Gemba in the Big City
Four years into the Lean Transformation at Armstrong World Industries, we started expanding Lean beyond our manufacturing operations. Forward-thinking leaders came up with an idea to help us better understand the customer experience from the inside. That is, we would conduct a “Customer Experience” Value Stream Mapping event, with the Gemba being the place where the customer interacted with our ceiling products the most – at their job site(s).
We built a team at our biggest plant in the Northeast, consisting of manufacturing, marketing, sales, and engineering. We planned to visit installations, distribution centers, and contractors who carried and installed our products. After laying out the plan on the first day of the event, we split into three travelling teams: Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington DC. I was the facilitator for Team NYC.
We drove up after the first day’s meeting and had a nice dinner. Then, as we planned out our day of visits, I was assigned to a team of three that was going to visit with a distributor and contractor on a job site in the middle of the city.
Our day in the Gemba started at 3 am at the receiving dock for the distributor. This was the assigned time for ceiling tile and grid deliveries. The drive from the manufacturing plant was approximately 3 hours, so they needed to leave around midnight. If they got stuck in traffic, the workers would wait on the dock until the materials arrived. We got there early and the shipment arrived late, so it was a tough start to our morning. We quickly realized this was an opportunity for us to improve the customer experience. Hearing about it didn’t make the same impact as seeing it in person, at 3 am!
After watching the materials being unloaded and stored, we noticed the contractor was ignoring the advice of how high the materials could be stacked. The reason? He didn’t have the floor space to store things two levels high, so he had to store things three levels high. This caused greater damage potential and gave us another critical improvement opportunity we could deal with at the factory.
Once we left the distributor’s site, we drove into the heart of New York City to see an installation in progress. In this case, we saw our product being taken off standard 4-foot by 4-foot pallets and restacked on 2-foot by 4-foot pallets, which was a major loss in productivity. The reason? The contractor elevators in the building were too narrow for the standard pallets to fit. Again, this was another opportunity to improve our customer’s experience.
We found many other things we could help with during our visit to New York City and the other teams found similar improvement opportunities in Philadelphia and Washington DC. When we reconvened at the plant, we prioritized all the ideas and then made plans to address the top issues.
Over the years, the company made many of the improvements to the process we identified as issues during our visits to customer sites. In addition, the manufacturing organization had a clearer understanding of how their customer used their products and were able to convey it in a more compelling way to their employees. Armstrong remains the producer of choice for ceiling solutions, due to their continued focus on improving the customer experience. The lesson here is to go see your customers, in their space, in their time, if you want to truly understand what they value the most. Go to Gemba!