Background: A large industrial client has nine separate functional organizations involved in determining a commercial offering for repair of large generators used by utilities, communicating with the Customer, testing for cracks in the rotating element, analyzing the crack indication, engineering the repair, designing the repair equipment, manufacturing repair parts, determining man-hours for the repair, and pricing the repair.
Situation: The 45 day process from inquiry to order plus the 30 day handoff to start machining exceeds the 14 days required by the customer to fit within his outage window, resulting in lost orders. Costs associated with machinists on site awaiting engineering direction made repair pricing non-competitive.
Analysis: This work, while important to the Customer, is a small piece of the business for those functional organizations involved and so is considered relatively low priority. Representatives from each of the nine organizations mapped the entire process and analyzed sources of delay. Handoffs from one department to another were the prime culprit. Duplication of effort between organizations, e.g. pulling drawings, etc., was another source of delay.
Improvement: An IT workflow application that the client already licensed was used to route the information through each of the organizations. All documents were placed in an electronic folder to which the workflow application pointed.
Result: Reduction of cycle time from inquiry to start of machining was reduced to under 13 days. Savings of approximately $10k per job by reducing the time that machinists were on site awaiting engineering direction.