Continuous improvement in the production of steel plate parts

Article by Jesús Martínez, Director of Global Project Office

This does not apply only to the more evident causes (physical defects, defects caused by the machine, incorrect part parameters, inadequate handling, etc.) but also to the ultimate cause of the problem (raw material from a particular supplier, specific machine or individual operator).

Among other data, these reviews can specify the quality of the parts to decide in real time which parts are valid and which must be rejected. The invalid parts will be those lost in production or scrapped, which means that the entire process must be repeated to create the part again.

Knowing the reasons why a part is unusable and must be manufactured again is of vital importance to the company. Reworking may be caused by a machine that destroys the parts and requires corrective maintenance or to defective raw material.

Lantek has developed several applications to review the validation of manufactured pieces:

•             Work validator centralized in Lantek Manager and Lantek Integra

•             Lantek Wos at the operator’s workstation

•             Lantek Workshop Capture for high mobility situations

Control must be enabled and a reason assigned for the defects in every rejected part in order to ascertain the cause of the lost production. With these systems - customized to adapt to the real production plant scenario - Lantek provides the option of recording the reasons for lost production.

The company can use these data to perform periodic studies of the rejected parts and thus work towards reducing the number of unusable parts to foster continuous improvement. Lantek provides a log that enables creation of different types of report to perform these studies. You will be able to see the reasons why parts are scrapped in a particular work center, how many parts are scrapped by a specific operator and how many parts have been lost within a certain timeframe.

In short, Lantek provides the support required to make the application of continuous improvement and total quality policies simple and easy to implement and fully integrate into the operators’ normal work routines, ensuring that the data is entered in a systematic manner. The system guarantees that the data is fully valid and therefore the conclusions reached are based on the real parameters of your production sequence.