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Lean Training Serves as a Springboard Toward Continuous Improvement at Amber Waves
With the help of: Impact Dakota
About
Amber Waves, a family-owned business located in Richardton, ND, was founded in 2002. They engineer and construct high quality hopper bottom bins for storing different products including grain, fertilizer, and frac sand.The company also manufactures overhead structures and other accessories to complement the hopper bins. Amber Waves works with customers from start to finish on customizing a single storage bin to a complete industrial sized commercial operation.
The Challenge
Impact Dakota’s training tools and manuals are well written, allowing for quick understanding of new manufacturing concepts. We were able to go on to our shop floor four hours into the training and find bottlenecks that could easily be improved. Reza as an instructor made sure everyone in the training understood the topics we covered before moving on by asking our production team questions about the topics and how they related to our company.
MEP's Role
Impact Dakota, part of the MEP National Network™, put together training materials and delivered on site. The training included coverage of Lean fundamentals with major focus on waste reduction and pull/Kanban system. The training also included a factory-wide walk to solicit input on how the company/participants go about implementing the tools and systems learned in class. Twelve employees participated in the training including supervisors and shop floor workers as well as the company’s general manager and engineering manager
The training served as a springboard toward achieving the goal of continuous improvements. It provided a common understanding of wastes; and how to reduce or eliminate the wastes. After the training, follow-up calls by Impact Dakota learned about the progress.
The employees are now much more aware of different types of wastes and some of them are more open to sharing ideas to improve productivity. Notable example include a designer technician has been evaluating products/components design for better manufacturability that can lead to reduced cost. Another example is reconfiguring process flow where subassembly components have been reduced to a manageable batch, resulting in reductions in multiple handling of components.