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By PAMELA C. TURFA pamt@leader.net
Sunday, March 09, 2003 Page: 1D
BERWICK – Under ideal conditions, a potato would roll off a truck and into
the Wise Foods potato chip factory, where it would immediately be scrubbed,
sliced, fried, seasoned, packaged and shipped to a customer with no wait time.
That’s the goal for Wise Foods as the longtime snack foods producer adopts
a philosophy of lean manufacturing.
Lean manufacturing is about reducing waste at every level – including
inventory, time, motion, transportation and defects or problems.
But, it also is about changing corporate culture.
With lean manufacturing, workers are given the tools, the involvement and
the authority to develop a systematic approach to the workplace.
“You’re always learning about ways to improve,” said Steve Diacont, the
company’s human resources manager and one of the first officials trained in
lean manufacturing.
Often, the improvements grow out of small-group discussions involving both
management and hourly workers with many years collective experience.
“We’re trying to work toward a more participative learning environment,”
Diacont said.
At Wise, which includes separate chips and related products factories, the
ongoing process of changing culture and eliminating waste in manufacturing has
led to a series of small and large changes:
Processes are now standardized and posted on the wall or written on
reference cards.
A worker cleaning out seasoning equipment for a flavor change, for example,
now follows specific steps, and the changeover time has been cut in half.
Workers are included in problem solving.
Unseasoned chips is an issue for customers who open a bag expecting
honey-barbecue flavor and finding plain chips, said Terry Boyer, production
manager of the chips plant.
A funnel feeds seasoning into a machine that shakes it on chips as they
roll in a barrel. “Folks running the line said it was hard to tell when the
funnel is low of seasoning.”
So workers developed a metal “flag” that is placed in each funnel and
drops as seasoning is used. When the flag drops to a certain level, a worker
adds seasoning.
Management and hourly workers are brought together to solve problems. The
process offers the benefits of collective knowledge, repetition and decreased
errors, said Blake Hippenstiel, production manager of corn products, the other
side of the Berwick plant.
Instead of one person with 10 years experience, a small group with dozens
of years experience tackles a problem. The process can be duplicated over and
over.
And the solutions can be shared among workers locally and with those in a
Wise plant in Virginia.
Subhed: Training key to lean manufacturing
Wise Foods began to train workers in lean manufacturing more than a year
ago after the company was purchased by Palladium Equity Partners, a private
investment firm based in New York.
Palladium stresses “proven management techniques,” including lean
manufacturing. Wise began sending its executives to the Lean Learning Center
in Novi, Mich. for training.
Lean manufacturing is based on the Toyota auto maker’s manufacturing
methods; Japanese tools are used to describe the tools used. Those small group
meetings are known as “kaizen.”
Company officials acknowledge there was apprehension among workers.
“Some workers worried that jobs would be lost,” Diacont said.
The company already was cutting back on jobs, but Wise was able to handle
the reduction through resignations and retirements, not layoffs, he said.
The first step Wise took was an educational process, Hippenstiel said.
Those who had been trained in lean manufacturing ran several kaizens fairly
quickly to introduce other workers.
Wise also began developing standard work instructions designed to cut
waste.
“We worked real hard to allow hourly employees to develop standard work
instructions,” he said.
The company also began to give hourly workers more responsibility.
Storage areas are divided into sections to prevent cross contamination of
milk and wheat products.
The floor of each section is now color coded.
`By doing something as simple as painting colored blocks on the floor,
stock clerks now participate in inventory control,” Boyer said.
Subhed: Improving is never-ending quest
Studies have shown that a typical worker wastes two to six hours of every
eight-hour workday, says Andy Carlino, a partner in Achievement Dynamics and
the Lean Learning Center.
“That doesn’t mean they’re bad people; it just means they’re stuck in some
bad processes,” Carlino says.
The Lean Learning Center and Achievement Dynamics work together to train
companies in lean manufacturing and help them with implementation.
“Ideal is a moving target,” Carlino acknowledges. Ideal “is possible,”
he said, using the Wise potato to chip example. “Whether it is practical
depends on the resources you have available to pull this off.”
But, “if you don’t shoot for an ideal state, you get to a point when you
say that’s pretty good and stop,” he said.
At Wise, Carlino and his staff started with an assessment of reality. They
then helped the company to develop an approach applicable to a snack food
manufacturer.
“We will never know anybody’s business as well as they know it.”
At Wise, the lean experts found that the company wasted resources on things
it cannot control – such as seasonal fluctuations in demand for snack foods.
Instead of worrying about fluctuation, the company would better use its
resources to devise a system for handling that fluctuation, Carlino said.
The lean experts also found that problems occurred and then reoccurred
because the company had not made a permanent fix.
And, like many companies, Wise workers were hesitant to accept that lean
manufacturing could apply to their company.
Lean can apply to everybody, Carlino said, not just manufacturing or a
particular industry.
Carlino describes lean as a journey that begins “where an organization
embarks upon lean.”
And, although at some point lean becomes part of the way of doing business,
“it’s a journey that never ends.”
Subhed: Cleaning out shelves is a start
Soon after Diacont returned to Wise Foods from training at the Lean
Learning Center, he surveyed rows of binders on the shelving systems in his
human resource director’s office.
The binders contained manuals collected over years of attending human
resources seminars.
Diacont pulled a pickup to the door outside his office, loaded the manuals
into the cargo area and hauled them to the dump.
“Everything should be within reach and should take only a few seconds to
find,” he says now.
For Diacont, cleaning out the shelves was a first step in an endless
process.
“We’ve probably taken one step in 100 steps,” he said.
Pamela C. Turfa, a staff writer, may be reached at 829-7177.