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How do You Implement Lean Manufacturing?

Writer's picture: C. Lloyd BrownC. Lloyd Brown

In the last blog, Jon and Connie talked to us about the culture aspect of becoming a Lean manufacturer. If you haven't had the opportunity to read about their journey into a massive culture change, you can do that here. In this blog, we'll continue our interview and dive into the procedural details behind the change.


Connie

The biggest change when implementing Lean, was that we moved from a push process to a pull process. Nothing happens until a customer does something. That was a big change because previously we were making large quantities of various products based on our best guess.


Moving from that to “just in time” manufacturing can be scary, and in fact, without a process it could be a disaster. That’s why we also implemented a Kanban system for parts and products. (The links for Just In Time and Kanban explain them fully if you're unfamiliar with those processes.)


If we wait for a customer to order, how do we know we’ll have the parts to make it? Well, with Kanban, you create markers to indicate when you are going to run out of something and should make or order more. You identify how many parts you’ll need to make, say, 50 of something. You put a marker on part #48 so that when you get down to that one you know it’s time to get more.


We even do that with the administrative part of the business. When we get down to “this many” rolls of toilet paper there’s a card that you bring to the person who orders office supplies, so they’ll know it’s time to order more, rather than just ordering a package every time so you don’t risk running out.


We do it with pens and other office supplies too because when we started looking for waste everywhere, we realized we had more pens than we could probably use in a lifetime!


Jon

We had so many pens! It was crazy. In production, we used to carry several months of inventory and when we ordered parts to produce something, we produced a lot of it because we were working with an assembly line.


Now we carry less inventory, which means we aren’t hoarding inventory we aren’t going to use right away. That means that parts that can be used in multiple products are available when we need them.


Another benefit of just-in-time manufacturing is increased quality control and less waste. Before, if we made 1000 of an item and discovered a defect, we then had to disassemble and remake 1000 products. All it takes is one person in an assembly line to do one thing incorrectly to ruin an entire batch.


Now we’ve moved away from the assembly line to single cell assembly. That’s when each person is trained to perform each step of assembly for a product on their own. That’s one person doing the process from start to finish, so instead of making a thousand of something, that person might make fifty. If there’s an issue and that person is doing one of the steps incorrectly, that’s fifty items you have to remake.


We’ve been trying to get our vendors to do the same thing: don’t carry extra inventory, carry just-in-time inventory. That way if we get a piece from a vendor that’s incorrect, we don’t have to wait three months for them to order us a new one.


This benefits them as well, because we’re putting in orders frequently and consistently, so they know what to expect from us. When you have inventory sitting on your shelves for six months, that’s money that could be put to better use during that time.


Connie

Oh yes, the assembly line. We ripped out the assembly line in October and instituted single cell assembly. That was probably the biggest procedural change that we made instituting Lean, and it was what saved us during the pandemic.


Because we moved to a pull system and knew exactly how much of everything we had, we could fill orders quickly. With the way it was before, what if we had 500 of something that no one ordered, or what if there was a part inside those 500 products that we needed for a product people WERE ordering?


When the pandemic hit, people were ordering air filters like crazy. With the new systems we had in place it was easy to scale because all we had to do was keep doing things the way we were, but with more people. In the beginning of the pandemic we weren’t allowed to bring on new people, of course, so we just worked as fast as we could.


Jon

Covid could have been a disaster for our company if we hadn’t implemented Lean. When covid hit, air purifier orders went through the roof. Out of nowhere we had to 5x our production. Had we not started Lean a few months before and started producing quality product as quickly and efficiently as possible, we wouldn’t have made it.


Once we were able, we hired more people to scale the process and it was so seamless, all we had to do was teach more people to do what we were already doing.


Every day was Black Friday. That sounds like a business owner’s dream but in reality, for actual Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it would take us two weeks to catch up and recover from that and I would be putting out massive fires all day long.


Now it takes about two days, and no fires. If we had been manufacturing the way we were before, we would have never caught up after covid.


At that time, we were making fourteen different models of air purifiers. When we were producing one model at a time with our assembly line process, it took forever to build them all. With single cell, it’s simultaneous. You can have fourteen different stations working on all fourteen models at the same time. Our only bottleneck was our supply chain.


We’ve shared these processes with our vendors so they’ll understand our inventory needs. They appreciate our predictability; our bills are paid on time, and everything is planned out because we don’t over-purchase. It’s more consistent for them to receive regular orders. We helped them become more efficient to help us be more efficient.


Connie

It has definitely affected our vendors. One day a team member was opening up parts to make a product and said, “I really wish this didn’t come in a plastic bag inside the box. There’s no value add, no reason for it to be inside plastic when it’s already inside cardboard.” So we asked the vendor not to put plastic wrap on them and they agreed. That saved the vendor the time it took to put the part in plastic wrap, and it saved us the time taking the plastic off. That improvement saved far more than two seconds. When you think, “what bothers me in this process I’m doing right now?” That’s when you find ways to improve.


Lloyd

This interview is such a great example of how Lean permeates every part of your business when you implement it. In fact, Lean spread out and into their vendors’ operations too! I’m sure you remember our blogs about Compounding. Lean is an amazing example of compounding at work, every hour of every working day... and that's what we're going to dive into next!

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