What do you do when you’re the Industry Leader – you Improve!

Armstrong World Industries is the global leader in suspended ceilings. That might not seem like much to you, but when you sell over a billion square feet of ceiling tile and the grid to suspend it every year, you’re making a big impact in the construction and housing market.

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.

A Little Dab Will Do Ya

In 1991, I was offered a line supervisor position at Armstrong’s ceiling grid factory in Franklin Park Illinois. I had been working as a staff Industrial Engineer at Thomasville Furniture in Thomasville North Carolina, so the position would be my first operations supervisory role.

With Persistence and Desire, Anything is Possible

I started working for Thomasville Furniture out of college as an Industrial Engineer. Born and raised in Maryland and working in North Carolina, I was called “Yankee,” and I had to prove myself worthy every day. I felt like I was up for the challenge. My mother reminded me I was born south of the Mason Dixon line, but it didn’t seem to matter to North Carolina natives.

A Tasty Breakthrough

A North American ceilings manufacturer was closing a plant that produced a product no other plant in the division could manufacture, due to specialized, but obsolete technology. They had a customer who was buying millions of square feet of this product annually. They knew they had to come up with an alternative the customer would approve of and keep buying after the old plant was closed.

Breaking Through - The Edge

In 2005, I was asked to help a team reduce the changeover time of a painting operation at a ceiling tile manufacturing plant in Oregon. The approach I used was SMED – Single Minute Exchange of Die. The goal was to reduce the existing changeover time by 50% or more, while improving the safety of the work.

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