Bonding - More than materials | Herrmann Ultraschall

“THE LEAN PHILOSOPHY IS A MEANS OF IMPROVING CONSISTENTLY.” Mr. O’Beirne, what exactly has changed here in the last few years? We were in the happy situ- ation of having grown well and strongly. This is posi - tive, but with the growth come new challenges you also need to overcome. A company that makes EUR 20 m in revenue works completely differently to one that generates EUR 100 m per year. From a cer- tain company size, it is no longer possible for everyone to know everything. The (maybe overly) familiar working methods must be revised and workflows must be redefined. This also applies to external partners, who have to keep up with our growth, so to speak. What methods have you used to adapt the processes and structures? An important approach for this change was the lean philosophy. This involves three key aspects: Each op- eration is part of a process. Each process has a customer who needs this process. Waste in the process is eliminated. Our starting point for making our company leaner was production. Here it quickly becomes physically visible where are the connections between processes, where there is waste, and where there is a need for improvement. Approximately three years ago, we introduced shopfloor management. The teams come together regularly for a short, very targeted exchange of ideas. What is coming next? What is going well? What is not going well? Are all the teams sufficiently informed to solve problems? This has worked really well so far! There is now shopfloor management in all depart- ments of the company. There is a term or phrase that is very often repeat - ed in connection to lean production: one-piece flow. How is this understood at Herrmann Ultraschall? Our ultrasonic tools, such as the sonotrodes, are usu- ally produced individually for each customer, as each application is different. What this generally means is that each piece is its own unique snowflake, or in other words, we have a richly varied single-piece and small series produc- tion. Production for stock purposes makes no sense for us. In one-piece flow, the pro - duction line is optimized so that a single device can be processed in a single sequence across all process steps until it is completed. The work steps no longer take place at separate work- stations but are merged into one flowing produc - tion process. In this way, we can op- timize our assembly and idle times very efficiently and hardly any buffer H errmann Ultraschall has developed rapidly in the last ten years: constant growth, not only in terms of revenues, but also in relation to the number of employees in the ultrasonic laboratories and in production. In addition, there was the clear objective of making workflows more efficient – those who grow must also become more productive. The family enterprise achieved this successfully: with the help of lean man- agement. Managing Director Carsten O’Beirne (COO) is a great believer in lean management and agile working. A concept for the future. time is needed along the production line. When a new assignment comes, the colleagues can implement it quickly. The short reaction times to new inquiries are a clear advantage for our customers and thus also for our company. What other projects have you implemented at Herrmann Ultraschall using the lean philosophy? We started a very current project in 2020. It focused on optimizing generator assembly. The genera - tor is our core product. Without it there would be no ultrasonic welding, as without a generator there is no vibration. We converted this assembly to a one-piece flow. The result was cutting the assembly times by half and reducing the cycle time to less than two days, compared to the “old” working method of more than ten days. That is a huge success! In this way, we have less material in the system, the sequence becomes shorter, the colleagues have more transparency about which position in the manufac- turing process an order is at, and we have more flexibility. Ready, Set, Lean! AT HERRMANN ULTRASCHALL, PRODUCTIVITY HAS FOUR LETTERS: LEAN 59