MRO Today - Butch Brotherton

Butch Brotherton
lean coordinator / sensei,
Carver Pump Company

In discussing the keys to a successful lean manufacturing program, Carver Pump president and CEO Mark Post pulls out a sheet of paper with the heading, “Getting Everyone on Board: Strategy.” Underneath, he has penned bullet points such as:
• Communicate, communicate, communicate.
• Demonstrate unwavering commitment to the process.
• Capitalize on a general sense that the company has not realized its full potential.
• Initially focus efforts on people that embrace the lean process and hope the rest follow.

For Carver Pump’s lean journey, Post addressed those points with one bold move. In 2000, he named Butch Brotherton, an hourly employee, as the plant’s full-time lean program coordinator/sensei. Sensei is Japanese for “instructor” or “mentor.” Brotherton had no formal lean knowledge at the time, but as Post puts it, “he embodied lean in his mind-set and work.”

Post’s decision communicated commitment to the lean process and to Carver employees.

“This was Mark’s way of saying, ‘Lean isn’t going to be a management-driven initiative. It’s going to be driven by the people off the floor,’” says Brotherton, who from 1988 to 2000 was an assembler and machinist.

Why Brotherton? Says Post, “First, he’s a sharp guy who knows our product and our processes. Second, he knows everybody in the (85-employee) company and is well-respected by everyone. Third, he’s an open-minded person who wants to see the company succeed.”

After receiving lean training from a local consulting group and “reading more books than I did in high school,” Brotherton set out to help pinpoint processes in need of focused lean projects, provide training and exposure to lean concepts, and lead teams out to break bottlenecks and remove waste.

“I see myself as a conduit between management and the shop floor,” he says. “Everything begins on the floor. I’m not going there to tell someone how to run a machine. Those people tell me, ‘This is the way we need to run it.’ I pass that information up to Mark’s senior staff. I’m in that group and we discuss, ‘We’re struggling here. Should we put an event against this or not?’ I bring that information back down to the shop floor. They may know how to run the machine, but we then work together to find ways to make it run better.”

Brotherton’s personable style, technical know-how and leadership skills have been instrumental in the success of the lean program since 2000. On average, he leads 16 events per year that involve nearly 75 percent of all Carver Pump employees. These events have had very positive effects on key corporate metrics such as dollars shipped per employee hour, inventory turns, on-time delivery, total shipments, total cost of quality as a percentage of sales, and burden expense.

In his role, Brotherton says he sees the company and his own performance in a different light.

“This allows you to take a step back and examine where you were at, where you are now and where you want to be,” he says. “Take me. I used to think I was the best at what I did. Through the lean events, assemblers now have so many more tools and resources. It would be going backward to do the job the way I used to do it.”

Post sees nothing but big things ahead for Brotherton.

“As Butch continues to learn, it would be neat for him to become a George Koenigsaecker — a lean guru who wows people with his knowledge” says Post.

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