Moving Mountains … of Paint

During my corporate career at Armstrong World Industries, I gained a reputation for many things: Lean zealot, “Conveyer Whisperer,” and someone who was willing to take on any challenge anywhere I was needed.

One of our lines at the Macon, Georgia plant was experiencing a large amount of downtime and scrap and I was sent to work with a team to resolve the issue. Many other engineers had been working on various improvements on the line with little effect. What did I know that they didn’t?

My first day at the plant, I met with the management team for the production line. They gave me a tour and showed me all the various issues they had been dealing with and how the other improvement projects were not helping.

As I walked around, I spoke with hourly employees who were dealing with these headaches. They were frustrated and seemed on the verge of giving up. When we passed a paint booth, I noticed the ceiling tiles were rotating and vibrating as they were going through the booth on cables.

I asked if this was a normal situation and was assured it was and it wasn’t causing any trouble on the line. It didn’t look right to me. I walked further down the line and sure enough, these turned tiles were causing problems in later processes.

I requested a small team to work with for the next day or so and was assigned a group of experienced hourly technicians. After reviewing principles of flow and conveyer alignment - I was the “conveyer whisperer” after all - we walked through the line and looked for areas that were violating the principles of flow.

We went to the paint booth and saw clear evidence of violations of flow principles. We walked around the booth trying to find what could be causing the trouble. Then we saw it – a “mountain” of paint that had built up on the floor, just after the paint booth. The cables were travelling through and hanging up through the pile of paint. Each cable was being slowed down at a different speed, which caused the boards to rotate and vibrate through the booth.

I asked my team how often the paint build-up was cleaned. They looked at me like I was from Mars. The answer was never. We immediately cleaned the paint build-up, reattached the cable washers (they were designed to spray water on the cables and capture any paint in a drip pan, rather than the floor) that had been disconnected many years before, and then implemented an audit to verify paint booth cleanliness and cable washer operational effectiveness.

Once we did our work, the boards stayed straight and square through the booth, the quality of paint coverage improved, and downtime was greatly reduced. How do you convince a group to change their habits? Show them results, of course.