The Goal: a process of Ongoing Improvement

DW: What was the problem?
KK: It was an operation where they were installing the fuzzy, felt-like
material that goes in the ceiling of the car—very big and very clunky. Our
data said that the mean cycles between failures was about five minutes, and
the mean time to repair was about a minute. I was amazed that the line was
stopping that often, and thought maybe the data was wrong, so we went and
looked for ourselves. Sure enough, we watched the operator run for five
cycles, stop the line, walk away, pick up five more of these big, bulky items
—they weren’t heavy but they were big—drag them back, restart the line,
and continue to install them. Every five cycles she would stop the line. Was it
considered a major problem before we looked at it? No. It’s not like we were
losing an hour straight of production because something had broken down.
We were only losing one minute. But it was happening every five cycles.
We could see immediately why the material wasn’t closer to the line. There
was a supervisor’s office in the way. We found out there had been a request
made some time ago to move the office, but it was considered very low
priority and it wasn’t getting done. So I got the office moved, and lo and
behold, throughput of the entire plant went up, which was a surprise, because
my experience told me that I couldn’t expect that. Then we used the software
to find the next bottleneck and continued on with that process until we were
making our throughput goals very steadily, every day. That was a real change
in the way that plant operated.

---

DW: Did you take your insights to other GM plants?
KK: Yes. We demonstrated the process when central office management
visited the plant, and it became apparent a lot of plants in GM weren’t hitting
their throughput targets. Eventually, I left DetroitHamtramck and went to a
central office position to help start a divisional group to implement this
solution. Seventeen years later, I’m an executive at GM who owns the
process for all of the North American plants, and it has been expanded to
include the simulation of future manufacturing designs.