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Nobody’s perfect. Anyone who tries to tell you that you are probably wants something from you. However, the inability to achieve perfection doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continuously improve. That is the concept behind Lean Manufacturing, a process that eliminates “waste,” which is defined as anything that adds cost, but not value, to a process or product.
Dr. F. Frank Chen, Lutcher Brown Distinguished Chair in Advanced Manufacturing at The University of Texas, San Antonio, and Bob Rosania, chief executive officer at Ehmke Manufacturing Co. Inc., presented, “Lean in Action: Practical Strategies for a More Efficient Shop” at the Emerging Textiles Conference, held in Orlando recently. The session outlined the concept and its history, and the speakers shared real-life examples of Lean’s implementation in advanced textiles.
How does it work?
Lean Manufacturing is about understanding waste vs. value, the latter of which is what the customer truly wants from the company. Lean is the elimination on non-value-added activities and focusing on “true value” for the customer. Business owners should ask themselves: Are you adding value, or are you just “firefighting”?
Some might bristle at the Lean concept, pointing to how busy they are as proof they are adding value. But Lean Manufacturing doesn’t try to suggest workers are lazy. “It’s not people not working hard. It’s because we do a lot of activities we think the customers value but actually they do not,” says Chen.
Think of the steps for making a hamburger: What really adds value to the customer, based on what someone is actually willing to pay for? High-quality meat and buns are value-added. Water leaking from an old faucet in the kitchen is annoying, but it’s a non-value-adding activity for making a burger. The cost of updating a menu with new items is a non-value-adding activity, but a necessary one.
Common types of waste are:
- Motion: Any movement of people, materials or machines that don’t add value to the product.
- Over-processing: Putting more work or effort into the product than is valued by the customers
- Inventory: Any unnecessary storage or accumulation of raw materials, supplies, work-in-progress or finished goods
- Transport: Any excessive or unnecessary movement or materials or work-in-process (WIP) that does not add value to the product
- Waiting: For materials, inspection, instructions, completion of previous step, etc.
- Overproduction: Producing more work than required or prior to it being required. (This is the worst kind of waste, because it causes other waste and obscures the need for improvement.)
- Defects: Refers to all processing required creating a defect or mistake and the additional work required to correct it.
- Under-utilization of human talent: While this is a Toyota-specific kind of waste, both Chen and Rosania highlighted its significance; it is a result of not placing people where they can (and will) use their knowledge, skills and abilities to the fullest
The two main pillars of Lean Manufacturing are continuous improvement (Kaizen in Japanese) and respect for people. While the latter is often assumed, it is crucial to get Lean right: Without respect for people, Chen says a Lean process will not succeed.
A business’s experience
Rosania’s company started its Lean journey in 2006, and he says continuous improvement has been a “key phrase” in the past two decades. A quote from Vince Lombardi embodies the principles of Lean Manufacturing for Rosania: “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.”
To demonstrate the importance of respecting people, Rosania emphasized that Lean Manufacturing was not about physically leaning over employees and harping “work faster!” “No one told our sewing machine operators how to sew better,” he says.
Instead, the process was about eliminating buckets of waste between operations to make the business more productive, which helps everyone. Ehmke’s Lean Manufacturing journey was “an organized war on waste,” he says.
The company began with combining, and then establishing, a standard sequence of steps in its manufacturing process. They identified examples of waste such as redundant inspections, excess forms and supplies, searching for paperwork, waiting for instruction and others.
Ehmke will hold Kaizen Events as part of its Lean Manufacturing processes. For example, if Ehmke wants to reorganize the shipping department to make it more efficient, the company will take a cross-functional team of employees from sales, finance, engineering, shipping, shop floor supervising and the company’s vice president offline for three days and they are focusing only on that Kaizen event.
“After those three days, that problem’s never going to come up again until you want to improve it again,” says Rosania. If you focus on the same task for a couple of hours each day for a few weeks, “you don’t dedicate as much time and effort to it, and then a month or two from now, you have the same issues all over again. This way, if you commit the Kaizen team to attack a problem … I assure you that after three days, you’re going to have the best solution.”
The results? In the first year of implementation, Ehmke saw a 48 percent increase in top-line revenue, 110 percent increase in EBITDA (which measures earnings before the impact of financing costs, taxes, and certain non-cash accounting charges), and netted two full-time employees. Over time, the company has experienced a 50 percent reduction of inventory with four times the amount of business.
For anyone interested in learning more about Lean Manufacturing, two foundational books were published in the 1990s by Womack & Jones on Lean Manufacturing’s principles: The Machine That Changed the World (1990), and Lean Thinking (1992), which Rosania calls a “must-read.”