Maximizing Efficiency

In the first quarter of 2015, our paint cleaning group brought a continuous improvement idea for the clear coat booth walls to our customer’s process engineer and maintenance engineer responsible for them. MacLellan had several concerns:

• Over spray build up had gone up dramatically in clear coat with the increase in production.
• The over spray build up was reaching a level that required chipping to remove it.
• The chipping was a bad ergonomic process for our team members.
• The chipping was bad for the walls and equipment for our customer.
• The rapid build up of over spray was causing robot faults – the robots are wall mounted and traverse on tracks in the wall.
• The process was very inefficient and absorbed a high number of team members.

Once we approached our engineering counterparts with the problem, we suggested and trialed a solution.

• MacLellan cleaned the walls and track using 40K psi blast equipment.
• MacLellan sourced a very thin, clear, anti-static booth vinyl to put on the walls where the build up had caused issues for the customer.
• MacLellan covered the rest of the walls in a thin layer of clear tacky.
• MacLellan and our customer’s engineers set up a beta test on a four foot square section and trialed it for two weeks.
• After proving out the process, it was expanded one booth at a time until all of the clear coat booths were using this method.

These efforts have allowed our customer to eliminate robot faults due to interference from clear coat build up, eliminated the potential for injury while our team members performed the task, reduced the wear and tear on process equipment, and greatly reduced the time needed to clean the walls.