Advanced Manufacturing & Power Systems - A Case Study
New Engineering Process cuts Rework, Material costs, defects, and more
Challenge
- Wanted to produce standardized engineering drawing sets that are more complete, accurate, and timely. AMPS realized that for their operations to function consistently and to reduce errors and inefficiencies, the engineering output had to be complete, accurate, and a standard format.
- The publication of the construction plans was being generated reactively, as demanded by production and without a standard process or schedule mechanism. Needed to switch to a proactive schedule to improve efficiency.
- Needed to identify all materials required for production before projects commenced so production personnel could build the projects without waiting for materials to be delivered. Procurement of materials during the production phase was delaying start and resulting in many mistakes and additional lost time. Materials returns and double orders had to be minimized.
Results
- Streamlined information flow and content for Increased productivity, efficiency, and quality
- Decreased rework by 50% and production labor and material costs by 25%.
- Decreased average production lead time by three weeks.
- Reduced errors (Improved Quality) by 95%.
Advanced Manufacturing and Power Systems (AMPS) has been headquartered in Deland, FL since 1999. As a Specialty Severe Power Systems Integrator, serving the electric power generation industry, they engineer and manufacture modular genset enclosures; HVHZ Missile Impact, Sound Attenuated, and Critical Equipment, Above Ground Fuel Storage Tanks; UL142, UL2085, and FDEP, Trailered Power Gen Equipment, and Bi-Fuel Systems. AMPS’s products are installed in critical applications serving state, local, and federal government agencies; the military, police and fire departments, clinics, hospitals and assisted living facilities, schools, emergency shelters, water treatment plants, and critical data centers.
Regardless of application, whether it is one of their HVHZ Generator Enclosures at Cape Canaveral, or a Packaged Bi-Fuel Generator Systems on the top of Macy’s at Herald Square in Manhattan, AMPS’s products are designed and constructed to withstand the most devastating environmental stresses. AMPS’s robust HVHZ (High Velocity Hurricane Zone) Missile-Impact Enclosure is certified by the State of Florida, which has some the most stringent building requirements in the U.S and around the world. The flexibility of their custom design ability enables them to adapt to their clients’ needs and the specific requirements of each unique project.
Strengths Can Also Be Challenges
The flexibility in design capacity that enables AMPS to build complex custom products, gives them competitive advantage and is a great strength, but it is also one of the company's biggest challenges. Nothing of value in life is easy, true. But with wisdom, it can become efficient. Different approaches to designing products over many years led to nonstandard and under-defined engineering procedures and inefficient processes. Production was forced to constantly adapt to different drawing formats and unique, undefined, and/or incorrect materials required for the application. Without established processes in place, many important details including bills of materials were not included in the drawings.
Furthermore, since the production departments “pulled” information from the engineering department, there was often little to no planning time to make corrections or procure the necessary materials. Because they operated by a “pull” method schedule there were delays and quality control issues, ultimately affecting customer satisfaction and costing the company unnecessary expenses like significant reordering of parts and consequently significant rework. Drawings were produced when production department supervisors demanded them. As a result, drawings were produced in haste, reactively and inefficiently. Often, drawings would be missing important details necessary for the manufacturing process. To compensate, the production staff would design on the floor to fill in the gaps. In many cases, the proposed or executed floor designs did not meet the required specifications and would need to be corrected prior to shipment.
The most significant data missing from the drawings was a comprehensive Bill of Materials, or BOM. Without an engineering prescribed BOM, the task of requisitioning materials for the projects fell to the production departments. Each production supervisor requisitioned the materials needed for his/her department’s portion of the project. This resulted in dozens of requisitions from many different sources and caused errors and excessive paperwork for the purchasing agents. Often parts were expedited at great monetary cost to compensate for delays in the ordering of parts. Also, since materials were being ordered only after drawings reached the production floor, there were delays in production proportionate to the materials’ lead times. And since designs were changing frequently during production, the required materials also frequently changed, which caused even more procurement delays.
Small Changes Yield Large Benefits
Many of the challenges that the AMPS engineers were dealing with related to their choice (or lack thereof) of drawing templates and inconsistent drawing format and title blocks. It was also found that the choice of the standard drawing sheet size was the source for significant inefficiencies in the publication of engineering output. In some circumstances, these aspects of the design would not necessarily warrant reform efforts. However, when viewed through an analytical lens weighing the costs and potential benefits, it was apparent that there was a business case here. Renascence Engineering’s consultants determined through Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing methods such as value stream mapping and root cause analysis that these factors had major quality and cost impacts on AMPS’s processes. They were determined to be the cause of 1) the incomplete drawings, 2) the inaccuracy of the drawings, and 3) the inefficiencies that delayed project completion. By establishing standard templates and procedures for engineering projects, the aforementioned problems were drastically reduced or eliminated. The following is a summary of the drawing set structure changes implemented and the results of those changes.
Engineering Content gets directed by New Drawing Templates
Ensuring that complex project designs are complete and accurate is a difficult task for even seasoned engineers. Many manufacturers struggle with maintaining an engineering staff capable of creating custom designs of complex systems quickly and efficiently.
Renascence Engineering tackled this problem, as it often does, by developing a system that can handle many variables but produces a consistent and standardized format for custom designs.
To work in coordination with a new title block, a new model space template was developed which prompts engineers for content (including Bills of Materials) to provide the best chance of incorporating all design aspects of the projects.
With this new system in place, 95% of AMPS’s projects are now guaranteed to be designed with all required design elements incorporated.
The new model space template and title block have improved accuracy, reduced wasted engineering efforts, and have ensured complete designs are delivered to the procurement and production departments for efficient build and delivery of products.
Drawing Format and Title Block
Another significant source of wasted efforts was found in the way AMPS’s engineers were producing the drawings. The engineering department at AMPS was using different drawing formats depending on whether the drawings were to be used for submittal, or production and even varied between different production departments. Because the drawings were not based on a single standard base model, much of the work effort was redundant. Significant excess work was required between various milestones in the production process and even between different designers working on the same project. Not only was this inefficient, but it inherently decreased drawing accuracy from many discrepancies and mistakes in the drawings.
Renascence Engineering and AMPS’s team agreed to convert the drawing format to the United States National CAD Standard version 6 (USNCS-v6), which was the current version during the project’s implementation. New model space templates and a new universal title block were created that contained all title block information that existed in each of the multiple prior title block variations. The primary differences include sheet naming, content, and organization convention. Also, some general product information, drawing notes, and legends that were previously included on the AMPS title block were relocated to the body in the USNCS standard location. Notes and legends were standardized for content and location, making them easier and more efficient to find. Comprehensive notes/legends work for multiple projects, therefore reducing the number of custom changes that would require additional labor hours to draft. This was all designed to the industry standard for engineering drawing sets, which makes it less complicated for stakeholders to use and read.
An innovative approach was necessary to allow the engineering team to be flexible and to make sure the drawings had consistent formatting and included all necessary details.
Detailed instructions and templates were developed for generating complete overall and assembly detail views and Bills of Materials. Using the model space templates, the designers are prompted to populate (draft) all possible configurations of nearly all projects AMPS could produce that are necessary for the project scope (roughly 5% exceptions exist for atypical projects). They are required to actively reject any elements that do not exist for the project they are working on. Integral to populating the template, BOMs are now required. The Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) provides clear instructions on how to efficiently generate BOMs using AutoCAD Mechanicals built in functionality to ensure that all information is accurate and that no essential information is omitted. Complete and accurate design drawings and BOMs are now generated for each project, ensuring there are minimal design changes after production commences and by extension, minimal delays for part changes.
Sheet Size
When developing the new model space and title block templates, Renascence Engineering evaluated the optimum sheet size for AMPS’s unique needs and found that the old sheet size selection was inappropriate and very wasteful. Prior to the process improvement project, AMPS’s published all drawings on ANSI C (17” X 22”), sheet size. This is the minimum size needed for the plans to be readable and useable throughout the production processes. The largest sheet size that is conveniently and cost affectively printed in most small businesses (AMPS included) is ANSI B (11” x 17”), and that means the ANSI C drawings had to be plotted on the slow and costly wide format plotter. This would be the best option if there were not any other stakeholders that require the drawings. However, the same drawings are needed for submittals, project reviews, and reference drawings for project management and others. The drawings for most of these other users needs only be 11” x 17”, but ANSI C does not scale down to 11” x 17” proportionately. It scales to ANSI A (8.5” X 11”), which is too small to read or to be useful in any of the applications for which it would be utilized. Thus, multiple sets of drawings were published on the larger, slower, and more expensive plotter adding much time and cost to the engineering efforts. Plotted sheets used more paper and ink, had to be manually trimmed, stored on a custom-made and space consuming rack, increased waste disposal costs, and were more cumbersome to handle and sort. By converting production drawings to ANSI D (22” x 34”), the secondary stakeholders of the drawing sets now get 11” x 17” sheets. They are perfectly suited for their needs and eliminate the inefficiencies and added expense of the larger sets. There is also the added benefit of having fewer sheets and less waste, since more information fits on the ANSI D than did on ANSI C. Also, ANSI D uses more of the roll paper stock, leaving less white space to trim and discard (efficiency of print supplies).
Renascence Engineering Provides the Infrastructure and Training to Ensure AMPS’s Continued Success
To address the challenge that custom designs are not standard and to allow for less-than-expert level design teams to engineer projects proficiently, Renascence Engineering designed a drawing management system to replace the inefficient and undefined processes of the engineering department. For the creation of drawing sets, the system utilizes the sheet set manager feature of the AutoCAD Mechanical software that AMPS was already using. Along with customized intelligent templates and support files, it includes Standard Operating Procedures (SOP’s) and a training manual. For the distribution and flow of engineering output to other departments, procedural changes to an efficient “Push” scheduling method were required.
Drawing Management System
Renascence Engineering designed a single standardized drawing format that fulfilled the needs of all users. This created seamless transitions through all production milestones and eliminated the unnecessary engineering and drafting efforts that had been wasted before. Following Renascence’s re-design and automation of the title block, all attributes are pre-populated from the project information or sheet information aspects of AutoCAD Mechanical’s built-in Sheet Set Manager feature. Now the information has only to be entered once to appear in every required location, significantly reducing drafting time and errors. Title Block content was also refined to meet USNCS-v6, and it now includes only designer ID, project ID, sheet ID, and drawing management information.
The title block was formatted to automatically update all project information fields. Thus, not only did the engineers not have to enter information into multiple title blocks as a redundant effort, but they didn’t have to enter most of the title block information at all! Previous title blocks required manual entry of information on each individual sheet, which required additional time and resulted in typographical errors.
The difficulties of changing the culture and mindset of an organization are mitigated by the implementation of proven, data-driven processes of change management methods like Six Sigma. By presenting the data that shows the inefficiency of an old process, allowing the team members to be involved in developing a new process, and then showing the benefits of the proposed new process by comparison, a change process achieves stakeholder buy-in.
At AMPS, the reactionary “Pull” scheduling method was evaluated, measured, and shown to be extremely inefficient. It was determined to be the primary “root cause” for the incomplete and inaccurate production drawings that led to production delays and mistakes. Renascence Engineering took a strategic approach to finding the optimum solution for the problem. A value-stream mapping study was conducted to determine the precise informational needs of the production departments and the most efficient flow of the information. Based on that study, a chart was published that prescribes the contents of the sheet sets and timing requirements for each department, as well as the distribution source department. Some drawing sets can pass from one production department to another along certain “critical paths” in the production process, allowing AMPS to reduce redundant paperwork even further. Published SOPs including the charts prescribe and guide the flow and content of the engineering output to production in a more efficient “Push” scheduling method. Removing the redundant work from engineering efforts allowed for more time and effort to be spent on the high-quality content creation and still reduced the overall engineering labor. AMPS engineering is now proactive, and production now receives complete drawings that include all the necessary information from which to build. Designing projects on the production floor is now a rare occurrence.
By using the proper tools which AMPS already possessed, drawing creation became consistent and accurate while remaining flexible and efficient.
Supporting materials were also developed and provided that allowed for almost seamless implementation of the improved system. Renascence Engineering provided training and hands on support while the AMPS team made the transition. After being trained on the new system, the engineering department now ensures that projects are drafted without errors and omissions and issued to production efficiently and at the appropriate time. Parts lists are given to the purchasing department prior to production beginning work, to minimize the parts-related cost overruns and delays in production.
Significant and Immediate Improvements
AMPS can now focus on doing what they do best and do it efficiently. They have eliminated redundant work, allowed skilled workers to optimize the use of more of their valuable skills, and production departments are now spending most of their time producing and generating direct bottom-line impacting throughput. The implementation of these tools and processes has made an immediate improvement in engineering output proficiency of 40%, production lead time efficiency of 22%, production quality of 50%, and customer satisfaction… priceless. Renascence Engineering’s innovation and strategic approach to identifying and addressing challenges has helped breathe new life into this established manufacturing business and has helped ensure AMPS continues to honor the high production standards they have upheld for decades.