Company Background
Premcar is a highly skilled product development and engineering consultancy with a proven track record of product delivery and performance. Established by Prodrive UK in 1996, formerly known as Tickford Vehicle Engineering, Bernard Quinn and Jim Jovanovski took ownership in 2012 at which point the business name changed to Premcar. The owners have been with the company through all of its history of engineering excellence.
Over a 20-year period, Premcar has delivered high performance variants of Ford vehicles such as the iconic XR6, XR6 Turbo, XR8, F6 and GT. The world class engineering that went into developing those vehicles is now being applied to new and exciting products for various manufacturers in Automotive, Marine, Defence, Mining and Aviation industries.
Key Business Objectives
There were two initial objectives set out by Premcar; conduct a deep dive into Premcar’s Nissan Navara N-Trek Warrior manufacturing processes using Concerto; model and improve organisational and operation gaps with regards to its people, process and systems.
And develop an end to end visualisation of Premcar’s business model; ‘The One Stop Shop’, which takes into consideration re-engineering design concept through to shipping the final product to the customer.
Desired Outcome
Concerto and Premcar have built a strong relationship through product and organisation transparency, our hands-on approach and a clear two-way communication has continued to build trust and ongoing support. The Premcar leadership team has a clear vision for their business model and where they intend to grow within the market. This vision was clear with each level of the organisation being included into the future state and improvement plan for the Nissan Navara N-Trek Warrior production.
Through a detailed process mapping activity of the Nissan Navara N-Trek Warrior manufacturing processes at a shop floor level, over 470 process steps were mapped out, with all Non Value Add and Value Add activities captured as part of the Lean 8 Waste methodology that identifies waste across transport, resource, inventory, motion, waiting, over processing, over production and defects across resource, process and production flow layout which was then visualised in Concerto and Non Value Add activities where reduced through process, system and layout changes. This method has enabled streamlining the application of processes to focus improvement on Value Add processes.
Solutions
- Created a Current State View of the organisation using Value Stream Mapping.
- Established and visualised all KPIs related to each employee through policy deployment.
- Identified the Value Add activates within each process step.
- Identified Non Value Add activities and develop a Future State Value Stream within Concerto to simulate improvements for each department.
- Concerto training across Lean 8 Waste methodology; inclusive of 5S, 8 wastes, visual management, policy deployment, standardised work and leadership confirmation.
- Premcar have been empowered with models that identify waste, organisational key performance indicators that influence daily improvements at relevant shift meetings in order to balancing the operational activities and smooth flow of product manufacturing in the safest environment at the lowest cost and to the highest quality.
Measurable result
Concerto was able to identify the Non Value Add activities from the production line, this data enabled a full review of the production facility, product flow and the refinement of this layout of delivery. Simple but effective layout changes were deployed; all parts, materials, and tools were housed and placed strategically for operators ensuring they have the correct parts, in immediate proximity, for exact production application. This has sped up the manufacturing process as well as implored the need to increase from 8 to 10 workstations to even the workload across the complete production line resulting in a reduction in wasted time.
“Days before I jumped on the spanners, the production line was reworked to unlock a bottleneck with attachment of the front bumpers. Hoists were repositioned and electricians called in to add Power Points – all in the quest for a better flow. Other tweaks and process refinements helped shave 40 per cent off the build time, in turn increasing total vehicle outputs and lowering costs.” – WhichCar 10/03/20
Cycle time per workstation was reduced from 45 mins to 34 mins per Nissan Navara N-Trek Warrior.
“The company has also worked with analytics and modelling specialist Concerto, which helped streamline the Navara Warrior production line to bring average work time at each line station down from around 45 minutes to 34.” – GoAuto 28/2/20
Consistency in volume achievement and customer shipping volumes have been recognized and communicated from Nissan Australia.
“Nissan is indicating the Warrior program has been well received and Premcar has upped production to as many as 15 per day on a single shift.” – Carsales 3/03/20
The daily use of Concerto modelling, live data inputs and daily review of dashboard against KPIs allows for instant changes to be made to ensure further improvements can be made and evolve Premcar’s ‘The One Stop Shop’ model.
Authors:
Paul McLoughlin is the General Manager of Concerto with a strong focus in business improvement consultancy, he assists organisations to crystallise their strategy for operational, people and analytics transformation.
Nicole Hindson is the Marketing Manager of Concerto, her main focus is to strategically shape, communicate and creatively evolve the brand to grow across multiple sectors, locally and globally.