LB Foster
Pueblo, Colo.
Employees: 23, nonunion
Total Square Footage: 56,000
Primary Product/Market: Insulated rail joints
Start-Up Date: 2006
Achievements: 99.68% first-pass yield for all finished products in 2010; 67% reduction in manufacturing costs per joint since 2007; 63% reduction in man-hours per joint since 2007; zero warranty claims since the plant's inception in 2006
If L.B. Foster's Pueblo, Colo., facility were a baseball player, it would be Ichiro Suzuki -- or Rod Carew.
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| See the other winners of IW's 2011 Best Plants award and find out how they made the top ten. |
In the never-ending quest to control costs and boost productivity, plant manager Bart Peterson has found that small, incremental process improvements can add up to big gains.
"We aren't necessarily looking for the home run every time," Peterson says. "We're looking for base hits. We score that way."
Walk the floor of the 56,000-square-foot plant -- which makes insulated rail joints for Union Pacific, BNSF and other rail companies -- and you'll see more "base hits" than you would at a Colorado Rockies game.
"You just chip away at costs and you keep at it," Peterson says.
A bit further upstream in the assembly process, workers use hand drills to remove plastic caps from bolt holes in the rail joints. The plastic caps prevent epoxy from filling the holes when the joints' components are glued in place -- and are a vast improvement over the previous method, in which workers had to remove the epoxy with a drill press.
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| A simple equipment modification at the rail-grinding station is one example of how L.B. Foster Pueblo has cut costs through dozens of small improvements. |
At the rail-grinding station, a worker uses a handheld grinder to remove excess epoxy from the rail joints. The process requires the operator to go through some 20 grinding wheels a day. Thanks to an employee suggestion, the plant switched from a finishing flap wheel that costs $7.50 to an equally effective grinding wheel that costs just 25 cents -- saving the plant nearly $27,000 a year.
"We would have to take all those [rail] bars and palletize them, set them next to a huge drill press and a guy would stand there and drill all day long," Peterson says of the previous method.
Using a drill press, it took 1 to 2 minutes to remove the epoxy from each hole, assistant plant manager Michael Smith adds.
"Now that we've switched to plastic caps, we do about six holes in 30 seconds," Smith says. "So we've reduced that time, and we were able to put it in our one-piece-flow process. We don't have to batch them and move them to another workstation and then bring them back like we did before."
