Ford award certificate to Durr employee
Keywords Ford, Dúrr, Paint application, Awards
Paul Banford of Dúrr recently received an Award of Excellence from Ford Motor Company, for recognition of his participation as a member of the ESTA Paint Spits Team.
In an effort to improve further the quality of their cars, raise production levels and improve supplier relations, the carmaker created several teams to examine specific areas of production. The goal of the ESTA Paint Spits Team was to discover the root cause of ESTA Bell spits, or minuscule anomalies in the paint surface that occur infrequently during the application process. A spit can be unpigmented, multicoloured, or single-coloured. A paint-derived product, it can be of any shape, can be wet or dry, ranging in size from 10 microns to 3mm.
The 14 member team, made up of suppliers including Dúrr, PPG, Du Pont,Herberts, and Boolig and Kemper, was assigned to analyse data collected by the technical division at Ford's Cologne facility, and determine the cause of the spits. The data had been gathered from a bonnet-inspection sample of 4,000 automobiles. Once the actual number of spits was determined, the data were separated into experimental factors, such as Bell wear, paint colour difficulty,change in Bell speed, level of cleaning, batch painting etc... and graphed mathematically to determine each factor's effect on the application process and its likelihood as a cause. Interactions between factors were likewise examined as potential causes. Once the majority of experimental factors were eliminated,the cause was narrowed down to a handful of factors and interactions that could be concentrated on specifically. Further studies revealed four main factors and two interactions that were thought to affect the mean number of ESTA spits, and two main factors and one interaction that were thought to affect the variation in ESTA spits.
Owing to the findings of the ESTA Paint Spits Team, the root cause of the spit problem was eliminated, ultimately saving Ford Motor Company money by greatly reducing the necessity for re-sprays.
Paul Banford said, "It really was a team approach. Everybody involved contributed their background knowledge and years of experience". Previously,Paul worked for BASF and in APT, Dúrr's UK Paint Application Division. He is now the liaison between APT and Premier Manufacturing Support Services, the technological and manufacturing support services division of the Dúrr Group.
Details available from: Dúrr Limited. Tel: + 44 (0) 1926 418800; Fax:+ 44 (0) 1926 400679.
