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24 The PCB Magazine • May 2016 and panels are easily damaged just from mov- ing them from a rack to the operation. Material handling rack design is also a major contributor and should be evaluated with the same 6S eye as the workspace to design out any extra fea- tures that could cause product damage. The shop environment is also a 6S oppor- tunity, as airborne particulate and chemical va- pors and residue can redeposit on WIP product. Cleanliness is a state of mind and needs to be ingrained in the daily work life of each and ev- ery employee. All 6S projects also need to be visual and placed in plain sight of all workers so every- one can understand the status of the system at a glance. Visualizing projects also supports the Shitsuke process of publicizing and rewarding successes. Digital imaging has made documen- tation of "before and after" improvement easy to incorporate into the documents, posters and reports that make up a good visual manage- ment system. Penny Wise and Dollar Foolish One roadblock to achieving the true ben- efits of Lean tools like 6S is that traditional im- provement efforts have always focused on re- ducing the time of value-added steps; in other words, reducing the amount of time it takes to do something to a product. Let's take a look at a discrete machining op- eration for example, where the run time of this operation is 19.5 minutes per part. Much effort is placed on fixturing, training, spindle feed and speed, etc., to reduce the 19.5 minute run time. While this is obviously an important activity, we fail to attack the greatest opportunity for im- provement: eliminating waste from the process. For example, zero effort has been expended to reduce the average two days of queue time this product waits before it can be machined, the 25 minutes of transportation time to move this large unit to the next department located at the opposite end of the building, the two weeks added to the product's lead-time waiting for raw material to arrive, or the four days of various inspections throughout the process due to infe- rior quality and/or process control. Contrast this to Figure 4, which graphically represents the results of a recent Lean project done by Calumet Electronics Corporation, a company that really gets it. Calumet is a print- ed circuit manufacturer that could have literally 100 process steps, so travel and motion is a big deal. By focusing on motion waste, this com- pany was able to reduce one department's func- tional motion by 45%, thereby taking it from 162 feet down to 88 feet. Saving seconds at the expense of minutes, hours, days or even weeks is saving a penny where you could be saving a dollar, and as I have said before, it's always about the dollars. QuiCk & easy 6s to reduCe HandlinG issues Figure 3: Before and after a PCB 6S project. Photos courtesy of TTM Technologies, Inc.