Masterminded by operations director Colin Arlott, the program was designed to streamline the manufacturing process, improve efficiencies and provide opportunities for staff.

The principle has been to create production cells for each of the Trolex product families where a team has become responsible for each aspect of that product’s production.

Five production cells cover the different Trolex product groups: The Sentro gas detector range; fixed sensors for flow, temperature, pressure and gas; control and display equipment; and power supplies and general instrumentation.

The Lean Manufacturing program represents a £100,000 ($US158,000) investment.

Much of this was spent on laser etching machines and on fixtures to reduce changeover time on the surface mount line.

Arlott, who joined Trolex in January, worked on several Lean Manufacturing programs before joining the company.

“In general, before the program started the factory was functioning well but was complicated and departmentalised and we also realised that a lot of time was being wasted with products moving around departments in the assembly process,” he said.

“The Lean Manufacturing program not only means better efficiency in production cells but more ownership by the production team.

“The benefit is improved delivery times, where in some case we can deliver products to customers in just a few days instead of a few weeks.”

The five manufacturing cells support nearly 500 products on a fast response, assemble and order basis.

All training has been conducted in-house and individual production specialists have been involved in cross-training other members of the team.

“We make a lot of intrinsically-safe ATEX approved products and the auditor for this equipment has been very complimentary about the new manufacturing process that we have introduced,” Arlott said.

“In all, this has been a very rewarding program as we have achieved in six months what normally takes some organisations one to two years.”

In parallel with the Lean Manufacturing program the company also introduced automated optical inspection.

Indeed, Trolex lays claim to being the first intrinsically-safe product company to have introduced this system for printed circuit board inspection for improved quality and efficiency.

To gain certification all intrinsically-safe products must be 100% inspected.

Before, it was necessary for the Trolex team to individually check safety-critical components on the PCB, which could take up to half an hour.

With the automated optical inspection, every component on the PCB is inspected automatically by scanning the board. This process takes between 25 and 30 seconds.