Lower Your Production Costs With Shop Floor Storage

Pretend that you’re not a composites manufacturer. Instead, imagine that you’re a surgeon about to operate on a patient. You reach for your scalpel, but it’s not there. It’s on the other side of the room. So you walk across the room to retrieve it. You walk back to your patient and make the first incision. You reach for a piece of gauze to soak up the blood. But there’s no gauze. It’s on the other side of the room. So you walk across the room again to retrieve it.

Your manufacturing operation may not be surgery, but the two scenarios are more in common than you think, says Liam Cahalane, industrial engineer at The Boeing Company. “If you’re a surgeon, you want all the necessary items you need to do the operation around you,” he says. “It’s the same concept for production. You want everything you need to build up the composite that you’re creating. You want the raw materials, the bagging, the tools, the tape, as close as possible, so you’re not wasting time walking to get whatever you need.”

Many manufacturers incur unnecessary costs by storing the materials they need far from the shop floor. Cahalane will illustrate how companies can reduce waste and optimize their production processes during an education session at COMPOSITES+POLYCON 2009.  The session, titled Utilizing a Capacitated Raw Material Storage to Minimize Manufacturing Cost, focuses on shop planning and lean manufacturing concepts, including point of use and push-pull production. 

“One of the major points of my presentation is not having warehouses so far away from where the work is actually getting done so you have to travel by foot or by cart to get the materials,” Cahalane says. “If you put the storeroom very close to where the work is being done, you can fill the items as the work is being done.” For example, at one company, Cahalane installed a freezer in the clean room to store small amounts of raw materials that needed refrigeration so they had everything they needed on site.

The benefits of this kind of production are obvious and relatively easy to measure, Cahalane adds: “It creates a low-cost production environment, where you can increase your throughput because people are actually working on what they’re supposed to be working on.”

Cahalane’s session takes place on Friday, Jan. 16 from 10:00 a.m  to 10:50 a.m.