Safran Electronics & Defense (SAE) in Mantes-la-Ville is a factory of 300 people that make Flight Control Systems. They have 2 main production departments: Machining and Assembly. The facility initially had a low level of OTD (On Time Delivery); less than 50%. So, huge amounts of work-in-progress, inability to give reliable delivery dates to customers, management team busy firefighting …

Convinced that the situation was critical, they  decided to deploy Theory of Constraints. This reduced the Work In Progress by over 85%. They then decided to change the plant layout, simplifying the production flow and organizing machines by product families. The target of the new layout was to help in further reduce lead times, simplifying the flow of parts and increasing global productivity… Around 48 machines needed to be moved without disturbing the production flow.

Guillaume Brethenoux, Maintenance Manager in charge of this project used the Critical Chain Project Management approach to challenge the initial planning of 8 weeks and eventually achieve the reengineering of the shop floor in… 6,5 days!