The “Mosca Kanban story”
The machine factory Gerd Mosca AG is one of the worldwide leading enterprises in the area of strapping machines with approx. 800 employees.
Mosca with its export share of over 80% is present in over 65 countries worldwide.
In 2006 the management of the Mosca AG has decided to optimize the enterprise-internal processes to get the advantage for the future challenges.
Mr. Kühnel, area leader in materials management moreover:
“In the analysis of our internal processes we found out that the present centralized production planning semantics based on our PPS system could not meet requirements of our customers high expectations and specific product adjustments any longer. We had to increase the transparency of the process dependencies and convert the very costly and poor production control into independent control loops.”
A major decision was the decision to introduce a Kanban system comprehensive.
“It was clear for us from the very beginning, that with huge amount of our articles we will come to the limits of the manual Kanban system soon.” so Mr. Kästner,
as a leader of the order center for small devices department, who was mainly responsible for the Kanban introduction. At the beginning of the Kanban introduction the team decided to use the software as a support.
“If we had started by hand, we would have had to change for an e-Kanban system anyway for the support. Why then not to start with such a system from the very beginning?” said Mr. Kühnel.
After familiarizing with the market offer, the Integrated Kanban system (IKS) of the manufactus Ltd with headquarter in Starnberg has been chosen.
“The system has convinced us by its diverse functionalities and stages of development. Moreover, IKS is easy to work with, what reduces expenditure on workforce training to a minimum.”
Mr. Kühnel is convinced from the decision also afterwards.
At the moment Mosca is using IKS for building and dimensioning the Kanban loops. Individually designed Kanban cards in Mosca style are being printed very fast on etiquette printers, which reduces expenditure for this “standard activity” drastically.
Permanent and also temporary Kanban cards are being used depending on the respective processes. IKS supports both features in the standard package.
An essential challenge was to connect the existing automatic warehouse management system to generate automatic requests, as soon as a Kanban container becomes empty.
“By the storage of the Kanban parts directly at the production line, we could raise the material availability substantially and reduce clearly the number of the storage operations in our warehouse”, explains Mr. Ernst, logistics director. “Moreover, we achieved a better order and overview in the production areas and the material supply occurs to be more stable than before” complements Mr. Kästner.
As by all changes, the employees at Mosca were also a little bit skeptical what the new system will bring as the advantage. Since the IKS Kanban solution has supported first production areas and the process has “settled” itself, the acceptance of the system has increased.
The essential advantages of the new e-Kanban of system lies in the opinion of the Mosca teams in:
- The high transparency about material and process
- The reduction of the storage operation and the handling expenditure
- The higher material availability in the lines
- The standardization of the processes to be able to carry out other improvements (active integration of the employees in the improvement process)
- The easy integration of new areas and also integration of external suppliers in future
- Reduction of the administrative expenditure in contrast to manual Kanban
- Immediate visual control of all Kanban loops
Conclusion
“The conversion from the classical PPS control to a Kanban system in our opinion was absolutely successful. Moreover the IKS has fulfilled our expectations and offers us possibility potential to optimise our processes and inventory.”
comes positive conclusion from Mr. Kühnel.
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At he moment Mosca changes the control of the material flow in other areas to Kanban.
Meanwhile Mosca also employs the new web interface of IKS to bind the external locations of the Mosca electronics in order to be able to control Kanban movements with barcode reader there.
For the future Mosca will also control its external suppliers like upstream production stages with the help of the Kanban system, to unleash more potential and make use of the acquired knowledge.
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