Making Boats is Plain Sailing
at Telwater
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Background
Telwater is a successful Gold Coast boat building company,
which manufactures the Quintrex and Stacer brands of aluminium
and steel boats. Paul Phelan, the Managing Director of Telwater,
had come into contact with, and applied the Theory of Constraints
(TOC) methods a few years prior to hearing of TOCCA.
In 2000, Telwater moved into new, state-of-the-art premises,
which gave it the potential to expand its operations dramatically.
The first step was to optimise capacity as quickly as possible.
Although TOC was already used to some extent, Phelan believed
it had more potential, so he contacted TOCCA to run a training
workshop to “refresh” old employees and bring
new employees up to speed with the TOC approach.
So, what did TOCCA do?
Initially, TOCCA ran a training workshop for Telwater to
deliver the TOC concepts to key staff in the company. The
next step was to help Telwater to radically improve its
production processes and thus facilitate its expansion into
new markets.
The Problem
Although boat building is an ancient trade, it is constantly
evolving. New designs, new materials and new methods are
continually being introduced. It is also a highly seasonal
business with peaks and troughs in demand closely mapped
to the seasons.
The boat-building processes at Telwater were already very
refined, with a product set of over 80 different boats,
all of which are highly customisable. This meant that it
was very difficult to plan and manage workflow in a consistent
fashion as well as optimise inventory to meet seasonal demand
fluctuations.
Paul Phelan already knew about the constraint in the company’s
manufacturing, through his previous exposure to TOC. He
said: ”We wanted to work with a company that was going
to help communicate the philosophy: ’what is good
for the entire company is good for the individual‘.
People always respond well to education and training and
we wanted the team to feel empowered with the ability to
make positive changes that impacted on the overall health
of the business.”
TOCCA was thus engaged to run a series of workshops with
all of the supervisory personnel from each of the manufacturing
cells, as well as sales, marketing and finance – to
provide a holistic solution. These workshops, which used
Lego exercises as a learning aid, gave Telwater’s
staff a clear insight into and understanding of the TOCCA
approach and how it applied to Telwater’s processes.
After the workshops, TOCCA was engaged to help improve
a specific area of the business – the medium boat
manufacturing “cell”.
The TOCCA Solution
The welding shop had been identified as the constraint
in the workflow process. Paul Phelan explains: ”We
knew we had a bottleneck in the welding shop but the answer
was not simply to hire more welders; we needed to look more
closely at this area.“
Welding is a highly skilled operation, so it was clear
that the use of the welders’ time had to be maximised.
Actual welding time was identified as “when the blue
flame of the welding torch is burning”, or “blue-light
time”.
What TOCCA did was very simple but effective: they carried
out a time-and-motion study to see exactly what the welders
were doing with their time. As they were the bottleneck
in the process, their welding torches, or the blue lights,
were expected to be on most of the time, welding boat parts.
The time-and-motion study proved that the blue lights were,
in fact, only on for a relatively small percentage of the
time! Most of the welders’ time was, in fact, spent
fetching and carrying components, waiting for parts to arrive,
and fitting parts to the boats. This is what was causing
the bottleneck in the production process.
Further examination of the non-welding tasks carried out
by the welders highlighted the fact that fitting the hulls
was a very slow process. TOCCA made the following recommendations:
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