Automating Process with No Capital Expense: Black Belt Project is a Winner

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This may sound like an odd question, but….

Did you ever mix your white laundry with red? If you have (or haven’t), you may know that the red could “bleed” and turn the load pink. The same effect could occur in an Emulsion Aggregation (EA) ink toner production plant. However, it doesn’t, certainly not at Xerox. Cleaning the lines prevents this unwanted color mixing effect from happening. But it takes time, “changeover cycle time,” in production language.

What to do? An opportunity to improve this process came about through a Black Belt certification project. That’s how the “Changeover Cycle Time Reduction” project was born.

Marc Hagan, process productivity specialist at the Xerox Supplies Development Center (SDC) part of the Xerox Research Centre of Canada (XRCC) in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, explains. “The production runs at the SDC are smaller than those of larger facilities because of the diverse product mix we produce. As a result, the amount of changeover required between different colors and products is high.”

There’s more…. “All changeover cycle time is essentially non value add. As such, a need existed at the SDC to limit the amount of time spent cleaning instead of producing product. The changeover procedure was outdated and not well defined, which limited automating it. Thus, most cleaning was done manually.”

For his Green Belt project, Marc semi-automated a section of the changeover process. For his Black Belt certification, he revisited the situation. This time, he took on the whole system.

“In the spirit of full disclosure, I had an on-site advantage,” Marc admits. “I’ve been working at the SDC for years in process-oriented functions. I knew the control system and had ideas about how to automate it completely this time. Plus I could try out solutions while doing my day job.”

He credits Lean Six Sigma with giving him the resources to tackle this project. ” I analyzed the process flow by performing a series of measurements to arrive at a baseline for the process. I saw variability in cycle time, which pointed to the need to standardize the process.”

With what he refers to as a “Lean 101” mindset, Marc derived a series of “quick wins.” Putting tools at the point of use is a case in point. He then went on to streamline the changeover procedure. In total, he removed 143 manual operations, which equates to about 50 percent of the process. That cleared the way for him to automate the remaining steps with what he calls a “control system recipe.”

The new and improved system went live in October 2013. It offers an array of benefits, such as:

•Standardizing, eliminating, automating and leaning out the entire changeover process
•Reducing cycle time by 32 percent, which frees resources to do more value-added work
•Increasing production and revenue as byproducts
•Doing all of the above without incurring any capital expense!
There’s one more impact to take into consideration. “I’m one of the first in-position people to get Black Belt certified in the supply chain or manufacturing groups at Xerox,” he says. What does that mean? “I get to live the benefit of the improvements every day. And I’ve helped make work life easier for my colleagues. It’s rewarding and there’s more to come.”