The following is an article from the Leader-Herald in Gloversville, NY.

Streamlining: Local business works to make itself leaner with help of state grant

By JASON SUBIK

The Leader Herald

JOHNSTOWN — When Spray Nine Marketing Services Manager Pat Hayslett was hired two years ago he said it was with the intention that he would spend most of his time working on market research, writing and publishing material about the company in periodicals and on Web sites, and doing strategic marketing of Spray Nine cleaning products.

When he actually started working for the company, however, he realized he was spending most of his time ping-ponging between his office and the company’s chemical laboratory in a weekly effort to ensure that the pressure-treated stickers of the various Spray Nine containers had up to date marketing and regulatory information on them.

“I would say that it easily took up about half of my time here, and that’s a conservative estimate,” Hayslett said.

In fall 2005, Spray Nine received a $41,850 grant from the New York state Department of Labor for the purposes of “leanness” training. Since then the company has spent $25,300 of the grant to hirethe Mohawk Valley Applied Technologies Corp., a consulting firm, that has spent the last seven months training the company on the concepts of lean culture.

Spray Nine Human Resources Manager Carol Johnston said the training taught the company to break down every process they used step by step.

“They wanted us to ask the question ‘what are we doing and why are we doing it,’” she said.

In Hayslett’s case, it was determined the label update process would work more smoothly if someone in the graphics department identified the label that must be updated. That person then brings it to the laboratory for any necessary regulatory changes. It goes to Hayslett from there. He adds any necessary marketing changes to the label before sending it back to the graphics department. That department then processes the necessary paperwork for the update of the labels.

“Now it takes up a very small percentage of my time, maybe 10 [percent] or 15 [percent],” he said. “That has freed me up to be involved a lot more in our marketing campaigns. A lot more researching markets and finding out who has needs that we can satisfy. I’ve also been able to spend a lot more time writing, which is what I was hired to do as my primary job.”

Mohawk Valley Applied Technologies President Paul MacEnroe said the leanness philosophy of business is based on the Toyota automobile production method.

“Eliminate all stuff that gets in the way of the process,” MacEnroe said.

Johnston said Mohawk Valley Applied Technologies preached the five Ss of lean manufacturing.



Sort through all materials

Spray Nine Director of Sales and Marketing Lorraine Gifford said finding files pertinent to customers was once a time consuming and laborious task.

“Every body had their own files,” she said. “I had my files on the customers. We had some files in another cabinet on the customer. Someone else would have a little more. It was very inefficient.”

She said Mohawk Valley Applied Technologies presented her with an organization method that reduced the number of filing cabinets in the office from seven down to three.

“First you have to see what files everyone has,” she said. “Then you see what files can be consolidated and eliminated. Then you find a central location where everyone can access them.”

Gifford said eliminating the excess files has greatly improved her ability to serve her company.

“The tangible benefit is that I’m on the phone or I get an e-mail and a customer needs something ‘like that’ I know exactly where to go to get it,” she said.



Set in order

The manufacturing floor of Spray Nine has been dramatically changed by the lean manufacturing method. Before lean was introduced a disorganized system of parts cabinets and toolboxes was used by workers to set up the manufacturing machines for each of the different product lines.

Spray Nine Vice President of Manufacturing Dale R. Henry said typically workers would be required to waste time looking through their tool boxes and cabinets for the right parts and equipment to perform each ‘change out’ procedure on a daily basis.

“What we did is we went to each department and found out what [tools] they didn’t need and then we found out what they did use on a daily basis for a machine set up,” he said.

A system of “shadowboards” was then set up throughout the plant. The boards have silhouette outlines of all of the pertinent tools used for change out procedures and hooks for the tools to hang from. There are also shadowboards for all of the machine parts that need to be installed.

“This way, if you need a tool, instead of fishing around in a drawer, you can just look at the board and know if it’s there,” Henry said. “It used to be cluttered around here. Now everything is clean and organized and it’s a lot safer.”

MacEnroe likened this aspect of lean manufacturing to the difference between how long it takes the average person to change a tire and how long it takes a race car team to change four tires on the NASCAR circuit.

“In NASCAR, they have leaned the whole process out,” he said. “When you need to change a tire at home you’ve got to go to find your jack and then go into your trunk and move aside your golf bag and get the spare tire out, and it usually takes you about a half an hour. In NASCAR, they can change four tires, oil up the car and get the driver a glass of water in less time than it took me to say that.”

MacEnroe said the key is having a defined place for all necessary equipment in a process so that it can accessed quickly utilizing route memorization to eliminate time wasted through searching. He said that typically this lean method can increase efficiency by as much as 50 percent.

Henry estimated that since implementing the shadowboards he has saved between 5 and 6 hours of manpower wasted in change out procedures every day.



Shine, and keep it clean

One of the biggest changes implemented at Spray Nine has been the reduction in excess inventory. MacEnroe explained that traditionally manufacturers have overproduced their products, and the components of their products, and built up inventory they don’t need. Spray Nine was a perfect example of that phenomenon with many weeks worth of inventory taking up space in their plant and costing them rent in a warehouse facility that charges by the foot.

“You have to remember that the only thing you get paid for is the products you are selling at that moment,” MacEnroe said. “The customer is not paying you to move parts back and forth.”

Mohawk Valley Applied Technologies advised that Spray Nine run shorter production runs so they are only carrying as much inventory as they need to keep up with current product orders. Johnston said this has made the business more efficient because they no longer have trucks running back and forth from the warehouse on a daily basis to assemble hordes of existing parts. She said it has also saved the company money in warehousing costs.

An added benefit to reducing inventory has been that the increased space in the plant can now be used for staging products to be shipped out.

“What’s changed is that whenever we are in dire need of something we can flip a switch and they can give us what we need,” Lou Zanella who works in the staging area said.

He explained that the increased floor space has allowed the workers to “pick and pull” the products that need to be shipped out and have them ready for staging where as in the past the entire process needed to be done all at once when the tractor trailer arrived at the plant. He said that the lean manufacturing method has saved the company approximately 18,000 square feet of floor space.



Standardize

The lean methods were also applied to how management deals with employees. Plant Supervisor Gary Cline said that he used to waste time every day in the morning telling each worker what his or her assignment was going to be that day. To make that process more efficient he now uses a large dry erase board to write out all assignments for the plant’s 45 manufacturing workers.

“It’s more efficient because as they come into work they actually pass right by it and they can see which product we’re running and what line they are going to be on,” Cline said.

Henry said the method also involves the workers in their jobs because they don’t need to be told what to do.

“With the board all we have to do is look up to see what our job is,” Ryan Bauman, a three-year veteran worker at the plant, said.



Sustain

Johnston said that most of the intense four- and eight-hour training sessions administered by Mohawk Valley Applied Technologies were completed in the first several months of the program. She said the company checks on the progress at Spray Nine every two weeks to see if they are sustaining the changes that have been implemented. She said that the key lesson learned by Spray Nine has been to constantly ask “why” as task needs to be performed and how it effects the value added to the finished product.



The bottom line

It is unknown what the long term impact of the leanness training will be on Spray Nine. Johnston said the efficiency of the company has been increased substantially.

“We know we can now do a lot more work with the same size work force,” she said.

The only way to test the new capacity at Spray Nine would be for the company to have a corresponding increase in product sales.

“They didn’t teach us how to increase sales,” she said.