How Gazelle is reducing downtime by 35% using Workerbase

About Gazelle

Royal Dutch Gazelle has been a bicycle manufacturer for over 130 years and is the leading bicycle manufacturer in the Netherlands. As a subsidiary of PON group, they produce a variety of bikes including e-bikes and are a premium dutch brand. Their factories assemble bikes along a belt driven system and produce around 300,000 bicycles a year.

The Challenge

Gazelle approached Workerbase with the goal of reducing the downtime of their assembly belt. The downtimes were not recorded in a central system and the root causes of belt stops were largely unknown. The continuous improvement team at Gazelle was facing several challenges:

• The assembly belt was stopped by simple push buttons and the reasons for stopping were unknown
• The support staff were not adequately prepared when responding to incidents because the root cause of the stoppage was only clear after they arrived at the station
• The duration of belt stoppages were not being recorded reliably, leading to a lack of transparency on the impact of the belt stoppages
• There was no easy way to tackle these challenges with traditional technology

The Solution

We helped Gazelle overcome their challenges by implementing our Digital Andon system for executing and recording belt stops. The solution now gives Gazelle full transparency:

1. 1. The belt is now stopped using the Workerbase Andon system installed on a tablet at each station of every line.
   2. The Andon system is directly connected to the belt PLC to stop and restart the line.
   3. All information for each bike on the assembly line was synchronized with SAP, providing clear visibility of which specific bike is being produced at each station.
   4. When an operators are now prompted to record the root cause when triggering a belt stoppage, which is verified by the support staff after resolution ensuring data quality.
   5. Belt support staff are equipped with Smartwatches to receive belt stop notifications in real-time.
   6. Data collected during this process is centralized into one analytics tool that is used to identify trends in the root causes of the belt stops. All the relevant contextual information is also captured such as which station executed the stop, which bike was produced at that station, and what the stop reason was.

The Results

With the added transparency, Gazelle was able to analyze the root causes of their belt stops and take preventive action. From day one of implementing Workerbase, Gazelle was able to avoid a significant amount of line stops and produce more bikes every day. The solution amortized in less than 3 months.