Kindred Industries

By: Brian Honey, Kindred Industries and Steve Pawlowicz, H.B. Maynard and Company, Inc.

Kindred Industries, a Masco affiliated company, and Canada’s leading manufacturer of stainless steel sinkware, recently over-hauled their work standards with the help of H.B. Maynard and Company, Inc. Kindred, which is located in Midland, Ontario, approximately 90 miles north of Toronto, designs and manufactures a wide variety of shapes and sizes of sinks for both residential and commercial use. Kindred had just completed a major facility upgrade project intended to improve overall productivity and throughput. The company had also recently purchased a new manufacturing software package called SyteLine™, to assist in the management of total plant operations. With both improvements to productivity and throughput being realized and the corresponding system having been selected, the need for accurate work standards became the critical piece to the puzzle. Along with satisfying the immediate need for accurate standards, Kindred was also thinking of the future. The company wanted a system that would not only be easy to use, but also easy to maintain. Another key requirement for the proposed system was the ability to electronically transfer the new standards to SyteLine. Based on these specifications, Kindred embarked on a Standards Update Project with the assistance of H.B. Maynard and Company, Inc. A project scope was defined, which outlined the need for the development of standards throughout the facility. This included two main production lines, a strainer and small parts production area, and some miscellaneous production areas. One Maynard® consultant conducted the project on-site over a six-week period. After a brief orientation of the manufacturing processes, the initial focus was to perform a top-down analysis of the entire plant operations. Once this analysis was complete, the necessary standard data elements were then developed using MOST® for Windows™. Finally, an AutoMOST™ application was developed to create the large volume of accurate and consistent standards in a relatively short amount of time. AutoMOST was a logical choice in order to process the large amount of part numbers that Kindred maintains. Both the standard data elements and operation level standards would be maintained in MOST® Data Manager. At the end of six weeks, slightly more than 3,000 standards had been created representing approximately twenty separate operations throughout the facility, from fabrication and finishing to assembly and packing activi-ties. As a direct result of both the top-down analysis performed and the consistency in methods employed by Kindred throughout their processes, only forty-five standard data elements were required to cover all activities. Kindred now possessed a standards system with both the level of accuracy and the ease of maintenance the company desired. By utilizing Maynard’s Productivity Solutions Transfer Application, the newly developed standards were electronically introduced into Kindred’s new manufacturing software package. This combination of accuracy, ease of maintenance and electronic transfer capability satisfied the goals Kindred had established at the outset of the project. Through the expertise of Maynard Consulting Solutions and by utilizing the full suite of Maynard Productivity Solutions software, Kindred was able to simplify the task of creating work standards, while at the same time, maintain a high level of accuracy and consistency. Knowing they can accurately staff, schedule, and cost their processes and products, Kindred Industries can now go forward with confidence searching for new business opportunities in order to expand its client base an ideal situation for any company! H. B. Maynard and Company, Inc. offers Consulting Solutions to provide clients with tangible improvements to operations through the application of Maynard products and consulting staff expertise.