Improving productivity in production nests

Case study of Indoorway solution based on implementation at refrigerated display case manufacturer ES System K.

Thanks to data from Indoorway, the customer improved

12%
increase in efficiency of assemblers
4 weeks
time from start of measurements to first results

About the customer

ES SYSTEM K is a manufacturer of refrigeration equipment used by customers
from more than 50 countries. The company's subsidiaries operate in several countries in Europe, Asia and North and South America.
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ES SYSTEM K offers a wide range of modern refrigeration furniture for the entire retail sector: large-format stores, for convenience store facilities, as well as pastry stores, ice cream parlors and gas stations. In the era of the
pandemic, ES SYSTEM K has also launched a range of solutions to support secure commerce, including a device designed for the storage and contactless receipt of e-grocery purchases. In total, the company has 35,000 sq. m. of production space with more than 600 employees.

"The most important value for me from the Indoorway solution is the availability of real-time data in the Customer Panel and the ability to interpret the previous day's data. I felt that the time from the start of monitoring to getting the results we wanted was very short. Indoorway was available to us on call (which I appreciated very much in our cooperation), and the topics we reported were implemented by the second or third day. The Indoorway team is open to new ideas, which allowed us to work better together and focus on reinventing the data."

Marcin Nabagło, Production Manager at ES SYSTEM K SP. z o.o.

Description of the problem

The production manager at ESSK, Marcin Nabaglo, identified the assembly process as a key process to improve in order to improve OEE. Based on his own observations, he was able to identify areas for improvement, particularly the insufficient dwell time of assemblers at their workstations, but he needed data to understand what the problems were from, how serious they were, and how they could be addressed.

Indoorway system implementation

  • Based on guidelines from the client, we installed measuring devices in the production and assembly nesting areas. Each assembler was given a locator that automatically and in real time allowed the recording of location and time spent in different zones.
  • The customer had access to live data, and could reconstruct the movement of each locator from a selected period by drawing spaghetti diagrams or creating heat maps.

Through heat map analysis, we have identified areas of high assembler traffic.

Implemented solutions and effects

Thanks to the data from the Indoorway system, the client was not only able to identify waste in the process, but also to quickly verify whether the corrective actions, implemented thanks to the data, were bringing the assumed benefits.

The main activities included:
  • The client reorganized the process of retrieving tools and components from the warehouse, eliminating unnecessary movement of production workers.
  • A new workstation has been created to bring necessary tools to workers in assembly slots.
  • The changes implemented reduced unnecessary movement of workers outside production slots, which translated into an increase in the average time spent by production workers at workstations from 71% to 81%.
  • The first effects were evident as soon as 4 weeks after the implementation of Indoorway and the system monitored on an ongoing basis whether the benefits introduced were being sustained over time and how they were affected by newly introduced changes in the production process.

Check out what such a project could look like in your company

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