Alabama State Port Authority | Mobile, Alabama
Company Information:
The Alabama State Port Authority (Port of Mobile) is experiencing growth issues reflective of those being experienced at Ports nationwide. McDuffie Coal Terminal, the Port’s largest revenue division, is the nation’s largest import coal terminal and second largest coal terminal overall with a designed capacity of 20 million tons per year.
Situation:
In 2003, one of McDuffie’s major import customers informed the Port of a desire to double the amount of coal coming through the facility. At that time McDuffie was working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 360 days each year and management had some skepticism as to McDuffie ability of handling the additional tonnage without major capital investments.
ATN Assistance:
The Port of Mobile utilized the assistance of the Alabama Technology Network center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (ATN-UAH) in the implementation of Lean principles at McDuffie. Realizing that a successful lean transformation is dependent on the education and empowerment of employees at all levels of the organization to identify and eliminate waste, McDuffie invested in initial lean training for key management and developed a high-level strategy for integrating Lean Enterprise training and implementation into the organization’s business activities. Next, a value stream map (VSM) was used to set a manageable implementation road map prior to application of specific lean tools at McDuffie.
ATN-UAH began by training all McDuffie employees in a 4 hour Lean Concepts overview course, then based on the VSM implementation plan, started scheduling kaizen events (employee involved continuous improvement activities). ATN-UAH facilitated a team of McDuffie employees in a kaizen event to improve the barge loading operation in the fall of 2004 with great success, barge loading times were reduced from an average time of 1 hour 59 minutes to an average time of 53 minutes (124% improvement!). After the initial success and excitement from the barge loading kaizen, ATN-UAH returned to facilitate 6 more events in 2005 to improve key operational processes.
With noticeable improvements taking place, a modified implementation model of lean tools was developed and employed specifically for port operations like McDuffie. Additionally, because of the training provided and the experience gained from previous improvement events, McDuffie employees began initiating Lean improvement efforts internally. Due to the improvements realized and the positive attitude of the employees, McDuffie’s relationship with ATN-UAH continued into 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.
Results:
McDuffie has experienced positive results that can directly provide additional capacity, including a reduction in: barge loading times (125% improvement), barge unloading times (70% improvement), ship unloading times (26% improvement), ship loading times (44% improvement), and train car dumping times (100% improvement).