Sloss Industries | Birmingham, Alabama
Company Information:
For more than half a century, the Fiber Division of Sloss Industries Corporation has been one of the nation’s major manufacturers of slag wool and derivative processed fibers for use in a wide variety of markets and applications ranging from ceiling tile and insulation to asphalt and friction materials. Headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, the company operates the world’s largest slag wool plant as well as highly specialized production, testing, and developmental facilities.
Situation:
Sloss Industries PMF division was experiencing long production lead times and needed to identify the wastes and bottlenecks in their current system. After attending training in Lean Enterprise from ATN-UAH, employees of Sloss decided to have UAH lean specialists assist in mapping their current process and identifying areas where improvements could made. A value stream map integrates both the processes involved in material flow and transformation of the physical product and the related information flow that drives that material flow. A properly constructed current state VSM typically results in the participants involved in its creation gaining an intimate knowledge of their own process and more of a “big-picture” idea of how things work in the current environment. Ultimately, this intimate involvement leads to discussions and identification of existing waste.
Center Assistance:
A current state value stream mapping event was held at Sloss Industries’ PMF plant in 2005. The event included two outside facilitators from the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s Alabama Technology Network center (UAH-ATN), and Sloss employees representing PMF production, quality, shipping, and continuous improvement. The event included value stream mapping training and creation of a current state and future state value stream map for PMF.
The process of creating the current state map allowed the team to identify several opportunities for improvement. Among the major issues surfaced were: lack of inventory control, complex and redundant information flow, ineffective communication methods, and equipment downtime.
The opportunities for improvement with the largest potential impacts were to create a finished goods supermarket to control inventory and to develop a simplified, integrated information flow to reduce inaccuracies and redundancies. Plans to implement a Total Productive Maintenance system would also prove valuable in decreasing the amount of time the product was in the plant.
Results:
The value stream mapping exercise provided a great deal of visibility of existing waste in the current state. The future state map provided a vision of an ideal PMF plant; identified necessary improvements to achieve the ideal state, and a prioritized action plan of how to get there.
Results of the current state revealed that PMF had 150-180 hours of process time yet the material was in the plant for over 35.18 days due to the problems stated above. The ATN-UAH facilitated the team in designing a future state. The result was a design that would allow Sloss PMF to process the product in 30.42 minutes, an 80% reduction and create a manufacturing lead time of 11.125 days, a 68% reduction from their current state.