Reducing Lead Times in Manufacturing with Real-Time Data Visualizations

Kennametal’s Nashville manufacturing plant experiences challenges with long lead times in their Top Notch Insert product line. The facility manufactures over 2,000 variants of Top Notch products, primarily custom made-to-order products, in a high mix, low volume environment. The resulting long lead times have led to late deliveries and the loss of potential new customers. Kennametal is interested in identifying and addressing the root problems causing long lead times. Prior to this project, data analysis of individual work center lead times and scrap rates was entirely manual. Besides requiring excessive time and effort, the process often produced outdated or inaccurate results—affecting their ability to identify opportunities for improvement. The primary focus of the project is to increase manufacturing process data accuracy, visibility, and real-time analysis. The proposed solution is a dashboard that provides a clear and accurate picture of the current state of their system. Kennametal is prioritizing reducing lead times, scrap rates, and increasing on-time performance, but prior to the dashboard tool, tracking progress toward those objectives and identifying solutions to address the issues were ineffective. Phase 1 of the project included data analysis, product grouping, and visualizations. The team developed a Python script to do the initial analysis of the data due to the complexity of the constraints on the calculations. Next, five distinct product groups within the Top Notch product family were defined. Finally, the calculations were adapted to natively run within Power BI to generate a dashboard with the desired metrics for each product group. Phase 2 focused on solution implementation and dashboard verification. Based on Phase 1 metrics, the team worked with Kennametal to implement several solutions to address lead time. The most impactful initial solution implemented was a standardization that increased the percentage of products manufactured from Blanks from 35.5% to 72%. This reduces the lead time by an average of 12 days per converted product. The final part of Phase 2 was to measure the impacts of the implemented solutions to validate the efficacy of using the dashboard metrics to inform decision-making. As a result of implementations to date, the weighted average of lead times reduced from 82.62 days to 63.86 days. Notably, the lead time for the product family, High Velocity from Blanks, decreased from 64.44 days to 28.52 days. The overall weighted average scrap rate decreased from 34.51% to 23.53%. On-time performance for the Top Notch product line increased from 61.46% to 70.61% overall. The overall results in lead time reduction, scrap reduction, and the on-time performance increase validate the effectiveness of utilizing the dashboard to inform decision-making in the manufacturing of Top Notch products within Kennametal’s Nashville facility.