On the right frequency
Radio-Tech Ltd is one of the leading designers, manufacturers and suppliers of wireless technology to the emerging remote metering and monitoring markets. Their products are used for applications as diverse as Energy Management, Intelligent Street Lighting, Legionella Monitoring, Rail Temperature Monitoring and Bespoke applications. MAS-East was asked to help increase efficiency with a view to delivering improved profitability.
Radio-Tech Ltd
Key Achievements
- 50% reduction in factory footprint
- Moved from 7 cells to 3 flexible cells capable of producing the same mix of products
- Average order processing lead-time reduced from 1 week to 48 hours
Radio-Tech required flexibility in their operations in order to deliver their innovative and sometimes bespoke products to customers.
The project was started with a Value Stream Map of the entire operation. From the mapping activity, it was clear that the bottleneck process was Order Processing, which could take up to a week to collate the information the production teams required.
A more effective process was introduced together with metrics for ongoing monitoring, which gave a tremendous boost to customer responsiveness by reducing the Order Processing time down to less than 48hrs.
A Lean layout exercise encompassing the entire facility together with Workplace Organisation (5S) was then implemented. Sufficient room was created to allow the business to move from two floors to one.
The extra space will also support future capacity requirements.
The Radio-Tech team are now trained in basic Lean Techniques and are looking forward to working on other improvement projects. Direct headcount costs and inventory levels have also been reduced.
Ade Asefeso,
Operations Director
