Sustaining lean


Management Services Spring 2012


17


Sustaining lean – multiply your successes


... if an By Don Kivell.


or more than 40 years, lean manufacturing techniques have been achieving outstanding success rates. First in Japanese plants, and now in advanced factories throughout North America, it has proven to be a cost-effective and fl exible approach to achieving superior customer satisfaction. Many shop fl oors, however, still look and perform as they did years ago, simply because sustaining the transition to lean has proven to be a task of monumental proportions.


F


Long haul You can’t go part way with lean – you have to go all the way. If you don’t marry yourself to 5S concepts, commit to continuous lean efforts and learn to make tough choices as needed on an ongoing basis, you always end up slipping back into the same bad habits.


A lot of manufacturers think that once they successfully implement lean in an ailing area of their facility or on one problem production line, their troubles are over. In fact, this is the time to use what you’ve learned and apply it somewhere else, multiplying your successes. One of my clients,


Mississauga, Ontario-based Tempress Ltd, a manufacturer of safety mixer valves and bathroom and kitchen faucets for the plumbing industry, learned this lesson well. Applying lean concepts to its assembly line for pressure balancing valve production,


we actually took a batch-based process and turned it into single-piece fl ow. After developing and reviewing several layouts, we completely rearranged the shop fl oor and restarted it with great success. But we didn’t stop there. We took the same lean approach to the company’s other line, the lavatory assembly cell. Here we also noted very positive results. Now on both lines, employees rotate effi ciently through their new modular work cells.


Pulling together Bill McLean, Tempress’ President, says the company has since been working on the visual factory piece of 5S, as well as some Kanban, or pull, features. Certain internal processes are running with it and the manufacturer also hooked up some of its local suppliers to improve the effi ciency of production. In the plant, boards have been mounted and displayed on the shop fl oor to show production output, 5S and health and safety information. This saves time and resources since signs, charts and graphs are much more visual and understandable than lengthy computer generated reports and emails.


In addition to organising the plant for visual monitoring and control of its processes, as well as adding single piece fl ow, Tempress has synchronised the fl ow between machines/


workstations and re-positioned machines and stations which has improved effi ciency and output per employee. Since the company’s transition happened over four years, Tempress knows the effort that is required in going lean.


“Once we had 5S(ed) one area, we just kept rippling it through the facility,” says McLean. “You do a trial. You maybe pilot your 5S or your pull in one area and then you just keep replicating it. That’s the way to ensure success.” Though there is still work to


do, Tempress is committed to going all the way. McLean says savings have been considerable. In one piece of the business, inventory has been scaled back to less than half of previous levels. Direct labour hours have been cut by 25%.


Staying power How do you make sure employees’ lean practices stick? You include measurements in the visual piece (the visual factory) so people know how well they’re doing. This way, all the information is in front of them: there are no secrets. Unless you measure your results, people naturally slide back into old behaviours. Good companies like Tempress do regular audits so that doesn’t happen. You may fi nd that some of your people don’t survive your lean transition. Everyone must be committed to lean. If not, the problem employee


employee is resisting lean because he thinks he is going to lose his job, this is your fault


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