Since purchasing new equipment at its factory in the last two years, Thomas Built Buses said the new machines have allowed the company to reorganize its workflow and reduce the average time of fabricating parts.
The school bus manufacturer said the purchase of two 4,000-watt laser cutters and a 20-foot-tall stacker in late 2010 and early 2011 allowed it to eliminate five other machines and lessen the time to fabricate parts by 25 percent. The new equipment is one of the most recent components of the company’s implementation of lean management, which began in Thomas Built’s Saf-T-Liner C2 bus plant.
The new equipment assembly lines for Type A and Type D buses in Plant One were updated and redesigned for more efficient production in 2007 and 2008.
Company officials said the new laser cutters also have enabled the manufacturer to bring production of more than 100 additional parts in-house, as it has been fabricating parts for all of its news buses and for some replacement parts for buses in the field for several years.
Lean management is the company’s philosophy of improving quality while driving waste out of the organization at every level. Additionally, empowering all employees as waste eliminators and problem solvers to achieve optimum efficiency.
“These new laser provide greater precision, so we get the optimum number of parts from a sheet, reducing waste, and we can produce higher quality parts,” said Jeff Allen, Thomas Built Buses’ vice president of operations.
Allen added that nearly a year after the installation, the lasers are contributing significantly to Thomas Built’s Zero-Waste-to-Landfill commitment, which was implemented last spring. The addition of the lasers has reduced fabrication waste and saved on material costs and recycling fees.
