Increase Lean Manufacturing Flexibility and Stay Compliant

Increase Lean Manufacturing Flexibility While Staying EHS Compliant With Innovative Clean-Air Solutions

How would your business benefit if you could conduct High-Mix Low-Volume (HMLV) Manufacturing with large-volume production in the same facility, without having to sacrifice valuable floor space? At Duroair™, we design Lean-manufacturing solutions to do just that. Our modular, portable clean-air systems improve process efficiencies while meeting your environmental health and safety (EHS) compliance requirements.

It’s not easy to stay Lean and maintain flexibility when you have to slow production for painting, grinding, sanding, coating, and finishing, especially for constantly changing HMLV workflows. Large-scale production usually experiences delays while these messy tasks are completed, due to the time it takes to mitigate airborne hazards such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and toxic fumes and dust. Yet safely containing processes from these contaminants is essential to ensure both productivity and EHS compliance.

In this blog, we’ll share examples of how Duroair’s flexible containment solutions can reduce bottlenecks in your manufacturing processes while safeguarding your people and output quality.

Remove Transport Waste for Lean Manufacturing

Waiting and transport, two of the 7 Deadly Wastes of Lean manufacturing, are often associated with sanding or painting large industrial workpieces, such as an electric turbine or a jet engine. However, most permanent clean rooms and paint booths don’t allow for crane access, so manufacturers are often forced to transport large pieces by dolly to move them into a separate bay. This type of movement significantly slows work in progress (WIP) and requires excessive man-hours and material handling.

Fortunately, our DuroRoom™ softwall, portable workstation retracts to 20% of its extended length to accommodate use of an overhead crane and can easily be moved to bring clean air to each workpiece — reducing delays and setup wait times caused by transporting large workpieces to a designated bay or workspace.

Additionally, our DuroRoom Hardwall™ enclosure is designed to accommodate wider spans — over 65 feet. And because DuroRoom Hardwall is modular, it’s easy to add, move, and reconfigure walls as needed to accommodate different types of large assemblies and sub-assemblies.

Each DuroRoom is combined with our patented, industrial air filtration, such as DuroPure™, DuroCap™, DuroDust™, or DuroClean™, to safely contain a wide variety of manufacturing operations and MRO tasks from airborne hazards, such as:

• Carcinogenic, hexavalent chromium particulate matter produced by sanding and coating aluminum components, or by welding stainless steel.
• VOCs and isocyanates produced by painting, which are especially prevalent in aerospace manufacturing.
• Toxic dust and oil mist produced by metal grinding and welding that can compromise visibility and facility equipment.

Make Efficient Use of Facility Floor Space

Another often-overlooked “waste” is wasted space. As noted above, dedicated sanding or painting booths aren’t always logistically viable for Lean-minded manufacturers who don’t want to waste valuable floor space. This is especially true if you want to accommodate both large-volume production lines while producing a high variety of products in small quantities with specific quality requirements, such as aerospace components.

You can make more efficient use of your facility’s floor space with our softwall DuroRoom, that can be quickly moved (with built-in castors) to each workpiece and retracted and stored when not in use. This is an effective way to optimize HMLV Manufacturing processes to create a smoother product flow, despite any product variations.

Duroair can even customize a dual-purpose vented workstation to accommodate sanding, coating, and painting tasks in a single modular enclosure. By combining DuroRoom with our six-stage filtration system and two exhaust units, your employees can perform multiple processes in the same booth by simply changing out the filters specific to the tasks being performed in the enclosure.

Increase JIT Production Control and Quality

The less time that is wasted from start to finish in your production line, the more units you can move out the door. This is the basic philosophy behind just-in-time (JIT) production, whether you’re executing high-volume production lines or low volumes with more variance.

Having a Lean plan of action can help you improve your JIT production control. Our Duroair clean-air experts can use our softwall and hardwall clean-air solutions to help you:

• Create a workflow plan: We can help you align on a product flow plan with a clean-air solution that allows you to better predict outcomes and eliminate failures in production.
• Optimize flow: The first step in optimizing operations in low-volume manufacturing is to create a smooth product flow, despite the many product variations.
• Uphold flexibility: Every aspect of a factory, from inventory to machines to the scheduling of staff, needs to remain flexible in order to handle the constant changes needed with HMLV Manufacturing.

It’s important to note that smoother, faster production cycles can improve quality because there are fewer opportunities for mistakes on the production line. More controlled environments also improve quality by containing airborne dust and particulate matter that contaminates the surface quality of workpieces.

Protect People While Increasing Lean Efficiencies

Providing a clean, safe, productive environment is always good for profitability. As we noted above, implementing Lean manufacturing technologies that contain airborne hazards can improve workflows and speed production output.

This is why Duroair engineers Lean, clean-air solutions that go beyond many life safety requirements (EHS) to mitigate hexavalent chromium and other airborne threats. Our retractable and modular workstations protect your people, help you meet EPA, OSHA, NFPA, and NESHAP compliance standards, and provide the flexibility to add and change workflows for Lean efficiency.

Learn How Flexible Containment Can Benefit Your Lean Manufacturing Processes

If you’re looking for new Lean efficiencies for your equipment, processes, and procedures, Duroair can help. Our motto is “there’s always a better way.” We go beyond what other vendors are willing to do, to help you continuously improve your processes to increase efficiency and save money.

Our clean-air solutions are specifically designed with Lean manufacturing best practices in mind, including:

• Portable enclosures that pair with any Duroair filtration system and retract to less than 20% of their extended length.
• Spray and paint booths that combine Duroair’s vented DuroCap air purification system with our patented Taper Draft Airflow technology to improve drying times and prevent overspray.
• Cellular clean rooms with DuroPure non-vented filtration that recycle air without the need to exhaust contaminants to the outside, eliminating the need for costly air makeup.
• Multi-stage filtration dust collectors that go beyond OSHA compliance to capture 100% of air particulates.

Contact us to learn how we can use these Lean manufacturing technologies to help you find cost-saving efficiencies for your manufacturing and MRO workflows, while covering your compliance bases.