TMH MidSouth began working on improving the flow of repair jobs throughout the shop and implemented a TLM visualization board. The two-sided visualization board shown in the pictures in this article, paired with a daily shop production team meeting, allows our team to easily see where a shop repair is in our process. In the past, we had no overall visualization of the status of all of the work orders in the shop. As a result, problems that kept the trucks from flowing through the shop were hidden and would stagnate for days before we knew to take action. Now, our team responds to workorders near the red zone on the visualization board by immediately creating solutions that will get the repair back on target before stagnation occurs. Before implementing this visual tool and production meeting, customer truck repair time through the shop averaged 17 days. Over a 4-month period after implementing these TLM tools, not only were we able to respond to a 67% increase in shop volume, we also accomplished a reduction in customer truck repair time by 8 days while managing the huge increase in volume without adding additional technicians. The customer is getting the truck back in half the time, which means we are getting paid for the service sooner as well. Due to this improvement, we have now raised the bar and reduced our target from 14 days to 9 days. This target reduction will continue to challenge the team and further improve the customer experience. This experience has strengthened our team’s understanding of the overall process and uncovered creative ways that we can improve our processes through suggestions from the technicians. Team member relationships have been strengthened through daily interaction and commitment to continuous improvement. It is rewarding, interesting, and exciting to facilitate this problem-solving process and see the relationships and productivity improvement come to life. Robert L. Payne III Toyota Material Handling MidSouth Corporate Compliance Manager and TLM Lean Champion
TMH MidSouth Shop Repair Lead-time Reduction using TLM Visualization Tool
