Two Concepts for Improvements
Large East Coast Industrial Consultant’s Idea… Variation of the lines for the existing sheet fed press in their existing multi-story plant facility.
Local Plant Engineer’s Idea… Web fed press utilizing 4-5 ton rolls on axel spindles fed down through 7 color presses, through an oven to bake on colors and then through chill rolls and onto the cutting, stacking and movement to the fill lines or to major customer warehouses.
Williams Engineering and VAA were hired, by the Plant Engineer to prove the viability of the local engineer’s idea.
The first step was to create a process flow diagram of the sheet fed idea. This quickly proved to be an extremely inefficient process requiring movement of products up and down four stories in an old building using an elevator and labor intensive operations.
The study need to be completed in a 60 day period of time. In order to quickly prove some of the new concepts of the web fed, our team moved to Waldorf’s offices. We found an open area, did some hand sketches, and taped them on the wall where managers were able to see what we were doing. It became physically apparent how this new concept would work and at the end of the study the engineer’s idea was approved and the Williams-VAA was awarded the design project.
VAA, teamed with WEA, designed the new web fed equipment in existing single story warehouse areas identified in the study as a better fit for the process. We remodeled the one story warehouse area of Waldorf Carton, originally designed for a different type of operation and currently under utilized. With the new process the entire facility would run efficiently and tie right into their overall product flow ending in their folding carton assembly areas.
Our ability to understand their operations and document it utilizing product flow diagrams helped to create an effective high efficient plant design and to convince management of the proper direction to follow in their quest for more flexibility, higher efficiency, and the ability to make rapid changes. Waldorf was pleased with our work and asked us to work with them again performing the same services on their multi-story manufacturing plant in Chicago.
