Saving Time and Money
Syracuse.com
Sunday, December 11, 2005
By Charley Hannagan
Staff writer
A handful of Central New York offices are slimming down, and we're not talking about employee waistlines.
Offices are cutting unnecessary steps and paperwork as they begin following the lean principles of work that have been a part of local factory operations for years.
Defense contractor Lockheed Martin, for example, used lean techniques to cut the time it takes to get security clearances at its Salina facility. The streamlining cut the process in half.
Black Clawson Converting Machinery cut several weeks out of its order-taking processes with a streamlined form.
And when Carrier Corp. took wasted steps out of its interviewing process, the human resources department found it hired better workers.
"The advantage in getting a company to think of it (lean) in a holistic approach is if you've got the office people involved and thinking that way, too, then it becomes a culture," said Cindy Oehmigen, a lean manufacturing specialist with the Central New York Technology Development Organization. "So, you don't have those little islands of excellence. It truly is more pervasive."
Only a handful of companies in Central New York have begun implementing lean techniques in their offices.
Onondaga Community College's Lean Institute, which already offers training in lean techniques for the factory floor, is considering offering lean training for office environments, such as banks and health care, said David Wall, the college's director of corporate and public partnerships.
Companies implementing lean techniques in their factories map out the entire production process, looking for bottlenecks that slow production and consequently waste money.
Mapping out the process, or value stream mapping, can take place in an office, too.
"Everything still applies," said Ed Reynolds. His job title at Lockheed Martin is black belt, which means he works to improve all of the company's processes in on the manufacturing floor and office.
The factory and the office both produce products, he said. In an office that product can be a report, a budget or a design, he said.
In the case of a report, for example, offices need to determine its value, he said. Do you really need that report, or is it something the office has always done?
Then it must look at the processes the creator goes through to complete the report. First you map out the process, then you take out the wasted time, Reynolds said.
"We identify opportunities to do things better," he said.
When it began lean techniques 18 months ago, Black Clawson deliberately started in its offices, said Steve Cole, director of manufacturing. If the company had stopped its lean thinking at the manufacturing floor, it would have become only half as efficient, he said.
Black Clawson designs, makes, installs and services equipment for the flexible web converting and plastics processing industries. The company's machines go into flexible packaging for food and health-care products, adhesive coated tapes and labels.
A significant portion of the company's work takes place up front in getting the information needed to build equipment to the customer's order, he said. The back-and-forth discussions often took four to six weeks, Cole said.
After mapping out the process, the company created a form asking for all the information it needs to begin making the machine.
"If we get that up front in the beginning, we should be able to eliminate that four to six weeks (of discussion time) down to a week or two," Cole said.
As a result, the company cut the delivery time on a typical piece of $2 million to $3 million equipment to 30 weeks from 38, he said.
Black Clawson's corporate parent has a goal to cut product cycle times by 25 percent, he said.
Implementing lean techniques allowed the company to do more work with the same or slightly more people, Cole said.
"Our sales per employee have gone up rather nicely from the year before to the most recent year," he said.
Crystal Jacobson, owner of Strategic Solutions, learned lean techniques at her old employer, Carrier Corp.
She retired from the company as manager of organizational development for its distribution and after-market business.
Jacobson said she became involved in lean processes at Carrier in the1990s. During her time in human resources, the group looked at how long it took from posting a position to hiring someone to fill it, and found bottlenecks in the approval process, she said.
The human resource manager screened candidates before handing them off to the hiring manager, Jacobson said. The time between handoffs and feedback about the candidate could take three weeks, she said.
Human resources found that both interviewers were asking similar questions and had to go back to the candidate a second or third time with more questions, Jacobson said.
After implementing lean techniques, the department created interview templates to improve the process, she said.
While it didn't significantly speed the hiring process, the improved interview process produced better qualified workers, Jacobson said.
"Why is a lean office a good idea?," asked Mark Panozzo, executive vice president at Black Clawson.
"If we don't start right, we don't finish right," he said.
