Yield Improvement Case Study | Faster Lead Time & Quality Gains

The Carlyle Johnson Machine Company is a Bolton, Connecticut manufacturer that designs and builds brakes and clutches for specialty applications. Their products are found in components for airplanes, satellites, surgical robots, military tanks, fire trucks, and more.

For over 100 years, Carlyle Johnson (CJ) has become known as the “go-to” brake and clutch manufacturer for parts used in manufacturing facilities across the nation – such as electric utilities, textile producers, packaging, and mining/drilling companies.

Challenge
Carlyle Johnson prides itself on providing the highest quality, most innovative products and services in a global marketplace environment of increasing competition.

In an ongoing effort to defend its market share and improve its manufacturing and support processes, Carlyle Johnson introduced a Continuous Improvement (CI) implementation initiative at the company to harness the talent of its workforce.

Having previously worked with CONNSTEP, Connecticut’s representative of the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), CJ opted to send one of its shop employees to its Continuous Improvement Champion Certification (CICC) program to refresh his CI skills, apply them at the company, and share his knowledge with fellow employees.
Solution
Carlyle Johnson sent manufacturing engineer Simon Bertocci to CONNSTEP’s CICC course, where classes are taught using a “Learn It – Do It” approach and a mentored Lean project is conducted at the facility of each attendee. Bertocci saw this as a perfect opportunity to take his newfound skills and apply them to a project that would benefit CJ’s Returned Material (RMA) process.

The RMA process at CJ had grown to a lead time of 43 days, which was not only upsetting customers but also perpetuating any errors found through more shipments than necessary.

To improve responsiveness and alleviate customer concerns, CJ set about to reduce the time and money spent on RMA’s since they are not paid for them, and establish a more streamlined RMA process to free up capacity for more value-added work.
Result
By applying new skills and techniques from his CICC training, Bertocci thought about what had to happen at every step of the RMA process and worked on reducing the back and forth to minimize steps. He drew out a current state value stream map for shop floor employees as well as a future state spaghetti diagram.

Bertocci then determined root causes to help create new improved flow processes which eliminated rework and resulted in significant cost savings. Internal documentation was streamlined to only capture what was needed and a visual management process was put in place.

Most importantly, total lead time was reduced from over 40 days to five days. In addition, total processing time went from 11.8 hours to 3.4 hours and first pass yield jumped from 10% to 90%.