Manufacturer of critical aerospace & defense components
When an aerospace & defense customer’s demand for a critical component spiked roughly tenfold overnight, this supplier had already added headcount and overtime and still couldn’t hit the number — and in this industry, a single missed part can ground a program. This is an operational story about a manufacturing process improvement effort that turned a plant on the edge of missing its customer’s needs into one that consistently beat them. Working with TBM, they increased monthly output by 45% and cut labor hours per unit nearly 40% — within about three months.
The client’s end customer needed roughly ten times the usual volume of a critical component, pushing the required output to 400 units a month. The client had already added people and overtime on its own and pushed into the 300s but couldn’t consistently hit target. A quick diagnostic pointed to the real problem: severe cycle-time imbalances and redundant handling across the value stream, from receiving all the way to final pack out. Individual parts were being counted and re-counted as many as four or five times before ever reaching the assembly line, and arrears kept building as an unplanned order for another 100 units from an overseas customer landed in the middle of it.
TBM led an assembly line optimization effort built around two levers: streamlining the assembly process itself and separating logistics and kitting out of it entirely. The team mapped the value stream, set target cycle times against takt time, and time-studied roughly eight sub-assemblies to pinpoint exactly where flow was breaking down. A dedicated kitting role and a visual parts-presentation system replaced manual counting — cutting nearly 70% of the work-minutes that used to go into handling and re-handling the same parts — while min/max replenishment stores kept material staged and ready at every shift change. Assembly line optimization, standardized work, daily flow targets, and hands-on coaching on the floor helped operators sustain the new pace long after TBM’s team left.
Within about three months, monthly output rose 45% and labor hours per unit fell from 11 to 6 — a nearly 40% reduction achieved with fewer people than the client had already added on its own which will lead to significant annualized labor savings. Quality held steady and, if anything, improved as the new visual kitting method proved more accurate than the manual counting it replaced. This manufacturing process improvement work also left the client with a physical audit process to sustain the new flow, and the gains have held in TBM’s follow-up checks since. TBM identified a further path to 6 labor hours per unit and a possible run rate closer to 600 units a month, upside the client — a conservative, deliberate organization — has not yet pursued.
At a Glance
Client
Results
