And that's only within the first six months of its opening back in January.
Almost immediately after the FIAT-Chrysler partnership began, we started to implement FIAT's World Class Manufacturing process in our operations. While it's a continual process to keep improving manufacturing quality, WCM has already borne a bountiful harvest.
The World Class Manufacturing Academy is just the latest example. WCM Academy is where our plant managers, team leaders and other plant employees are trained in WCM. It's a 25,000-sq.-ft. facillity, housed within the UAW-Chrysler Technology Training Center, Warren, Mich., and can train 1,200 people annually.
"The financial results of the home plant projects have made the Academy an excellent business case," said Head of WCM Mauro Pino. “By year end, we expect the savings to grow to nearly $2.5 million."
One concrete example of the WCMA's success is a new process started by Tracey Aber from our Indiana Transmission Plant (ITP) in Kokomo, Ind. Aber attended the Academy’s Seven Steps of Micro Stoppages course. Micro-stoppages are small equipment breakdowns that can cause major losses in time and money. The course, using a slot car track as an educational tool (example above), teaches participants to see that there might be more to a breakdown than what is obvious to the naked eye and apply to a disciplined process to find the root cause of a problem.
After taking the course at the Academy, Aber returned to his home plant and engaged his team to use the methodology he learned to identify the true root cause of the hidden phenomenon that was causing pallets along the line to impact each other and stop the line about 15 times per day.
By analyzing the issue using WCM tools, the ITP team implemented two countermeasures that dampened the impact of the pallets and eliminated the re-coil effect, resulting in the machine having zero micro-stops for three months.
"The human element is at the center of WCM. Our success depends on the involvement of our workers, who work in teams," Pino added.
See a January 2012 blog post for more on our World Class Manufacturing Academy opening. In May 2011, we looked at the early results of WCM.
