Initial success in the process of applying 5S and Kaizen in Nam Thanh Textile

Nam Thanh Textile Export Co., Ltd (belonging to the industrial cluster of the trade village of Phuong La commune, Hung Ha district, Thai Binh province) is one of the enterprises participating in the project “Supporting craft village enterprises to apply tools Kaizen improvement to improve productivity, quality, production and business efficiency” of Foreign Trade University starting in 2019. Nam Thanh’s products are high quality cotton towels which are consumed both inside and outside country.

The manufacturing process at towels in Nam Thanh includes the following stages: Importing and distributing yarn, Weaving of carpentry towels, Dyeing, Cutting, Sorting and Packing. During the survey and assessment of the current situation, the consultant team found that the Company’s production equipment is quite modern, the orders are stable, but there is a lot of goods in the warehouse and after the sewing process. The cause has been identified as the imbalance between production stages. In addition, there is no consensus among management levels at each process that leads to lack of consistency in production across stages. In addition, there is no labor code at the company, leading to a situation where employees are not disciplined and uncooperative in teamwork.

Facing this situation, the consulting and improvement support team has planned as follows: (1) In terms of production: Proposing the application of 5S and Kaizen tools to eliminate waste and improve public production capacity. cross section and eliminate waste of movement during sewing; Improve line balance according to JIT criteria and shorten cycle time at sorting and packaging stage; Rearrange prices, shelves at the packaging stage. (2) In terms of management and employee encouragement, the group proposed a plan to apply daily management, develop and apply a mechanism of care and encouragement to employees to create labor motivation for staff. employees.

After implementing the above plan, under the guidance of the consulting and improvement support group, Nam Thanh Company has obtained the following results:

1. 100% of employees participated in on-the-job training to raise awareness about Kaizen and committed to apply after training.
2. At the production workshop, the field improvement activities have been focused on implementation, including: Record stage errors to analyze the root cause and solve problems; Practice 5S to increase the use of production area and reduce waste of moving and searching; Screening, recording books, setting up warehouse cards for 100% of warehouses of semi-finished products and fiber materials; 5 times more visual management markers; The innovative design of the option reduces the error and reduces the horizontal sewing time by 15% compared to the previous one.
3. Separating and Packing stage: Thanks to the practice of line balancing and rearranging the area to reduce travel waste, the production capacity has increased by 20%; 90% of finished products (300 cartons) have been arranged on shelves and pallets to ensure product quality, at the same time helping to increase 40% in loading capacity compared to before.

It can be said that the positive results obtained after the implementation of the project have contributed to reducing production costs, increasing productivity and product quality of Nam Thanh Company so that businesses tend to develop sustainably. and create a firm position in the market.

Productivity and Quality Office