Stryker Orthopaedics is a leading manufacturer of high quality medical devices in Mahwah, NJ with $3.9B in annual sales. It manufactures replacement hips, knees and shoulders and trauma medical devices. Stryker Orthopaedics is a division of Stryker Corp., a $6.7B worldwide medical device supplier.

Customer Knee Femoral backorders were $420,000 on $45M annual sales. On-time delivery to the customer was 70%. Lead-times were 46 days from traveler generation to Finished Goods. The value of WIP was $.9M. These long lead-times cost the company millions of dollars a year in lost sales due to customer dissatisfaction.

The project was approached from a Lean Manufacturing perspective. It was decided to change the manufacturing flow from a push system to a pull system. Value Stream Mapping was utilized to identify bottlenecks, eliminate unnecessary paperwork, and calculate ‘supermarket’ WIP levels. Subsequently, a Kaizen Blitz was undertaken, involving the engineers, planners and key shop floor operators, and bottlenecks were eliminated.

• Within 3 months the average lead-time was reduced by 20 days, to 26 days.
• Work-In-Progress was reduced by 44% Value of Production to $.5M.
• Backorders of $420,000 were reduced to under $1000.
• Customer satisfaction levels increased from 70%, to 99.6%.
• Cost of Quality decreased due to earlier detection of defects and their causes.
• Sales increased as a result of growing customer confidence that when a replacement knee was needed, it would ship the next day.
• Industry reputation was greatly improved.
• AutoCAD was used to modify shop floor layout.
• Value Stream Mapping was used to identify bottlenecks, unnecessary paperwork and to calculate ‘supermarket’ WIP levels.
• Kaizen Blitz was used to open communication and implement the pull flow system.
• MS Excel was used for planning and execution tracking