A Tasty Breakthrough
A North American ceilings manufacturer was closing a plant that produced a product no other plant in the division could manufacture, due to specialized, but obsolete technology. They had a customer who was buying millions of square feet of this product annually. They knew they had to come up with an alternative the customer would approve of and keep buying after the old plant was closed.
The product had a heavy texture and was extremely durable and tough. None of the remaining plants in the division had the capability to produce this particular visual with the same durability and the project team was at a loss to come up with an alternative. They decided to use a Lean technique called Production Preparation Process (3P). They had very little experience with it, but the stakes were high and they were assured a breakthrough could be achieved by using it.
I was asked to facilitate the Kaizen event with help from a consultant and we would use 3P and its 11-step method to drive the creativity of the team to create, test, and develop the new product in a one-week timeframe. Needless to say, there were a lot of skeptical people in the room, including me.
The first few steps of the 3P are designed to remove all preconceived notions of what the solution should be and force the team to define the true essence of what the customer is asking for. Once done, the team identifies how nature is able to meet those customer requirements. This part of the process usually results in the relaxing of inhibitions and the start of laughter and opening of minds to what might be possible. For some teams, it is a true leap of faith that these steps will lead to something useful.
This team consisted of engineers, designers, scientists, and technicians. We had the use of all of the testing and development facilities for the company and any resource we needed was made available to us. Scientists and engineers are typically more analytical than they are free thinking. Once we got to nature, I saw the team was loosening up and they seemed willing to try something new.
Steps 6 and 7 of a 3P require the team members to come up with 7 ways of solving the problem and then trying them out in real time with available materials. This is called “Moonshining”. During Moonshining, the team members started using available materials in the testing and development facility to come up with new textures and strength properties. Nothing seemed to look like or act like what we wanted. A respected engineer with more than 35 years company experience told us he was going on a shopping trip to find what he needed. We all wondered what he would come back with.
After about an hour, he returned with many different things he bought at a local grocery store, including various cereals, cat litter, salt, and other granular materials. Curious to see what would happen next, we followed him to the testing facility and watched as he poured the various materials, mixed with adhesives, onto boards. Cat litter didn’t look right to him. Then he crushed it, and it still didn’t look right. Next was salt. No good either. Next came cornflakes. He decided to grind them up and poured them on the board. They looked promising. They had the visual texture similar to the customer’s wishes. With the right mixture of adhesives, they might be able to achieve the desired durability. About a dozen trials later, he was able to get a texture and durability the whole team liked.
The team knew it couldn’t use cornflakes in the finished product, but they now knew they could create the proper texture and durability. The rest of the 3P (steps 8 through 11) was spent developing a method to replicate the cornflake texture with materials that could be adhered to the board and painted over in the manufacturing process. At the end of the week, the team was able to provide the overall project team with a concept and method to achieve this new product in an existing manufacturing facility.
Just over a year later, the product was being manufactured in an existing facility, at a reduced cost with better properties than the original product that was manufactured in the closed facility. The customer continues to buy the product to this day, and has no idea that the inspiration for it was found at the grocery store.