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Articles - Publication Date 4.6.2001
The Journey To World Class
Key elements at the start include training, training, and more training.
By Jim Cauhorn
Editor's Note: Jim Cauhorn is manufacturing advancement manager at the J W Harris Co. Inc., a privately held manufacturer of brazing and welding supplies located in Mason, Ohio. It employs about 400 workers. Cauhorn has four decades of manufacturing experience and has been a contributing member to several IndustryWeek Best Plants winners. He was hired by J W Harris in September 2000 to assist the company in its goal to reach world-class status. This article is the first in a series of reports by Cauhorn documenting J W Harris' continuous-improvement efforts. In this initial report, Cauhorn provides a broad overview of the company's plans and progress in becoming lean. Future articles will update the firm's progress and provide a more detailed look at specific efforts under way.
I arrived at J W Harris Co. Inc. in September 2000 and found what was very typical in my experience -- a good operation with good employees and a good image within its markets, but a company that was continually fighting customer back orders, quality problems, rising costs, and diminishing return on investment.
After spending several weeks assessing the situation, talking with virtually every employee, and hiring a new plant manager, Jeff Boothby (a long-time associate of mine), a plan was established to guide J W Harris to world-class manufacturing status. This plan included the following elements: teaching everyone in the company the principles of "lean," training the supervisory staff, conducting an employee survey, designing a demand-flow process (the process of responding directly to customer demand rather than building inventory to a forecast) using kanban signals, conducting kaizen events, and training the employees to use the new kanban system before full deployment. This was a very ambitious six-month plan.
The First Step: Training
The "lean" training addressed the principles of total quality, lean manufacturing, the identification and elimination of waste, the benefits of a visual workplace, demand flow, kanban, and the power of kaizen events. It was a two-and-a-half-hour presentation designed to provide an overview of the change to come and to energize people to pursue the new direction. Variations of the training, customized for the particular audience we were addressing, were presented by myself and Boothby to all departments in the company, including the outside sales force.
We conducted training of the workforce in groups of six to 10 per meeting to facilitate good interaction and participation. The training began in November and was completed in the first week of December. The response to this training was extremely positive. The employees are ready for change.
Taking AIM
In December we conducted our first, week-long kaizen event. (At J W Harris we call kaizen events "AIM" for Accelerated Improvement Mode.) Kaizen events are short-term, team-based efforts to rapidly improve a process. The objective of this event was to develop a streamlined process for packaging and loading UPS shipments. We have a goal at J W Harris to ship orders the same day they arrive; however, this goal was being missed all too frequently. We selected six workers from the shipping area and one man from maintenance to work on the project. Two members of our human resource department sat in for the week-long event to observe and learn. They will help facilitate future events.
Prior to the AIM event we videotaped the existing process to use for analysis. We spent the first day of the event training the participants to recognize and eliminate waste. For this purpose, we recounted the seven wastes of the Toyota Production System -- overproduction, waiting, transport, overprocessing, inventories, movements, and defects -- and added two of our own: lost creativity and excessive information. We reviewed elements of our training in lean techniques, and we then studied the videotape.
As with most of the event
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