Going lean takes cultural overhaul

By Karen Hanna

Ten-plus days in purgatory.

That’s how long raw materials and finished products languished between receiving and shipping at the plant of a custom molder, which needed only 142 minutes to perform the actual work of turning resin into plastic speaker frames.

That meant over 98 percent of the time those plastics were in the plant was spent in inventory — a frequent source of manufacturing waste targeted by lean advocates like Kurt Middelkoop, a senior sustainability and lean adviser for the Texas Manufacturing Assistance Center (TMAC), which provides consulting services. He helped the molder confront the problems in its process.

“The value-added area where things are getting done is when that plastic media goes through the heater and then gets compressed and injected out into the molded product,” he said. “That’s where the company’s making money, when that injection molder is pumping out good product. Anything prior to that, and typically anything after that, they want to really shorten that time and the effort that we’re spending, so we’re trying to maximize the place where the plastic’s being converted to the product in the machine.”

Dedicated to paring down manufacturing activities to the tasks directly connected with making money and creating value for customers, lean advocates say their approach can make your plant more competitive.

Take a hike

Funded by a public-private partnership and part of the national Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), based at the National Institute of Standards and Technology network, the TMAC serves manufacturers in Texas. But its lean manufacturing approach can have implications beyond the workplace, Middelkoop said. It can be life-changing.

“One of my purposes in life is to share what I have so that it could benefit that person, not only in the manufacturing perspective, but also personally; it could transform their life,” he said. “It can also transform a company when the organization starts embracing, seeing things differently, they can change them. Then, they have to take action.”

Identifying and eliminating all the waste within the workplace can start with a walk. Or a map.
For Middelkoop, it begins with Post-it notes strung across a wall, identifying every step goods travel, from the time a company receives them as raw goods to the moment they’re shipped out as final products.

For other lean advocates, the first step in the journey can begin just by putting one foot in front of the other and taking a tour — often called a gemba walk — to observe how employees actually carry out processes within a plant.

Gaining a global understanding of what your company does is key to the process, according to the Kaizen Institute, which provides consulting to a variety of industries in lean methods, also known as kaizen.

“We love to look at the whole value chain to understand better the steps within the process, and that usually gives us a very good idea of the gaps and the pieces that are broken within that process,” said Vera Adam-Groetschel, who leads environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives for the institute.

Identifying value

First developed in the 1950s by the Toyota Motor Corp., lean methods aim to minimize the resources required for a single product to flow through the entire production process. But the approach isn’t concerned with how processes suit the companies that perform them; its grounding principle instead is meeting the needs of companies’ end users.

“Just imagine a process that goes smoothly from getting the raw material until we have the finished product, which most of the case is not the case; there’s always hiccups,” said Adam-Groetschel, who began her career providing guidance to oil, gas and pharmaceutical companies.

Middelkoop punctuates the point by clapping his hands when he walks through clients’ plants.

“What are we doing now?” he asks clients.

Often, the answer has no direct relationship to the actual process of making parts, or serving customers.

Molders might respond, for example, “ ‘Oh, well, they’re moving the beads, or the media, over to get ready to set up a machine.’ I’m like, ‘No, that’s not making the product, it’s just moving it around. This is an opportunity for you to reduce that time,’ ” Middelkoop said, recounting conversations he’s had in molding shops.

Developing a value stream, or value chain, map — a visual representation of the flow of a product from start to finish, such as his Post-it note series — is one way to begin identifying activities or resources that aren’t contributing value.

“When we think lean or kaizen, we think, ‘What is the value for the customer, the stakeholder — not the process, not the product — the customer?’ ” Adam-Groetschel said. “What is it that the customer wants from us, product or service, whatever it might be? So, understanding the real need and tailoring our product or service to that means we stop any type of overproduction, any type of redundancy.”

On the hunt for waste

For Lori Cobb, who has experience with lean methods as a senior quality engineer at D&M Plastics, a Burlington, Ill., molding shop, the approach boils down to doing things right the first time, rather than constantly doubling back to fix things. But the search for improvement never ends.

She loves it.

“It’s cleaner, because operators have time, and quality inspectors have time, to do more because now we’re not going back and doing it right the second time. We’re doing it right the first time,” she said.

At the shop of his molding client, Middelkoop and his team identified multiple areas for improvement. They included: excessive movement between the warehouse and production floor, the potential to reuse oily rags and recycle scrap plastic back into production, and the establishment of a system to track all waste streams.

The molder achieved an annual savings of $6,000 after rectifying leaks in 13 air compressors, and anticipated it could garner $200,000 in extra sales from customers supportive of its efforts to eliminate waste, according to Middelkoop and a case study posted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Among manufacturers, major sources of waste commonly include overprocessing and defective parts, Adam-Groetschel said.

Machine breakdowns, employee injuries and lengthy set-up procedures all cut into the value manufacturers can deliver to customers.

“We want to keep the machines running without delays throughout the entire day making good product. Reducing set-up changes and downtime becomes a critical activity to manage to reach daily production goals,” Middelkoop said.

Keeping too much stock in inventory, as his client was doing, is a costly practice, as it requires companies to devote space and energy to goods that won’t help the customer — at least not until the customer needs them. Efforts to store or move such goods also waste employee time and can contribute to accidents.

The goal should be to produce parts when they’re needed, rather than warehousing them until they’re ordered.

“Ideally, in the Toyota system,” Adam-Groetschel said, “I order the Toyota, and the Toyota is being manufactured from the moment that I say I want it. So, it’s not that we produce cars in different colors and push it to the market and say, ‘Just pick one.’ No, we say, ‘Which one do you want? OK, I produced that for you.’ ”

Making that switch requires communication with customers, as well as suppliers, alongside other lean changes. But, ultimately, it helps customers.

“If you can turn a job pretty fast through an organization, that really helps with their increase of sales possibly, or [to] get more additional sales,” Middelkoop said.

Putting it in practice

For some workers, an approach of asking questions, providing input and seeing processes from the perspective of the end users’ needs requires a mindset shift. Some people might chafe at the change.

Among Middelkoop’s clients, 74 percent end up implementing lean changes.

Succeeding requires developing a culture of trust where everyone’s input is valued.

“We have to empower the people. So, people have to be able to do the work they’re doing, and we have to make them capable of also doing what we want them to do,” Adam-Groetschel said. “It is about improving the skills — soft skills, hard skills. It is about empowering them to be part of the process. That is very, very, maybe even the biggest and most, important part of becoming lean.”

For second-shift foreman Kyle Bellon, who began working at D&M Plastics about six months ago, it was a bit of a culture shock. At first, he was apprehensive about speaking at the plant’s lean meetings, which take place every day on each shift.

“I guess more or less it’s just nerves and having the confidence to speak up for stuff like that. It’s helped with speaking in front of people and taking charge of the conversation, or sparking other people to bring up ideas that they may have been hesitant to bring up otherwise,” he said.

Seeing the commitment of the plant’s CEO and president, Peyton “Chip” Owen, meant a lot to Cobb, who started working at the company 34 years ago — long before it adopted lean methods.

She bought into the approach when she realized Owen was sincere.

“Once he started, and he showed everybody that what he says, he means, and he follows through with what he says, I caught on, and then, once one catches on, then another catches on, and you just say, ‘Hey, you’ve got to give the guy a try.’ ”

Implementing change at small workplaces — D&M Plastics had just 53 workers as of October — can be easier than shifting the culture of larger companies, Adam-Groetschel said.
Typically, lean consulting clients see a return on investment within a few months, Adam-Groetschel said.

But embedding the culture can take several years.

At D&M Plastics, where Owen introduced lean methods about 11 years ago, Cobb said some workers who couldn’t buy in have left.

But that means today’s workforce is committed.

“With the new lean, if somebody comes up with a lean [idea], everybody listens,” Cobb said. “And they say, ‘How about if we also add this to that lean?’ Everybody’s working together more, and they’re listening to each other more, and it’s better teamwork.”

Knowing that her ideas are valued and that managers support workers’ efforts to make changes that can benefit everyone has made her job better, Cobb said.

And, in over a decade, the flow of ideas hasn’t stopped.

“I don’t believe you’re ever done learning. And no matter how many years you’re here, you can always learn something,” she said.

Contact:  

Kaizen Institute North America, Scottsdale Ariz., 888-464-3622, https://kaizen.com/us 

Manufacturing Education Partnership, Gaithersburg, Md., 301-975-2000, www.nist.gov/mep/centers

Texas Manufacturing Center, Fort Worth, Texas, 800-625-4876, https://tmac.org