Sani-Matic, Inc., a Madison manufacturer of custom stainless steel sanitation equipment for the food processing, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries, was facing issues familiar to many manufacturers: long lead times that were affecting competitiveness and excessive WIP (Work In Process) that led to confusion on the shop floor.

So Sani-Matic, which employs 80, began its improvement journey, tailoring continuous improvement tools to its custom manufacturing environment, beginning in engineering. Because so many of Sani-Matic’s products are custommade, the load on engineering is significant. “We worked with them to streamline their process by detecting very early in the process whether they had already built an identical part before. If that was the case, they could reuse the documentation package,” said Jim Houge, WMEP manufacturing specialist and portfolio manager for Sani-Matic.

They also discovered that by providing customers with application information, they could eliminate some custom design work. “Their spray balls, which deliver cleaning solutions into their sanitary tank products, provide a certain flow rate at a certain pressure,” said Houge. Rather than always engineering a new spray ball to achieve a specific flow rate, the pressure can be changed by the end user to reach the flow rate, if the end user has the necessary application information.

Extensive changes were made to the spray ball manufacturing area as well. That work began with Value Stream Mapping (VSM), a Lean tool that specifically identifies where waste is occurring. With Value Stream Mapping, a company’s processes are detailed and a visual representation is created to illustrate material and information flows.

“We realized we had some inefficient things going on,” said Jay Petter, Sani-Matic manufacturing engineer. Every job that moved through manufacturing had a routing, and workers had to record every task they performed on the computer, even if the task only took 10 or 20 minutes. The solution was to capture all labor under one job number, with materials charged separately.

“Another area that came to their attention was final assembly, where 20% of man-hours were being spent,” said Houge. This stemmed from a lack of communication between engineering and the shop floor, as workers went to engineering to get clarifications on what should be done. Understanding that other departments have a legitimate need for information helped reduce delays.

They also were processing orders in batches, with the balls being stored as WIP in various places throughout the shop. A few balls would be pulled to fill custom orders, throwing off the count for the original order. Confusion and long turnaround times resulted.

They solved this problem by creating a work cell and setting up a supermarket system consisting of clearly labeled storage bins for parts. Two rotating bins are dedicated to each part; when the first bin is emptied, parts are reordered or machined to refill it, while parts from the second bin are then used for production.

Some of the parts they stock this way are common assemblies, or components that are half-built. “The idea is to do a certain amount of work ahead on a part that can be further specialized,” said Houge. Such a part would not be a single-use item, but might be used for several configurations. In Sani-Matic’s case, one of the spray ball’s hemispheres is fitted with a collar, which they now attach ahead of time. All that needs to be done to finish a spray ball is to drill the holes in the other hemisphere (which is done to order), weld it together and grind it. The result is a “faster response time by using material built up to the point to which it is configured to order,” said Houge. Previously, they were manufacturing the spray balls one at a time.

“We also set up shelving at each operation,” said Andy Prochaska, Sani-Matic manufacturing engineer. Parts move from one operation to the next, so that the work that needs to be done on those parts is obvious. Before, all the parts were housed on one shelf, and it was difficult to know what needed to be done to each part.

Additional work on the shop floor included combining certain operations in a single step thanks to new tooling, using Kanban cards to signal when materials need to be replenished, and establishing visual cues to communicate schedule changes and work priorities. This was done using an order board and by the positioning of the parts themselves (parts highest on the shelf have the highest priority). The reorganization of the shop floor reduced the walk to get parts from 250 feet to 20 feet!

Sani-Matic has also been working to improve their scheduling process, using rough cut Capacity Planning to identify bottlenecks and balance workloads to match orders. “If you don’t have a way of doing rough cut Capacity Planning, bad things happen too late to do anything about it,” said Houge.

The results of Sani-Matic’s improvement efforts include:

• 75% reduction in WIP
• 40% reduction in lead times
• 40% reduction in labor costs (from reduced overtime and not needing to replace a retiring employee)
• $100,000 cost savings
• $100,000 in increased sales
• $100,000 saved by avoiding unnecessary investments.

The improvement work is ongoing, said Prochaska, with the work expanding to other product lines. The goal is to establish work cells similar to the spray ball area, as well as standardize their manufacturing procedures.

“Their improvement journey also showed how the company’s departments can work together more effectively,” said Houge. “There’s more of a feeling that they’re doing different parts of the same job versus different jobs. There’s a greater sense of collaboration between sales, engineering and manufacturing.”

Sani-Matic’s thoughtful approach, tailoring Lean tools as needed to a custom manufacturing environment, produced exceptional results. Their continuous improvement efforts “have positioned them for ongoing success,” said Houge.