Changing the fabric

SI Corporation’s lean transformation has resulted in gains in productivity and cost reductions across the board. It has also largely absorbed SI’s maintenance department into production.

by Tom Hammel

Chattanooga, Tenn. — The saying goes that everybody has to start somewhere. This story starts with Vietnam. Synthetic Industries (SI) was founded in 1967 to produce sandbag material for the Vietnam War. In 1969 SI began producing products for the carpet market. By 2001, it was one of the largest U.S.-based producers of polypropylene products, with 2,500 employees and annual sales in excess of $400 million. It owned a lion’s share of production in two key markets: carpet backing and concrete reinforcement products.

So why rock the boat and bring in some “flavor of the month” improvement program?

The reason could be summed up in three words: competition, costs and consolidation. Synthetic Industries, now SI Corporation, faced threats both from foreign competition and domestic consolidation. Rising costs for everything from materials to healthcare added to this pressure.

High time for change
In 2001, the stars of change aligned over SI. The company’s president was retiring, and a retiring old guard of company leaders began stepping aside for new blood with aggressive new ideas. That new blood was incoming company president, Joe Dana, who hired Stan Brant as his vice president of manufacturing. Brant, a veteran of Duracell, was a champion of Lean manufacturing. Together, Dana and Brant were determined to break with the old ways and transform SI into a Lean, mean manufacturing machine.

In 2001, SI was composed of four divisions: SI Concrete Systems, SI Geosolutions, SI Performance Technology, and SI Flooring Systems, the world’s second largest producer of carpet backing.

In August 2005, SI sold its Flooring Systems division to a local customer and reorganized into two divisions, SI Concrete Systems, which produces polypropylene concrete reinforcement products, and SI Geosolutions, which makes nonwoven products for the flooring, auto, filtration and recreational markets. These two divisions employ 600 people and produce combined annual revenues in excess of $200 million.

Worlds of waste
When Dana and Brant joined SI, they saw waste everywhere: equipment was maintained in a reactive “band-aids and firefighting” manner, the plants were dirty and dark, mountains of inventory and supplies choked the available space, safety incidents were at unacceptable levels, significant percentages of off-quality goods were being produced and turnover among hourly workers ranged from 40 to 50 percent.

Brandt set about launching a Lean initiative in each of the company’s seven plants. First, a guiding coalition of employee “teammates” was set up in each facility, aided by a Lean Deployment Team Leader (that facility’s top performer). These were the first to begin receiving intensive training in Lean tools and philosophy.

Once this was completed, the guiding coalitions in SI’s two largest plants created value stream maps for their facilities, current state first, then a six-month future state.

Preston King, manager of manufacturing strategy for SI’s Chattanooga plant, explains the subsequent plan of attack.

“We didn’t just walk into a plant and announce, ‘We’re going to do 5-S here,’ ” he explains. “We looked at the future state value stream map and chose the tools that would best achieve that goal. We use the tools where necessary. We knew we would need to be good at standard work, and 5-S is a keystone of that, so 5-S was going to be a part of our approach but not the only one.”

These first steps took a year. Once the guiding coalitions and Lean Deployment Team Leaders were satisfied that standard work processes were falling into place, they introduced TPM in year two.

This involved appointing a TPM coordinator for each facility, who was charged with establishing and leading the TPM activities in that plant. These included cross-training operators in basic equipment maintenance — and maintenance people in equipment operation.

Next, the largest plant was reorganized into cells: department managers became cell leaders. Beneath them, SI added another layer of leadership among the hourly teammates. These people were given leadership training and were charged with helping lead the cross-training and cultural transformation required to make the program succeed.

As might be expected in plants where many teammates count their tenure in decades, this type of major cultural change met with some resistance. Ironically, the loudest opposition came not from the bottom but from the middle.

I object!
“The biggest problems we had were not with the paid by the hour teammates on the floor who did the work but with their supervisors and department leaders,” King says. “These people were so accustomed to doing these things themselves that they couldn’t pass that baton on to the people who worked for them. We were excellent managers, but were very weak when it came to leadership.”

But for all the objectors, there were also early adopters. In order to create more pull through the organization and confront the objectors, model cells were established. These cells were focused on achieving the long term future state at a much faster pace than other cells in the organization.

Creating cells also allowed leadership to address another chronic issue, the “bleeding” of materials and personnel between production lines. Each cell was staffed exactly at the level it needed to perform its standard work. If a cell teammate was absent, this would be immediately obvious because a machine would be left standing idle.

Lean tools also helped SI’s leaders get to the root cause of its high hourly teammate turnover. In interviewing exiting teammates and those who had already left, SI learned that its own seniority system was the culprit.

“We learned that a lot of people were leaving because in order to move up to the next level and earn more money, they had to be here a certain number of years and it just wasn’t advantageous for them to stay,” King notes.

This epiphany led to the advent of Pay-for-Skills at SI. Teammates who learned more skills — how to operate a wider range of machinery or to perform basic maintenance functions — could now earn promotion to higher pay grades regardless of tenure.

But here again, standard work was the fail-safe. No cell’s teammates can become eligible for Pay-for-Skills before having their standard work “house” in order. If a cell’s standard work indicates it needs only eight teammates for the job but it is staffed at 12, four people must be deployed before Pay-for-Skills can become available to the remaining teammates.

Job insecurity
At first, the threat of being deployed from a long-held position was a major roadblock. SI met this by pledging that no employee would be laid off as a direct result of deployment through Lean improvements. Teammates were guaranteed that they would not lose their jobs as a result of a Lean event, but they were not guaranteed the same jobs.

SI quickly adopted a corporate deployment policy that helped to ease issues with respect to positions and pay. King notes that teammates who accepted the changes ended up in other areas of the plant, often at higher pay grades thanks to Pay-for-Skills.

Eliminating inventory overload
Another part of the process involved eliminating dead stock in Chattanooga’s 10,000 square-foot supply warehouse. Under the old way, supplies like boxes and other materials, even those needed for one-off orders, would be purchased “by the container load just to get the lowest price.” The fact that large portions of these supplies might never again be used was immaterial to the ordering process.

SI addressed this by eliminating not just dead stock but the low volume product lines that were responsible for them in the first place. In 2003, SI trimmed its SKUs by 30 percent and ceased manufacturing crimped steel fiber for concrete reinforcement. This move allowed SI to fully focus on its core polypropylene business, slash dead and excess supply inventory, dump the steel-related equipment and free up valuable floor space.

Today, SI simply sources the steel product to its specifications.

The big change: absorbing maintenance
After three years of effort, the Lean transformation within SI was paying big dividends in improved productivity, reduced waste, cost reductions and better space utilization, but challenges remained that were deeply embedded in the old ways of doing things.

Although some teammates were embracing maintenance functions and beginning to take ownership of their equipment, they were few. King noticed that many production operators remained too dependent on maintenance people to perform tasks that those operators could do themselves if they felt more secure in their power to do them.

This led to SI’s most aggressive culture shift; the integration of maintenance into production. No longer would maintenance workers report only to maintenance managers; now they would report to production shift leaders.

This meant that formerly sacrosanct professions, like maintenance mechanics and electricians, would now report to production shift leaders. And the shift leaders would in turn report to the overall plant cell leader and Lean Deployment Team Leader, Charlie Stiner.

To pave the way for this move, in January 2005, SI created a TPM coordinator’s position and staffed it with one of the plant’s lead maintenance workers, Pat Womack. As TPM leader, Womack was charged with training production operators and maintenance mechanics to perform routine checks. These checks became the basis for the daily, weekly and 12-week TPMs that are visually depicted on the TPM boards that now hang prominently over each production cell in the plant.

“Things are so much more visual now and its amazing how much easier Lean has made my job,” Stiner notes. “At first, I confess I thought Lean was another flavor of the month, but now, wow! Things almost take care of themselves; production is flowing smoothly, equipment gets fixed and we’re no longer seeing the same failures again and again. We truly have taken control of our destiny here.”

Another part of Womack’s job was to begin laying the ground work for the big change-over, which took place on October 1, 2005. On that day, SI’s Chattanooga maintenance department, as it had been, ceased to exist.

Core maintenance
Three key maintenance teammates were held back to form a core Preventative Maintenance Team, which performs high level PMs and other tasks on a set shift of 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday through Friday. In addition to key PMs, this team leads SI’s root cause analysis failure prevention program.

The net result is that SI’s Chattanooga plant went from a maintenance staff of 12 down to 10. Here again, the reductions in staff were executed by attrition — no one lost a job. A few teammates, however, who were unable to come to terms with the idea of reporting to a production supervisor, elected to leave.

Andrew Brown, a process engineer with SI, now leads this preventative maintenance group. During an initial 12-week effort to draft SI’s maintenance future state map, Andrew helped identify and address the gaps in maintenance that would be opened once the formal department was integrated with production.

“We said, ‘Okay, since we’re not going to have a maintenance manager anymore and our maintenance teammates will now be reporting to a shift leader, where are the gaps going to be?’ ” Brown recalls. “So a lot of those weeks were spent identifying those gaps and determining how to attack them and make sure they got filled. Who is going to check water filters; who is going to supervise this or that outside vendor and make sure these contract items are done?”

Armed, but gun-shy
One of the biggest challenges of the new culture within SI lies in developing confidence and a sense of ownership in the teammates so they will begin to act more autonomously. Each preventative maintenance team member has a procurement card which can be used at any time to purchase up to $1,000 of tools or supplies — without the need for prior approval by management. The assumption is that since the preventative maintenance team members know better than anyone else on the floor what they need to do their jobs, they should just buy what they need when they need it.

Reality so far is different. Because they have never had such power before, the team members are still reluctant to put the card to use. When this happens, it must be handled diplomatically.

“When a person who has that card is out of a part but doesn’t order it, we don’t focus blame and ask, ‘Why didn’t you order it?’ ” King explains. “We have to focus on what motivated that person to not place the order. We take that motivation as root cause. If we can attack that root cause and address that motivation, then maybe we can get the correct behavior as a result.”

Preston, Charlie, Andrew and Hubert “Bullet” Sims are quick to acknowledge they have a long way to go, especially since the big change in report structure took place on October 1, 2005. But to a man they are optimistic because they have seen not just what life was like before Lean but how much better every aspect of the business has become since they began the journey.

This article appeared in the February/March 2006 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright 2006.

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