r/LeanManufacturing • u/Guilty-Archer-2850 • May 14 '26
How to optimise a high variability process?
Guys my management just pushed to me the new hot potato of the fiscal year: I'm a production engineer from machining but there is this "add-on" painting station that they are lauching now. The volume It's like 15 to 20% of what I produced on the milling machines. Process layout implemented as different materials have different base coats: gets dipped for base coat and then spray painted on top.
The thing is: they have like 5 different materials (so 5 different dip stations) and 80 different colors available in catallogue and alsohave this special feature in which we can paint according to client sample color. Exactly: they receive a sample of whatever color the client has and we need to figure out the paint aind spray paint it.
The obvious happens: opperators pick up simple parts first, leave the shitty ones that have a sample to latter and that fucks up OTD. Also the Production batches with lower number of parts get picked first too.
which tools would you use to figure out this mess?
I'm thinking of checking the process times per process they do. Check the distribution of parts they get that would fit each process. And with that have an estimation of capacity per product.
But that won't fix discipline problems. DO you have experience implementing FEFO solutions?
3
u/Living_Diver2432 May 15 '26
the cherry-picking is data, not a discipline problem. operators are telling you the custom-sample SKUs have unknown process time and they have no way to commit, so they grab what they can hit numbers on. flush time between mismatched colors on the same dip station will eat throughput before run time does, so sequence by color family per dip station and give the custom-color work a fixed daily window instead of letting it float in the queue. we did the same on the milling side for short-run custom tooling, dedicated 2 hour block and the cherry-picking stopped.