During the annual Manufacturer’s Summit, a special award ceremony is held to celebrate the most innovative businesses and leaders in the Inland Empire. These leaders have great ideas for growing the business, dramatically improving performance and addressing some of the toughest challenges in today’s manufacturing industry.
E=mc² Innovation Awards will be presented to local manufacturers who submit the best innovations that result in tangible business improvement.
Congratulations to our recent award winner!
2019 Innovation in Resource Efficiency Winner
Website: https://www.ingrammicro.com
Address: 12510 Micro Drive Mira Loma, CA 91752
Summary:
Ingram Micro is the world’s largest technology distributor with operations in 56 countries and more than 30,000 associates. Ingram Micro helps businesses fully realize the promise of technology and provide the tools and technologies that will support your business needs. One of the main strategic drivers is Operational Excellence. Ingram Micro has a longstanding commitment to quality and process improvement through lean processes.
The Southern California Campus fully committed to Operational Excellence in November of 2017 when a Lean Leader was hired. The Lean Leader is fully dedicated to leading the Continuous Improvement effort to bring the Southern California Campus into alignment with the corporate commitment to Continuous Improvement.
After assessing the campus, the Lean Leader and the Executive Director identified many opportunities for improvement and decided to focus 2018 Continuous Improvement efforts on three priorities:
1. Leadership Lean Training
2. Lean Projects
3. Lean Wall
Leadership Training
The Leadership team consisting of the Executive Director, Senior Managers, Operations Managers and front-line Supervisors were required to complete a 19 Module training course. This training includes Modules in the following topics:
· Project Charter & Project Kickoff
· Deployment of Lean
· Cost Savings Analysis
· Lean Principles & The 8 Wastes
· Process Flow
· 55 & Visual Control
· Quality Concepts
· Root Cause Analysis
· Kaizen and Kaizen Events
· Flow and Pull
· Set-up Reduction
· Mistake Proofing
· Change: Secret to Success
· Theory of Constraint
The training Modules consisted of video clips, interactive team and individual activities and techniques dealing with real life warehouse/distribution issues. The exercises focused on applying and refining the Lean tools learned during training.
The purpose of Lean training was to provide the Leadership team with the skills and resources necessary to become effective change agents. Most important to train their mindset and be able to identify wastes, improve processes and build a culture of continuous improvement.
A Kaizen event was conducted in the custom box making area. This area needed to be standardized and improved. The team was able to eliminate unnecessary steps and improve work flow. This was accomplished by rearranging the layout and extending the roller conveyor to easily identify priorities for air and ground shipments. With the improvements and the elimination of wastes a total of $10,015 of annualized savings was realized.
Lean Projects
Throughout 2018 the campus was able to complete 33 LEAN projects with a validated total savings of $1,054,435. There was a great range of projects completed throughout multiple departments and buildings focusing on “Improving Visibility, Reducing Variability, Increasing Velocity” through waste elimination. Below are the two most impactful projects.
1. Asset Lockers: annualized savings of $227,267
a. Replacement of a manned assets cage to distribute and collect RF guns with automated Asset lockers. Not only was there a direct labor savings for the cage operators, but equipment traceability was improved and bottlenecks to check in/out RF guns were eliminated.
2. Efficiency Improvements: annualized saving of $585,000
a. Implemented best practices throughout the warehouse to reduce Time Measurement Unit and Cost Per Unit. After multiple observations throughout the warehouse the team improved and implemented the following: received product moved to endcaps to put away (task interleaving), when unloading switched from 4 high stacking to 2 high reducing unnecessary motion during receiving, posted hourly KPI’s on productivity allowing for real time mentoring, added additional shipping loading area on other side of warehouse to reduce travel distance.
Lean Wall
A Lean Wall was created to allow associates and visitors to have an opportunity to view the completed projects. The Lean Wall serves as a showcase for the hard work and dedication and promotes “Pride and Ownership” among the Leadership team and associates. In November prior to PEAK (high volume) season there was a campus wide “Savings Revealing Event” where associates that participated in projects were celebrated, congratulated and thanked.
These successes were accomplished in the first year of our Lean Journey. The most challenging stages of the Journey lay ahead as the campus continues to expand and grow. Now we will need to sustain the improvements achieved and replicate the successes throughout the campus. We have built a strong foundation and are confident we will continue to strive for Operational Excellence.