Operational Improvement

About This Project

Challenge
Poor levels of security screening x-ray equipment availability was causing excessive queue times, increasing repair costs, low levels of staff morale and ultimately a large proportion of dissatisfied customers.

Solution
Implementing the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology our team carried out a comprehensive review and analysis of the equipment’s performance, investigating the root causes of the low availability. The highest proportion of failures was found to be as a result of poor loading operations and screening curtain design. A new screening curtain arrangement was designed and a new staff-training package developed and rolled out.

Result
As a result of our solutions, equipment availability increased from 74% to 99.5% and repair costs reduced by £12k pa per machine. A further saving was made by the liberated capacity from downtime eliminating the need for overtime at peak times equating to £0.3m pa