Table of ContentsTable of Contents.....................................................................................................................1

Rockwell Collins Accelerates With Lean Engineering...........................................................2Streamlined product development processes cut cycle times, reduce time-to-market.

Average Isn’t Good Enough................................................................................................3-4Simply stated, manufacturers that aren’t continually improving are losing ground. VIBCO Vibrators has embraced the principles of lean to assure it remains in the game, not behind the pack.

How to Make it in America -- the Lean Way.......................................................................5-6Five questions with American Leather co-founder Bob Duncan.

Lessons From the Road: Sustaining Your 5S Efforts..............................................................65S too often is short lived, but these six steps can help keep it running smoothly.

How to Design a Lean Implementation So Failure is Guaranteed...................................7-8Three critical characteristics will help gauge your chances for success.

Safety Beyond Compliance.....................................................................................................9A ‘lean’ approach to safety builds a culture that engages the entire workforce in proactively seeking out and removing injury risks.

Lean Confusion................................................................................................................10-11It has been embraced, ignored, misunderstood and even derided, but lean’s proponents continue to exhort its value as a driver of operational excellence.

Lean for Machines............................................................................................................12-13Applying continuous-improvement strategies to maintenance can help your plant run like a well-oiled machine.

Don’t Let Size be a Lean Barrier............................................................................................14Small manufacturers have advantages when it comes to implementing lean.

IW | The Manufacturer’s Guide to Lean | 1

By Jonathan Katz

Rockwell Collins Inc. is in a race with global suppliers to ex-pand into emerging markets, such as Russia, China, India and Brazil. Diversifying into new markets has never been more im-portant for the aviation electronics and communication equip-ment manufacturer, with the United States and Europe clamp-ing down on defense budgets.

In late 2010 Rockwell made several announcements regard-ing agreements the company signed with China’s state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China to provide systems for Comac’s C919 aircraft. The company also is working with Russia’s Irkut Corp. to build the MS-21 commercial aircraft and is competing to provide technology for Brazil’s next-generation tanker platform, says Nan Mat-tai, Rockwell’s senior vice president of engineering and technology.

The global expansion means aerospace manufac-turers must make improving time-to-market a priority. One of the ways Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based Rockwell Col-lins has hastened the product-development process is through lean engineering. The company began its lean engineering initiative in the 2001-2002 timeframe. Rock-well adopted lean techniques being applied to its plant floors to standardize the engineering process.

“We standardize our processes into what I call a technical-consistent process,” Mattai says. “We standard-ize the major tools we utilize.” The company’s lean engineering system is called Core Process Optimization and includes an up-stream and downstream approach. That means the company fo-cuses on its pursuit and order-capture processes as well as how the design and development processes transition to manufac-turing, Mattai says.

Rockwell implemented common engineering tools that allow engineers to move across different business segments in a more streamlined fashion, Mattai says. Downstream the company in-troduced a “manufacturing introductory index” that helps tran-sition designs to the plant floor and a manufacturing readiness level that assesses where a product is in the development pro-

cess. So Level 1 may be simply a design idea, whereas Level 9 is a product realization.

“The manufacturing readiness level assesses how robust a design is for transition into the factory,” Mat-tai says. “So it looks at whether you’ve completed your qualification test, have you put the right infrastructure from a test-equipment standpoint in the factory, have the build operators been trained, have the technicians been trained, have you run a pilot line. It’s assessing those areas to evaluate your readiness for factory tran-sition.”

The lean engineering processes help Rockwell move engineers where they’re most needed, optimize re-search and development dollars and accelerate the engineers’ learning curve as they move from the gov-ernment side of the business to the commercial side,

Mattai says. The result has been an average cycle-time reduction of 20% to 30% across various projects over a three-year period, according to Mattai.

As part of the engineering team’s lean adoption, the com-pany also has implemented a variation of a “pull system.” That is, the engineers are closely aligned with internal and external cus-tomers to ensure they’re adhering to customer requirements. Some of this engagement occurs in customer labs, such as the Air Force Research Lab, or working with internal business units during their strategic-planning sessions to understand their needs, technology gaps and to infuse innovative thinking into their processes, Mattai says.

Rockwell Collins Accelerates With Lean EngineeringStreamlined product development processes cut cycle times, reduce time-to-market.

Rockwell Collins systems engineers perform tests in a Blagnac, France, lab on the crew alert system for the AgustaWest-land AW149 and AW101 helicopter programs.

Photo: Rockwell Collins

Nan Mattai:“We standardize our processes into what I call a technical-consis-tent process. We standardize the major tools we utilize.”

IW | The Manufacturer’s Guide to Lean | 2

By Jill Jusko

When your actions -- or more precisely lack of action -- make a grown man cry, it’s not a mo-ment you are likely to forget.

Karl Wadensten hasn’t forgotten. The president of privately held VIBCO Vibrators cites the incident as the catapult that launched his Wyoming, R.I.-based manufacturing company on its lean journey more than eight years ago.

The story goes like this: A salesman for a distributorship sells a large construction project on the benefits of purchasing products made by VIBCO, which manufactures electric, pneumatic and hydraulic vibrators for construction and industrial use. The salesman places the order with VIBCO, which provides him with a delivery date. VIBCO misses the delivery date. The manufac-turer then misses a second delivery date, which prompts the salesman to call VIBCO on a Friday afternoon, in tears. His reputation and likely his job are on the line, “and here we are not holding up our end,” says Wadensten. The construction firm is set to begin pouring concrete the follow-ing Monday.

Add to the story VIBCO’s typical manufacturing operations work week, which is 40 hours in four-and-a-half days. Thus the plant floor is largely cleared out by the time VIBCO’s customer service representative escalates the issue to Wadensten, who has been home sick. The feel-good ending is that VIBCO shipped out the order on that Friday, after rallying employees to return to the manufacturing facility and push through the order.

Except, of course, it wasn’t a feel-good ending. “It’s not one of those orders you can celebrate.

Average Isn’t Good EnoughSimply stated, manufacturers that aren’t continually improving are losing ground. VIBCO Vibrators has embraced the principles of lean to assure it remains in the game, not behind the pack.

VIBCO President Karl Wadensten (in orange) says the entire work-force embraces lean with the same ferocity he exhibits. Pursuit of those lean principles helped the company gain market share dur-ing the economic downturn.

Photo: VIBCO Vibrators

IW | The Manufacturer’s Guide to Lean | 3

Yes, we did it,” Wadensten says. “[But] we built no bridges with the relationship at this point. We did nothing for the brand of our company. It’s sad that we had to get to that point to get something out for somebody.”

Time for Self-Reflection

The high-profile incident drove Wadensten to take a good, hard look at his company, and what he saw frustrated him. The VIBCO president describes the mindset of his company back then as typical of U.S. manufacturers. “We were like an average manufacturer. We’d miss some [dates]; we’d make some,” he says. While the incident with the crying customer wasn’t the norm at his firm, he said it brought home some ugly truths about how good the company really was. And he recognized the need to improve.

Wadensten points out the competitive advantages U.S. man-ufacturers should bring to U.S. customers -- speed, agility, trust and relationships. Yet what he saw in his firm were unpredictable delivery at times and a lack of stable processes. On the plus side, he says VIBCO made a good product and boasted a dedicated staff, “but we weren’t communicating.”

That mindset no longer prevails at VIBCO. Indeed, exactly the opposite is true, and Wadensten credits the company’s embrace of lean for the change. He describes the lean transformation as more than waste elimination or process improvement (al-though both are important), but a cultural change as well that has turned the employees into a workforce of problem-solvers. “I have 85 problem-solvers,” he says. “They are intuitively fixing things all day long.”

It’s to the benefit of customers. VIBCO produces 1,300 dif-ferent products and 6,800 component pieces and can deliver within 48 hours “from scratch,” with same-day or next-day deliv-ery on standard products. Helping boost that velocity are lean practices such as quick changeovers. For example, changeovers on lathes that once took 75 to 90 minutes have been reduced to less than 10. Assembly times that took hours have been driven down to four minutes.

“We’re doing everything for the customer because at the end of the day, that’s what we’re in business for, that’s what pays our bills,” Wadensten says.

VIBCO’s embrace of lean benefits the company as well. Its benefits became especially obvious during the recent reces-sion. Wadensten points out that VIBCO didn’t lay off people dur-ing the downturn and worked 40-hour weeks. It spent money

on marketing and equipment, and grew market share by 16%. Plus, Wadensten says the time saved by eliminating non-value-added tasks freed time to develop new products, pointing out that VIBCO added 13 products and two new patents to its stable in recent years.

“Lean allows you more time to do things that are important to the customer and that they are willing to pay for. Then your company can grow and spend more time on R&D, spend more time on innovating, spend more time on process control, spend more time on material and information flow,” he says.

Lean Activist

Wadensten has become an ardent advocate for lean manu-facturing. (The manufacturer even hosts a radio show called “The Lean Nation.”) He has advice for manufacturers who sug-gest they don’t have time for lean. Make time, he says, “because the rest of the globe is making time for this, and you are going to get your clock cleaned.” Also, he says, don’t think you can “dip your toes” into lean, choosing small pieces to incorporate and think you’re done. That’s flavor-of-the-day thinking, Wadensten observes.

That’s not to suggest lean is easy. Some lean tools, such as single-piece flow, are counterintuitive to the batch production taught in engineering or business schools, Wadensten notes. Standard work may be another challenge. For VIBCO, however, the biggest early challenge was the “people” side of lean. Some employees were skeptical and didn’t believe their ideas would be heard. And while VIBCO strove to encourage what Waden-sten describes as peoples’ intuitive desire to share in the im-provement process, such collaboration requires that companies gain the trust of their employees -- trust that driving business improvements does not equate to driving away jobs. “Lean is a growth strategy, not a strategy to eliminate people,” he says.

More recently, VIBCO has encountered the challenge of sus-taining its lean efforts. In June 2010 lead times started stretching out, and a backlog began to develop. The company consulted with other manufacturers that had been pursuing lean journeys over longer periods and gained valuable perspective. Among the learnings: VIBCO’s lean journey had driven many point so-lutions, but an overall corporate strategy was lacking. The in-frastructure needed to sustain the gains was missing, in other words. That’s where VIBCO is concentrating much of its efforts today. Its backlog has largely disappeared and the company may soon improve on its same-day, next-day mantra.

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By Josh Cable

The story of Bob Duncan isn’t your typ-ical success story in manufacturing.

Duncan didn’t rise through the manu-facturing ranks as a salesman or a plant manager, nor did he invent anything. In fact, before Duncan and Sanjay Chan-dra co-founded luxury furniture maker American Leather in 1990, Duncan had no manufacturing experience whatso-ever (except for the time he spent in his father’s cotton gin as a kid).

After earning his master’s degree in manufacturing engineering, Duncan got a job as a consultant. In his two-year stint in the consulting world, Duncan learned about a business concept that changed his life: lean manufacturing.

For American Leather CEO and co-founder Bob Duncan, lean is the business model.

Today, Dallas-based American Leather is a $70 million business, and it has carved a niche by manufacturing and deliver-ing customized high-end upholstered furniture in three weeks or less. Duncan built the company on lean principles, so much so that he insists lean is his business model.

IndustryWeek recently asked Duncan about his company, the importance of lean principles and his commitment to manufacturing in America.

IW: Of all the possible business ideas you could pursue, why did you choose high-end furniture?

BD: One of the clients that I had con-sulted with was involved in the furniture industry. They own their own stores, and they had a factory, and in the course of doing some work for them as a consul-tant, I learned about the industry.

I learned that for the most part, the furniture industry from a manufacturing standpoint was still a very old approach to manufacturing -- it was more of a batch-based manufacturing mentality, and lead times were very long, even for domestic producers.

... So if you wanted to special-order a leather sofa, or for that matter a fabric sofa, probably the standard lead time for a domestic producer was 10 to 12 weeks. Eight weeks was really fast.

At the time, Italy was the dominant off-shore producer, subsidized by its govern-ment, and it was very price-competitive. Italian goods had an even longer lead time -- I’d say probably 16 weeks.

And so our whole idea was that we would apply Japanese manufacturing methods to an old-line industry, and al-low consumers to have a lot of choice -- everything made to order. So allow a consumer to come in and really custom-ize exactly what they’d like, and then ship dramatically faster than was the norm in the industry.

IW: So lean was the foundation of your business model?

BD: When we started our business, our mentality was, ‘If Toyota was going to build furniture, how would they do it?’ Lean was our business model and our business advantage from Day 1.

IW: How has the industry changed since you started American Leather?

BD: A lot of our domestic competitors now do a substantial amount -- if not all -- of their production offshore, mainly in China. And when you do that, obviously it affects the lead time. And typically that model isn’t really set up for custom or made-to-order business.

So they’re able to produce and sell a brown sofa at a much lower cost than they were four, five years ago in their do-mestic factories. But if you want a differ-ent color, if you want other options -- we have hundreds of options, and ultimately we have tens of millions of configurations that could be ordered from our factory at any given point in time -- that’s just not typically what a Chinese manufacturing model is going to be set up to do. They’re normally large, very efficient batches, but it’s going to be less custom-ordered.

So in some respects, we have less com-petition in our niche than we did say five to seven years ago.

IW: What is the biggest operational challenge that you face?

BD: We’re two or three times more ex-pensive than a mass-market price point because [the overall price of furniture] has gone down. And so we have to explain to a consumer why are we worth it.

To do that, the pressure on us hasn’t been so much to make things less expen-sively, but it’s been to offer more choice, more features, more options, more inno-vation. (Duncan notes that the company now offers 87 different leather colors and approximately 400 fabrics.)

So the complexity of our process today is easily two to three times higher than what we would’ve had say just five or six years ago.

... The manufacturing model certainly, but even just keeping track of all the data and getting everything right, is a huge challenge. The only way I think you can

For American Leather CEO and co-founder Bob Duncan, lean is the business model.

How to Make it in America -- the Lean WayFive questions with American Leather co-founder Bob Duncan.

IW | The Manufacturer’s Guide to Lean | 5

pull that off is through lean principles.

IW: Why is it so important for you to keep your manufacturing operations in the United States?

BD: There are two reasons. The first is for our business model, I think it would be very challenging to do it offshore. Cer-tainly to do it in China with the [shipping] times and the distance over water would be very challenging. Maybe you go to Mexico -- we’re not that far, we’re only 300 miles from the Mexican border -- so may-be you could replicate that in Mexico.

I grew up right on the border with Mexico, and it’s a different country. There are just challenges to doing business in a different country, and our model is ex-tremely demanding.

Plus I just think from a communication standpoint, from a supply chain stand-point, I think that there’s a good chance that it would kind of fall apart if you tried to replicate the model outside of our mar-ket, outside of the U.S. So from a business standpoint, I just think that there’s a very high likelihood that it would fall apart, that it wouldn’t be sustainable.

And the second reason is that I love

manufacturing, and I like to build things. I suppose some people would say you could buy your own factory somewhere, or have a strategic partner, but what’s been more typical in our industry is that they simply outsource and just contract with somebody else to build their prod-uct. For me personally, the passion and the enjoyment is making things. And so if I wasn’t making it, then why do it?

... Personally, this is only fun for me if I’m building my own products and build-ing them in the U.S. If I had to go offshore to do that, then I think I’d just like to do something different.

By Jamie Flinchbaugh

5S is probably the most common lean method applied. It is seemingly simple, progress is visual, and it involves everyone. However, the average lifespan of a 5S effort is a paltry one year. This is worse than doing nothing at all. Getting the organization to put this much effort into something and then not sustain it sends the unintended message that their efforts were not valuable. It is disrespectful.

So how do you sustain the 5S efforts? The following steps include actions to take during its installation, and afterward.

1. Communicate the purpose. The purpose of 5S is not safety, discipline, engagement, tidiness, being “tour-ready” or improving efficiency. Those are benefits, but the primary purpose is to be able to spot problems quickly. Look inside a NASCAR garage, and you are likely to see the cleanest garage you’ve ever seen. Why? Because if there is one drop of oil on the ground, I want to know about that problem right away. I don’t want to find the problem 10 laps from the finish line. I want to find that problem immediately. 5S, when done right, allows you to walk into any area and spot abnormalities easily. People need to have a clear understanding of the purpose to be able to make good decisions about its use.

2. Audit at the leadership level. Most organizations get some kind of audit and check into place. Some do it from inside the team, some from peers from other groups, and sometimes from a central team. Audits are inherently wasteful but necessary. The leadership of the organization also needs to do a form of audit. What’s the purpose of their audit? It’s less about accountability and more about finding systemic barriers to 5S success through direct observation and engagement. These are the problems that leaders must solve to help enable sustainable 5S.

3. Periodically change your audits. Audits can become stale and routine. When they do, they stop becoming effective. Change the audit methods periodically. You might change the scoring, change the roles, change the frequency or change the evaluation

method. Audits are about seeing what’s working and what’s not. Sometimes you need to look from a different angle. Changing how people view the process can help them see something they missed before, as well as prevent them from taking the audits for granted.

4. During a crisis, double your audits. If an area is in the midst of a crisis, be it production or quality or anything, what is the natural reaction? Do you drop the nice-to-have audits, or do you double

them? Dropping is the common reaction but the wrong one. During a crisis, you want your process as stable as possible so you can focus in on the challenge or abnor-mal condition causing the crisis. If 5S is truly connected to helping you maintain a stable process, then it is more important than ever to sustain it. Not only does drop-ping the audit during a crisis send the wrong message, it can make recovery even harder.

5. Escalate problems. If audits find breakdowns in the process but there are no consequences, then what’s the point? There must be an escalation process with consequences for failures. For example, one organization knows that if an area is out of control, they run the risk of serious problems. Therefore, if you fail one au-dit, you have a chance to correct things. But if you fail two, your area is shut down. And management must come to the area to figure out what is going so wrong and what to do about it. There must be an escalation of breakdowns in 5S for corrective action to be taken seriously.

6. Eliminate doors and drawers. You can only solve problems of an organization when you can find them. What’s the purpose of doors on cabinets and drawers? Primarily, to hide the clutter. We don’t want to hide the clutter —we want to eliminate it. Eliminat-ing doors and drawers help make observations and finding ab-normalities easier.

5S is relatively simple. But simple doesn’t always mean it’s easy. If 5S is worth doing, it’s worth doing the hard work of sustain-ing the efforts. Only then do you reap the gains from this invest-ment.

Contributing Editor Jamie Flinchbaugh is a co-founder and part-ner of the Lean Learning Center in Novi, Mich., and the co-author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean: Lessons from the Road.”

Lessons From the Road: Sustaining Your 5S Efforts

5S too often is short-lived, but these six steps can help keep it running smoothly.

IW | The Manufacturer’s Guide to Lean | 6

By Lonnie Wilson, founder, Quality Consultants

Let me share with you a scenario I have seen often -- way too often.

Someone from the C-suite, like the CEO, makes a visit to a nearby facility that claims it is “lean by every measure.” He is completely wowwed by the neatness, with a place for every-thing and everything in its place. He is amazed by the smooth flow of the product and the smooth flow of both the people and the information they need. He is further impressed with the “visual factory” depicting a high degree of control, resulting in excellent on-time performance with low levels of scrap and rework. Furthermore, he sees a workforce that is producing in-dependently at a pace his facility cannot even approach, yet it is working with both a high degree of comfort and confidence -- almost like a stress-free environment. In addition, the facility is doing this with some surprisingly unimpressive machinery.

And he is sold, absolutely, totally sold on this “lean thing.”He promptly gathers the rest of the C-suite and with con-

viction and passion declares that this “lean thing” is “exactly what we need.” With animation like he has never displayed, the CEO relays all of the wonderful things he has just seen. Soon he is surrounded by a group of impassioned followers. Quickly they devise a plan by appointing Juan as the lean leader. He is a midlevel manager who is proficient in many of these tech-niques and has been a vocal advocate of lean for years. Next they appoint three others to work with Juan -- the lean imple-mentation team -- and announce that Juan will unveil the lean implementation plan in 30 days. The team, on schedule, pub-lishes the implementation plan. They want to get everyone in-volved so their year-one objectives are to implement 5S and standard work across the entire corporation. Juan and his team teach all the facilities and spend a great deal of time traveling to each facility. Juan and his team not only introduce the initia-tive but also teach the tools. They then are required to follow up and assist the various locations as those workers implement the lean tools.

Does this sound good to you? Well . . . don’t be fooled. This is the perfect formula for failure.

So what’s wrong? We have a jazzed-up top management. We have dedicated expert resources to train and support. We have a published plan. Everyone appears to be on board. Ex-citement and anticipation are high. Doesn’t it sound like suc-cess is right around the corner?

Well, the lean answer is “no.” The not-so-lean answer is “hell no.”

Culture-changing efforts designed like this are failing by the droves. And it makes no difference if it is a lean initiative, re-engineering, something smaller like a total productive mainte-nance push or an effort to implement Six Sigma. They will fail if they are designed in this manner.

Again I say, “So what’s so bad about this?”Well, let me share some information. We at Quality Consul-

tants have studied a number of culture-changing initiatives

and compared their measured level of success to a variety of critical success factors. The success of each firm was comput-ed using a 1-to-4 scale with 1 being a failed event, 4 being a continuing success, and with gradations between. Each critical characteristic was evaluated on a 0-to-5 maturity scale with 0 being very ineffective toward achieving success and 5 repre-senting full maturity of the characteristic of concern.

Using these data, correlations were made and three critical characteristics stood out as some that could be categorized as “sounding very good but not leading to success.” Each of these three critical characteristics was an “error” in the design of the implementation effort and was so significant that if the char-acteristic was done correctly, success was possible. However, if the characterisitic was executed ineffectively, failure was virtu-ally guaranteed; each was a “litmus test” for failure.

Just what are the three characteristics and what do the cor-relations to success look like? These critical characteristics, in question format are:

1. Have you integrated the culture changing initiative into your daily activities?

2. Do you have the required sense of urgency? 3. Is your initiative line or staff driven?

ERROR NO. 1- Implement a Tools-Only Approach

This characteristic measures how well you integrate your culture-changing initiative into the daily activities of both

How to Design a Lean Implementation So Failure is GuaranteedThree critical characteristics will help gauge your chances for success.

”“ Does this sound good to you?

Well . . . don’t be fooled. This is the perfect formula for failure.

IW | The Manufacturer’s Guide to Lean | 7

the management and the rank and file. Many times people talk about the “tools” of lean manufacturing, citing such tools as kaizen, heijunka, 5S and value stream mapping, to name a few.

Then an effort is made to integrate these tools into the busi-ness culture. This, too, “sounds” very logical. The people are taught the theory and techniques on how to apply the tools but all too often are left to their own inexperience on “how” to apply these tools. In effect the implementation team is say-ing, “Here is a tool, now go apply it.” All the “tools” of lean are countermeasures designed to mitigate some type of waste. So in “lean speak,” when we use this “tools” approach we are ef-fectively saying, “Here is a countermeasure [a solution], now go find a problem to use it on.” As strange as that may sound, that is all too often the approach used. However, to properly root out waste and improve on a daily basis we must ask ourselves for:

1. an understanding of the present state 2. an understanding of the desired future state and 3. What are the next steps, the countermeasures, we must

take to achieve the desired state?This questioning approach then leads to a selection of

countermeasures that are employed. So in the end tools are se-lected. But they are selected based on the needs of the facility not some arbitrary selection process. When using the problem solving approach, which is the correct lean approach, tools are “pulled” based on the needs of the facility rather than “pushed” to them and expected to be utilized.

ERROR NO. 2 -- Create No Sense of Urgency

The second critical characteristic is that there must be an appropriate sense of urgency. Our mythical but all too real CEO got all “jazzed up” about what he saw, and I am sure he was sin-cere in his desire to improve his business. Again that “sounds” good, but the rank and file -- the folks with their hand on the tiller -- needs to know each and every day that what they are doing is necessary. Nothing will catalyze this better than if they can see daily that they are making a difference to what really matters. They need to feel both a sense of accomplishment and a sense of urgency to stay focused. The CEO may convey his passion in his periodic speeches, but each and every hour of each and every day the rank and file must be reminded by this sense of urgency to stay focused. With it they can see their contribution and sense their individual importance toward the betterment of the facility. The point is that the motivation of the workers cannot come in fits and starts from the passionate speeches of the leadership. It must be present, with the worker, on the floor, continually reminding and reinforcing his/her ac-tions. There simply is no substitute for this.

ERROR NO. 3 -- Let the Program be Staff Driven

The third critical characteristics really gets to the point of precisely who is implementing the initiative and who will both learn from and lead the waste elimination efforts. When the staff is involved beyond basic design, initial training and specialized support untold amounts of damage are done. The initiative absolutely must be line-driven. The corporation man-agement and leadership must be lean-competent; there is no substitute for this. And it must be driven from the top down with no layers missed at all. Again there is no substitute for this! When the line organization relies heavily on the staff to train and execute waste countermeasures a great deal of effort is improperly directed, knowledge transfer is missed and lean leadership is completely lost to the staff functions. This may look good in the short term, but in the long term it guarantees failure.

Summary

The danger of these three typical errors is that they all “sound” so good. But make no mistake about it; to be success-ful we need not just any lean tools that “sound” good but the specific lean tools that will assist in the attainment of our criti-cal goals. We need to have a motivating sense of urgency that is visible each and every day, not just periodic injections of en-ergy via “sound bites” from the C-Suite. Finally, although it may “sound” good for the lean implementation to have some early successes led by the staff trainers; in the long run it is impera-tive that the entire line organization incorporate lean leader-ship skills into their daily activities so this culture-changing initiative is the “new way” to do things, which then leads to continual success.

Lonnie Wilson has been teaching and implementing lean and other culture-changing techniques for more than 40 years. His book, “How To Implement Lean Manufacturing” was released in August 2009. His new book on “How to Lead and Manage a Lean Facility” is under construction and will go to print in the third quarter of 2011. Wilson is a frequent speaker at conferences and seminars. In addition to IndustyWeek, he has published articles in Quality Digest and is a frequent contributor to iSixSigma maga-zine. His manufacturing experience spans 20 years with Chevron, where he held a number of management positions. In 1990 he founded Quality Consultants, www.qc-ep.com, which teaches and applies lean and other culture-changing techniques to small entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 firms, principally in the United States, Mexico and Canada. In his not-so-spare time, Wilson is the men’s varsity soccer coach at Cathedral High School in El Paso, Texas. You can e-mail Lonnie Wilson at law@qc-ep.com.

IW | The Manufacturer’s Guide to Lean | 8

By Jill Jusko

Too often, manufacturers think of safety only in terms of compliance.It’s easy to understand why. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires companies to

observe a wealth of rules and regulations designed to keep workers safe and healthy in their workplaces. Fines can be hefty if the federal agency catches a manufacturing company not complying with those regula-tions, and severe consequences are assured -- to both the manufacturer and employee -- if failure to comply with the regulations leads to grievous injuries or even death.

Nevertheless, safety should not be only about compliance, says lean consultant Robert B. Hafey, president of RBH Consulting and author of “Lean Safety: Transforming your Safety Culture with Lean Management.” His expertise comes from some 40 years working in manufacturing at companies that include U.S. Steel and Flexco, where he spent part of his tenure as director of lean operations.

Hafey says safety should also be about building a culture that engages the entire workforce in improving workplace safety. However, too often the safety role is put in the hands of one person (human resources manager or EHS director, for example) to push down to the employees.

“You have to have compliance, but you can also have a continuous improvement component,” Hafey says.

That’s where lean comes in. Lean safety is about using lean thinking and lean tools to drive world-class safety programs, Hafey says. And for manufacturers who are trying to introduce lean into their operations and anchor it into their cultures, the consultant suggests that safety is a “great way to start.”

“Everyone will rally around safety,” he says.To share the impact lean tools can make on safety, Hafey points to a safety kaizen he facilitated. The goal

of the safety kaizen was to reduce the risk of injury, primarily ergonomic-related injury that can result from such actions as repetitive motions, excessive straining or moving of weights, and out-of-neutral body posi-tions.

The three-day safety kaizen event took place at a host manufacturing plant. The 10-person kaizen team included members from the host facility, other area facilities and a few additional individuals. As part of the event, the kaizen team observed an employee performing her duties as a packer. Unlike with some kaizen events, no stop watch was employed to time the woman’s speed in performing her tasks and no one docu-mented each step. The sole focus of the event was to improve safety, Hafey emphasized.

After observing the woman performing her tasks, the kaizen team developed a list of about 50 potential improvements related to reducing injury risk. For the second two days of the three-day kaizen event, the team spent its time making changes to improve the safety of the employee’s job. Among the processes implemented were one-piece flow to reduce the repetitive motions associated with batch work she had performed and changes that reduced the amount of bending required to perform the job.

Hafey said ultimately the employee felt physically better as a result of the task modifications, and the work grew easier to perform. The changes even ultimately sped up how quickly she could perform her tasks, despite the clear objective of the kaizen event to improve safety.

“By applying lean to safety, [employees] can see what is in it for them,” Hafey says.The use of lean tools is not limited to kaizen events. Hafey notes that many lean tools, such as 5S, root-

cause analysis and A3 reports, for example, can easily be applied to driving world-class safety.The “Lean Safety” author also emphasizes the need to involve the entire workforce in driving safety

throughout the workplace. “The more people you engage in safety, the more cultural safety can be,” he says. That’s why Hafey believes in having broad-based safety committees that includes plant-floor members with management facilitation.

Ultimately, a safer workplace delivers on two of the goals of lean: less waste and improved customer focus. “Injuries are waste,” Hafey says. They lead to employees being at home recovering rather than at work being productive -- and they consume enormous amounts of resources.

On the other hand, engaging the workforce in creating a safer workplace helps deliver on the promise of supporting customers, Hafey says. “But only if you think of safety as continuous improvement rather than only compliance and a cost.”

Safety Beyond ComplianceA ‘lean’ approach to safety builds a culture that engages the entire workforce in proac-tively seeking out and removing injury risks.

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By Jill Jusko

Does it seem like lean has been under attack recently? For example, several lean proponents were up in arms in the wake of a July article in the Wall Street Journal. The article outlined component shortag-es faced by Apple and Nissan Motor, and concluded that in part “the drawbacks of lean manufacturing methods” were to blame, augmented by an overstretched global supply chain. Shoddy investiga-tive reporting, commented one lean proponent about the article. Apple has never been considered a lean company, pointed out another. Lean has been com-pletely misconstrued, said yet a third.

Toyota’s recent woes, too, have been cited as an example of the failure of lean, a position frequently opposed by those who claim the failure was Toyota’s stray-ing from its own Toyota Production Sys-tem (TPS), the epitome of a lean produc-tion system.

At the other end of the spectrum are the manufacturing companies and plants that extol the great productivity and other operational gains they have reaped through their implementations of lean manufacturing. Indeed, over the past five years more than 90% of final-ists and winners of IndustryWeek’s own Best Plants competition, which recogniz-es manufacturing excellence, reported implementing lean manufacturing to a significant degree or more. Those same plants reported median 30% reductions in manufacturing cycle times over the past three years, median scrap reduc-tions of 33% and median productivity improvements of 24%.

Why the diversity of opinions regard-ing lean? If you speak with lean experts, a possible answer rears its head. That an-swer is that people are confused -- both about what defines lean as well as how

to implement lean. Get that confusion straightened out and the value of lean as a driver of operational excellence grows more apparent.

What is Lean?

What precisely constitutes “lean” has been a challenge for many since the term joined the manufacturing lexicon more than 15 years ago. The term was coined by researchers led by James Womack to describe how Toyota ran its business. On Womack’s Lean Enterprise Institute website, lean’s core idea is described in this way: “to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Simply, lean

means creating more value for custom-ers with fewer resources.” Lean thinking, the explanation continues, “changes the focus of management from optimizing separate technologies, assets, and verti-cal departments to optimizing the flow of products and services through en-tire value streams that flow horizontally across technologies, assets, and depart-ments to customers.”

In reality, the definition of lean fre-quently varies depending upon whom you speak with -- whether it should or not. “I have always said if you had 100 lean practitioners in the room and asked for a definition, you might get 80 answers and about 20 themes, mostly around the tools of lean,” says Sue Gillman, a partner with Aveus LLC.

Lean is strategic, states Rick Bohan, principal of Chagrin River Consulting. He

says that done right, lean should provide an organization with substantial core capabilities that are difficult for other companies to emulate even over the longer term. A sustained competitive ad-vantage is how he describes it. Few lean experts likely would find fault with that description.

That said, managers don’t always view lean in that fashion. “They tend to imple-ment [lean] as if it were simply tactical,” Bohan says. “They view it as simply a set of cost-cutting tools. Lean means provid-ing better service to the customer at the same or lower cost, and looking at it sim-ply as a set of cost-cutting tactics often can send a company down the wrong road.” Unfortunately, there exist litera-ture and even consultants who reinforce that viewpoint, Bohan adds.

The definition of lean is “pretty sub-jective,” agrees lean expert Art Smalley. “The analogy I use is the four blind men and the elephant, and they’re all touch-ing a different part of the elephant and they’re all trying to tell you the truth of what they’re seeing or touching, but it’s not the whole.” Smalley is among the few Americans who have worked at Toyota in Japan, and he makes a distinction between lean and TPS. He is author or co-author of several books about lean, including “Creating Level Pull” and “Un-derstanding A3 Thinking.”

The lack of an agreed-upon definition may play a part in the current state of lean, which Smalley describes as a mixed bag. There are isolated success stories, he says, as well as a few plants that are implementing lean without results. Then, he says, there is a large pack in the mid-dle that have started on the lean path, using a variety of tools and wondering why they’re not getting better results. “They’re starting to question themselves, which is a good thing,” Smalley says.

Lack of a clear definition may impact peoples’ perceptions about what lean is. It may contribute to lean implementa-tion outcomes. But execution -- or lack thereof -- is a significant contributor to a lean implementation’s success. That’s because lean is ultimately about solv-ing problems. “The lean movement has been characterized by a tool-based em-

Lean ConfusionIt has been embraced, ig-nored, misunderstood and even derided, but lean’s proponents continue to ex-hort its value as a driver of operational excellence.

IW | The Manufacturer’s Guide to Lean | 10

phasis,” Smalley says. People fall in love with tools like pull systems, 5S and stan-dardized work, for example, and forget to problem-solve. “You really have to put [the tools] in the right structure and con-text with problem solving discipline to improve productivity, quality, cost, deliv-ery, whatever dimension you are focus-ing on,” he says.

Who is Doing Lean?

Good data to identify how many man-ufacturers are employing or attempting to employ lean are difficult to come by. Lean guru Norman Bodek suggests that maybe half of U.S. manufacturing com-panies are into some aspect of lean. “Many do run kaizen blitzes, but only a fraction are truly committed to using all of the aspects of lean,” he suggests. “As an example, I feel that only 1% have the person ‘pull the cord’ [to] stop the process when they discover a problem.” Bodek, an author and publisher, has traveled to Japan more than 50 times to bring Japanese manufacturing method-ologies, including the Toyota Production System, to U.S. industry to help improve quality and productivity.

Bodek is leading a week-long lean study tour to Japan in September, which quickly sold out, seeming evidence of lean’s continued draw. While that news is good, it’s only 24 travelers, points out Bodek. “We should have 24,000 wanting to go,” he says.

Thomas & Betts Corp. is among the manufacturing companies that have embraced lean in its operations. Most of the plants use some lean tools every day, says Herb Bradshaw, plant manager at Thomas & Betts’ Athens, Tenn., facility, a 2005 IW Best Plants winner. Whether it be from when customers think about purchasing a product, to using pull on the manufacturing floor, to working with suppliers, or to stabilizing processes -- “We use lean in everything we do.”

And lean continues to reap dividends for the Athens plant, even as it has been a constant for nearly 10 years. For exam-ple, he points to a recent team effort that

improved throughput in a cell by 40%. “It never ceases to amaze me.” Like others, Bradshaw also shared his belief that an operation never fully implements lean, “because you always see more things to work on.”

What’s Missing?

Companies’ lean implementations fre-quently focus on singular aspects of the process rather than the whole, suggest several lean experts. For example, Smal-ley opines that quality is underempha-sized. Just-in-time and flow seem to take precedence even though “jidoka” -- or quality built in during the manufactur-ing process -- is a pillar of equal impor-tance to JIT in the Toyota Production Sys-tem. Jidoka, which Toyota translates as automation with a human touch, means that equipment stops running when it detects a defect and ultimately when processing is complete.

That ties into another difference be-tween lean and TPS outlined by Smalley -- the production equipment. TPS em-phasizes the importance of quality ma-chine tools, with significant emphasis on developing better machines that break down infrequently. That’s not so much the case with lean, he opines. People often take the machinery for granted, while they will point out the kanban sys-tem or a standardized work chart. The equipment is underappreciated because what is happening is invisible inside the machine, he says. For many people, “You walk by all these big machines, and you don’t even know what you’re looking at,” Smalley says.

At the other extreme is the human side of lean, an aspect Bodek says U.S. companies tend to overlook. Bodek cites automotive industry supplier Au-toliv as one example of a manufacturer doing a good job of addressing the hu-man side of lean. Last year at an Ogden, Utah, Autoliv plant, he notes, managers received 63 implemented ideas per per-son. “They are an excellent example of a lean plant. People are encouraged to use their brains, opposite to the [Frederick]

Taylor concept of asking the workers not to think.” That’s not to say it doesn’t still have a ways to go, he adds. Even Toyota, Bodek says, has not designed work for the full potential of its people’s talent.

Lean is never successful without sub-stantial involvement from employees at all levels, adds Bohan. In most compa-nies, that requires a substantial culture change, an aspect of lean that Bohan says frequently is ignored. Adds Bodek: “People should be empowered at every level based on their experiences, ex-pertise and knowledge, but our man-agement system asks everyone before change takes place to get permission and that permission is rarely granted. There is a great fear of making mistakes and yet making mistakes is one of the only ways we learn.”

Aveus’ Gillman cautions that lean gains are not sustainable without em-ployee buy-in and involvement, at least “not if the employee is expected to par-ticipate in the new process, or way of do-ing things, over time.”

She adds, “Lean generates a lot of ex-citement and initial buy-in to the process and solution. However, the test of sus-tainability is if you can move the people who instituted the change and the pro-cess remains robust.”

What Next for Lean?

The lean movement continues to grow and evolve, moving beyond manu-facturing production and into areas such as product development, administrative, information technology and accounting. It has moved beyond the manufacturing industry as well, most notably into the health care industry.

Smalley suggests that asking what’s next for lean is a question that may be posed too soon. He remains focused on today, noting there is still plenty in the here and now to address. “When we have 100% uptime, 100% quality, short lead times, then we can worry about tomor-row,” he says. “If you want to get results, you have to address your problems of now.”

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By Josh Cable

Before General Cable Corp. began its lean journey about a decade ago, Mark Thackeray, senior vice president for North American operations, says the company’s maintenance per-sonnel were kind of like firefighters -- responding to equip-ment breakdowns as quickly as possible.

But now that the Highland Heights, Ky.-based manufac-turer of wire and cable products has implemented lean strat-egies at many of its North American plants, Thackeray notes that the company has shifted from a “reactionary mainte-nance” mode to a “preventive and predictive maintenance” focus.

“[W]hat we’ve changed in our philosophy about main-tenance in the lean environment is you have to be much more involved and proactive in ensuring the reliability of machines instead of running to the problem when they’re broken down,” Thackeray explains.

Another shift since General Cable embarked on its lean journey in North America has been the company’s ef-fort to squeeze additional output -- or “entitlement capacity” -- from its ex-isting equipment rather than buying new equipment when plants reach full capacity. To achieve this, the company has focused on improving its overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), a mea-surement that shows the percentage of time that equipment, when running or required for production, is producing good-quality products at current rate (or speed) compared with theoretical maximum rate. (OEE is calculated by multiplying uptime rate by production rate by first-pass quality rate.)

“Here we look to maintenance as a key stakeholder in improving the up-time leg of the OEE metric, and finding us additional capacity without spending money on machines,” Thackeray says.

General Cable has implemented a number of continuous-improvement strategies to pursue its maintenance objectives, including investing in a formal computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). Through its CMMS, General Cable can track equipment

breakdowns, schedule preventive maintenance activities, anticipate its needs for maintenance parts and automatically issue purchase orders before machine maintenance work is performed, according to Thackeray.

“That has helped us to be much more compliant in work-order completion,” Thackeray explains. “It’s allowed us to schedule the time we need to maintain our machines in a

preventive mode instead of running them to failure, without disappointing customers on work orders. And it’s al-lowed us to minimize our investment in MRO [maintenance, repair and opera-tions] inventory, yet still have better up-time on machines.”

Thackeray notes that maintenance personnel are embedded with plants’ natural work teams, a departure from the “old traditional factory” days when “maintenance was a very prized set of skills tucked away in the corner.” Having maintenance and production personnel co-located not only has had an impact on OEE rates but also on metrics such as safety.

“So rather than having maintenance in a separate corner of the building, we like maintenance to actually have their location in the cell, in the value stream -- we like their toolbox to be front and center of the cell -- and for them to be part of that work team that has own-ership of the mini factory,” Thackeray

explains. “In so doing, they have daily contact with opera-tors. So when an operator has a safety concern, they can pull maintenance right over and they can figure out the way to address that unsafe condition immediately.”

Lean for MachinesApplying continuous-improvement strategies to maintenance can help your plant run like a well-oiled machine.

Carlos Garcia conducts an analysis of overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) at General Cable’s facility in Des Plaines, Ill.

Photo courtesy of Gemeral Cable Corp.

Lean Tools for Maintenance

A number of common lean tools can be applied to the maintenance function to remove waste in the delivery of maintenance services and improve equipment performance and reliability.

They include:

5-S (sort, straighten, scrub/shine, • standardize and spread/sustain)

Elimination of the “Seven Deadly Wastes” • (overproduction, waiting, transportation, processing, inventory, motion and defects)

Standardized workflow•Value-stream mapping•Just-in-time•Kanban (pull system and visual cues)•Autonomation (quality at the source)•Mistake-proofing•Kaizen•

Source: “Applying Lean Concepts to the Mainte-nance and Reliability Function” a presentation by Bruce Hawkins of the Management Resources Group Inc.

IW | The Manufacturer’s Guide to Lean | 12

When their natural work team conducts a lean activity such as a kaizen event or a single-minute exchange of dies (SMED) improvement, maintenance personnel routinely par-ticipate, Thackeray says.

“We may have a kaizen to develop a visual factory re-plenishment signal for a feeding operation. Maintenance will be involved in that for a number of reasons,” he explains. “One is to help design the physical at-tributes of the pull signal, whether that’s putting lines on the floor, a containerized replenishment signal, and on lights or something of that nature. But they also help on the upfront design of that to come up with low-maintenance solutions. From a safety perspective, they look at it from a pre-operations standpoint and ask, ‘Does this create a trip hazard? Does this create a pinch point? Does this create an unsafe condition or allow for an un-safe act that we can solve before we ever put it in place?’”

Since applying continuous-improvement princi-ples to maintenance, General Cable’s North Ameri-can plants, on average, have achieved a 40% im-provement in their OEE rates over the past decade. Still, General Cable, which has had multiple plants named IndustryWeek Best Plants winners over the years (including two plants in 2009), is striving to improve those rates.

“I don’t view it as world-class until you get to the 85% range,” Thackeray says.

The Power of TPM

Like many IndustryWeek Best Plants winners and finalists, General Cable practices total productive maintenance (TPM), a comprehensive approach to maximizing equipment effec-tiveness. The objectives of TPM are to eliminate waste, reduce defects, maximize productivity and engage the work force, and it is considered a key enabler of a lean maintenance strategy.

One important component of TPM, as noted by Lafayette Hill, Pa.-based maintenance consultant and author Joel Levitt in his book “Lean Mainte-nance,” is encouraging operators “to take a greater role in the health and productivity of the machines they are tending.”

At the Carrier -- Carlyle Compressor Facility in Stone Mountain, Ga., for example, operators con-duct daily “PMs” -- inspections based on checklists of performance and safety criteria specific to their machines -- and typically are empowered to clean, inspect and change filters on their machines as well as check gauges to make sure their machines are operating within defined operating parameters, accord-ing to Greg Bailey, facilities manager. In some cases, opera-tors also may perform some fluid changes.

While the daily operator PMs are just one level of preven-tive maintenance conducted on machines (a work-order system generates a schedule of weekly, monthly and annual routine maintenance), Bailey notes that the operator PMs are “our first line of defense” against problems that could lead to

unplanned machine downtime.Plant manager Matt Walker points out that the facility has

added visual indices (such as red and green stripes) on gaug-es to make it easy for operators to determine if equipment is running within its acceptable parameters. If a gauge “starts creeping up or getting closer to the high side,” the operator

can log it on his or her TPM sheet for the day, and the supervisor would enter a maintenance work order, Walker explains.

“The operator may not have the training and skillset in electrical and hydraulics troubleshoot-ing, but they understand the basic functions of the machine and how it normally runs, and how it has run,” Walker says.

The Carrier -- Carlyle facility, which was named one of IndustryWeek’s Best Plants in 2009, has achieved some impressive results from its TPM approach and lean strategies. The plant’s aver-age machine availability rate last year was 99.5%. Meanwhile, the plant has reduced the number of maintenance hours by about 20% over the past three years, according to Walker.

Bruce Hawkins, director of field operations for the Southbury, Conn.-based professional services firm Management Resources Group Inc., is a big believer in the power of TPM to “help lean out the maintenance processes.” He notes that the TPM

philosophy emphasizes the importance of engaging “any-body who has anything to to do with the physical assets of the plant” in “managing and caring for” those assets.

Hawkins adds that with proper training, “it’s perfectly OK to have operators be responsible for the basics of mainte-nance.”

“We call the basics of maintenance ‘TLC’: tightening, lu-bricating and cleaning,” Hawkins explains. “And just like I’m

responsible for that on my own car, operators should be responsible for that on the machines they operate everyday. They’re the ones who, in essence, own the reliability for their equipment. I don’t expect the guy down at the garage to own the reliability of my car -- I do that by taking care of the basics.”

While a big part of TPM is operator empower-ment, an equally important aspect is how it cre-ates a collaborative relationship between two commonly disparate functions -- maintenance and operations -- asserts John Kravontka, president of manufacturing solutions for Manchester, Conn.-based Fuss & O’Neill Manufacturing Solutions LLC. “In so many plants we walk into, you’ll see the op-erators in one corner saying, ‘Man if maintenance could fix this equipment better and if they knew

what they were doing, it would run a lot better,’” Kravontka says. “And maintenance is in the other corner saying, ‘If the operators didn’t mess up the equipment and they knew how to operate it, this thing would work better.’ It’s maintenance versus the operators, and maintenance versus operations. The TPM process helps us pull both of them together to work as a team to improve the equipment performance and reli-ability.”

“Here we look to main-tenance as a key stake-holder in improving the uptime leg of the OEE metric, and finding us additional capac-ity without spending money on machines.”-- Mark Thackeray, senior vice president, North American operations

“It’s perfectly OK to have operators be respon-sible for the basics of maintenance.”-- Bruce Hawkins, direc-tor of field operations, firm Management Resources Group Inc.

IW | The Manufacturer’s Guide to Lean | 13

By Jill Jusko

The state of lean manufacturing across North America is largely a matter of anecdotal evidence. And what evidence there is focuses primarily on larger manufacturers -- Toyota, Danaher, Ford and even significantly smaller companies than those behemoths. However, frequently left out of the mix is the small manufacturer, whose annual revenue may top out at $50 million.

The state of lean among these small manufacturers? “My sense is there’s a world of opportunity out there,” says Rick Bo-han, principal, Chagrin River Consulting, acknowledging the lack of hard data.

He suspects not as many small companies are implementing lean as should be or as well as they could be. In some respects, one could point to the literature about lean as a culprit in the lack of implementation. Bohan says it is easy to get an impres-sion from lean literature that lean is a big-company initiative. Small firms likely don’t have the resources to have a full-time, separate lean champion or spend three days to train everyone on lean methods, both of which are frequently cited in stories about lean implementations.

Small companies can also point to the reality that everyone already is wearing two or three hats. “They’ll say we’re already pretty lean,” Bohan says. “We make these parts and we send them right out.”

Bohan some of that comes from not fully understanding lean, a challenge that besets companies of all sizes. Bohan in-

cludes in his definition of lean: * It is strategic not simply tactical. It results in substan-

tial capabilities that are tough for other companies to emulate. * It focuses on customer service. * It always involves a substantial change to the com-

pany culture. Improvements don’t stick if culture change isn’t a part of lean, he says.

The question companies should be asking is “Can we put a better product in the customer’s hands exactly when the cus-tomer wants it, in the form and format the customer wants it, every time without error or delay,” Bohan says. “That’s the ques-tion that should be driving the lean initiative. Not so much ‘Can we reduce the cost of what we’re doing now.’”

The consultant points out that small companies actually have some advantages over large companies when it comes to im-plementating lean, especially with respect to the all-important aspect of culture change. In smaller manufacturers, the CEO’s office may be right next to operations. He can -- quite literally -- speak to everyone on a daily basis to discuss the lean imple-mentation and how each individual is feeling or reacting to it. It may also be easier to see when the workforce is beginning to di-vert from the lean implementation or when everyone’s energy is beginning to fade. As a result, a smaller firm can more quickly get back on track.

“Feedback loops are short [in small firms]. That’s an advan-tage to implementing lean,” Bohan says.

Also, “My experience has been the results show up more quickly and substantially in small companies.”

Don’t Let Size be a Lean BarrierSmall manufacturers have advantages when it comes to implementing lean.

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