With today`s business world, it is very important to deliver the right product with right quality and quantity at the right time. By ensuring that the staff are happy and have the opportunity to work in a workplace with good structure, the company will be able to reach these parameters and at the same time maximize the efficiency.
The project has been carried out at Stena Stål AB in Värnamo. The company's main task is to cut, store and deliver production steel and tool steel to processing companies in the surrounding region. Stena Stål AB in Värnamo is one of total 21 companies in the company group Stena Stål. Stena Stål is a part of the Stena corporate group which owns a total of eight different company groups that are spread in about 250 different locations in 14 countries.
The purpose of this report is to give Stena Stål AB in Värnamo suggestions on how to design a new facility for tool steel. The demands that the company have on the new facility is that it should be able to deliver within 24 hours, it should be characterized by good order and clarity and that the work situation for the employees should be improved. In order to find the best way to reach the purpose and meet the company’s requirements, the following questions were developed:
1. What is the value added and the necessary non-value added work in the value stream?
2. How can the layout of the new department be designed according to the requirements above?
3. How can work and pallet places be designed from the perspective of good order, efficiency and ergonomics?
By studying how the current situation looks like using timestudies, observations and interviews, the authors have developed spaghetti diagrams and tables. These show that the major problem at the section is that necessary non-value-adding work takes too much time, the staff goes longer distances than than necessary and that the section is largely lacking of orderliness. Through interviews and obsevations it has also emerged that staff often work with ergonomically unsound lifting.
By trying to eliminate the major problems of today, the authors have come up with a layout suggestion with associated 5S work. By focusing on 5S work as well as remove heavy lifting from production the authors meet the requirements from the company. The result of the final suggestion improves staff's ergonomic situation considerably by using a traverse for all lifting over 16.5 kg. By placing machines and materials in optimal positions and introduce a customized 5S work for the section is the time for an order reduced by 50-78%, and walking distances for the same order have decreased by 28-60%.
The conclusion is that Stena Stål AB in Värnamo can reach the goals that they have on the new facility if they are willing to use the layout which has been worked out, and assimilate the methods that are described in this report.