Conzato: a car bodyshop becomes lean

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Our client is a large auto body shop located in Pozzoleone near Vicenza which is specialized in auto and truck repairing and in advertising decoration of vehicles. By decision of the founder’s son, Eddi Conzato, lean principles have been applied to the operational process and their application is clearly visible throughout the whole shop: value streams are clearly defined and their cadence is in line with the complexity of the repairs; workspaces are clean and tidy with every tool at its own place; production flow through the various phases is controlled entirely by sight; production schedule is clearly visible in a large Heijunka box in the very center of the shop.

[custom_headline type=”left” level=”h2″ looks_like=”h4″ accent=”true”]The Challenge[/custom_headline]
The excellent results of the lean transformation have encouraged the company to extend lean principles to the offices which were poorly organized and worked in a rather chaotic way. They opened a folder for each repair and all information was on paper. Often the folders remained for days on a desk because the information contained were incomplete and it was difficult to have a clear idea of the shop real work load. Production scheduling and meeting customers’ expectations was often difficult. All this was the cause of stress, frustration, tension and, of course, inefficiency.

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Our project took six months to be implemented and was divided into three phases. The first phase was devoted to training and motivating people. In the second phase we mapped the present state and set the objectives to be achieved in the third and final phase of implementation. Since the very beginning we have involved all the resources in the application of 5S and in the methods of value stream mapping. It became soon clear that the concept of takt time/cadence was totally unknown to office people and that there were many wastes such as batch processes and work in progress (WIP) along the whole process. Reworks were also common due to lack or incompleteness of information. Our first Kaizen groups have identified those activities which could be turned into flows with a definite cadence and no work in progress. After this we defined a few “supermarkets” (the level of which monitored by sight) to feed activities which could not be made into a continuous flow with the activities preceding them. These first improvement actions have made it clear that the company needed a tool capable of levelling the number of cars to be repaired to the available capacity. The brilliant solution adopted is an Heijunka Box in plexiglas designed by Eddi himself (see photo).

[custom_headline type=”left” level=”h2″ looks_like=”h4″ accent=”true”]The Results[/custom_headline]
The achievement of the predefined objectives is now monitored weekly through a set of indicators which measure customer’s average waiting time, punctuality, and average lead time which has already been reduced by 50%. A critical reading of the above KPI’s is the main tool to evaluate the results of the actions suggested by office people during the frequent moments of discussion and participation.