Mitsubishi Electric Automotive America (MEAA, Maysville, KY) manufactures a range of electronic components for automobiles, including starters, alternators and ignition coils. Last November, the company embarked on a $32-million, 40,000-square-foot expansion, adding another 60 jobs to the plant's nearly 400-member workforce.
A committed lean manufacturing practitioner, MEAA installed a Production IQ (Rocky River, OH) production monitoring and downtime tracking system in all eight of its coil assembly lines in early 2003. MEAA chose Production IQ because its system allows MEAA to calculate and display a real-time production target quantity, based on the cycle time of the process. The system also enables the company to broadcast real-time production performance to the factory floor, and provide network access to the data for reporting and monitoring in a visual format via a Web browser.