Month: June 2017

As a company manufacturing a wide range of components, we have lots of different types of tooling in our factory.  But we don’t want unnecessary tooling crowding our work space as this just leads to waste.  The same goes for the components we make.  Like all companies, we occasionally get parts that are not quite right and are rejected during our quality control processes.  A lot of these can be reworked so we don’t want to throw them away.  But how do we manage this so that we don’t have rejected parts piling up over time and tooling that ‘might get used for something in the future’ taking over?  That is where setting up a red tag system will help.

Something that has always been a bit of a pain for us is ordering material.  The responsibility for looking at the technical drawings and working out what was required has always fallen solely on Rob’s shoulders.  But this  just added to his already-bursting-at-the-seams workload!  We knew there had to be an easier way to work out our material requirements based on our orders.  And it also had to be done in a way that anyone could take charge of it, not just Rob.  But we also didn’t want to have to start spending out on computer software.  So we set out to come up with a really simple, free, Lean ordering system.