The Fabricator - August 2009

AACompany Profile Beginning the lean manufacturing journey

LAI International takes the first steps, reaps rewards right away

By Dan Davis, Editor-in-Chief

The resume for LAI International, Scottsdale, Ariz., is an impressive read. The company boasts $60 million in annual sales; five manufac- turing locations stretching from Scarborough, Maine, to Tucson, Ariz.; 250 employees; and a customer list that reads like a who’s who in the aerospace and energy industries. The company’s engineers have developed product designs—such as screen panels for fighter jets, flexible tubing for medical applications, and specialty parts for turbines—that aren’t easily duplicated by rivals.

The company is approved to ISO 9001:2000, AS9100, and NADCAP standards. It has manufacturing skills in the areas of waterjet cutting, laser processing, and machining that make the company a strategic part of OEMs’ supply chains. In fact, LAI has developed its own technology for waterjet cutting of complex geometries in coated jet engine and power system components.

But resumes don’t tell you everything.

They don’t list areas of improvement and give you only a superficial view. It’s only after an in-depth conversation that you get a clearer picture of the entity behind the fancy grade of paper.

After such an interview, you find out that LAI has room to improve and eagerly wants to explore those opportunities. Company leaders aren’t afraid to admit that the company can do things much more efficiently.

This realization came when LAI hired individuals who had experience with lean manufacturing—the practice of rooting out waste in processes. Lean manufacturing and Six Sigma—a quantitative, analytical method that seeks to remove the causes of errors and variation in manufacturing processes—became regular parts of the LAI lexicon. Then came the realization that to make the largest impact on the organization as a whole, lean had to be “institutionalized,” according to John Rogers, LAI’s vice president of operations.

Frank Bailey, plant manager, LAI Midwest, Minneapolis, Minn., is a certified Six Sigma black belt and helped to establish training goals for the company. Over the past couple of years, thousands of dollars have been spent training people in

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the ways of lean manufacturing and certifying them as black or green belts in Six Sigma.

“We think continuous improvement has to come from the top. And it has to be done at every level of the company. That’s how we run the company,” said Stewart Cramer, LAI’s president.

Ultimately, the improvements will make a difference with LAI’s customers as well.

“[Our customers] are very sophisticated and demanding. Many of them are further down the path in lean than we are. Many of them come into our facilities and want to see what we’re doing with those types of skills and tools,” Rogers said.

“That’s another motivation,” he continued. “We actually want to get out ahead of the curve on that. These folks that have a lot of experience in these disciplines will be the first to tell us that we are not very far along. But we have reaped some benefits, and we have captured some low-hanging fruit.”

These small victories have helped to energize the entire company as it moves forward on its lean manufacturing journey.

390 Ways to Improve

When LAI’s Rich Technology International in Maine launched its lean training efforts, facility leaders met with small groups of people, teaching them the basic ways to help identify waste, selling them on the idea that this was necessary to stay competitive, and reassuring them that this wasn’t a secret effort to reduce labor. Each of these groups also was involved in brainstorming sessions to think of potential projects.

That resulted in 390 ideas, according to Melanie Wintle, an LAI lean coordinator. Those ideas were categorized into long- and short-term projects, and a few of the short-term projects were tagged as prime opportunities to chalk up quick successes. The groups then appointed product champions—nonmanagement types—to lead the project teams made up of people from across all shifts.

“We established clear project plans, set goals and roles for the team, and made sure we had management buy-off,” Wintle said. “Then we set out to implement the plan.”

C FIGURE 1 By putting a quick-release plug on a grounding wire that had to be attached to a fixture before a cutting job began, the team at LAI company Rich Technology International was able to reduce changeover time to a matter of seconds instead of 1.5 minutes.