Rio Tinto Aluminium Smelting
Lean in Smelting

Rio Tinto Aluminium, now part of Rio Tinto Alcan, published the following report at the International Mine Management Conference in October 2006, detailing their own findings on the impact Lean had in smelting and mining.

As in all projects, LMR helped to tailor the Lean Production System to suit Rio tinto Aluminium's environment in order to sustain the gains made in quality and efficiency.


- RTA Smelting (a 2.7Mb pdf to download)

JIT and Standardised work in heavy equipment manufacturing

Heavy Equipment Manufacturer

Scope:
Provide Lean support to the operations for the implementation of Standardised Work and Pull Systems.

Application:
The company had a campaign to implement Standardised Work across all cells of the operation within a tight timeframe and used a workshop approach to complete this with LMR’s coaching assistance. With long cycle times of production against takt and unusually large items weighing 100 kilos or more, LMR had to tailor the full Standardised Work System (SWCT, SWC, WES and Yamazumi) to cope with the demand placed on work sequence, timing and potential introduction of overburdening. LMR helped to introduce pull systems for all key parts of the operation using the principles of Just in Time, particularly those of Pull Systems, Heijunka and One Piece flow.

Results:
The kanban implementation has reduced inventory in the overall value chain and improved throughput and delivery accuracy. The Standardised Work implementation is providing sustainability and consistency of production. The team leader to team members ratio has been reduced from 1:22 to 1:11 without increasing headcount, thus providing a productivity and quality improvement beyond expectation. ROI on LMR resource 14:1.

Future Plans:
Reduce the team leader to team member ration further to drive quality control and reduce failures in the field.

Lean Layout

Case Study – Layout Workshop Our client is a family owned company with over 23,000 employees and a worldwide production footprint. Products vary from heating applications to geared motors.

Scope: As our client’s European production footprint expands, the senior executive team asked LMR to evaluate whether any consolidation of operations into existing sites could be achieved in order to reduce operating costs.

Application:
LMR proposed a Lean Layout workshop with key individuals including: production, production engineering, facilities and senior divisional representatives. The workshop was 5 days in duration held in a facility likely to receive additional capacity. The agenda for the 5 days consisted of general Lean awareness followed by some training in advanced Lean layout techniques used to formulate the Future State. Upon completion of the training, various production modelling sessions were held which could then be evaluated against the 3M principles (Muda, Mura, Muri) to determine the overall effect on unit cost of production and distribution costs. The top 3 proposals were then evaluated further using 1/50th layouts, high level standardised work, and production flow. Lastly, projections on the three scenarios were evaluated against fluctuations in demand to verify flexibility in production to meet customer demand.

Results:
Consolidation process met the needs of expansion with no further requirements for new premises.

ROI on LMR resource 140:1.