By Paul V. Arnold


From Henry Ford's assembly line to Lee Iacocca's "lead, follow or get out of the way" mantra to Toyota's Production System, automobile manufacturers shaped the industrial world in the 1900s.

But what industry holds the key to 21st century manufacturing success?  Computers?  Aerospace?  Autos (yet again)?

How about the casket industry?  Don't laugh.  There may not be a sector as fast, flexible, forward-thinking and focused on the customer.  And in this industry, no one does it better than 116-year-old Batesville Casket Company.

What makes this company, based in the small town of Batesville, Ind. (population 4,000), so hip?

Call up your local Ford dealer and ask if he can order you an olive
drab-colored Taurus with black crushed velvet interior.  On the car
seats, have the factory stitch the United States Army logo in gold.  You also want black, metal door handles; red, white and blue striped hubcaps; and a green radio antenna.  And, oh yeah, you want it delivered to the dealership in two days.

What Ford can't do for its customers (but would love to in five years), Batesville Casket Company has done every day for the past three years.

Personalization and customization is just part of the Batesville story.

This company becomes truly world class when you consider what its five plants and seven regional distribution centers do.  Its Batesville, Ind., manufacturing facility:
- produces more than 230 base models on the same assembly line (akin to a Ford plant running compacts, luxury cars, minivans, SUVs and pickup trucks down the same line at the same time);
- manufactures more than 1,000 caskets per day, of which, for the most part, no two are alike;
- attains 98.5 percent on-time delivery;
- massively slashed rework and quality issues in this diverse environment; and,
- achieves 99 percent uptime on its production equipment.

"You'd think this is a staid, stoic, old-school business," says Joe Weigel, Batesville's director of corporate communications.  "Just because we make caskets doesn't mean we can't use proven or even 'cutting-edge' manufacturing techniques to make a better product.  People don't realize this is happening in the casket industry."

Digging a hole for itself
Denny Knigga, manager of Batesville's Indiana assembly plant, takes an afternoon walk through his 391,000-square-foot building and can't help but beam.

The building, across the street from the 106,000-square-foot stamping and fabrication building, is alive.  The assembly line is pumping.  Forklifts motor up and down aisles.  Workers glance up from their stations and wave, or shout "Hey, Denny!"

"You can tell how healthy the business is by how many high-fives you get," says Knigga.

A few years ago, assembly line speed and end-product inventory were the indicators of success.

"It used to be a hurry-up-and-wait system," he says.

The assembly lines had no flow.  Product sped through some areas, only to stall and stack in others.

Knigga and stamping plant manager Dave Johnson say assembly lines ran on 24 percent overspeed in order to account for forced and unforced downtime.  Casket components flowed from the stamping building.  Thousands of finished caskets filled a holding area in the assembly building.  Both facilities piled substandard products tabbed for rework.

"We used to think more is better," says quality control manager Francis Hensley.

Sections of the plant operated in a material flow mode (just crank out an unlimited amount of components).  Others operated in a batch mode (put a die on the press and churn out a month's worth of a component).

"It might not be good quality, but if you had it piled up, you must have done something right," says Hensley.

So, inventory and work in progress were everywhere.  Components sat and rusted.  Models changed, rendering pieces made months ago obsolete.  And quality?

"If you run 30 days' worth of parts and have a defect in the part, you have 30 days' worth of defect," says Johnson.  "If you discover the defect 30 days, or longer, after the batch is run, how can you know what caused the defect?  You can't, and the same problems will happen again."

That was then.

The customer is always dead
Today, assembly lines flow.  Products, from an inventory aspect, don't.  They aren't made for the heck of it (why waste money or engulf your factory or distribution centers?).  Customers set the production process in motion.

The family of the deceased (a.k.a. the real end-user) works with a
funeral director and chooses a casket.  The choice will either be a stock model, a model customized to some degree (different color, interior, hardware, etc.), or a model fully customized and personalized to reflect the deceased's life, loves, work, hobbies and/or personality.

The funeral director places the order with a regional distribution center (RDCs) strategically located in one of seven regions of the
country.  Each RDC acts as a warehouse, but is also equipped to do some customization work.  This hub-and-spoke system allows fulfillment of most orders within 24 hours.

If the RDC stocks the item or is able to do the customization, it fulfills the order and then requests a replacement of that model from the plant.  If the RDC doesn't stock the item or can't do the custom work, the center sends a special order to the plant.  The plant merges the order into the production cycle.  Most custom models (even the Ford Taurus example) can be manufactured and delivered to the RDC within 48 hours.  A massive customization (the Taurus example taken to an extreme) takes up to 12 days.

Such a system explains the diversity of products that move down the Batesville plant's assembly line.  Moving from station to station, no two caskets are alike.

"Years ago, we'd just push product.  We'd flood the field with inventory," says Knigga.  "We wouldn't know if it would ever turn or not.  Now, we let the customer -- the funeral director and the families -- pull the product through the system.  We will never again have a day where we make 12 units of an A shell just because that's what we feel like manufacturing."

Says production worker Tommy Miles: "It goes against conventional thinking, but we're trying to meet customer demand, and customer demand doesn't run in batches."

A massive undertaking
How did the Batesville plant make such a transition?  How has it achieved record production numbers while incorporating a "customer of one" mind set?  And, how has it drastically improved quality in an environment where product diversity increases the chance of errors?

Managers and hourly workers point to the company's Continuous
Improvement (CI) program.

Weigel describes CI as a multi-level program that gives employees a framework into which the company's guiding principles and goals can be placed.  In essence, it is a tool box that houses improvement ideals such as lean thinking and kaizen, especially the latter's 5-S approach (sort, straighten, scrub, systematize and standardize).

In generic terms, CI eliminated waste and streamlined inefficiencies.  Specifically, it drastically cut press setup time, redesigned the assembly lines, raised hourly workers' responsibilities and increased machine uptime more than 10 percent.

Better ways to die
No task embodied Batesville's old "hurry up and wait" approach like the changing of dies in the stamping building's presses.

Hensley, a 29-year plant veteran, recalls the days when it took 16 hours to do a full press setup.

"In the 1970s, it took that long.  But then again, after it was set up, we'd run eight to 12 weeks' worth of parts," he says.

Reducing batch runs from 12 weeks to 30 days worked to cut setup times to eight hours in the 1980s and to one hour in 1992.

Meeting customer demand and changing from a push to a pull manufacturing system required another enormous leap.  It was accomplished through training and a handful of kaizen events.

"We found better ways," says Johnson.  "The big thing was to standardize.  We videotaped people and looked for ways to improve.  We mapped out an optimal way of doing the job and then instructed people, 'This is the way we're going to do it, the same way every time.'"

The mapping process went beyond the setup job itself.

"Anything you can do outside the press before you start your setup saves you time," he says.  "Go get your air pins.  Set the die in the die cart.  Have all the tools you need handy and lined up on the cart."

Today, press setup is down to 20 minutes and teams constantly seek ways to shave off more time.

Buried in rework
Looking deeper also led to a new way of assembling casket components in the stamping plant.

For years, the building's production line was linear and its workers were specialists.  A worker on the cap (casket lid) line was either a welder, rough-sander, grinder or finisher and was placed at points along that line.

With everyone concentrating on his or her own job, defects weren't detected most times until the cap was ready to be sent to the final assembly plant.  Some of the time, defects weren't found until it was on Knigga's production line.

"When a person used to make a defect, he passed it along to the rest of his internal customers until someone way over here says, 'This has a defect,'" says Johnson.  "At that time, they'd just send if off.  No one went back and told this guy that he made a defect.  It's clear across the line.  There was a time when we had 1,300 rejects throughout the stamping plant."

And if the line went down?  Production stopped.

The solution to this dilemma was two-fold.  Six cells replaced the single line.  And workers inside those cells became do-it-yourselfers.  Each was taught to weld, sand, grind and finish.  This was done through education, communication and seeing eye-to-eye (30 percent of the plant's hourly workers belong to a union).

"There is ownership now.  They are responsible for their own quality," says Johnson.

A cap marked for rework is returned to the responsible cell.

"Those 1,300 rejects are now down to 100," he says.

And if a cell shuts down for any reason, production continues at the other five.

The assembly plant's production line also is upgraded.  By putting the focus on flow and attacking bottlenecks, Knigga's crew eliminated more than 100 feet of conveyors.  It's also found ways to save time and money by improving processes.  Interior bed frames joined with spot welds now snap together, saving the company precious line seconds, and a cool $1 million a year.

Quality issues also were addressed in the same simple manner as at the stamping plant.

"We had an area to place items bound for rework.  If it wasn't good enough to ship, we put it on a rerun line," says Knigga.  "We got to a point where it was like, 'It's OK to have rework.'  We needed to change that, so we blocked off the area where rework was stacked.  We said, we aren't going to use this area anymore.  We just needed to get our people focused on quality and let them know what was going on.  Now if they have rework, it'll run back on the main line."

If it sounds gruff, that's the point.

"You can be fast, but you also have to be good," he says.  "Otherwise, the rework kills your momentum.  You lose cycle time."

A few years ago, nearly 20 percent of caskets were tagged for rework.  Today, that figure is 6 percent.  But that doesn't mean workers and managers overlook problems for the sake of rosier numbers.

"A defect that passed two months ago will not pass now," says Johnson.   "Everyone is pickier."

Working the graveyard shift
Improvements made by plant management, as well as production, quality and tooling personnel, would be worthless if equipment problems continually shut down the lines.   But maintenance more than holds its end of the bargain by pushing uptime for all plant production equipment.  An uptime figure of "less than 90 percent" five years ago became 96 percent in 1998.  It climbed to 98 percent in 1999 and 99 percent in 2000.

How did maintenance and engineering manager George Doll do it?  By emphasizing preventive and predictive work, and picking the brains of maintenance departments at Ford, General Motors and other companies to obtain their best practices in these areas.  Today, Doll's department incorporates PdM tools such as oil analysis, vibration analysis and laser alignment.

And since Batesville's assembly lines run two shifts per day, Doll sets aside nine of his 32 crew members to do PM- and PdM-generated work orders during the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. graveyard shift.  During first and second shift, he uses a team approach to handle urgent situations.

"There are little islands of activity around the plant, but if something serious happens, the word goes out and people respond to the scene.  They know they are on the clock because the plant loses a cycle for every minute it's down," says Doll.  "Everyone has a role.  Someone clears the enclosure, another makes sure the safety rules are followed, and so on.  It's like a pit crew."

Hastiness doesn't mean a subpar diagnostic job.

"When possible, we challenge our people to tear it apart and find out why it failed," he says.  "Get into the root cause.  Do a cause and effects analysis.  Production helps, too, because they don't want us to fail.  They'll bring their side of the story to the repair table and assist us."

Epitaph
With the company bearing little resemblance to its former self, how does Batesville Casket Company want to be remembered?  As a cutting-edge manufacturer or a cutting-edge casket manufacturer?

"We make caskets.  We're proud of what we do," says Weigel.  "On the surface, there is something intrinsically fascinating about this business.  But we think the fascinating part is how we're making caskets and taking care of our customers -- funeral directors and the families that they serve."

To learn more about Batesville Casket Company, visit www.batesville.com.

This article appeared in the October/November 2000 issue of MRO Today magazine.  Copyright 2000.

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