Industrial Products

The Revolution Starts Today

The economic recession is changing the assumptions and cost-benefit equations that have driven manufacturing decisions for decades. Orders for durable goods are down sharply. Erratic and unpredictable consumer demand is contributing to inventory buildup, product obsolescence and missed sales. Commodity and transportation costs have fallen for the time being but no one thinks they will stay where they are.

It’s time for a sea change in management thinking and behavior. It’s time to stop dabbling and reinvent your core business processes to be more responsive and flexible in today’s market, and be ready to capitalize on tomorrow’s opportunities. It’s time to move beyond manufacturing and extend the returns from your lean program across the enterprise to the bottom line.

Many manufacturers of industrial products have implemented some lean tools in their factories to cut costs. But lean is about much more than cutting costs. Lean is a business system that can help you leapfrog your nearest competitors. Three to five years into a lean transformation, it’s not unusual for TBM clients to have doubled their rate of sales growth and increased net income by 4X or more.

REAL WORLD GAINS FROM A LEAN SIGMA TRANSFORMATION

Real World Gains

The Lean Sigma transformation starts with employee development, which drives performance improvement, process excellence and a superior ability to plan and execute. By building internal capabilities, TBM helps our clients become self sufficient, accelerate the pace of change and sustain their gains. Our industrial products clients include:

Automotive parts suppliers
Electrical equipment manufacturers
Metal fabricators
Chemical producers
Makers of plastic parts
Heavy equipment and machinery manufacturers.

For many companies that have experimented with lean, the improvements remain isolated and progress slowly tapers off. As the returns diminish, or as plunging markets make cost-cutting the top priority, management’s attention moves on. This doesn’t have to happen. Lean programs can be reinvigorated to deliver results that have an immediate impact on your business. And Lean training and experience can be used to meet cost-cutting requirements while preserving a culture of continuous improvement.

Set Your Priorities

TBM’s industrial clients produce thousands of products an hour or they may custom engineer and build one machine per week. We’ve helped companies like yours around the world to increase productivity and respond effectively to rising materials and labor costs. We have helped clients:

Create visual, demand-responsive factories
Establish lean performance measurement systems
Optimize capital investments and factory networks
Expand leadership skills
Speed changeover times, reduce lot sizes, and boost first-time quality
Shorten delivery times and eliminate backlogs.

With so many opportunities for improvement, it can be difficult to know where to start. TBM can help you set intelligent business priorities and fully leverage Lean and Six Sigma techniques, which we combine as Lean Sigma. We start by helping you build your continuous improvement team’s knowledge and skills, which includes classroom training, exposure to best practice operations, and hands-on coaching. Using a combination of project teams and the kaizen breakthrough methodology, we help clients move their operations forward in multiple areas at the same time. A rigorous project selection process utilizing value stream maps and an impact/difficulty matrix is one of the keys to success.

“We select projects that have potential for real bottom-line results,” says John Crum, vice president of operations for Seaman Corporation. “Selection may take two to three days, but the end result of selecting projects with the greatest impact— the highest return on investment—is critical.”

Some of the outward characteristics that distinguish our clients’ operations include:

Tight alignment between production with demand
A strong emphasis on improvement through constant training and communication
Minimal work-in-process inventory
Market-leading order-to-shipment cycle times.
Ubiquitous visual status and quality indicators
Clean and organized work areas

Applying a Lean Sigma mindset and process improvement tools to your business may sound easy. But if it were easy, everyone would do it and there would be no competitive advantage. To learn more about our experience and how we can help your company move forward, contact Bill Swisher at 800-438-5535.