Thriving on lean

Leaders at Buck Knives, New Balance Athletic Shoe and lawn mower maker Ariens Co. detailed for ProMat 2007 attendees how they bet big on lean manufacturing and won.

By Corinne Kator, Associate Editor -- Modern Materials Handling, 2/1/2007

To many, lean manufacturing sounds like a big risk. To others, not adopting lean is the bigger risk.

The latter is how top executives at Buck Knives, New Balance Athletic Shoe and Ariens Co. viewed lean. In fact, two of the three were in a turnaround situation and literally bet the company on eliminating waste.

Today, all three are thriving because of their decisions. And at last month’s ProMat 2007 Keynote Forum, executives from the companies detailed their journeys and what it has done for the health of their companies. Here’s what they had to say.

In the late 1990s, Buck Knives was facing what president and CEO C.J. Buck describes as “catastrophic business failure.” So in 2001, the company’s new board of directors set out a five-year plan to turn the company around.

“We took every single area of our business,” says Buck (800-326-2825, www.buckknives.com), “and redeveloped it based on the Toyota business model.”

Company management implemented lean manufacturing processes that included a Kanban signaling system and strict adhesion to the 5S housekeeping techniques (see box for details on Kanban, 5S and other lean lingo). But they didn’t stop there. They extended the lean philosophy to marketing, sales and finance.

“Each department has its own definition of lean,” says Buck. For the marketing department, lean means delivering a specific message to a specific type of customer. For the accounting department, lean means eliminating any details that won’t actually be used to make decisions from financial reports.

Once a company commits to a lean way of thinking, Buck says, “it starts filtering through your entire business.”

Buck Knives is one of many companies that have found success not by dabbling in the lean business practices pioneered by Toyota in the 1950s but by total immersion in Toyota’s lean philosophy.

New Balance Athletic Shoe began applying lean techniques in its U.S. manufacturing facilities two years ago, says company executive Herb Spivak (800-622-1218, www.newbalance.com), and today the company is expanding its lean initiative beyond manufacturing.

New Balance is applying lean techniques in product development, says Spivak, cutting the time it takes to move a shoe from design to production. The company is also applying the lean philosophy to its order fulfillment system. The goal, says Spivak, is to turn around orders from New Balance’s smaller retail customers in less than 24 hours.

Until recently, he explains, the company’s order fulfillment process included lots of lag time. Faxed orders from small shoe stores were collected from the fax machine just once a day. Orders entered into the computer system were batched and transmitted to the distribution center once every few hours. This meant some orders sat by the fax machine all day and then sat in the computer system for hours before employees in the DC could begin the work of picking and shipping.

Now these orders move more quickly. Office workers gather orders from the fax machine every hour, and the IT department has reconfigured the company’s computer system to transmit orders to the DC more frequently. In these and other ways, New Balance has taken the “continuous flow” techniques it uses in manufacturing and has applied them to order fulfillment.

For the Ariens Co., a Wisconsin-based manufacturer of snow blowers and lawn mowers, total immersion in lean means applying lean broadly across the company; it also means making a long-term commitment to the lean philosophy.

Company president Dan Ariens (920-756-2141, www.ariens.com) says his company used lean techniques to recover from a financial crisis in 1999. The crisis has passed, he says, but his commitment to lean remains.

Ariens sustains his dedication to lean by continually creating a sense of urgency. “You need to find fresh battles to keep everyone on their toes,” he says.

Like Buck Knives, the Ariens Co.’s first battle was simply one for financial survival. Next, the company focused on meeting the low-cost manufacturing threat from China. Today, the goal is to bring products to market more rapidly than ever before.

When that battle is won, Ariens will find a new motivation for the company’s next lean initiative. “Continuous improvement is forever,” he says.

One way lean has become a way of life at Ariens Co. is through a commitment to Kaizen events. A traditional Kaizen event involves 10 people focusing for an entire week on improving a particular process. The Ariens Co. conducts smaller, shorter Kaizen events but conducts them frequently—at least every other week.

“I think it’s important to do that many events so it becomes very routine, so that it’s just the way we work,” says Ariens.