Becoming Lean

Less can be more through continuous improvement initiatives

Story by Sean Fitzgerald

IN THESE LEAN ECONOMIC TIMES, it can’t hurt to scale back your operations and processes to make them more lean as well.

That’s been the scenario at Performance Welding, a Freedom-based contract metal fabricator that cuts, forms, welds, paints, assembles and packages metal products for a variety of customers. Performance Welding Vice President Kurt Wollenburg said the lean journey the 44-employee company embarked on in May of 2008 demonstrated success almost immediately.

Wollenburg said a 12-hour job for one of its customers was reduced to just eight hours, pulling four hours of seemingly wasted labor out of the process. The lead time on the project was able to be trimmed from 23 days down to just nine days, allowing customers to receive their orders more timely. Overall, the improvements on that process alone saved Performance Welding nearly a quarter million dollars a year, Wollenburg said. Not only did the improvements capture his attention, his employees saw the fruits of these improvement efforts as well.

“I felt like a proud parent. I saw the light bulbs go on,” Wollenburg said. “And the thing of it was, they weren’t working any harder.”

Performance Welding isn’t venturing into  its lean journey alone. The company is in the good hands of Wisconsin Manufacturers Extension Partnership, a quasi-government manufacturing consultant which is shepherding Wollenburg and his staff as the manufacturer continues its improvement. 

Since that first Kaizen event more than a year ago, consultants from WMEP have helped Performance Welding create a shadow board in each of its departments on the shop floor to house tools and small equipment, and is currently undergoing an extensive value stream mapping process for its three wood burner products. Wollenburg said the exercises have reduced clutter on the shop floor and have literally cleared away valuable space which can be used to help grow the company without physically adding square feet.

“To me, we’ve gained so much space. We thought we were plum full,” Wollenburg said. “Now we see we have so much more space to add capacity and take on new jobs.”

Continuous improvement initiatives like lean, Six Sigma, Total Quality Management or Statistical Process Control are perhaps taking a more prominent place on many business owners’ radar these days as slowing economic conditions have created more time to roll up their sleeves to make their operations more efficient. Those firms taking strides to improve now are poised to take a more dominant position in the market when the economy rebounds.

“As the recession goes on longer and longer, companies that are preparing well will come out of this stronger than their competitors,” said Don McDonald, regional manager for WMEP in northeastern Wisconsin.

 Seeking help

THERE’S NO SHORTAGE OF HELP out there for businesses looking to become more lean.

WMEP is one of several organizations that consult with employers on a variety of continuous improvement initiatives. Most notably, it’s been working with manufacturers in the state looking to make their processes more lean.

WMEP works exclusively on site with its clients to minimize the disruption to their normal daily tasks of creating a product, as well as to have relevancy to the work with which employees are familiar, said McDonald. When working with a new manufacturer, McDonald said the exploration stage involves identifying what kind of improvement is needed, what type of results can be achieved, and establishing metrics to chart those results.

“Sometimes, there’s so many issues with a company that we need to help them with the development of a strategy to deal with those issues,” McDonald said. “These are the businesses that see the biggest changes.”

Lean is a solid first step for companies who haven’t before implemented any type of improvement effort, said Dave Hall, director of organizational services for the Business Excellence Consortium through Milwaukee School of Engineering. MSOE’s Business Excellence Consortium works with manufacturers, health care providers and service providers across the region to identify and reduce wasted movement and material.

“What lean does is eliminate the waste so that you can go in and begin to be more effective with the Six Sigma tools,” Hall said.

MSOE has worked significantly with Menasha-based Affinity Health System. And while a health care entity doesn’t manufacture a product, there are people and materials moving throughout its facilities and processes to standardize.

Affinity began its work with MSOE two years ago in an effort to eliminate waste in its various departments, said Gary Kusnierz, vice president of performance excellence for the health system. Over time, employees of Affinity began to adopt lean as a philosophy guiding their day-to-day routine and decision making.

“The big thing for us was to ultimately provide better access for the patients and their families; to provide more face-to-face time between patients and their doctors or their nurses and other care givers,” said Kusnierz.

In the past two years, Kusnierz points to a variety of improvements within Affinity, most notably reducing the time to schedule an appointment within its clinics or getting medication to a patient’s bedside in a more timely manner. Recently, Affinity has started offering same-day breast examinations and providing the results of those exams within 24 hours, all as a result of a Six Sigma project carried out by employees.

 Employee support

IF EMPLOYEES AND MANAGEMENT don’t buy in to continuous improvement efforts, the chance of such exercises proving successful are slim to none.

In fact, WMEP’s McDonald cited industry data suggesting 40 percent of continuous improvement initiatives don’t continue a year after they’ve started because employees don’t understand what the initiative is intended to do.

Earlier in 2009, Moraine Park Technical College in Fond du Lac launched a series of academies aimed at providing continuous improvement solutions to employers throughout the area, not only to make local businesses more competitive, but to better prepare individual workers to be more flexible for career roles they may have even years from now.

“We’re really focusing on improving the workforce, so we need to be flexible in what we’re providing,” said Kathy Schlieve, a workforce and economic development specialist with MPTC.

The academies were designed to provide training that not only earns participants a certificate upon successful completion, but college credit toward a degree as well. MPTC’s lean certificate program offers a broad-based introduction to lean tools and primarily has worked with companies that are newer to lean practices, Schlieve said. More in depth, MPTC’s Six Sigma training program provides preparation for white, green and black belts in Six Sigma through training sections offered twice each year.

Likewise, Fox Valley Technical College’s Lean Performance Center offers employees training in the basics of lean and supervisory guidance to “train the trainer” within an employer, but it also crucial training for company leadership as well. All too often, lack of support from company leaders can sink an improvement initiative before it even gets off the ground, said Anne Haberkorn, director of the Lean Performance Center at FVTC.

“If the strategic planning and all the measurements that are put in place for a lean launch are not a focus for the executives, then it’s not going to be successful,” Haberkorn said.

Costs for lean training programs can start out at more than $1,500 per person, but both Schlieve and Haberkorn said Workforce Advancement Training Grants are available through the Wisconsin Technical College System to help employers defray the costs of such an investment.

 Planning for the rebound

IN AN ECONOMIC ENVIRONMENT in which some companies are simply struggling for survival rather than to move into a more dominant position in the market, demand for the kinds of improvement services companies are seeking has changed slightly.

“They are looking for more strategic-type services right now than they are looking for tactical assistance,” said WMEP’s McDonald.

In many cases, that’s meant taking the focus off of the shop floor and into administrative functions in the office, where the movement of information from person to person and across functions can help significantly improve the cost, quality, flexibility and time it takes to deliver on a customer order.

“Most of the time and resources a company spends on an order is spent in the office,” McDonald said.

The Lean Performance Center at FVTC is also seeing more requests for assistance from support functions like the front office or the engineering department, and even from the health care arena, where FVTC has seen a particularly heightened demand.

“We’re not seeing as much on the shop floor,” said FVTC’s Haberkorn.

Worth the effort

BE IT LEAN, SIX SIGMA or another initiative, continuous improvement initiatives do require financial resources and employee time. But the rewards often exceed the investment for those organizations that are diligent.

For all of its efforts, the successes at Performance Welding have captured attention outside company walls. The firm was named the 2008 Small manufacturer of the Year by the Fox Cities Chamber of Commerce, and earlier this year was one of just 56 firms nationwide to receive a Blue Ribbon Small Business Award from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

For Wollenburg – who started the company 14 years ago with his wife – the reasons for continuing to improve are even deeper.

“I’m fighting for U.S. jobs, and to do that, we need to be competitive,” he said.