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What is Lean Manufacturing?

Read what IMPO Magazine has to say about Lean Manufacturing at Cole Hersee

Changes that are being implemented 
at Cole Hersee

Cole Hersee management realized a few years ago that their reputation for on-time delivery showed room for improvement, according to Dick Kuzmitski, Vice President of Operations. With the salutary realization that they were missing vital business opportunities, things began to happen quickly at Cole Hersee. The implementation of cell manufacturing became the focus. "The company owners had done a great deal of studying about this and they felt that it was the way to go," said Kuzmitski.

Defined as a one-piece flow production process, cell manufacturing provides a quantum leap to greater efficiencies and an enhanced flexibility, a versatility that is all-important in a high-quality short-run manufacturing facility like Cole Hersee. "We jumped right in and started with a couple of prototype cells," Kuzmitski says, "and we could see measurable improvements right from the beginning. We decided to build on our success, and to start implementing the process throughout our whole facility. We realized that the task was bigger than just altering production flow. There would have to be a major investment in worker training, and a reassessment of the corporate environment and culture."

Where to start?
Because of the enormity of the task facing them, and the urgent need to make changes at a rapid and controlled pace, Cole Hersee engaged Grant Thornton, an international consulting firm. Working together, a program was developed in short order to meet the specific needs of the company. They developed five modules: team-building, TAKT time, flow of product, problem solving and 5S (a method of eliminating wasted time and resources).

"We started the program by training 15 people from the company. We took them off the factory floor and gave each of them a rigorous 40-hour training," Kuzmitski says, "Then we did a blitz on the cell and saw a 20 percent increase in production efficiency." But that wasn't the only benefit that Cole Hersee saw. There was an immediate boost in quality of the product, work-in-progress levels plummeted and product rejections fell dramatically. Additionally the introduction of a kanban system allowed Cole Hersee to drastically reduce inventory levels from 4 months to 4 weeks.

Planning for the future
Now that there is a highly successful training program and a well thought out plan in place, Kuzmitski anticipates an all-cellular production facility in the future. "We are on a crusade with an end result of building about 45 cells, each with dedicated equipment and cross-trained workers. We will be totally cellular."

But Dick Kuzmitski is not a man to rest on his laurels. He sees this lean thinking as not just for manufacturing, but as the right path to follow for the whole company. "If you narrow your focus you miss opportunities for continuous improvement," he says, "This method works for every department from marketing and sales to order-entry and accounting."

All these benefits have produced cost savings, which Cole Hersee has promptly reinvested in the means to make greater improvements. "We have seen a 10 to 15 percent efficiency gain, a 20 percent inventory reduction and a 50 percent savings in floor space," enthuses Kuzmitski, "In fact we have saved so much floor space that next year we will close down a distribution building and consolidate the operations and bring the staff into the main facility. This will give us the added benefit of eliminating duplicate management and minimizing product movement. Then we won't have the waste of trucking product between our facilities!"

Visitors are impressed
Because of the radical changes that Cole Hersee has been making, and the palpable enthusiasm for change that comes from both management and the individual workers in the cells, the facility has become a 'benchmarking' location. Managers from other companies, both local and national, have visited Cole Hersee to see how to implement comparable improvements. "We also use their suggestions and input to see where we can make added refinements," says Kuzmitski, ever-ready to take every advantage of a self-help opportunity, "As a matter of fact, early in the new year we will be hosting one complete day of a three-day university seminar. This is going to be a real hands-on course in Lean Production, and it will be led by Prof. David Cochran of MIT. He won the 1990 Shingo Prize, and he's quite a star, you know."

With a vision that the future of manufacturing in the United States calls for the ability to respond to rapid change, Kuzmitski emphasizes that cells have been engineered to allow for rapid breakdown and reassembly in order to make new products. "We have an built-in flexibility to move and adjust to what is happening," he says. "But we are on a long-term journey to achieving an even higher level of performance, and an all-encompassing corporate culture of continuous improvement. It will take us years to achieve the goal of becoming best in class… and even then there will be room for improvement!"

What is Lean Manufacturing?

It's a philosophy of manufacturing efficiency.

Lean manufacturing uses less of everything compared with mass production: half the human effort in the factory, half the manufacturing floor space, half the investment in tools, half the engineering hours to develop a product in half the time.

Also, it requires keeping far less than half the needed inventory on site, and results in fewer defects.

It accomplishes this through:
Teamwork
Communication
Efficient use of resources
Continuous improvement

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