Few years ago we saw the need to approach changing demands from a new paradigm and for us, that shift led us to Lean Manufacturing.
As a high mix-low volume manufacturer of sheet metal, forged and machined components, we decided to make significant investments in our people and process. In 2017 King was awarded a Workforce Training Grant by the Ministry of commerce, India for the implementation of Lean Manufacturing into our operation.
Our goal was to create a World Class manufacturing facility that could compete anywhere in the world, a big goal and a challenging opportunity. We committed our workforce to over 6000 hours of training, redesigned our manufacturing process and made significant investments in new equipment.
Our ongoing Lean programs help us to continuously improve our operation and have provided major benefits to our customers from our quality system, on-time delivery, quick turn production through our flexible manufacturing cells and less inventory exposure of large production runs.
In order to meet demands more effectively, we looked at every step of our operation to see where dramatic changes in our layout and process could impact our ability to be more flexible and drive efficiencies. The result was a completely redesigned shop layout with Flexible Manufacturing Cells with cross-trained teams focused on reducing both machine setup time and product cycle times.By colocating traditional workcenters within a Manufacturing Cell, we have been able to make dramatic improvements to our flexibility.This flexibility has benefited our customers on numerous levels and helped us create a roadmap for future success by focusing our energy driving value back to our customer.
Just in time manufacutring and Kanbans programs are a key component of Lean manufacturing and flexible Cellular Manufacturing. From vendor delivery programs for raw stock and components to customer Kanban programs, King Group strives to create a complete system from start to finish. We work with our customers to create the best possible manufacturing plans from prototype through the changing dynamics of product life cycles. The best manufacturing plans start with Design for Manufacture and continue with our Design for Production planning where we analyze product demand, manufacturing best practice and specific manufacturing cell capabilities to ensure placement of parts and projects are being produced in the most efficient and flexible manufacturing environment.