ImagesMagUK_August_20

www.images-magazine.com AUGUST 2020 images 81 BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Will Pearson runs a small screen print shop and has been fanatical about the one-piece flow approach ever since he read two books 13 years ago: Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming; and The Machine that Changed the World by James Womack and Daniel Jones. www.phantomscreenprint.co.uk And that’s not factoring in the savings on inventory that will accrue in avoiding waste from spills and overuse etc. Putting a PDCA cycle into practice So, what did our PDCA look like? Well first, we decided that we should find a bigger can and decant our degreaser into that. After a lot of searching, we found the big red can in the photo, which not only holds 20-litres, but it also has an automatically opening lid when you hold the handle and tip it up. Plus, the spout is aerated, so the can does not ‘glug’ when you tip it up. That meant no more spills! Pretty good, we thought – we’ve killed off steps 3, 4, 7, and 10. Time now to PDCA it again. We thought the changes worked well, but we realised that getting the funnel and placing it in the bottle was an unnecessary step. A bit more research and, as it turns out, the big red can manufacturer also makes a yellow spout that fits onto the can, and hinges upward as you tip up the can. Fantastic! That’s step numbers 4, 5 and 8 dealt with. So, we then observed these changes for a while. It turns out that, whilst things were a lot better, the funnel created its own problem, as when you placed it in the neck of the spray bottle and poured, it sealed into the neck of the bottle so well that there was nowhere for the air to escape from the bottle during the decanting process. This meant that we had to pour incrementally with a few short breaks to fill the bottle. This is the ‘Check’ (C) part of the PDCA cycle. It was time to think again, come up with an idea, and then ‘Act’ (A). We decided that if we drilled a small hole in the very top of the bottle, this would act as a vent and solve the problem that the new funnel had created. We did this, and it worked. Now we were back into the ‘Plan’ (P) stage again. In this PDCA project, we managed to eradicate all inventory waste, reduce the job from 10 steps to 3, and reduce the task to just 30 seconds. And we won’t stop there: the next step might be constructing a holder attached to the edge of the bench to put the bottle in, so it is held firmly during the filling procedure. Notice how, in coming up with ideas, we had to try them and watch them before we had the knowledge of how our actions would really play out. The yellow funnel actually created an unforeseen problem, which we wouldn’t have seen if we were sat elsewhere in a cosy office. We were able to go back into the problem and fix this issue, because we had real- world experience of the situation. I use the bottle example because it’s straightforward, but hopefully you can see how PDCA and a culture of really observing and trying to understand what’s at the heart of the problems in your print shop can lead to the correct solutions and will move you closer to the goal of lean processing. Many PDCA projects are small, many have almost zero cost (okay, some do need cold hard cash thrown at them too) and everyone can get involved in these incremental and continuous improvements. Do we ever expect to reach our goal and reach a point where everything is perfect? Of course not, and for two good reasons: ■ The world is not a static environment – things change constantly, and what was a great idea one year, will hopefully have developed into something completely different the next year. ■ Our old friend entropy (the natural tendency of any system or order to break down into a chaotic state): unless you keep chipping away at your problems, entropy will quickly unravel all your good work as soon as you turn your back! [L] Switching to a larger capacity can that didn’t ‘glug’ when pouring saved time and reduced waste but there is still room for improvement. [R] Fitting a hinged yellow funnel that is specially designed for use with the large red can eliminates the spillages and subsequent clean-up, plus the need to fetch and replace the small funnel each time the degreaser bottle is filled. Each improvement shaves seconds off the overall time and cost of refilling the degreaser bottle, which adds up to days of production time when similar improvements to other small tasks are calculated over a month or year