Getting products from the shop floor to the hands of customers in the shortest amount of time, and with the lowest price tag is a recipe many of the state’s manufacturers are trying to perfect. And one local organization is aiming to help.
The process is known as “turnaround,” and it is often hindered by poor process design, product contamination, and customer demand said John Cronin, executive director of the Rhode Island Manufacturers Extension Services (RIMES), a non-profit organization created to help “Rhode Island manufacturers in becoming globally competitive.”
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Today, RIMES is teaching many of its clients about “lean manufacturing,” a process of eliminating those actions that do not add value to the manufacture of a product. Examples of processes that don’t add value include producing more than is demanded, too much movement of workers from one station to another, and the overproduction of defective products.
“There are nine different wastes that we identify,” said Jim Welch, engineering manager for RIMES. “Those wastes become obstacles to production. When you remove those obstacles you become more competitive.”
An old idea, created in Toyota’s car making plants more than three decades ago, the concept is being used today in smaller factories and manufacturing facilities – like the Pawtucket-based Blow Molded Specialties.
The company, which was first opened in Providence as BL Plastics in 1988, was a container-molding specialist. With the passage of North American Free Trade Agreement in the mid 1990s, the company experienced a 40 percent loss in sales in a six month period, prompting its owners to reorganize.
“We have had our peaks and valleys,” said Avril Cook, operations manager. “We had to change our focus when we lost many of our customers.”
Today the company, which recently moved to a 30,000-square-foot building in Pawtucket, has found a market making plastic containers for the medical industry and over the past few years has watched both sales and production once again rise.
For Cook, the recent move has given the company a chance to really examine its production process.
“We are very new at the process of lean,” she said. “But we are able look now at how we are doing things, and we are trying to be more efficient.”
One of the first major changes came in the form of an inspection area. Previously one of the company’s products was made on one machine and then carried to another area for inspection. Today, that product is inspected as it comes off the machine and then is immediately packaged, all by the same worker.
“We eliminated a secondary operation and eliminated about $2,000 a month that we spent on the labor that went into it,” Cook said. “We have also created a contamination team to find out why some of the products are contaminated when they come out of the machine. We haven’t found the root cause yet, but we will continue to work on it.”
One of the company’s other major problems is its turnaround time which is about 30 days. Cook said they are hoping to reduce it to only seven days – something their customers haven’t yet accepted.
“We are carrying an awful lot of inventory,” she said. “We have one particular customer that wants to get their shipment once a month, and when we asked them if we could ship it weekly they initially said no. But we will keep trying.”
According to Paul Cary, field engineer and project manager of lean technology at RIMES, a successful lean factory includes all of the workers.
“It’s a culture change,” he said. “Everyone needs to understand and want for it to work for the process to be successful. People on the shop floor need to identify waste, as well as the managers.”
Cook said her employees are already beginning to embrace the concept, as more than 50 percent of the company is already involved in lean training. In fact, she said one of the company’s third shift-operators came up with an idea that is currently being utilized on the shop floor.
“After the training she was thinking about things that we could do and we have applied that,” Cook said. “Lean is a little different and I think once employees understand the idea they really embrace it. It gives them a sense of accountability.”
Cary agreed.
“Once we teach employees how to identify ways to improve production they get excited about it,” he said. “Employees go out and they see different things and identify obstacles. Then it becomes a very successful method.”
Cook is only at the beginning of her “lean journey” but she said the company is already looking at other areas that could be improved.
“We have four projects that we are working on and using the lean technique,” she said. “We are a very small company, but we are doing what we can.”
The concept of lean, Cronin said, is helping local manufacturers reinvent themselves and become more competitive in the local, national and global marketplace.
“We have a lot of progressive manufacturers in this state, yet the image remains that it’s a declining industry,” Cronin said. “It’s becoming an innovative industry.”
