Case Study: Job Duration Gauge

Industry: Manufacturing

Background: The Industrial Engineering group at a Final Assembly plant manufacturing commercial aircraft was responsible for creating the production schedules for each work cell. They were using a scheduling tool called Aurora that was based on Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM). One of the inputs for this tool was job durations; specifically the duration which an average technician could complete within 50% of the time and the duration which they could complete within 80% of the time.  The million-dollar question was “how do we come up with those numbers for the 10,000 or so jobs in the schedule”? One thought was to use judgmental estimates, which can be accurate if performed by experts, but how would one find an expert for all those jobs? The group had access to actual duration job data for the initial 30 or so builds but it wasn’t easy to extract or analyze and was generally considered “dirty” or full of mis-clocking errors.

Tool: Access, VBA

• • • • Connected into the Teradata CDW into the MES and Time Keeping tables.
      • Scrubbed the data using an algorithm that would minimize clocking errors.
      • Stored scrubbed data in a new static table and imported newly scrubbed data on a weekly basis.
      • Created an access Form based UI which allowed users to visualize the scrubbed data with graphs and statistics.

Results

• • The tool was used as the basis of estimation for all jobs where an expert couldn’t be identified.
  • The tool was adopted by the internal Lean Organization and used to identify and validate improvement projects.