Taking lean to the people
Magazine Article, Source : The Manufacturer
Zone : World class manufacturing
Published : December 2005
As the lean drive continues, Malcolm Wheatley discovers how companies are conquering the most difficult issue – getting wholehearted buy-in from their workforce
In the coming year – perhaps more than ever before – manufacturers will be redoubling their efforts to be lean. A sluggish global economy, low levels of consumer confidence, higher interest rates: already buffeted by competition from low-cost economies overseas, British manufacturers know that it’s time to get lean. And, what’s more, stay that way: unlike dieting, in today’s tough economy backsliding can carry perilous consequences.
But if a decade’s experience of adopting lean manufacturing within British industry tells us anything, it’s that lean isn’t a ‘turnkey’ solution. Lean must be worked at, not just wished for. There’s no easy software to plug in, although software can, under certain circumstances, help. Nor can lean be bought, although again, the services of consultants may make the transformation easier. This leads to the most fundamental of questions: how?
The transformation needs to start at the top, insists Mark Fillingham, managing director of Chesterfield-based Robinson Paperboard Packing. Three and a half years into a lean revolution that began shortly after Fillingham’s arrival in 2002, lean manufacturing at Robinson has been underpinned by a firm belief that people are vital to the strategy – and that a demonstrable commitment to getting the best from those people makes a difference. “We simply don’t believe that you can fully harness people’s skills and abilities without this commitment,” stresses Fillingham.
If that sounds a little ‘touchy-feely’, it isn’t. Several members of the existing team of managers and supervisors that was in place when Fillingham arrived are no longer with the company. “Having management with the right values is vital: it’s not that the people who left us weren’t effective, it was that they didn’t have the right ‘people values’ for the changes that I wanted to bring about,” he says. Routinely, for example, senior management would park their cars in the disabled bays close to the entrance: no more, says Fillingham.
Today, the three production cells that comprise the factory are probably no more than 25 per cent of the way along what Fillingham regards as the full journey to lean. 5S is in place, as is operative-led maintenance, underpinned by standard operating procedures and checklists. Nevertheless, backed by demonstrable commitment from the top, a sea change has taken place: there will be no going back, insists Fillingham. An early benefit of the new standard operating procedures, he adds, was a number of operative-inspired manufacturing innovations – several of which subsequently earned the plant an award.
Successful lean programmes have another workforce-related dimension, adds Stephen Parry, an organisational change consultant: they’ve often been ‘sold’ to employees carefully, and sensitively. “The word ‘lean’ can be something of an issue,” he notes. “Employees can think that eliminating waste means eliminating people, which can create resistance. The message needs to revolve much more around preventing waste arising – and redeploying them to create business value elsewhere in the organisation.”
It’s a pitch that certainly resonates with John Caruso, senior vice-president of operational excellence and corporate quality at Sanmina-SCI, a $13 billion dollar American-owned global contract manufacturer for companies such as Sony, IBM, and Sun Microsystems. “To me, our plants that have been most successful in adopting lean manufacturing have been those where they have seen it as a way of improving how they run their business, as opposed to it being just another programme mandated by the folks at corporate,” he confirms.
“Winning the hearts and minds of the workforce is vital if lean is to stick,” agrees Chris Dewhurst, a senior lean manufacturing and six sigma trainer with Smallpeice Enterprises, the training arm of the Smallpeice Trust, a charity set up by retired industrialist Dr Cosby Smallpeice in the 1960s to help manufacturers ‘make things better, quicker and more cheaply’.
Dr Smallpeice didn’t add ‘more enjoyably’ to his objectives, but that can indeed often turn out to be an important aspect of working within a lean environment, argues Dewhurst. “Lean isn’t just about cost reduction, it’s about waste elimination and continuous improvement,” he points out. “If the thrust is all about cost reduction, employees will soon come to think that there’s nothing in it for them, whereas a genuinely lean environment provides hassle-free working, and a sense of fulfilment through working together towards a common aim.”
In summary, he stresses: “It’s all about involvement, visible commitment, getting people involved in making improvements – and feeling proud of early successes.” Success breeds success: a few ‘early wins’ further inspires those who helped bring them about, and also encourages others to join in.
Those early wins, and those that follow them, come from the application of techniques and new ways of working, of course. But even if management is keen to make improvements, some experienced insights into where to start can make the difference between success and failure.
At Crewe engineering company CHK, for example, it was a diagnostic study from MAS (the Manufacturing Advisory Service) in the form of Manufacturing Institute facilitator Tim Fox that helped kick start the business’s lean transformation. “CHK was facing a lot of challenges, but has come through strongly,” says Fox. It is now also a very different business: formerly solely a subcontractor – with all that implies in terms of low margins and fluctuating workload – the company has recently introduced the first of several fabricated products of its own.
Lean didn’t just free-up the physical space in which to manufacturer these, notes CHK’s operations manager Steve Toplis, it also dramatically increased productivity. Formerly, 140 people were employed: it’s now 80 people, says Toplis, collectively generating the same sales value – and with manufacturing capacity to spare.
The trick, he adds, has been to move away from an environment of perpetual firefighting, and towards manufacturing in a more structured manner. And although the move to lean has generally been popular with the workforce, among those who have left the business have been people who haven’t appreciated the change. “Some people like to fight fires: they enjoy the adrenaline rush,” says Toplis. “With lean there are far fewer fires to fight.”
Training is another aspect of the lean transformation that can make the difference between success and failure. The issue: techniques half-grasped, or picked up from books, tend not to work as well as those that have been imparted in a classroom situation by experienced trainers – people well-versed not just in delivering lean training, but also in implementing lean in the real world. What’s more, training helps cement the required culture change, especially when carried out in-depth.
At dairy products manufacturer Dairy Crest’s Davidstow cheese-making creamery, for example, training from Smallpeice has underpinned a lean manufacturing initiative that is now well underway. Four in-house lean ‘experts’ were trained initially on a 10-day lean course, with three more colleagues following them, while a number of engineers and operators attended a three-day ‘overview’ course. “We’re aiming to significantly increase the number of people put through the courses, so that we can have someone with detailed knowledge of the principles and tools in each production team,” explains Richard Boundy, continuous improvement manager at the plant.
Just as importantly, recurrent lean training can help refresh people’s skills and understanding, and also fill the gaps in lean knowledge as people leave or get promoted. Ole Dam, operations manager at Creative Memories, an American manufacturer of personalised scrapbooks and photograph albums, has been a lean practitioner for almost 25 years. But when appointed to his present role seven years ago and asked to implement lean manufacturing, Dam began by sending his company chairman on a four-day course at American lean manufacturing institute JCIT International. “I wanted him to know what was going to happen to his company,” explains Dam.
The result: a free hand to do as he wished, to which Dam responded by sending every manufacturing manager and supervisor on the same four-day course at JCIT that the chairman had attended. Seven years on, lean has revolutionised the business: plant throughput time has fallen from three weeks to 10 minutes, work-in-progress levels have fallen by 80 per cent, even though volumes have increased, and the space needed for this has reduced by 70 per cent. A significant transformation has taken place. But even to this day, every newly-hired or promoted supervisor attends the course – and some senior engineers and other specialists have attended more advanced courses.
But once the lean initiative is underway, how can its impetus be maintained? While ‘refresher training’ helps maintain knowledge levels, sometimes something more forceful is required. At Telford-based Alcoa Fastening Systems, for example, a lean manufacturing initiative begun in 1997 had delivered impressive results: a 60 per cent reduction in lead times, a 60 per cent reduction in setup times, and the freeing-up of 40 per cent of the plant’s floor space.
But in April this year, recognising that the pace of improvement had slowed, the factory recruited Jonathan Griffiths as continuous improvement manager. His role: spearheading further improvements, and monitoring the involvement of personnel in improvement activities: a monthly report to the managing director details the percentage of the factory’s workforce actively involved in lean activities in the previous month. “We’re trying to involve 100 per cent of the workforce,” says Griffiths.
Another impetus-sustaining innovation: a maintenance fitter, employed by a local engineering firm, is kept permanently on site to manufacture anything by way of guides, jigs, fixings or anything else that will make operations more efficient. No requisitions are needed: shift leaders have the authority to have any such equipment manufactured. And a director of the engineering firm in question visits the factory every Thursday, to sit in on an improvement meeting, and make sure everything is working well.
When it comes to the interface between the factory and the outside world, external supply chain partners can help sustain the pace. When Land Rover outsourced its inbound logistics operations to NYK Logistics, explains Richard Osborne, logistics operations manager at Land Rover, part of the rationale was tapping into the capabilities of another organisation with skills in material handling, rather than vehicle manufacture.
Using techniques such as value stream mapping, 5S and the ‘seven wastes’ in a materials context unlocked significant new savings, adds NYK’s director of logistics Gwyn Thomas: a distribution depot formerly used for offsite component storage has been closed completely, he says, being replaced by a ‘cross-docking’ facility at an NYK facility five miles away, at which inbound parts sit for just four hours.
Finally, don’t forget the impact of lean on the rest of the business, advises Martin Armistead, director of consulting at Deloitte. Here, lean can be a double-edged sword, he adds: an opportunity to extend the benefits, but also undermine the progress being made in the factory, if the rest of the business isn’t in tune.
“Tools such as 5S and kanbans can in some ways work against the adoption of the broader lean principles,” he warns. “The reaction to early successes is to want more of the same, from the same tools. But the lean toolset includes a number of other less visible techniques, which are much more likely to influence the business in the long term – addressing issues such as the way an organisation measures itself, or encourages and rewards individual behaviours.”
At Northampton-based motor sport manufacturer Cosworth, for example, four people have been recruited as ‘business analysts’ specifically to address such issues, says planning and scheduling manager Darren Dowding.
“The danger is that lean can end up being a manufacturing initiative that doesn’t extend any further across the business: I’ve seen supposedly lean factories with warehouses that were bulging with inventory,” he notes. “The role of our business analysts is to look at how all our business processes fit together in the context of today’s marketplace and today’s order book – looking at how the finance function calculates things, for example, or how the stores operate.”
The intention: a company that's not only a lean manufacturer, but an agile business – ‘closing the loop’, and ensuring that something that began in the factory spreads out to enable the business as a whole to become fit, lean, and ready for anything. And, as the nation prepares for its Christmas gorging, it’s certainly an objective that's as fitting as any.
