"Unlock lean potential and build a new ecology for textile machinery production together"

Lean Management Never Stops

Since 2022, this account has successively launched special columns on lean management such as "Talking about Lean" and "Party Building + Lean Production", actively exploring new models of lean production to further promote the high-quality development of the enterprise and gather momentum to fully achieve the task objectives of the three-year action to revitalize textile machinery. This year, "Looking at Lean through Numbers" sets sail again. Each issue selects typical improvement cases and presents the data comparison before and after lean improvement with visual charts. Let us take data as the engine, promote cost reduction and efficiency increase with precise policies, and inject new momentum into building a benchmark for intelligent manufacturing in the textile machinery industry.

• Production efficiency: increased by 38.8%
• Turnover distance: reduced by 53%
• Key dimension accuracy: increased by 30%
  Through lean improvement methods, the machinery factory has achieved remarkable results. Lean is the foundation, innovation is the wing, and intelligent manufacturing is the victory!

Improvement Team

Lean Improvement in Circular Wall Panel Processing of Machinery Factory
"Lean as the foundation, innovation as the wing, intelligent manufacturing as the victory"

Improvement Background

Based on the company's overall planning of the "lean management system", in order to effectively improve the production efficiency and processing quality of the circular wall panels of carding machines, the company decided to carry out the "lean improvement project for circular wall panel processing" at the beginning of the year. It is required to take the concept of lean production management as guidance, take the company's technological transformation project as an opportunity, and comprehensively improve its processing accuracy and production efficiency through systematic optimization.

Improvement Measures

• Process optimization: Relying on the company's technological transformation project, the machinery factory upgraded the processing equipment for circular wall panel assemblies to achieve process integration, that is, completing all processes in one clamping, which effectively improves the dimensional consistency of parts. At the same time, the turnover of each part is shortened from 85 meters to about 40 meters, a reduction of about 53%.
• Tooling improvement: The original tooling had low man-machine efficiency and was difficult to operate when auxiliary supports were locked, making personnel adjustment inconvenient. By optimizing the layout of auxiliary supports and the position of fixtures, the man-machine efficiency has been improved. Each piece saves 1.5 minutes of clamping time, and the clamping time efficiency is increased by 5%.
• Tool improvement: The lean team proposed the "faster, more precise, and more efficient" standard, clarifying the goals of shortening the cycle, controlling deviations, and improving efficiency. After demonstration, advanced high-speed and heavy-duty cutting tools are adopted, which can effectively shorten the processing time while ensuring accuracy, achieving the unity of efficiency and quality.
• Strategy optimization: Before improvement, the processing program had the problem of repeated paths. The team used programming software for simulation, repeatedly tested cutting parameters, optimized processing strategies, eliminated repeated paths, and matched the best speed and optimal path for efficient processing. The idle running time of tools was reduced from 30 minutes to 25 minutes, a decrease of 17% compared with before optimization.

Specific Results

1. Before the improvement, the circular wall panel assembly needed to go through three process turnovers to be completed. After the improvement, process integration was realized, and it can be completed with only one turnover, and the turnover distance was reduced by about 53%.
2. Focusing on the processing pain points of circular wall panel assemblies, the team made efforts in four aspects: process optimization, tooling optimization, tool improvement, and strategy adjustment, breaking production bottlenecks in multiple dimensions. Finally, the processing efficiency was increased by 38.8%, and the production capacity was effectively released.
3. Through a series of optimized measures for precise improvement, actual testing shows that the overall dimensional accuracy of the center distance has increased by about 58%; the overall dimensional accuracy of the bottom foot perpendicularity has increased by about 33%. The processing accuracy of key dimensions of circular wall panel assemblies has increased by an average of about 30%.
4. The integration of processes effectively reduces the number of repeated positioning of parts. At the same time, relying on advanced processing equipment, the dimensional consistency of parts has been greatly improved.

Experience and Insights

The machinery factory will continue to focus on core parts, take the whole-chain collaborative optimization of "equipment + tooling + tools + strategy" as the starting point, and form a closed loop of "problem - implementation - verification - calculation" to achieve the coordinated improvement of efficiency and quality.