Reliable Plant 2012 Conference and Exhibition

Quick and Simple Lean Simulations that Your Employees will Understand!

Mike Thelen, continuous improvement leader, Wells Dairy

Have you ever wondered how you can get your employees to gain a basic understanding of lean philosophy and why they should be excited to jump on board? Hands-on participation and classroom presenting are great learning aides, but they don’t seem to be driving home the message? Feel bogged down with tools and techniques that still aren’t helping with culture and concepts? How about a few quick and simple simulations to help speed the learning?

Participants in this session will actively participate in simple, easy-to-use and easy-to-understand simulations that will help them educate their workforce in either the shop or the office. Get exposed to: the “5-S numbers” game (and see how standardized work can even be included), a fast and simple “gemba kaizen” ball-pass technique, and the ergonomic “OK” in this interactive, full-participation seminar. Other simulations that support a variety of lean tools also may be discussed. All participants will receive supporting documentation and contact information to assist with running the simulations at their place of business.

Senior Management Guide to the Lean Transition

Jack Harrison, The Hands-On-Group

Running into lean implementation problems? Having trouble sustaining the gains? Difficulty getting some of your peers or subordinates on-board? You aren’t alone – many face these same type of problems. This session will address these issues and your specific challenges to implementing and sustaining lean in your organization. The speaker has twenty two years of lean consulting experience, covering dozens of industries in over one-hundred plant sites, combined with a solid manufacturing management background, including CEO and owner of a manufacturing plant. Bring your top issues and questions to this problem-solving session designed to get you on the right track with your lean transition.

Using OEE to Drive TPM

Adrian Pask, management analyst, Vorne Industries

Are you interested in reducing breakdowns, minor stops, and slow running by up to 80%? The concepts of OEE and TPM have been around for over 50 years, and while many sites have implemented these tools, few see long term sustainable improvement. In this session you'll learn how to identify and explore the fundamental foundations that enable long term results with the tools of OEE and TPM. We will provide real, practical steps that you can take straight from this session and put into place in your factory the very next day.

You will learn:

·         How to increase OEE by 6-11% with virtually no investment

·         5 Top Tips for successfully implementing a TPM program

·         How to practically use OEE to get results in the real world

·         What TPM is, and how it can help your machines run more efficiently

·         A simplified 5 Step TPM roadmap that you can take away and apply to your factory

Get to this session for practical, interesting, and you will get some real actions that you can take away.

Maintenance Black Belt Certification at Sonoco

Jeff Slater, Operating Excellence Leader, Sonoco

While on their journey to develop their Continuous Improvement Culture, Sonoco realized that the statistical aspect to Lean Six Sigma tended to deter maintenance personnel from participating. This realization led to the birth of a Maintenance Black Belt Certification program. There are some statistical tools that are related to MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) and MTTR (Mean Time to Repair), but the certification I focused on a hands on approach with daily team maintenance, 5S, and predictive maintenance. Learn more about Sonoco’s Maintenance Black Belt Certification in this intriguing case study presentation.

Lean Maintenance Transformation: Transform Ineffective Maintenance Practices to World Class

Ken Hughes, Maintenance and Facilities Manager, Power Partners, Inc

In this case study presentation you’ll learn how Power Partners, a transformer manufacturer, effectively implemented a plan to go from reactive to proactive by changing culture and removing waste from the maintenance department. Discover just how easy it is to transform your maintenance department from being a burden to an asset and partner with operations in this insightful presentation.

Lean in the Utilities Sector: Luminant’s Operational Excellence Model

Steve Wells, Operational Excellence strategist and Lean Six Sigma consultant, Luminant

Luminant Power was one of the first utilities in the electricity producing industry to start down the path of continuous improvement. In 2004, the company implemented a model of CI using a program titled “The Operating System”, which used the combined elements of Lean, Six Sigma and Plant Reliability to cut costs, increase revenue and provide savings. These improvements were realized through eliminating waste by revamping processes, increasing generation through standard work and best practices, and evaluating project costs utilizing the principles of changeover and SMED. As The Operating System matured, it was retitled Operational Excellence to indicate the depth and breadth of principles, systems and tool usage across the enterprise.

Attendees will take away insight into the critical foundations of an Operational Excellence program, which will enable them to review their own continuous improvement efforts for missing elements, or to lay a foundation in the preparation of a program. Examples will be presented of how Luminant utilized this model to instill a high-performing culture in a mature workforce in existing plants and mines, while ramping up employees into newly constructed facilities.

Sustain the Progress with Kamishibai Cards: Tips from a Former Toyota Group Leader

Scott E. Cornell, project manager, Argo Inc.

As businesses begin their lean transformation, they often struggle with how to sustain the improvements that they have begun to see. Usually, setting up frequent audit systems can help some, but how do you manage that audit system? Usually, it is set up with a system of “supervisors or managers” auditing the work of “operators or workers”. In the short term, this can work. However, who audits the auditors? Do we have a system set up to verify that the auditors are doing what they are supposed to do, and are they doing it correctly? This is where a “management kamishibai card” can be extremely beneficial.

Management kamishibai cards are a way for managers’ work to begin to be standardized, as well as injecting much needed accountability into the existing system. It is a top-down managed approach, so it is important that every member of management is involved (director, plant manager, area manager, supervisor, team leader – as well as the continuous improvement manager). Management kamishibai cards eventually become part of a manager’s daily standard work, just as much as checking their employee’s time cards or performing root cause analysis on specific downtime events.

Using the 3P Approach in Process and Workplace Design

Mike Wroblewski, Senior Operations Consultant, Gemba Consulting North America

In this session, the 3P (Production Preparation Process) in both manufacturing and healthcare will be presented showing the overall Lean design approach that includes the rapid testing of ideas and the embedding of Lean principles into process and workspace design. The Production Preparation Process is an approach used to design production process and equipment to conform to lean principles such as one-piece flow, building quality into the process, quick changeover, and flexibility. Production Preparation Process involves consideration and testing of various process alternatives using a cross-functional team approach and providing feedback to product design in order to improve the production process.

Lean at Federal Heath: The Results Speak for Themselves

Rick Foreman, director of manufacturing and lean development, Federal Heath

Federal Heath’s culture change comes from being a learning organization, maintaining a consistent sense of urgency, and through engaging, connecting and influencing lean thinking behavior. Its culture of striving to standardize and make some small improvement on a daily basis has developed more of a point-kaizen focus that contributes to the pursuit of excellence and an improved bottom line. The results speak for themselves. In a tough economic environment, which greatly impacted its industry, Federal Heath has seen significant improvements with customer satisfaction, improved inventory turns, strong cash flow, improved setup efficiencies and savings throughout every area of the organization. Recognition was given by TMAC for the company’s Euless facility in 2010, and the Jacksonville, Texas, facility will receive the same recognition for operational excellence from TMAC in the first quarter of 2011. Lean thinking is in the company’s DNA, and it simply asks daily, “Did we have a good day?” and “How can I improve on it tomorrow?”

Manufacturing Intelligence: The Art of Making Factory Data Talk

Michel Baudin, owner, Takt Times Group

Recommending a road map to lean for a plant requires understanding its business and its technology. Much – but not all of this understanding – can be gained by observing the shop floor and listening to the concerns of managers, engineers and operators. Direct observation and human perceptions, however, must be supplemented by data analysis. Manufacturing operations always need and generate data: production is driven by orders converted to schedules, it is performed according to specifications, its status is monitored, and results are recorded both in terms of quantities and quality. The analysis of this data often reveals internal inconsistencies, discrepancies and unsuspected patterns that are key to identifying and quantifying improvement opportunities. It is done with tools that are either already present on engineers’ laptops or can be downloaded at little or no cost. Focused data cleaning is the most challenging first step. Once you have good, clean data, making it talk requires tools that are much simpler and easier to use than those described in the data mining literature.

Attendees of this session will learn how to:

·         Work with the information systems staff to retrieve factory data from the multiple and often incompatible legacy systems in which they typically reside.

·         Decrypt arcane and inconsistent naming conventions to reverse-engineer a clear, easily understandable information model.

·         Clean the data and structure it for analysis.

·         Apply a variety of tools to uncover and quantify relevant characteristics

·         Map these results to decisions on actual processes.

Training Within Industry – Fundamental Skills in Today’s Workplace

Donald A. Dinero, principal, TWI Learning Partnership

The Training Within Industry (TWI) Programs have been called “the most underrated achievement of 20th-century industry.” They are “underrated” because most Americans do not know about them. They are an “achievement” because they helped America and its allies win World War II. In addition, however, they involve fundamental skills that every person should master and use on a daily basis. As such, they are necessary for all members of any organization to use in order to be as successful as they can be.

These programs were developed in the USA in the 1940s and have since proven themselves around the world in that they provide a simple yet powerful methodology of providing fundamental skills. They fell from favor in the U.S. and have been used continuously by others, mainly the Japanese. Their resurgence in America has been due to the discovery that they are a foundational element of Toyota’s Production System (TPS), which Americans and others around the world are attempting to emulate as Lean Production or Lean Thinking.

The developers of these programs recognized the dichotomy between knowledge and skill and created programs to address each separately. Program development was created to address knowledge-based issues and three other programs (Job Instruction, Methods and Relations) were developed to deal with skills.

This session discusses why these programs, developed almost 70 years ago, are still not only relevant but also necessary in today’s workplace. Not only have organizations’ cultures changed over time, but management’s focus on culture has changed. Yet today, these programs produce the classically required results of increasing quality, safety records and productivity as they did when they were developed. In addition, however, they substantially improve morale, teamwork and communication, which are also of great concern in today’s workplace. Moreover, they do this without coercion, but rather by building an intrinsic motivation in employees. This is done by getting employees more engaged in their work. The session also discusses how the programs should be used to accomplish the aforementioned objectives. Specific points are itemized to address the successful implementation and sustainment of the programs in the organization’s culture. The required concepts may seem almost heretical by today’s thinking and, perhaps, this is one reason they have lost favor over the years. For example, training is not complete unless 100% of the prescribed material has been transferred to and absorbed by the learner. The author explains why concepts such as this are still valid over time.