The interim manager was commissioned by a manufacturer of specialty wires. The company's products are used in wire erosion, electronics, welding and soldering. The aim of the interim mandate: To ensure a high level of plant availability in production.
The particular challenge for the interim manager was restrictions imposed by the shareholders. The company had just emerged from a crisis that threatened its continued existence. As a result, the shareholders were not prepared to spend any significant amounts on expanding the machinery. Furthermore, it was not foreseeable at the time that the industry economy would stabilize at a good level.
Expanding production capacity without additional machines
The task for the interim manager was to optimize the processes in the "EDM wire" area so that production capacity could be maintained at a high level without additional machines.
Optimizing set-up process downtimes
Extending machine availability is known as increasing the degree of utilization. Put simply, the aim is to reduce non-productive times as much as possible. As it is not possible to set up the wire drawing process parallel to the production time, non-productive times can only be reduced within the continuous process. A high level of expertise in relation to the wire drawing process was required here. The solution to this task was to convert all process steps outside the wire drawing process - as far as possible - from sequential to parallel. This resulted in a 5 percent increase in productivity for the entire machine group (48 wire drawing machines).
Wire production efficiency increased by 10 percent
The main way to improve the performance of a wire drawing machine is to increase the drawing speed. However, the installed drive power sets limits, as do the internal logistics and quality requirements. The interim manager and the working group iteratively developed a process that ultimately improved the performance level by as much as 10 percent.
