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In 1995 the organization was confronted with the consequences of a general economic malaise. The operating profit decreased. The market placed increasingly higher demands and more serious competitors were added. Furthermore, internal operations were under stress due to the deteriorated situation.

In 1997, the organization was taken over by another company. In this case description, we focus on the company’s strategy to reduce assembly lead time by reorganizing the assembly department layout (U-shape) and way of working.

After the takeover, a number of changes were implemented. One of the greatest changes was related to the assembly department. In the past, all parts required for an order were picked from the central warehouse and brought to benches where the assembly was carried out by the assembly workers. The parts were located on one or more pallets. The production management has put a lot of effort into reducing the throughput time of the assembly. They basically made an assembly organization in which no time was needed anymore for picking the correct parts. There are a number of assembly cells: a separate cell for each pump family. An assembly cell consists of racks containing parts, placed in a U-shape.  The assembly of pumps are performed on carts, trolleys. If the demand for pumps from a certain family increases, more assembly workers can be assigned to the cell, each of them taking care of the assembly of a pump on a trolley. The assembly worker walks with the trolley (or mobile assembly table) along the racks. The fast running parts are on the lower part of the racks, the slow running parts are higher. The stocks of parts are placed high or in the back of the racks. Two bin systems are used to fill the rack with new, standard, modules. Due to the modular product structure, a pumping family comprises a large number of variants. The batch sizes of assembly orders are small (1 - 3).

By using this new assembly organization, the picking of components from the central warehouse has not to be done anymore in the lead time of orders.  Furthermore, assembly time has been reduced by means of a smart 5S design of the assembly trolleys.

The changes in component manufacture and assembly also resulted in a significant change in the layout of the company. There is more space in use for the assembly.

Finally, this new way of working makes it easy to change the amount of workers that are assigned to different cells, according to the demand of the pumps. Additionally, when a specific type needs to be produced in a large batch, there is the opportunity to work with two persons in this u-shaped cell, see figure below.