Putting the Pieces Together at Sur-Seal and Acuity Brands
When Mark Preston joined the Acuity Brands Lighting team, the company was a lot less agile and just starting a lean manufacturing strategy throughout the entire company. Acuity is the largest lighting company in North America. But it didn’t come easy….
Preston began working on kaizen at TDK where he was mentored by 5 Japanese sensei over his eleven years there. He traveled to Japan for TDK lean leadership training more than 20 times, then furthered his knowledge at Respironics by learning Demand Flow Technology. Armed with these learnings and experience Preston led the transformation of the Kennesaw, Georgia Respironics plant, still one of the leanest operations producing oxygen concentrators today. Preston moved his experience into the supply base at a Maryland supplier called Action Products with management consultant Patricia Moody and Honda veteran Dave Curry, adapting the Honda 13-week BP program (Powered by Honda, Nelson, Mayo and Moody) into a repeatable supplier development process.
Acuity employees accelerated their implementation to 800 kaizen events per year, starting with plants - Acuity can point to over 480 u-shaped cells throughout its facilities - then moving kaizen to offices with key performance indicators and process maps. It’s a natural progression we’ve seen in the 15 years since The Kaizen Blitz (Laraia, Moody and Hall, John Wiley and Sons) and Maasaki Imai’s Kaizen first appeared.
Preston has moved onto the next level of continuous improvement by focusing on supplier development and distribution to customers. Five years ago Acuity developed value streams for all major production flows with templates and standard work maintained on a Sharepoint site that supports their focused factories. Not technology-shy, Acuity has implemented their own solutions in addition to its Oracle systems to partner with agencies and customers as well as suppliers.
“You must have a good root structure for your tree to withstand strong winds of the economy and I see our roots as a strong supply base,” says Preston. Current and potential suppliers are evaluated on a number of factors. It takes financial stability, excellent quality and excellent delivery to be an Acuity world-class supplier. “We must also go to the gemba - where the work is being done - to assess quality and review their service. We work with suppliers to create a value stream map and identify key areas for improvement together.” Acuity continues to right size its supply base and targets key projects for improvement.
Blue Heron asks all companies about their supplier assessment protocol. Preston recommends doing a one-hour meeting with the executive team on what lean manufacturing means to Acuity. Following the usual gemba walk, Preston’s team can complete the Assessment document, outline the gaps and identify areas that need work. The next decision is whether to implement an improvement program, like the one at Action Products, the first of over 52 such programs. When BHJ asked how many new suppliers have conducted gemba walks, Preston answered “less than 50%.” “Learning to see waste is merely the first step in continuous improvement. I learn something new every week and I love to share best practices. We need to see ourselves as sponges soaking up ideas and knowledge, but we have to squeeze these ideas back out to others in order to soak up more.”
Legos!
Sur-seal, a gasket and seal producer located west of Cincinnati, requested supplier development help. Mick Wilz, one of three brothers who owned the company made the invitation. This job shop had no flow and was wasting money. Preston stepped in with a 13-week improvement program, including value stream mapping, systematic 5S, kanban - the works - and within weeks the company started to feel different. “I would hand them an idea and come back in a week or two and the place would be twice as good – did that for two years, two Fridays a month.”
Mick Wilz recalls the turning point for his company. “The energy of the world was going so well, but we weren’t keeping up with current processes. Then, during the downturn we stopped and decided to work on engagement because we knew labor was critical. We knew we couldn’t improve the processes unless we had engaged the team,” Wilz recalls. “It took a year, but we changed the process, and it’s now being driven by the employees, not the leadership team. This amounted to substantial change in operations. We went from a job shop to cellular manufacturing.”
Next steps for Sur-seal? Wilz wants to continue their work on “building engagement and trust while they refine and build sustainability into processes. We are excited about the progress, and we were very excited when Shingo used the plant as a tour site for visual manufacturing in 2010. And we’re looking forward to being an AME tour site in November for the Great Lakes Region.”
“The biggest thing in manufacturing right now is to keep it simple, make it understandable for everyone. Everybody is getting too complex. The new buzzword is engagement, and it has to come from the heart. If you have true engagement you’ll know it - people come to work with smile,” says Wilz.
Now here’s the fun part. One of Preston’s gifts to the company was a drawing of the whole plant in Excel – not AutoCAD – but the simple blocks of Excel, the engineer’s favorite! “I prefer Excel,” he says, “because you can manipulate every box.”
He turned the drawing over to Sur-seal’s team and two weeks later upon his return – out on the floor – yes, right there! – the whole plant had been captured in bricks! Legos, down to the tiniest flow detail displayed on a desk-sized table in the middle of the plant floor.
Next, the team laid a Plexiglas “shield” atop the mock-up where all one hundred workers were encouraged to share their ideas with sticky note suggestions to improve the flow!
“I’m really proud of them,” he said, “they changed the whole plant from a job shop to its future state with no warehouse, no raw materials stacks and a main street with flow. Everything is delivered line-side. And here’s the good part – Sur-seal reaped the gains of eliminating waste, and last year they were able to implement gain-sharing for their employees!”
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