Established in 2002, Attica produces high quality components, assemblies, fixtures and machinery, supplying the water treatment, healthcare, packaging, food and beverage, military, energy and automotive industries.

Their 25,000sq.ft. Facility houses a team of apprentices, machinists, tool & die makers, technicians, technologists and engineers working together to meet the demands of the precision machining industry.

They were nominated as finalist for the 2009 Quality Award in London's Business Achievement Awards through the American Society for Quality.

Attica actively pursues new technology and is implementing continuous improvement initiatives to stay competitive in a global market. The recent realignment of their plant floor and high speed high precision equipment & implementation of a new "Production Reporting System" have been their latest armaments in combating waste and ensuring value to their customers.

One of things that has added and enhanced the success of Attica is the implementation of some Lean tools and concepts. Their shop has literally been transformed through 5S and Value Stream Mapping & they have successfully instilled a culture of continuous improvement in their employees!

At this session Attica shared with the Consortium;

-          What they did

-          How they did it

-          What worked & what didn't

-          Costs vs. payback on investments they made in the of process continuous improvement

This is a great story……Attica's experience was valuable for any EMC Member Company!

One of the new tools Attica has implemented to support their Lean initiatives is a "Production Reporting System" which was developed right here in London by a company called 10in6 inc. This is a very impressive tool that Attica shared with the group!

Background:  Attica is a low volume, high model mix CNC machining environment.  Typical batch sizes average 100 pcs and they manufacture approximately 500 different parts.  The key to profitability to Attica is to keep their equipment running all the time and minimize load times and change over times. 

The system supports Attica's lean initiatives by automatically capturing critical production information, directly from the production equipment and provides reporting to assist their operations team in making improvements.    

The system integrates into their production scheduling system and provides measure such as:

1)       Actual start and end times for each production order with OEE for the production run

(by product/machine/operator)

2)       Changeover and setup times (by product/machine/operator)

3)       Operator load/unload times (by product/machine/operator)

4)       OEE measurement by Operator, Machine and Product

5)       Weekly trending and graphing

The system provides real time displays to provide feedback to operators/management.

Expected  Results: 

The system's primary function is to remove the subjective nature of 'we think this is our problem' such as it takes too long to do changeovers and move to a decision making process that is based on fact. With quantifiable metrics that can be relied on (because they come directly from the equipment) Attica can plot and trend the improvements made. The system will tell them precisely how long each changeover takes and provides a level of accountability to chart improvement progress. They now know which products are profitable and which ones are not so profitable.

The unexpected benefit was that it forced Attica to re-engineer their scheduling and setup process so that they could help the production operators perform their changeovers quickly. Everyone is now accountable to driving down changeover times and increasing the utilization of their equipment.