A propulsion inverter build took more than 20 hours per unit. It required five people, with three of them doing little more than holding the frame in position while the other two worked.
Filly Fabricating built a rotisserie-style fixture so one person could rotate the unit, rewrite the assembly sequence, and redesign the workstation so the work could be performed seated.
Build time dropped to 13 hours. The three-person hold was eliminated. Across the program, that returned roughly 4,000 labor hours a year to the customer.
More than 500 units shipped with zero defects.
The opportunity was in the process: the fixture, the assembly sequence, and the way the workstation was set up.
The Line We Hold
Filly builds the customer’s print and quality requirements. No supplier-initiated design changes. No substitution.
Where a customer’s standard differs from Filly’s internal process, the customer’s standard governs.
That does not prevent us from looking for a better way to perform the work.
A fixture. A resequenced operation. A different material cadence. Kits packed in build order instead of part-number order. Those are process decisions, and when we see an opportunity to make the work run better, we bring it to the customer.
Your design is yours. How the work runs on our floor is a conversation.
Where This Shows Up
The inverter program is an example. There are others.
Filly wound and brazed more than 800 stator units for a rail transit program with zero defects. The customer free-issued the material, retained control of the material cost and specification, and Filly supplied the skilled labor.
On an electrical box assembly program for data center and mission-critical power systems, weekly material shipments were repeatedly arriving short. Filly recommended changing the material cadence from weekly to monthly, helped restructure the kitting and communication process, and production downtime dropped to zero.
For another customer, bus components were spread across three storage sites, and a crew of five or six people was spending too much time locating material. Filly consolidated the inventory onto one site, created a mobile racking and cataloging system, and packed kits in the order of assemblers needed them on the line. The kitting crew dropped to two people.
Different programs, same pattern: detailed, repeatable, labor-intensive work that was slowing production until the process changed.
Let Us Walk Your Floor
Together we can explore how your production is running and if our process can complement yours.
