Process Improvement Partners
Helping you grow your profits through sustained process improvement
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Stories of Leadership, Lean, and Learning

Posts in Operations
Diving into the Deep End

Armstrong World Industries was forced to open a mineral wool plant, in response to the loss of a critical supplier of this vital raw material for ceiling tile manufacture. Because of this, they relied on more outside vendors to design and build the plant than they were comfortable with. They had never spun molten stone (slag) into fibers before and therefore couldn’t use their experience to reduce the potential for errors and inefficiencies in their process.

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My First True Gemba Walk

I started my career as an industrial engineer for Thomasville Furniture in North Carolina. My initial responsibilities included warehouse barcoding support and veneer plant projects. For the warehouse, I had to learn how barcodes were used to inventory, ship, and receive finished furniture from the various plants in the network. In the veneer plant, I was to conduct time and work studies and also identify improvement projects.

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The Bottleneck

I met Andrew Koenig, the CEO of CITY Furniture, at a virtual Lean conference during the pandemic. We immediately hit it off, and he invited me to help strengthen the Kaizen culture at his company.

For two years, I facilitated Kaizen events on a monthly basis. It never ceased to amaze me at the number of improvements and breakthroughs that could be accomplished in a company that has been living Lean and continuous improvement for many years. More than that, the energy of team members was inspiring and infectious. I was warmly greeted by associates on every trip and many of them proudly showed off prior improvements and how they were sustaining the gains from our Kaizen events.

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An Unlucky Break

Critical problems seem to happen over a holiday weekend when there is less coverage. For me, Thanksgiving provided many challenges. Early in my career, I had to come into the ceramic tile factory the day after Thanksgiving to supervise a crew trying to clear a jam in the kiln. Many years later, a water main in St. Helens Oregon broke and shut down the ceiling tile plant. Once again, I was the one covering, and had to respond quickly and deal with a near disaster.

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Three Principles for Funding

During my time living on the west coast, I wanted to give back to the community. Many of the staff at the St. Helens, Oregon plant participated in some way or another with the United Way of Columbia County. I was intrigued. I had participated in many United Way Days of Caring during my time in Pennsylvania.

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Plant Reliability Rollout – the Story of Mobile

I was a corporate industrial engineer at Armstrong World Industries. From time to time, I was given projects that impacted all facilities around the world. John, our manufacturing VP, was hired from an outside company. He was determined to have an accurate measure of performance, to compare facilities, and identify the highest value opportunities for improvement and investment.

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When You Want Something Done Right – Outsource It

I was asked to create a discrete event simulation program for a planned factory expansion many years ago at Armstrong World Industries. What is that, you may ask? Basically, it’s a computer model of a process as it operates. It tries to mirror the behavior of the process, allowing the user to try various “what if” scenarios, such as adding capacity, downtime, resources, or speed. Having not built any simulations since my college days, I started doing research on options and whether or not I should try to build it myself or hire an outside vendor.

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Pick It Up and Move It

I was an early Lean practitioner at Armstrong World Industries. I’d spend a week with a production and maintenance team on a production line, helping them implement improvements to safety, quality, productivity, and customer service. At the end of the week, we’d give a tour of our changes. Because of our numerous successes, I was requested to help many of our manufacturing sites around the world.

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If you can’t stand the heat, get out!

I was the Industrial Engineering manager at a ceramic tile factory in western New York for two years. During that time, I participated in many improvement projects. As a member of staff, I was responsible for various administrative and plant coverage duties. One of the most critical responsibilities I had was holiday coverage for the tile firing and curing process.

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How do you measure knowledge?

If you produce a physical product, it’s easy to see things being created. You can count them, measure them, and identify the cost to produce them. But what happens when you create knowledge or a new product idea. How do you measure your output? More importantly, how do you measure your effectiveness and identify when you need help?

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The Vortex

Sometimes we don’t see what’s right in front of us. We just do what we do and deal with the problems that inevitably arise.

I facilitated a Kaizen event for a non-profit. Contributions were declining significantly. After taking a Gemba walk through the process, we identified the need to improve donor engagement. It was taking up to two months to acknowledge the highest value donations. No wonder donors were leaving in droves. Recognition was slow and not meaningful.

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Saving Is Not Saving

We were building a ceiling tile manufacturing plant in Russia. Like most projects, the engineering team was directed to save money, as long as it didn’t negatively impact safety or productivity. As most were unfamiliar with doing business in Russia, they used their experience with known vendors to acquire equipment for the plant. If there wasn’t enough capacity to fill equipment needs, the project team worked with local consultants to identify the “best” options for equipment purchases.

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We Won the Battle but Lost the War

During my corporate career, we identified a critical gap in our safety training system. There wasn’t a good way to ensure traveling engineers, scientists, and technicians were compliant for annual safety training requirements. We had to get everyone immediately compliant and then develop a system for annual recertification.

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Let’s See How Things Go

During my tenure as Production Manager at a ceiling tile plant in Oregon, I implemented strict rules around changeovers: No one is allowed in the breakroom during a changeover without Team Manager approval; Everyone is available to help during the changeover; Everyone is at their stations when the line is ready to start up; One Best Way changeover procedures are followed to the letter. No deviations. The procedures were developed by the technicians. There was no reason not to follow them.

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It’s Better to Beg Forgiveness than Ask Permission

In 1998, I was invited to Hoogezand, the Netherlands, to help a team make improvements to their ceiling tile production line. Little did I know it would be the longest Kaizen event in my life. I had been to the plant three months before and identified significant changeover time reduction potential. It was time to put my money where my mouth was. In advance of the trip, we identified members of the team and the need for an interpreter. I didn’t speak Dutch and still don’t. We’d have two weeks to work on the line and were to coordinate with the Production Manager any time we needed to shut the line down to work on or test the equipment.

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Call 911

In 2005, a ceilings manufacturing plant on the West Coast was experiencing high downtime rates. I was asked to come to the plant and run a Kaizen event to identify the impact of downtime on the plant.

I was given a small team consisting of four production technicians, two mechanics, one electrician, one engineer, and one supervisor. Our mission wasn’t to solve the specific mechanical or electrical downtime problems, but rather to understand why the response to and recovery from downtime took so long. This was a new concept for the plant and for me, but we felt we were up to the challenge.

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