Hi Guys.

Our company, a Plastics Injection Molding Automotive Supplier, has been trying to raise our profit level and be profitable once again. We (all salary) employees, have been tasked to come up with at least 2 cost saving ideas.

So I am stretching out there, to see if anyone has any ideas that might help. We have already done the cost reductions through re-cycling and hydro. Anything can help.

Thank you.

We are implementing "Cash Flow Management". My training was from my company and it seems to have worked well for us over the past year and 1/2. I can't go into details on our system since the company owns it, but there seemed to be a lot of classes availible on the subject when I googled it just now. "Cash Flow Management" must be one of the "hot" things to implement right now.

Welcome to the Cove, sidvic :bigwave:, and what an interesting first post :agree1: This subject is very much a factor for all of us, so this thread should attract a lot of attention if we know what is good for us...So I am stretching out there, to see if anyone has any ideas that might help. The best method by far when it comes to saving money is to avoid costs, so have a look at ways to:
reduce scrap and customer rejects.
reduce setup times
improve control of energy consuming equipment like electric motors, ventilation, lighting, heating and such. Most of us can save huge amounts of energy (and money) that way. In fact, we are launching an energy management system right now./Claes

I just went thru a couple of classes that would benefit you also so take a look into them. These are all part of what is called the "House of Lean"

VSM (Value Stream Mapping) Great Class :agree1:
Takt Time
Cellular Mfg.
Coninuous Improvement/Kaizen :agree1:
Plant Layout
SMED (Single Minute Exchange Die) :agree1:
Kanban
TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) Basicly exactly what Claes recommended :agree1:
POUS (Point of use storage)
Quick changeover\setup reduction :agree1:
Poka Yoke
Batch Reduction\One piece Flow
Visual Controls
Workplace Organization\5S
Standardized work
Workforc practices


The VSM and the TPM are really good classes. Kaizen works really great in some areas. (ex. I worked for an airplane company and took a job that took 21 hours to build a part down to 6 hours strictly with Kaizen. Had up front cost of more tools but you can see the difference) Like I said it doesn't work everywhere but the areas it does work in can make a difference. Kanban works if you do not try to implement it all at one time. The company I work for now (Automotive 2nd tier) tried to impliment this all at once and it ended up a failure (both guys who worked on it are no longer here). The way they taught us in class was to take small steps to reach the big goal.

Apparantly Toyota is really big into this and has teams working all the time on these items. Another thing they taught us was that you have to work on it constantly to have everyone buy into the ideas. Hope this helps a little.

Dale

I just went thru a couple of classes that would benefit you also so take a look into them. These are all part of what is called the "House of Lean"

VSM (Value Stream Mapping) Great Class :agree1:
Takt Time
Cellular Mfg.
Coninuous Improvement/Kaizen :agree1:
Plant Layout
SMED (Single Minute Exchange Die) :agree1:
Kanban
TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) Basicly exactly what Claes recommended :agree1:
POUS (Point of use storage)
Quick changeover\setup reduction :agree1:
Poka Yoke
Batch Reduction\One piece Flow
Visual Controls
Workplace Organization\5S
Standardized work
Workforc practices

Dale


These are all good techniques. But, don't forget, improving the supporting processes can also save time and money by making the all the operations more effective.

I just went thru a couple of classes that would benefit you also so take a look into them. These are all part of what is called the "House of Lean"

VSM (Value Stream Mapping) Great Class :agree1:
Takt Time
Cellular Mfg.
Coninuous Improvement/Kaizen :agree1:
Plant Layout
SMED (Single Minute Exchange Die) :agree1:
Kanban
TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) Basicly exactly what Claes recommended :agree1:
POUS (Point of use storage)
Quick changeover\setup reduction :agree1:
Poka Yoke
Batch Reduction\One piece Flow
Visual Controls
Workplace Organization\5S
Standardized work
Workforc practices


The VSM and the TPM are really good classes. Kaizen works really great in some areas. (ex. I worked for an airplane company and took a job that took 21 hours to build a part down to 6 hours strictly with Kaizen. Had up front cost of more tools but you can see the difference) Like I said it doesn't work everywhere but the areas it does work in can make a difference. Kanban works if you do not try to implement it all at one time. The company I work for now (Automotive 2nd tier) tried to impliment this all at once and it ended up a failure (both guys who worked on it are no longer here). The way they taught us in class was to take small steps to reach the big goal.

Apparantly Toyota is really big into this and has teams working all the time on these items. Another thing they taught us was that you have to work on it constantly to have everyone buy into the ideas. Hope this helps a little.

Dale


Dale
Outstanding Response.

:applause: :applause:

Hi Guys.

Our company, a Plastics Injection Molding Automotive Supplier, has been trying to raise our profit level and be profitable once again. We (all salary) employees, have been tasked to come up with at least 2 cost saving ideas.

So I am stretching out there, to see if anyone has any ideas that might help. We have already done the cost reductions through re-cycling and hydro. Anything can help.

Thank you.

Sidvic: Really hard to say without probably getting some proprietary info from you and company size / competitive ranking, corporate culture.

Not making profits is not good and sometimes unpalatable decisions have to be made. Some ugly and not so ugly possibilities:-

From a macro business side:-

- Subcontract non-essential operations that are currently company run.
- partnership with similar business to share costs. Move equipment to shared building costs or perform work for another company that they'd like to do but can't because they can't take on FT employees.
- Ask the non-exempt employees to give something up in short term: a few days Holiday or renegotiate overtime. Same thing with salaried. (Bummer thing but if you are in a crisis, it is better to do this and keep your job).
- If you are loosing money on exchange rates (The loonie vs Dollar), buy currency options. Same thing if you are dependent on commodities.This is what Southwest do to hedge against oil costs.

From tactical side:-
- Look at your product portfolio. Is there some products that cost more that others ? Why is that ? Can you make a change to that or renegotiate a parameter that you are testing to or inspecting to end cusotmer doesn't require ?
- Can you enforce a lifetime buy on product that is near the end of it's business cycle (This will short term give additional orders for example aftermarket). You may find out that you are making more money on real old stuff but volumes are not there.

From quality side:-
- Look at predictive instead of preventative maintenance.
- Implement knowledge based testing. If sampling on every lot, consider moving to skip lots if data has not sourced any failures.
- Move to an outlier based system for reliability testings. Link product parametrics to quality/reliability and implement screens around them.