The innovative concept to increase competitiveness is called “Exponential Productivity”
During my professional career in Operations I could frequently increase the productivity of my plants by more than 10% p.a. Through this systematic and a practical realization of the Exponential Productivity method, the improvements were not incrementally but erratically achieved. The productivity gain is measured in factor value – a factor value of 1 equals 100% of improvement.
Example
Manufacturing of car body parts
Multi-stage tooling is used for the production of car body parts. Forming presses require a closing power of e.g. 2.000 t to form metal parts depending on size and geometry. The productivity is measured in strokes per minute, also in produced parts per minute.
The older presses work with a speed of 12-15 strokes/minute. This productivity can be easily increased by 100% to 30 strokes/minute with relatively less technical actions. Our excitement moved higher once we achieved more than 100 strokes per minute with innovative technology. This productivity gain has a factor value increase of 6 or 600%.
Engineering effort for the new construction of tools for a vehicle door
The previous construction duration was about 6 weeks for a specific tool of a body part with the construction software CATIA V5. After a redesign of the new process flow, the design work duration, including the milling programs, the parts list, the assembly plans and the measurement and test reports was only about 1% of the previous working time.
Additional realized improvements
- Material savings -50% in current production (factor improvement 2)
- Scrap reduction from 50% to 0.01% (factor improvement 5,000)
- Reduction of the personnel expenditure in the work preparation by 95% and simultaneous increase of the planning quality (factor improvement 20)
- Reduction in inventory by 50% (factor improvement 2)
- Reduction of the lead time to make prototypes (plastic parts) by 95% (factor improvement 5,000)
- Improvement of delivery reliability (factor improvement 2)
- Reduction of logistics costs by 50% (factor improvement 2)
Exponential Productivity is methodically implemented in several steps and can be easily learned and trained.