Guiding Principles – Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide

During my career at Armstrong World Industries, I honed my kaizen approach and spent more travel time at the Macon, Georgia plant than at any other location. That’s why I have so many stories to share about my time there.

In another story, I talked about being called the “Conveyer Whisperer.” I was always looking at board flow around the miles of conveyers that snaked through our factories and trying to figure out how to improve flow and reduce jams.

I was invited to the Macon plant to try my hand on the busiest line at the world’s largest ceiling tile plant. I met David, the Business Unit Manager, and he showed me the areas he thought were causing the most downtime and jams on his line.

As I watched boards go around the line, I noticed many conveyer guides “pinching” the boards and sending them in places and at angles that were the root cause of the downtime and jams in my opinion. I shared my thoughts and improvement ideas with David. He didn’t agree. He bet me that my suggested changes to the guides and conveyers would make things worse.

Challenge accepted! I took his bet and proposed an experiment. I would take a small section of the line and make various changes to the guides and squareness of the conveyer. If my methods didn’t work, he could send me home to corporate on the next available flight. If my method worked, he had to let me continue and use necessary downtime to make changes to the rest of the line. He agreed.

David gave assigned a team of operators and mechanics to me. They were interested in what I thought I could do and my approach to the work. They were a bit skeptical that straightening out guides, removing guides, and leveling conveyers would make a difference in the flow around the line, but they were willing. I had to win the bet – I wasn’t ready to go home yet!

We picked our first target area. It was a small section of conveyer, leading to a stacking mechanism. Boards were flowing into guides that looked like “funnels.” Some were getting stuck, and operators were stopping the line to correct the situation and adjusting the guides.

We built a plan to shut the line down for two hours to find the center of the stacking mechanism, make one of the guides parallel to the direction of travel, and remove the guide on the opposite side of the conveyer. We would skew rolls to drive the ceiling tiles to the remaining guide and then allow them to straighten out as they approached the stacker.

We communicated our plans and then shut down and locked out the line for safety. The team got to work and made all the changes. David came out to see what we were doing and poke some fun at me regarding our bet. He told me that my jet to corporate was waiting!

We finished and took our locks off the line. When the line started up, we noticed a significant improvement in the flow of the boards into the stacker. The team was convinced our work helped and started cheering. David came out of his office to see what was going on. His eyes widened. He couldn’t believe what a difference our small changes made. And, we had removed excess equipment from the line, which got in the way of his employees.

David told me that my flight would have to wait. We had to do this work all over the line. For the rest of the week, we did similar work around the line. By week’s end, we had removed more than a dozen guides from the line and everything was flowing better than anyone remembered.

David told me he was disappointed that I didn’t remove more guides from the line and he was willing to have me come back in the future to complete my work. He’d even make my travel arrangements for me.