My First Process Improvement Project

I graduated from Virginia Tech and went to work as a corporate industrial engineer for Thomasville Furniture in North Carolina. Harriet was my first mentor. She was working on a project to improve the productivity of one of our bedroom furniture manufacturing facilities.

I was totally inexperienced supporting manufacturing operations, but Harriet could tell I was curious and interested in helping her in any way she needed support. After a few trips to the plant, she decided to use my help organizing a wood drying and storage facility that supplied the vital materials to the plant. The wood was received from an outside source and had to be dried for a few days before the plant could process it into bed rails, canopies, dresser drawers, and other furniture components.

It must have been over 100 degrees when we took our first walk through the Butler Building (the storage facility). Inside was a massive amount of wood stacked up all over the dirt floor. There didn’t seem to be any organization to it. Two workers were sitting on a stack of wood talking about the latest NASCAR race.

I told Harriet I wanted to spend time in the building and convinced her to let me go “solo” for the rest of the week. The next morning, I showed up at 7 am. The two workers, Sam and Joe, were surprised to see me. I was an engineer who was willing to hang out with them. More than that, I was a “Damn Yankee” from up North (their words, not mine).

I got to know Sam and Joe and followed them around as they did their jobs. Whenever they got a call on their walkie-talkie, they’d jump on their forklifts and dig out requested loads of wood and bring them to the main plant. They dealt with two key problems:

1.      The forklifts would dig ruts into the dirt floor, making it difficult and dangerous to maneuver through the building.

2.      Different species of wood were stored in the same aisles of the building, forcing the workers to move big stacks of wood to get to what they needed. Oftentimes, it would take many minutes to find the stack of wood they were looking for. Sometimes, the stack would fall over and they’d have to pick everything up and restack it.

At the end of the week, I reviewed my findings with Sam, Joe, and Harriet. They confirmed these two issues were hampering their work and reducing their productivity. Together, we came up with a plan to pave the floor and organize the wood by species.

Within a month, we reorganized the building and paved it. We put up signs on the walls indicating storage locations. I visited the building many times to verify it was helping Joe and Sam do their job more safely and productively.

A month after we paved the floor, I stopped by and asked Joe and Sam if things were still working the way they wanted. They were proud to show me they had made a few improvements of their own that made things even easier. It was a win. Then, they told me that even though I was a “Yankee,” I wasn’t a “Damn Yankee” anymore. Now I was a “Good Yankee.”

Sometimes You Have to Let Things Go

I was a supervisor at a small ceiling grid plant in Franklin Park Illinois. I could see all the way from one end of the factory to the shipping docks at the other end from my second-floor office.

After less than one year on the job, the company announced a joint venture with a competitor and our factory was scheduled to be shut down in the coming months. I put on a brave face with my crew to keep them safe and productive during the final months of operations.

As we got closer to the end, most orders had been transferred to our other plants. I was always looking for constructive things to keep our employees occupied. I think I was trying to keep myself busy too.

One day, I noticed a large pile of steel tooling sitting on pallets in an unused corner of the plant. The tooling looked like it hadn’t been used in years. It was covered with many inches of dust. Doing some research, I found out that it was for products that hadn’t been produced at the plant in many years. This was one of those things that was easier to avoid than deal with.

I gathered a group of my most willing crew members and we had a disposal “party.” We brought a large scrap metal dumpster over to the tooling, and proceeded to throw, chuck, drop, and sling the tooling into it. “Clang, clang, clang,” went the tooling as it hit the sides of the container. The more we did this, the happier we felt. It was almost as if we were releasing our stress about the factory being closed.

We took a break for lunch and I went into the office, extremely proud of my team of “disposal engineers”. I stopped by to talk with our maintenance and engineering manager and invited him out to review our progress. As we reached the dumpster, he exclaimed, “What have you done? We can’t just throw this away without taking it off our books – they’re going to kill me back in corporate!”

I didn’t know what to say. He was right. We had an obligation to account for everything in the plant before disposing of it. As I attempted to come up with a plan to retrieve the tooling from the dumpster, he said to me, “Oh what the heck. What’s done is done!” And with that, he started throwing the tooling into the dumpster with a “clang, clang, clang!”

Why Would You Treat Your People that Way?

Our fiberglass ceiling tile plant in Ohio got their board stock from another company (let’s call them Vendor X). They had some problems with the quality of some of the boards they received. As Vendor X was a critical partner, they decided to co-host a Kaizen event to eliminate the quality problems.

The first day, we met at the ceiling tile plant and laid out the issues we were experiencing. Walking through the receiving and production areas, we identified several quality issues that could be rectified from the plant’s internal processes. We then agreed to walk the Vendor X process on the second day.

Walking through Vendor X’s factory, we saw many impressive safety ideas we could emulate back at our factories. One was the painting the bottom stair red, so everyone would know it was the last stair before reaching the ground. This idea was implemented after they learned some of their people were missing the last step and had tripped or fallen. Once implemented, these issues went away.

The process to make fiberglass panels was fascinating and somewhat like the process to make mineral fiber ceiling tiles. We learned how molten fiberglass was spun into fibers and formed into long panels. Then, the panels were cut to finished lengths and stacked at the end of the line. Then, I saw something I wasn’t expecting. Instead of a barrier for the panels to hit and be stacked, they were hitting a worker.

This worker was taking the blow of the panel on his waist or stomach and letting it bounce off and then drop into a stack in front of him. I asked if this was a temporary situation and was informed it was a “normal” job in the factory.

This company, which was known for its focus on safety, was clearly missing a huge opportunity to eliminate a safety risk. They told us they had tried to automate it in the past, but it didn’t work and their employees preferred the current method of stacking. I couldn’t believe it could be okay to put their people at risk like this. It was clear their Leadership Commitment didn’t reach to this area of their process. I can’t imagine people are still treated that way in their factory these many years later. But, when I am having a bad day, I think back to that tour and realize that someone is always having a worse day! The lessons here: 1. No matter how good you think you are, there is always room for improvement; 2. Put yourself in the position of your people; and 3. Even someone who says they’re “OK” with a current process deserves to have it improved, if possible.