Hello All,

I would like to thank Chris Roy at Rainbow concrete Industries for hosting the April SIG event.  I would also like to welcome our new members BESTECH to the Sudbury consortium.  The good folks at Rainbow Concrete talked about the activities they are doing to improve the business model at Rainbow.  It is clearly evident the amount of work they have done with 5's, and process improvements.  Chris Roy, the Production Manager at Rainbow Concrete talked about all the initiatives and improvements they have seen in a very short time.

Chris Roy, Production Manager at Rainbow concrete:

We here at Rainbow are improving and kick started our journey in the pipe plant.  We were running at approx 10 rounds a day (8-9hr shift).  We started the CI with a 5S and reorganized the plant, ridding the plant of about 20yrs worth of "junk".  During this process formed a spaghetti graph to have a better understanding of where to strategically place the tooling and other resources used on a day to day basis to create better flow and efficiency.  While reorganizing we mapped out the process to determine if we could eliminate some of the non-value areas, and commenced x-training

Afterwards we performed some time studies of the process and then broke it down into each action of the process (TACT time), this involves timing every movement that occurs such as the time the crane goes up and comes down, unhooking moulds…  This will help distinguish where we can improve which has the most effect on production, in doing so we determined that the most critical part of the process was undermanned and other parts of the process did not require the amount of manpower.  It was also determined that we were missing some tooling that would enhance our ability to be efficient.  We went on a road trip to analyze another facility which were utilizing the same practices that we were beginning, which confirmed the road we were on was correct.  This was able to get us to the original target of 15 rounds and lead to the new target of 25 rounds in the given time (8-9hrs) which was accomplished.

We developed a PM program to shut down once a month and do upkeep and preventative maintenance with performing the obvious repairs that were able to be held off until the day.  The old style was we would wait until it broke.

Our culture required some nurturing due to the change of 30yrs of same practices, we approached it in a manner of reassurance by no job loss and that the results were proof enough.  We were achieving more and working less with less effort, the area was clean and free of clutter.  We have managed to sustain the level of production and cleanliness by holding people accountable for their areas and providing support from top to bottom.  We approach issues by getting the DNA of the issue utilizing the 5 WHY's in order to achieve the "root cause".  In addition we have installed ANDON, meaning when we have a problem rather than running it or continuing we stop, fix the issue, take action and go.

Our long term target will be to achieve 40 rounds.

Thanks,

Chris