Six Sigma Case Study: Increasing Shipping Efficiency

Problem:  A manufacturer did not understand what contributed to the quantity of product shipped each day.  They did a lot of work to keep production moving and reduce downtime, but it never seemed to impact their ability to ship more units

Causes

• 165 variables were tracked daily including:
  • Downtime
  • Defects per unit
  • Model mix production (48)
  • Model mix labor (48)
  • Actual labor per department (15)
  • Quality per department (8)
  • End of line defects
  • First Time Quality
  • Material shortages
  • Off line inventory
  • Repair hours per unit

Solutions

• Identified top 7 contributors to product shipped
  • Departmental quality (2 departments)
  • Repair hours per unit
  • First time quality
  • Labor in repair dept.
  • Off line inventory
  • One model
• Analyzed First time quality (units not shipped within 4 hours)
  • Identified the largest quality issues that prevented units from being shipped
  • The largest reason for not shipping in 4 hours were trucks with nothing wrong
  • Additional defects were identified that were more traditional such as brakes

Result

• The company felt that had staff to address the issues. They merely needed help wading through all the data to determine root causes.