The first time Don Alcorn saw the Hayward Industries plant in King''s Mountain, NC, the parking lot was a sea of molded plastic balls. The balls extended into the parking stalls and walkways and, being round, were difficult to store. They frequently fell down into the aisles, sometimes getting damaged as they bounced onto the ground.
At the time, in 1997, Alcorn and Hayward accepted the yearly invasion of the molded balls as part of the seasonal business that is swimming pool manufacturing. Those balls were the housing for sand filters, one of the numerous filter systems Hayward offers customers for continually cleaning the water in swimming pools, and the warehouse for storing such items was overflowing.
Every fall and winter, the company had to make enough plastic globes and other filters and pump components to supply its customers through the summer. By spring, the company''s four manufacturing plants were getting crowded with inventory.
And that was the crux of the problem.
"There had to be a better way," said Alcorn, who makes hard-hitting business observations in a genteel North Carolina accent. "It took too much inventory and too much capital to run the company."
By 1999, managers at all four Hayward plants, including the one that Alcorn managed 100 miles away in Clemmons, NC, were asking for more capital to build on significant brick and mortar expansions in order to store this inventory.
Instead, four years later, Hayward has found that it doesn''t need new buildings; it doesn''t even need the King''s Mountain plant, which was closed two years ago and folded into the Clemmons plant. The company has cut manufacturing space almost in half, improved productivity, and more than doubled its WIP (work in process) inventory turns, reducing warehouse space, while improving product quality.
The difference for Hayward has been LeanSigma.
By combining the Lean Production System with Six Sigma and deploying these principles with the speed of kaizen, LeanSigma creates a formidable tool for attacking problems -- from minimizing scrap and space to maximizing customer satisfaction.
LeanSigma makes waste-free, intelligent processes and carefully focused quality tools work together, achieving results that consistently are superior to what either system could achieve alone or that both could accomplish independently.
Lean contributes action and results. Based on the principles of the Toyota Production System, lean attacks waste, whether in components, process, or space. Using kaizen breakthrough methodology, companies like Hayward assemble cross-functional teams to make massive improvements -- creating one-piece flow, just-in-time management of inventory and materials, reducing lead time and inventory -- all in five days or less.
During kaizen events, teams train, observe current processes, and create solutions that can be implemented immediately. Thirty-day homework lists are often used, post-event, to complete those tasks that couldn''t be completed during the five-day event.
As employees gain expertise, smaller problems can be solved in a matter of days with shorter point kaizen events.
The first kaizen can be as simple as lining up machines and processes in the order in which they will be used, getting rid of costly, inflexible, batch-and-queue systems. These are the kinds of opportunities that we call low-hanging fruit -- the first, most obvious areas for improvement.
Picking that fruit clears the branches, allowing us to see more clearly the challenges that require a Six Sigma approach -- using statistical tools to uncover the unseen roots of problems. Popularized by Motorola and General Electric, among other U.S. companies, Six Sigma has been marketed as a silver bullet.
However, the approach has a down side: By creating an elitist cadre of black belts and master black belts who spent months on a single project, the approach sacrificed the bias for action inherent in lean projects. The momentum for transformation was lost. And it took too long to solve problems.
Combining the Lean and Sigma approaches gives us the precision tools needed to find hidden problems while making sure that we don''t just "knee jerk" react to perceived problems or overlook the obvious.
That''s how it is working at Hayward.
Before embarking on those plant expansions back in 1999, executives of the privately held company sought an outside assessment of their situation. After hearing the presentation, Alcorn recalled, "management agreed, if we can do one-third of what they said we can do, we''d be better off."
To demonstrate management''s commitment to the new manufacturing principles, the first product slated for transformation was Hayward''s bread and butter product: the Super Pump.
"This is a key product, the heart of the business," said Tony Groves, supervisor of the Kaizen Promotion Office, the internal team that plans, oversees, and follows up on each kaizen event. "That says a lot for management''s dedication."
The Super Pump had been built on a traditional assembly line that snaked along inside the 300,000 sq ft manufacturing plant. Workers faced the line and turned around every few minutes to grab components from "gaylords" -- yard-square boxes lined up across the factory floor like trunks in a train station.
The 20 lb motors that are the heart of the pump had to be picked up three or four times in the process, becoming heavier as more components were added.
"If you''re picking each motor up multiple times a day, by the end of the day, you''re tired," Groves noted.
Today, the Super Pump is produced in a U-shaped cell. Workers stand on the inside, facing neatly organized bins of components arranged within their "strike zone" -- the area from knees to shoulder where a person can comfortably reach for objects without bending or stretching.
In between, the motor with its attached components slides along a plastic track on its way to becoming a pump. It is picked up only twice, at the beginning and at end of the process. Each assembly process and each station has been standardized: Every process is done the same way every time, with operators following the standard work instructions for each step.
Thanks to takt time scheduling -- the process of matching production to the rate of customers'' orders -- Hayward makes only the number of pumps that customers order. Products do not stack up in the warehouse.
Workers also keep a record of their progress posted on a board beside the work cell. Any supervisor passing by can note the progress of the cell, including any problems that have arisen, by checking the board, without interrupting the workers at their tasks.
"The supervisor has to be able to walk along and see what is going on," Alcorn explained.
Assemblers are supplied with components by a "water spider," a worker who is cross-trained on the assembly line and whose job it is to follow a defined route in replenishing components in the cell. Oftentimes, the water spider sets components into kits for each product -- another control to ensure that every product has the right parts.
As water spiders replace components, they notice how many are left in each bin. If a process requires two of one component and one of another, the water spider should find twice as many of the first component in that bin as the number of the other component in the neighboring bin.
Should that not be the case, the water spider knows that a mistake has been made. That requires a check of the products that have been made since the last time the bins were replenished: a far simpler task than checking every item in the warehouse at the end of the day.
For some products, the assembly cells have been moved next to the molding presses, allowing the presses to feed directly into the cell -- truly creating one-piece flow. Molded parts are no longer hauled across the factory floor from the presses to the assembly cells. All are made at the same place and assembled there.
Hayward has also implemented SMED (single minute exchange of dies) in order to run small lot sizes. Molds have been put on tracks for ease of movement. The Tooling Department has installed guides to position the molds, both sliding in and sliding out of the press. Mold changes that used to shut down the press for hours, now take just minutes.
While the Super Pump has been the model cell for LeanSigma adaptation at Hayward, the other lines are not far behind.
"Everybody here wants to be on as many kaizen events as possible," said Groves. "It''s a big part of the culture now."
With 64 events completed over the past four years and two or more events a month scheduled, on average, there are plenty of opportunities.
"It permeates the entire organization from top to bottom," said Ray D''Andrea, whose combined duties make him manager of both Kaizen Promotion Office and Manufacturing Engineering, a measure of exactly the kind of integration he was talking about.
"Now, all changes to work methods are directed in combination with engineering and the workforce," he said. "Lean principles are involved in the design of products."
Marketing and a customer representative are now involved in new product design beginning at the initial stages.
For the past two years, Hayward has been reinforcing the gains it has made through lean with complementary quality focused sigma events, christened Sigma Kaizen. The manufacturing cell for the cartridge filter element provides a strong example of Sigma Kaizen in action.
As the name cartridge filter indicates, the process begins with pleating a roll of white fabric about a yard wide. The pleating machine folds and cuts the fabric before the operator sends it along to the next station in the U-shaped cell, all in takt time.
The move toward one-piece flow was progressing well, but a problem existed with scrap from the pleating operation. Early this year, a Sigma Kaizen team set out to determine why.
In the first week, the Measure/Analyze phase of the Sigma Kaizen project, they found that the fabric roll had to be changed every 12 minutes. Significant waste was occurring when the roll was changed.
Further analysis revealed that the cause of the problem was two motors that produced the pleats were running at different speeds. Not only were they running at different speeds, they ramped up at different speeds. That difference was causing the waste. Complicating matters, adjusting the machine to meet takt time meant that it was not running at its own optimal speed.
With a full set of issues discovered during Measure/Analyze -- and many of the obvious problems already fixed -- the team began the Analyze/Improve phase a few weeks later. At this point, the team had already met its goal of scrap reduction, but went looking for more opportunities.
For example, part of the problem was caused by operators "fiddling" with the controls. That was solved by setting up a standard work procedure for making machine adjustments and insisting that operators stick to it. Some lingering issues have been assigned as homework, in the Control phase, to be completed in 30 days.
LeanSigma has even solved Hayward''s original problem with the excessive amount of molded balls.
Today, the blow molding presses from the King''s Mountain plant sit within an 18,000 sq ft work area at the Clemmons plant. It''s an impressive area with machines that are ceiling high and as wide as a movie screen.
An off-white rubber tube about eight inches in diameter pops down onto a blow pin. As the hot air begins expanding the tube into a sphere, a pair of giant tweezers travels across the top of the ceiling to pinch and seal the top of the tube. When the machine is done, a ball rolls down the ramp into the arms of an operator.
While the machine makes the next globe, the operator performs secondary work and assembly. Once completed, this product is ready to go into distribution and ship to the customer -- all at the pace of customer demand.
Looking back, Hayward has accomplished a lot over the past four years. Looking forward, they know there is so much more to do on this never-ending journey.