Bottleneck - Automotive fuel bundle fabrication
Situation: A three line fuel bundle cell fabricated the three individual lines (feed, return and vapour) for assembly and test in semi-automated delta pressure leak testers. Three dedicated benders bent each individual line. Hot air forming machines formed the multi layer plastic tubing adjacent to the benders. Insertion machines installed quick connects in the plastic tubing. Crimping presses installed stainless steel wire braided teflon hoses and quick connects on the engine end of each line. The sub-assembled lines were staged by two employees on manually rotated carousels in the middle of the cell. Five employees running as many leak testers picked the lines from the carousels and set them with open plastic clips in the leak testers. When a successful leak test was completed, the clips would be installed automatically allowing the employee to pick and pass the fuel bundle assembly to the packing station at the back of the tester.
The line needed to produce 130 bundles per hour on one shift to meet customer demand. The supervisor complained that the dedicated benders were only producing 100 lines per hour and thus the cell was not able to keep up on one shift. A second small shift was running to make up the shortfall.
Analysis: A thorough visual review of the benders was conducted. It was concluded that the benders were running at the fastest safe quality speed and could not be speeded up without compromising throughput or up time.
Outcome: A cursory stopwatch review of each operation was conducted. It was found that one employee could easily fill both carousels freeing up one employee to be reassigned. Further it was found that only three leak testers were needed to keep up to the benders. This freed up two more employees. In total three employees were saved with less than an hour of analysis work. A small second shift was added to fulfill daily demand. The dollar value saved was roughly $120k per annum.
This is an example where it was not practical to make the bottleneck to run faster. In reality this was a line balance problem, where a quick stop watch study quantified a substantial labour savings, to bringing the testing and pre-staging processes into 
takt balance with the upstream dedicated benders.
