Despite the loss of momentum, the process didn't stop. Soon Heard and his team were finding new ways to improve operations. One of the biggest savings came when the group questioned the venerable cylinder-straightening process. "You hear it before you see it," Heard explains, recalling his first visit to the plant. "And then you see it -- two men beating on these beautiful things with eight-pound sledge-hammers. There are automatic straighteners, too, but they're little more than mechanized hammers." Like birth, the hammering was a brutal event that prepared the way for the cylinder's later refinement.Heard wondered aloud why there was any need to straighten the cylinders at all. "The steel came in straight, and was machined precisely. Who the heck was bending it?"
Studying the manufacturing cycle, the group finally zeroed in one the cooling process. After removal from the furnace, cylinders were set on two four-by-eights on the floor and covered with vermiculite, granular material that insulated the cylinders so that they cooled gradually, over a period of days. While buried there, the hot metal sagged. Because of this deflection, cylinders had to be straightened as many as three times, each time requiring anywhere from 15 minutes to three hours. "If you had a really bad one," notes Porter, "you could spend an entire shift on it." Working closely with manufacturing engineer Ivan Quesenberry and weld-shop foreman Ronald Surface, the JIT team concocted and built a new cooling setup -- an eight-foot pit divided into 12 compartments, where smaller cylinders could be hung vertically.
"The first time we used it, they came out straight," says Heard, "but the alloy cracked -- it was cooling too quickly." Insulating the inside of the pits solved the problem, and now all of Xaloy's smaller cylinders are cooled that way. As a result, they require less machining and only a single, relatively simple straightening. "With that one change, we took 20% of the labor content out of the product," boasts Heard.
"None of our competitors that we know of -- certainly none of our domestic competitors -- are doing anything like this," adds Cox. "It gives us a distinct advantage in the marketplace." Xaloy is now considering the possibility of constructing deeper pits for its longer cylinders. "It's got the potential," Cox says, "of cutting the labor cost by 50% on all of our product lines."
The new cooling arrangement was but one of a proliferating number of JIT innovations. To control work-in-process inventory better -- and to cut down on travel distance -- Heard suggested that cylinders be stacked on special tables rather than on the floor. The tables, built in the weld shop, hold a limited number of units, preventing indiscriminate piling; they also minimize lifting and lowering.In another case, a quality circle dealing with excessive changeover time on one boring mill -- "It took 2 hours and 45 minutes to set up for a 3-hour job," explains Heard -- completely redesigned the machine boring head, trimming an hour and 45 minutes from the task. Estimated savings: 262.5 hours a year.
JIT not only sparked ideas, it also required that workers become increasingly, sophisticated. "These were not people," emphasizes Heard, "who were used to analyzing operations in detail, putting numbers on things, justifying capital expenditures. . . ." Not surprisingly, some of the efforts failed: A clever attempt to speed up changeover on a VDF boring machine, for example, generated unacceptable vibrations, and wasn't implemented. Then, too, some of the workers were less than enthusiastic. Those who had enjoyed the anonymity of their jobs on the floor hesitated to rock the boat. Some, who understood that JIT had become a political battle-ground for Arehart and Cox, aligned themselves with one camp or the other. "He's an anti-," Cox remarked of one white-collar employee who had embraced JIT reluctantly.
Sometimes even Cox, who had to weigh political and financial considerations, seemed to waffle in his support of JIT. When workers came up with a new clamping system for five honing machines that would have cut setup by 50%, they found that the price tag for all five -- $40,000 -- was too high; they got permission to purchase the necessary tooling for just one. To them, it seemed that management's commitment was questionable. Cox, however, had another delicate issue on his mind."I found myself betten a rock and a hard place on that one," he recalls. "You want to be responsive when an idea like that comes in, but there are other matters to contend with." In this case, it was Xaloy's board. The purchase of five new clamping systems would require board approval; the purchase of one would not. "I decided to bring them in one at a time," says Cox.
"When you say that you're going to introduce equipment that's going to save time," he explains, "the board's reaction is, 'Give us the name of the person it's going to replace. Give us the name, and we'll authorize the expenditure." That was an effect Cox wanted to avoid. "You've got people here who are trying to make improvements," he continues. "How can they do that if they know that they're working themselves out of a job?
"The board is all for anything that's going to cut inventory costs, decrease our lead time, make us more efficient, or improve our market position. But when we get down to details like that, they revert to 1950s-1960s ways of thinking. Which means I've got to walk a tightrope."
This time, fortune smiled on Xaloy. Because of the dealy in obtaining the five clamping systems, Cox discovered that the manufacturer might be willing to trade the new tooling for some surplus equipment that Xaloy owned. "Now we may get all five," he says enthusiastically.
Slowly, cylinder by cylinder, project by project, JIT continued to make headway in this less-than-ideal environment. In one department, tools that had been scattered about the place, or that were locked up in operators' personal toolboxes, were organized in cabinets. More progress was made in reducing setup times. Xaloy began to restructure its relationships with vendors and customers in light of JIT (see "Just-in-Time Marketing, page 105 and "Supply-Side JIT," page 109).
