KAIZEN

13 November 2007 - A breath of fresh air in Trend

Trend Technologies, Mullingar. A World Class company.

The state of the art cleanroom in Trend Technologies in Mullingar

The "famous" Regina Gardiner who implemented many Kaizen Project tools and techniques at the plant

Enda Donlon, Donal Lulham and Michael Moran of Trend Technologies who have reduced changeovers by 50% using the SMED process

Marie O'Toole of Trend Technologies. Her vision and dedication to the growth of Trend Technologies has inspired the entire workforce to adopt and implement Kaizen Principles at the plant in Mullingar

This week the Kaizen team visited Trend Technologies in Mullingar and were overwhelmed by the commitment of Brendan Molloy in the cleanroom for his efforts on the elements of Standard Work. For those of you who don't know about of this process, Standard Work represents a set sequence of events that ensures problems are prevented throughout the week. In other words, if you didn't get defects, delays, errors, rework, etc., then you don't need Standard Work. Trend Technologies have really proven that the concept of Standard Work "works well " for them and they eliminate all possibilities of errors. Truly a "WORLD CLASS COMPANY" here in Mullingar. A wise man once told us that the secret to business success is "to give the customer more than they expect". This company really strives to give just that.

Trend have also perfected Shingo's SMED technique and have effectively reduced changeovers by over 50%. Donal Lulham is now working on changeover analysis and has already listed improvements to the common steps of press changeovers. Donal is working with Enda Donlon and Michael Moran with the fast changeover project and these three have shown that a detailed analysis of changeovers, combined with simple visual tools can in fact reduce changeover times significantly. Well done lads and thanks for your involvement, we really appreciate the effort made so far.

Of course, we can't exclude the tremendous efforts made by Regina Gardiner over the past year and each week. This lady has made so many improvements to date that we would have to set up another web site just to detail her involvement, commitment and implementation of the Kaizen tools in the Trend Production System. Gini has implemented visual controls, kanban, cycle-time reduction, 5 Day 5S, Kaizen Cards, and a host of other tools to help Trend become the best Production System in the world. To you, a Gem, we raise our hats.

A sincere thank you to the wonderful team in Trend, Mullingar

From the Kaizen team

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