Rose Corp – training and sustaining continuous improvement by including everyone.
Improvement, empowerment and accountability….a powerful set of words when linked effectively can produce powerful positive results.
I am very proud of this project, the hard work Rose Corporation’s team put in initially and the fact that even through very difficult financial times, Rose’s team continues to improve a little bit every day. A family owned business founded in 1987. Rose Corporation occupies eight large buildings comprising over 150,000 sq. ft. Oversized doors, and cranes as high as 65 feet with 60-ton capacity, enable them to work on very large components.
Beginning their Lean training in 2006, Rose made steady improvements with workplace organization, pull/flow, and quality, then began to plateau.
In 2008 business team then decided to create a more inclusive system of improvement, creating an “everybody, everyday” type culture focused on continuous improvement.
The first step was to train the business team on the “people side of continuous improvement” and to have the team select rules for the program. These rules consisted on 8 things that were not acceptable to the company such as reducing safety or quality.
With the rules in hand we trained all employees in the kaizen or improvement kata process, then formed 12 mixed level teams including everyone from the Chairwomen of the Board down to the newest hire. Each team selected a clearly defined problem, directly observed the problem, identified root cause, the developed countermeasures to implement the plan. All plans required meaningful measures and targets. Teams that decided an equipment acquisition was required were required to present their case to the business team for approval.
Director of Quality and Safety Tom McDevitt:
A couple thoughts:
- The Fast-track kaizens remain popular with our guys
- Our original rules remain unchanged and respected
- Any kaizen involving funds required the team leader to present justification of expenditure to business team
Another point: we started measuring “impacts” in addition to projects logged. We quickly realized that kaizen projects had impacts on more than one area. For instance, a kaizen team implemented an improvement idea to create a pipe-die shadow board in assembly. They saw the value in eliminating the time wasted looking for the correct dies; however the second value was quality improvements. Centralizing and labeling the die sets eliminated the problem of using incorrect die sizes; therefore improving quality, and eliminating waste. The Impacts recorded in this example were Production, Quality, and 6S.
With the rules in hand we trained all employees in the kaizen or improvement kata process, then formed 12 mixed level teams including everyone from the Chairwomen of the Board down to the newest hire. Each team selected a clearly defined problem, directly observed the problem, identified root cause, then developed countermeasures to implement the plan. All plans required meaningful measures and targets. Any team incorporating equipment acquisition into their future state solution was required to present their case to the business team for approval.
