Kaizen Success Stories
Real Manufacturing Results. One Kaizen at a Time
Explore real-world Kaizen success stories showing how manufacturing teams solved critical problems, improved performance, and created sustainable results.
We're Never Going Back!
How a 47-year veteran helped transform a tool room and inspired a team to take ownership of its future.
Four Teams, One System
How a cross-functional team transformed a complex business process into an integrated system in just three and a half days.
From 46 Minutes to 15: A Huddle Transformation
How a team redesigned its weekly construction huddle in a single day and discovered a better way to manage its work.
Hidden Capacity Was Sitting Above Their Heads
Sometimes your biggest capacity expansion isn't a new building—it's hiding inside the one you already have. Discover how a 5S Kaizen transformed a cluttered maintenance shop into an organized workplace while creating new manufacturing capacity and inspiring employees to take ownership of the improvements.
What Are You Going to Screw Up Today?
A historic winter storm shut down the plant, stranded team members, and cut a four-and-a-half-day Kaizen nearly in half. Most people would have postponed the event. Instead, the team cut changeover time by nearly 50% and turned one skeptic into one of its biggest supporters.
From 330 Feet to 4 Feet in 3 Days
A manufacturing team spent years living with an inefficient quality testing process. In just three days, they reduced travel distance from 330 feet to 4 feet, cut processing time in half, and uncovered a solution worth millions in additional capacity.
Butt Ugly by Friday
Kaizen is messy. It should be so accessible that anyone can do it. So, I use a phrase that I was taught many years ago, to make it okay to try and fail and learn quickly. The phrase? Butt Ugly by Friday!
Shining Like a Star
Kaizen events can be life-changing for team members. This is the story of Steve, who grew so much during the week that his co-workers almost didn’t recognize him.
Hope is a Precious Commodity
I’m passionate about helping teams improve the reliability of their processes, using basic yet effective techniques to immediately boost the performance of their manufacturing lines. The best part is that the team can see and feel the results, and the techniques I teach are easy to learn and transferable to other lines and processes within the facility.
Simpler is Safer, Lighter, and Better
I was in Florida, working with a residential building products manufacturer on our second Kaizen event together. This time, we focused on improving materials delivery to the production lines. The tasks were challenging, physically demanding, and slow, leading to high turnover in the material handling position.
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.
Aligned Area Owners are the glue that holds things together – Part 2
I took a site visit to a new client that runs a paper mill in Oklahoma. After a solid day of meeting the leadership team and touring the site, we agreed on a series of Kaizen events, starting with two 5S events, one on the paper mill side of the plant, and the other one on the converting side. Talk about night and day! In Part I, we saw what happens when the area owner wasn’t aligned. This story is about an aligned area owner.
My first VSM for a non-manufacturing process
I applied Lean thinking exclusively to manufacturing processes for many years of my career. I wasn’t able to stretch my thinking beyond what I could see – the production of a physical product and how it impacts the customer, business, and employees. I conducted Value Stream Mapping (VSM – a strategic planning approach based on the view of the customer) sessions for many manufacturing facilities and we were able to identify countless opportunities to significantly improve safety, productivity, quality, and customer service. I developed a reputation for my ability to engage teams and facilitate complex sessions.
Never tell someone their baby’s ugly
I have been influenced by many pop-culture references over the years. During my Kaizen events, words or phrases come out of my mouth that are my attempt to make the situation relatable to the team and make them feel better about the situation they’re in and the problem they’re facing. I want them to realize it’s not the first time something bad happened in business and their problems aren’t insurmountable. I wasn’t always this way – maybe you can learn from my mistakes!
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.