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Case History Medical Products
Client: Manufacturer of Disposable Medical Face Masks
Outcome: $940,000 savings in annual labor costs. Dramatic yield increase of 10 million linear yards.
Challenge
A manufacturer of polyester medical facemasks (client) was facing intense price pressure from both competition and managed care.
The client took extensive measures to reduce costs and streamline operations, including bringing some activities in-house. But they did not achieve the desired savings and throughput improvement. Also, with an enormous investment in 52 machines to produce these facemasks, a wholesale upgrade of production equipment was not economically feasible.
Compounding the challenge was that the client had a manufacturing bottleneck. The production line was using pancake rolls to feed strips of fabric into the mask-making machines*. Throughput on the manufacturing line was limited because the pancake roll had to be changed every 10 to 12 minutes. Some machines spliced the pancake rolls, but this operation didn't function correctly. Splicing of the narrow raw materials was a significant part of the problem. The splicing difficulties were caused by, (1) operators not loading backup rolls, (2) tape splice being misapplied, resulting in no splice actually taking place, and (3) splices breaking in the production machine.
Overall, the client’s management was under pressure to reduce costs (through labor and material savings), increase productivity, and improve production speed, packaging throughput and quality.
Solution
Web Industries’ experts collaborated with the client to solve the problems, beginning with a solid cost analysis including labor, benefits, overhead, machine depreciation, space allocation, etc. After studying the problem, Web Industries and the client jointly developed an overall solution to the manufacturing problem, based on the following:
a. Spools Instead of Pancakes: The spool approach to handling slitted polyester would replace the existing pancake roll approach. Spools would be changed once every two hours instead of pancake rolls being changed every 12 minutes. This would reduce splicing problems and downtime dramatically.
b. Unwind Machinery: The client’s existing machinery was designed to use the narrow pancake rolls, so some engineering was needed. Web would assist the client in designing the equipment necessary to allow spools to feed into the narrow slot on the existing machinery. Web provided the spools to the client’s specifications (width and diameter), and found a firm to build custom unwinding equipment.
c. Standard Components: The ultimate solution was built to use standard components wherever possible. This helped to keep capital costs to a minimum by reducing the amount and type of equipment that had to be purchased.
d. Proof of Concept Demonstration: Web Industries brought demonstration equipment to client’s premises to prove the viability of its proposal.
e. Providing Spooled Material: Web provided the polyester slitting operation and spooling service.
f. Web’s Dallas Location As Critical Distribution Point: Web’s plant location in Dallas aided the client’s efforts to minimize shipping costs and minimize the risk to raw material supplies.
Results
This joint effort produced nearly $1 million of annual labor savings, reduced waste by 1% and increased yield by 10 million linear yards of polyester. This was all accomplished with a customer investment of approximately $1 million, less than 1/20th of the cost to convert the entire production line to new equipment.
This joint effort produced nearly $1 million of annual labor savings, reduced waste by 1% and increased yield by 10 million linear yards of polyester. This was all accomplished with a customer investment of approximately $1 million, less than 1/20th of the cost to convert the entire production line to new equipment.
- Splicing time was reduced by a factor of 20.
- Production downtime caused by splicing difficulties was reduced and splicing problems in total were substantially reduced. Web was able to show that this was a case where hand splicing was actually more effective than automated splicing.
- Waste reduced by 1%.
- Yield increased by 10,000,000 linear yards, (approx. 1% of total).
- Production line uptime improved by 3%.
- Number of "good" medical masks shipped increased from 94.5 per 100 to 96.2 per 100. (Several factors beyond spooling improvements contributed to this increase.
Web Industries supplied a new technology (spooling), and because of its expertise in all aspects of slitting, was able to pull together a series of products, services and suppliers that made the project successful.
Cost/Benefit Analysis
Non-Recurring Costs
- Engineering cost to design custom stands for spooling polyester $330,000
- 150 spooling stands to support 52 individual machines making medical facemasks $525,000
- Installation of the custom spooling stands $200,000
Total Costs......................................................................$1,055,000
Annual Savings
- 27 operators were eliminated from the machine lines (reduced from two operators per machine to one operator per machine). 27 x $32,500/yr = $877,500
- 2 slitter operators eliminated from the slitting department. 2 x $32,500/yr = $65,000
Total Labor Savings.........................................................$942,500/yr
Service Note — Web Industries provides contract slitting services and a number of other value-added services, one of which is called "spooling." Spooling uses a special winding process to place, for example, inch material on a high capacity spool instead of the relatively low capacity pancake roll. A spool can often hold ten times the capacity of a pancake roll, which greatly reduces splicing, roll changes and production downtime during manufacturing. This can help make the process of manufacturing medical products more efficient and cost-effective. The advantage of spooled material over pancake rolled material directly contributed to the outstanding results from this project.
See our page on contract medical manufacturing.
Call us today at 800-932-3212 for more information on how we can help fill your outsourced manufacturing needs.
*A surgical face mask is composed of several types of fabric, which are processed and assembled into a final product. When purchased, the raw polyester fabric is in large rolls, ranging from 24 inches wide to several feet wide. In the manufacturing process, a “slitting” operation takes these large rolls of material and cuts or “slits” them down to widths ranging from one inch to several inches. Slitting operations perform the slitting service and ship the narrow width material in what are known as “pancake” rolls. These pancake rolls might be 12 to 24 inches in diameter, but the material might be only one inch thick, looking very much like a pancake. Splicing is a significant quality issue during manufacturing. It affects both cost and the quality of the finished product.