process, as well as the reduction of interfaces and the standardisation of processes, the lead time has been reduced by 40%. The flow of information is now also much more efficient and the workload of the employees has been significantly reduced. In addition, the on-time delivery reliability has been increased by approx. 20%.