"Valuable Building Blocks"

Doug Wilson and Mike Kochis

Industrial Engineer

July 2005, pp. 40-44

Medrad Inc. is a 2003 Baldrige Award-winning manufacturer of medical devices and services. When Medrad purchased a new facility, they took the opportunity to improve their old manufacturing processes by adopting lean principles that they dubbed MedFlow. A cross-functional team from manufacturing engineering, quality, and production was formed to learn about Lean and apply its principles. The team used value stream mapping, created visual work instructions, and implemented a kanban system. Two years later, a new team was formed to implement cellular manufacturing.

Some of the results from MedFlow were:

• An overall productivity increase of 30 percent
• Reduction of cycle times by 60 percent
• Reduced finished goods inventories by 50 percent
• Reduced floor space by 50 percent
• Reduced product defects and training time by 35 percent

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