Bob McCulley

Improvements in Automotive Heat Treating

Bob McCulley - DaimlerChrysler Kokomo Transmission Plant (KTP)



A little over four years ago the heat treat department at KTP (Kokomo Transmission Plant) decided it would become MQAS certified. MQAS is an automotive standard which is based on ISO 9000 type documentation and review; but extends far beyond the ISO standard in the detail of requirements. For the HT department at KTP alone, more than 500 significant documents were prepared in order to meet the requirements and survive the annual or semiannual audits. The major focus of MQAS is "auditing" and "continuing improvement".

As background, the heat treatment department at KTP consists of:

The primary items being treated are annular, pinion, sun and match gears and several shafts. Currently the department treats about 2 million items per month, but at peak times there has been as much as 4 million items per month to about 50 different drawings. About 50% of the output is gears, 8% shafts, and 42% miscellaneous other parts.

It has been learned through the application of MQAS that the cost benefits of "quality" can more than offset the economics of "workforce reduction". A committment was made up front that MQAS would not cost jobs (and in fact may actually add jobs to the department).

There was an initial three prong approach to Total Quality which began with getting everyone on board with the benefits of the program.
1) Teams were formed. Each team included supervision and hourly employees and was charged with writing detailed "Standard Working Instructions" (SWIs) for each furnace and other equipment in the department. It was soon learned that at least FOUR SWIs were needed for each furnace. One for loading, one for monitoring, one for operating, and one for unloading each major furnace. A lot of expertise (which is frequently lost with a changing labor force) was captured in this process.
2) A genuine committment was made to Safety, Quality, Delivery, Costs, and Morale, with new understandable tools developed to measure these items. Particularly "morale" had previously been very poorly measured. New measures included: injury counts, absenteeism, innovative contributions, etc.
3) Employee training. A monitoring system was put in place to ensure that people were trained and cross-trained, and than no process would be run by an untrained person at any time. A very special program was developed for the "instrument men" (traditionally the "highest seniority" position) which had lead to highly variable skill levels in this important area. More will be said about this later.

The SWIs are posted at every furnace, as well as in a master book, and in supervisor offices. The chart of cross-training is at the side of every supervisor, and no worker can be assigned to a process until he has trained on it.

A "Core Team" for MQAS meets every Thursday. The team includes production. maintenance, metallurgy, management, and engineering. Team members from all shifts are encouraged to attend, and those coming at off shift times are payed to attend. The team looks hard at ways to improve the qualtiy of the product. There are adjenda items with expected results "within the week", as well as "long term" projects which are addressed. An example of a "long term" project was a problem from assembly that some shaft splines were "nicked" and causing assembly problems and expensive down time. The heat treat team studied the problem, and found that there were no nicks in any splines coming out of the carburizing process, however after "cleaning" it was a different story. The parts were being "bin dropped" twice in the cleaning operation, which was the source of the nicks. As a result, a fixtured cleaning method was developedl which actually ADDED two employees to the department's work force while giving an overall cost savings to the company because of reduced down time in the assembly plant ($8000 per minute down).

Side benefits have been:
1) HT has the plant record for no safety incidents since implimenting MQAS.
2) HT is the cleanest department in the plant (pride of workers is a factor).
3) Because of the core team, HT gets exceptional cooperation from maintenance, and equipment fails (and injuries occur) far less frequently.

A bit more should be said about the "instrument men". This used to be a "short term" job because it was taken by the "most senior" department man who would soon retire. It was decided that with modern technology and todays sophisticated systems, "long term" and "highly trained" individuals were needed in this role.

In agreement with the union, the job was opened up to all workers, but workers had to undergo extensive training (on their own time) in order to qualify. This training includes:
64 hrs - hands-on in programming logic controls
64 hrs - Systems management
64 hrs - Calibration and repair
64 hrs - Metallurgy

It worked out good for KTP that the State was willing to pick up 100% of the training costs, and good for the trainees that they are awarded 3 hours of college credit per unit (12 hours total).

Now there will be truly qualified instrument men at KTP for a long time to come.

Just how effective has MQAS been for KTP. In the past four years the scrap rate has been reduced to just 0.5% (one half or one percent). It is estimated that it used to be ten times that great.