The Unexpected Benefit
It was my first Kaizen event with a new client in Florida. They make building products for the residential market. On my first visit with Brian, my sponsor, I saw many opportunities to apply Kaizen to and made my recommendations. He picked his current pain point, which was labor utilization at the end point of a multi-line operation. The goal of the Kaizen event would be to balance work across all lines and require less labor to support the operation. The people wouldn’t be sent home, they would be redeployed to other parts of the plant where overtime was being used to keep things running.
Brian was the plant manager and Jeff, our team leader, was the operations manager. We built the team with top players, as this first Kaizen event would set the tone for future efforts. We wanted a strong win. Our goals were challenging. Besides improving safety, we needed to reduce labor required by 30 percent.
Messaging to the team had to be supportive and reassuring. No one would lose their jobs by reducing labor required. I worked with Brian and Jeff to write the charter and communicate to the team in ways to strengthen their message and not make them fearful they would be blamed for labor reductions.
Our first day included a Gemba walk to a very hot production floor. It must have been 100 degrees. We watched team members do a lot of waiting and a few quality and cleaning tasks, except at one critical moment: When the pallet was full, it had to be wrapped, strapped, labeled, and removed. All while the next products were coming through the line (albeit at a very slow rate).
There were a few other tasks that took time away from the line, including a quality check every 30 minutes. This required the operator(s) to take a long part from the line, bring it to a saw, cut it to a specified length, and verify density of the product through a weighing process. Operators didn’t like this task for many reasons, including the transport of the product, time away from the line (which could happen at the moment packaging had to occur), and the use of the saw in the hot environment.
When we finished our Gemba walk, the team returned to the meeting room to brainstorm ways to improve things and simplify tasks. They prioritized three activities they thought could reduce effort and labor required: housekeeping, palletization, and product sampling and quality checks.
The housekeeping team created a cart with everything operators needed to maintain and keep the lines clean. All supplies were provided that typically would be searched for during the day, reducing time and effort for all operations.
The palletization team created locations for supplies, developed simpler palletizing methods, and created standard work that greatly reduced the time it took to wrap and palletize the product. This not only simplified things, but also reduced the stress the operators felt when finalizing each pallet of material.
The product sampling and quality check team wanted to reduce the time and effort it took to cut and weigh parts of the finished product. They experimented with relocating the saw, possibly buying a new saw or two, and buying another scale or two. All of those ideas would have helped. But then, someone asked, “Why do we need to cut the product at all?” The light bulb came on. What if they didn’t, and could weigh the finished product, without losing the critical quality information necessary for certification?
Inspired, they found an extra scale and weighed dozens of products, verifying the correlation between their results and the prior method. They met with the quality manager to align around their approach. He helped them build a plan to ensure their method could work. With the statistics confirming their method, the team had to come up with a simple way for operators to do the sampling without having to leave the line.
They mounted a scale to a cart that had height adjustments. Once they configured it properly, the cart could be brought up to the stack of products and one piece (up to 30 feet long) was slid onto the scale to get a quick reading. If too heavy for one person (identified in the standard work), they would get assistance from another operator or the section lead.
This new method turned a messy, hot, heavy, and minutes-long process into mere seconds. It was a huge win. But, even more than that, the need to destroy finished product had been eliminated, saving many hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.
Why didn’t they come up with this solution before the Kaizen, you may ask? We only know what we know. For the many years of the prior approach, no one had ever questioned it. People just did what they had been trained to do. Kaizen opened our eyes to possibilities and gave us the latitude to try new things. And because of this, we won.