The POD - Part 5

Finally we were ready to begin. On the last Friday afternoon we conducted one final check of everything – material, machines and manpower. We had schedules set up for each machine and I had designed a basic Schedule Control to allow us to measure Blocks/Hour at all steps every hour.

At precisely 7:00am on Monday morning we fired up the Vertical Mill and began to 2D machine blocks. It took the anticipated 15 minutes for the first blocks to come off the Vertical mill at which point they were stacked in front of the next two mills in the process. Half an hour in the first blocks were ready to be drilled.
And that’s when it happened. One of the two drills didn’t work.

Word quickly spread that “half the POD was shut down.” I couldn’t believe it. These two drills were specifically selected because they “were the best we had.” Unfortunately no one had bothered to try them out.

I asked my plant manager how it was possible that no one knew this drill did not work. With an “I told you this wouldn’t work” grin on his face he explained that we had “so many extra drills it didn’t make sense to waste time fixing a broken one.”

And that’s when the next amazing thing happened. My maintenance man, who had been to intimately involved in setting up The POD jumped into action. He and a helper quickly pulled the broken drill apart and diagnosed the problem. It took them just under two hours to make the necessary repairs and we were back in business. I heard more than one comment to the effect that no one had “ever seen those maintenance guys more so quickly before.”

When it came time for our 10:00 Schedule Check we found predictably that we were a little behind schedule. However the delay getting the one drill up and running was somewhat compensated by the lower than expected time required to mill each block. While there was no immediate explanation for this, I secretly suspected it was due to a lack of material handling associated with the machines being set up next to each other.

When the first blocks started to emerge milled and drilled I had a look at the Minutes per Block. Even with the equipment problems we were tracking at just under 50 minutes/block. Certainly an improvement over the “hour to mill and hour to drill.” But still not the “70% improvement” I had been promised. However the first day was generally considered to be a success and we shut things down for the night.