Cypress Technologies Implements Lean Manufacturing

Challenge: Try to manufacture in a highly mixed manufacturing environment while reducing inventory, reducing cost, and improving delivery, all while keeping it simple.

Cypress Technologies manufactures products for all types of businesses and industries, and has a strong bond with oil and gas service companies. These companies have unique manufacturing challenges. They need rugged products that withstand harsh environments like extreme weather conditions, debris, and vibration. They also need products that are extremely high in quality, delivered on-time, and they need products that are manufactured at the lowest costs possible to maximize their profits.

Manufacturing products with military levels of quality and at the same time reducing costs and improving deliveries has always been a significant challenge for any contract manufacturing company, one that Cypress Technologies has solved with experience and Lean Manufacturing.

Lean manufacturing is a manufacturing method with a goal of removing waste and maximizing value of the product being manufactured. It is quite simple. Value is something the customer will pay for while waste is not. Lean manufacturing redirects efforts to value based steps and flushes out the wasteful ones.

Cypress Technologies also uses one-piece or continuous flow manufacturing. We do this in-order to make small batches of products. This alone keeps our inventory down, reduces our lead times and improves our quality. A smaller batch also keeps our assembly floor flexible which is what a high mix manufacturing environment demands. With one piece manufacturing, we in effect eliminate over-production a lead time killer. We also identify and correct problems while they are happening enabling us to correct the process and educate the assembler immediately thereby improving our quality.

For each assembly line or work cell, Cypress Technologies has KanBan carts for maintaining sub-assemblies. These sub-assembly carts give our assemblers a visual tool and self-managing system for knowing what is needed to maintain efficient manufacturing flow. It is simple; if the sub assembly is missing build it. If not, build something else thereby controlling over-production a wasteful problem. In other words we only build what is needed at that particular time, and not what is needed is say 30 days from now.

You cannot effectively go lean unless you adopt 5S. Cypress Technologies does embrace 5S. Before we launched our lean manufacturing programs, we trained and counseled with each Cypress Technologies employee to understand the importance of Sorting, Simplify, Sweeping, Standardizing, and Sustain or Self-discipline.

Where do we go from here? While internally Lean Manufacturing has lead to significant improvements that we have already passed on to our customers, we will expand our lean ideas out to our supply chain. We will work with them to adopt similar techniques with their material deliveries and encourage them to do the same with their suppliers. In a perfect world, we want items delivered today to hit the floor today. While this level of flow is difficult to achieve, we feel confident that we can make great improvements in this area to further reduce lead times, costs, and improve quality, so we can pass these savings on to our customers’ while keeping us competitive especially during these difficult economical times.

Internally, we still have yet to integrate all of our departments into work cells. This is mainly due to our facilities change over. However, around April 1st, 2009, our new 12,000 sq/ft facility will be set-up and fully functional which will double our floor space and allow much needed room for our new customers to benefit from our lean processes.