Danville Metal Stamping

Aerospace and Gas Turbine Supplier Strengthens Commitment to Lean Manufacturing with IFS Applications

Since its inception over 50 years ago, Danville Metal Stamping Co., Inc., has grown from a three-person shop producing metal stampings to a company employing more than 450 people. The Danville, Illinois-based company currently produces a variety of metal components for the aerospace and gas turbine industries. Its customers include Pratt & Whitney, General Electric, Honeywell, and Rolls-Royce.

Meeting Competitive Challenges

To keep up with rapid growth, Danville Metal Stamping (DMS) realized it needed to make major changes in the way it does business, including the introduction of a lean manufacturing initiative at its plants in Danville, Ill.
“To us, lean manufacturing was a necessary step in maintaining our position in a highly competitive industry,” said Tony Nogoda, who as Continuous Improvement Manager has been responsible for continuing the transition to lean manufacturing at DMS.

“As demand for our products increased, our customers demanded shorter lead times and additional price concessions. We knew we couldn’t continue to meet these requirements without exploiting every opportunity to reduce waste in the production process.”

Formulating a Lean Manufacturing Strategy

DMS management outlined the company’s lean manufacturing objectives, which included specific goals for reducing scrap, rework, overproduction, inventory, and work in progress. Among the goals was increasing throughput to improve inventory turns by four percent per year.

The management team also looked to other companies that had adopted lean manufacturing techniques for best practices that could be adopted at DMS. Company personnel took advantage of outside training opportunities, including Six Sigma Black Belt and lean management training.

Using this knowledge, management mapped out a lean manufacturing strategy for DMS. A major component of this plan was the transition from departments to manufacturing cells. These small, focused production teams, coupled with Kanban and just-in-time inventory techniques, would help DMS shorten delivery cycles and enhance product quality.

“With manufacturing cells, you can produce just what you need, with minimum materials, equipment, labor, time, and space,” Nogoda said. “A cell has a simple and direct routing between operations. This lets us easily identify and eliminate bottlenecks and excess travel, and reduce lead times. Also, cells produce parts in small lots, which will allow us to discover and correct problems faster than before.”

Recognizing the Need for an Integrated IT Solution

With the lean manufacturing initiative in full swing, DMS’ management realized that the company could benefit further through investing in a modern, integrated IT system to replace its existing systems, which were becoming more cumbersome and inefficient as the company grew. The problem was that much of the company’s production data was stored in a mainframe system, transferred to a variety of standalone internal systems, and eventually re-entered into the mainframe.

“The result was a variety of hand-offs, with duplicated efforts, to try to maintain the consistency of the data,” said IT Manager Brian Pirie. “To get information, you had to go to multiple places and then combine that information before reaching a conclusion. And because the information was not available in real time, you often had to wait a long time to analyze the results of your actions.”

These shortcomings were becoming increasingly apparent as the company deepened its commitment to lean manufacturing.

“At first we were going after the changes that could be implemented most quickly, and it really didn’t matter that the data we were working with was slightly dated,” Pirie said. “But as we got further along, we realized that we would need real-time data to make the best informed decisions and take advantage of the biggest opportunities for improving the bottom line.”

Choosing and Implementing the System

The need for accurate, real-time data prompted DMS to replace its multiple legacy systems with a modern, integrated business solution that would better support the company’s lean manufacturing initiative. After evaluating offerings from several enterprise software vendors, the company selected and implemented a component-based solution from IFS.

The IFS software enabled the company to consolidate its business information into a single system for the first time. Company personnel no longer had to run multiple reports to collect data, or merge data from different reports to get a clear picture of what was happening within the company. Also, because the IFS system is component-based, DMS was able to minimize implementation costs by deploying only the core functionality that it needed right away and adding other components as needed. Initially, DMS implemented IFS solutions for supply chain management, corporate performance management, product data management, time reporting, document management, and business-process modeling.

The IFS software supports lean manufacturing by making it easier to accurately map existing processes with proposed new processes, allowing internal error-proofing, or Kaizen, groups to better identify and address opportunities for waste reduction. IFS’ process-modeling tool, IFS Business Modeler™, has made it possible to create more detailed process definitions. This, in turn, has illustrated how changes are reflected throughout the organization. The process models have enabled the company to satisfy the configuration management requirement for AS 9100 certification.

“We need to get immediate feedback on the impact of a decision,” Nogoda said. “That way we see how often issues are occurring and what the impacts are on costs. This allows us to do a better job of identifying opportunities for improvement.”

Demonstrating Results

Nogoda conceded that DMS’ lean manufacturing initiative has required a cultural shift and that resistance to change is human nature. He noted, however, that the change is occurring as more and more people buy in to the lean culture.

“Buy-in is based on results, and once you start seeing results, people convert fairly quickly,” Nogoda said. “Having an integrated IT system is helping tremendously in this respect.

“With our old systems, it was hard to show timely improvement trends with regard to our lean manufacturing efforts. With our new IFS software, we can see those results much more quickly, demonstrating to ourselves-and to others-that our lean manufacturing efforts are providing added value to our customers and rapid payback on our investment.”