QUALITY

QUALITY & MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS

We are an accredited ISO 9001:2008 company. Our Management Team is committed to upholding this policy and to ensure each and every employee is trained and adheres to the discipline.

We recognise that the achievement of ISO quality accreditation is essential to our customers' piece of mind and the knowledge that we are a committed to continually striving to improve the quality of the products we manufacture.

Bolwell employs Lean Manufacturing principles in our manufacturing processes. We undertake regular Kaizen activities throughout our organisation to review and optimise our processes and systems.

Additionally, we utilise Kanban to scheduling work throughout our facilities for efficient and highly visible tracking of orders.

Bolwell utilise Lean Manufacturing and JIT principles in our manufacturing processes.
Our quality systems are ISO9001 accredited.
stopwatch

LEAN MANUFACTURING & Just-In-Time (JIT)

Lean Manufacturing or lean production, often known simply as "Lean", is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination.

Lean manufacturing is a generic process management philosophy derived from the Toyota Production System (TPS).

The term "Lean Manufacturing" was coined in the mid 1990s and is renowned for its focus on reduction of waste in order to improve overall customer value.

Just-In-Time (JIT) is a pull driven inventory system in which materials, parts, sub-assemblies, and support items are delivered just when needed. The objective is to eliminate product inventories from the supply chain.

JIT systems are fundamental to time based competition and rely on waste reduction, process simplification, setup time and batch size reduction, parallel (instead of sequential) processing, and shop floor layout redesign.

Under JIT management, shipments are made within rigidly enforced 'time windows' and all items must be within the specifications with very little or no inspection. It was developed and perfected by the Toyota Corporation during 1960s and 70s to meet fast changing consumer demands with minimum delays.
sanding

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT PROCESS

Continuous Improvement Process (CIP) is a management process whereby delivery (customer valued) processes are constantly evaluated and improved in the light of their efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility.

Some see it as a meta process for most management systems (Business Process Management, Quality Management, Project Management). Deming saw it as part of the 'system' whereby feedback from the process and customer were evaluated against organisational goals. The fact that it can be called a management process does not mean that it needs to be executed by 'management' merely that it makes decisions about the implementation of the delivery process and the design of the delivery process itself.
Some successful implementations use the approach known as Kaizen (the translation of kai ("change") zen ("good") is "improvement"). This method became famous by the book of Masaaki Imai "Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success."

The core principle of CIP is the (self) reflection of processes. (Feedback)
The purpose of CIP is the identification, reduction and elimination of suboptimal processes. (Efficiency)
The emphasis of CIP is on incremental, continuous steps, avoiding quantum leaps. (Evolution)

The elements above are more tactical elements of CIP, the more strategic elements include deciding how to increase the value of the delivery process output to the customer (Effectiveness) and also how much flexibility is valuable in the process to meet changing needs.