CASE STUDIES
HELLA: Global Tier One Automotive Supplier
Drishti makes a practical AI solution a reality in 10 weeks and helps the HELLA team uncover improvement opportunities.
Client Overview
HELLA is a lean manufacturer and one of the world’s leading automotive suppliers. Their world-class team had historically used state-of-the-art lean methodologies and advanced technology to optimize their production. When the HELLA Ventures team met Drishti, they discovered an opportunity to take an evolutionary step in their lean manufacturing practices with our AI-powered video and analytics.
The challenge: discover hidden opportunities for optimizations
HELLA’s operations team wanted to see if Drishti could truly find hidden opportunities for optimization. So they deployed Drishti on one of their best-running, most highly optimized lines to see what Drishti discovered.
10 weeks later, they had the results they needed to move forward with the Drishti deployment in more plants around the globe.
The solution: AI-powered production with Drishti data and video
HELLA's objective was to identify standardized work deviations and areas for productivity improvements. Their continuous improvement team used Drishti to record cycle times for each workstation on the line in preparation for a kaizen event.
They deployed 12 Drishti video streams to their workstations.
Allows manufacturers to use live and recorded video from every station to improve assembly line quality and productivity
Uses AI to continuously measures cycle time for monitoring and rapidly improving line performance
Putting it to the test
Marcos Aurelio Alves Junior is the operational excellence and industrial engineering manager at HELLA Mexico. He was tasked with the Drishti project and had the Drishti Customer Success team to support him.
Drishti’s team not only provided guidance on how to use the Drishti system, but also provided expert feedback on improvement activities and where to prioritize efforts. Within five weeks, the HELLA team had Drishti-generated analytics for the kaizen event, including line balance, cycle time frequency by workstation and production trends.
This wasn’t like any other kaizen event Alves had run in the past.
“Normally with a kaizen event you record a hundred cycles through time and motion studies,” said Alves, “Drishti records 500 or 1000 cycles without people feeling observed, so there’s no skewed data. You have the real environment at your fingertips for a much more realistic kaizen, and you can run it whenever you want.”
The HELLA team used Drishti’s line variability and trend charts to surface cycle time anomalies and click into videos directly from the charts. With videos at their fingertips, the ways to balance lines out don’t become huge, time-consuming puzzles to solve. They could now improve the lines more frequently and with better insights.
The results: new lean processes pay off
0%
decrease in cycle times
0%
increase in productivity
0%
increase in OEE
Alves and team completed the Drishti-supported kaizen event proving that highly optimized lines still have greater productivity potential and believing continuous improvement activities could actually be run continuously.
Overall, the team saw a 7% decrease in cycle times while productivity increased by 5%. The result was a capacity increase of tens of thousands more automotive electronic product components per year. Reductions in labor costs came from the ability to re-balance the line and immediately react when variability showed up between shifts – improving productivity.
Now, HELLA is expanding its Drishti deployment to additional plants around the globe. In HELLA’s view, the team has broken through a lean production barrier with new AI and video technologies supporting their push into the era of AI-powered production.