Lean manufacturing tips for the 15-person shop

I bet a lot of readers think, “These lean ideas presented each month are great, but my company is small and has fewer employees than those big guys. How can these ideas really apply to me?” That is a fair observation.

“Small” is a relative term. A 500-person plant is small compared to a 2,000-person plant. A 50-person plant is small compared to a 200-person plant. So for the purposes of this article, let’s define “small” as a 15-person fab shop.

Can lean be scaled down to a 15-person (or fewer) operation? The answer is yes. Let’s explore.

Small Versus Big

Being small has its advantages. For one thing, small shops are nimble and lack bureaucracy. With few layers and levels to cut through, they act and react quickly to make changes.

You can see it all, from the first operation to the last. You can see the flow (or lack thereof), and internal customers can see each other, upstream and downstream.

And you can get everyone in the same room, be it for training, problem-solving, or anything else. Controlling the message is very manageable.

Sounds great so far. But being small has its disadvantages too. Small shops have limited bench strength, simply because they have fewer people than a larger organization. Outside of welders and perhaps some machine operators, few specialize in one task or skill. A large shop might have someone dedicated to implementing and coordinating 5S; the small fabricator may depend on machine operators, welders, and assemblers to be their own 5S resource.

A large company may have specialists and perhaps full-time lean resources. At a small company, you need to wear a lot of hats, and this affects how deeply you can dive into any one issue or improvement opportunity. You might have to figure out how to implement lean with people who work part-time and wear multiple hats. The bad news is you’re stretched thin; the good news is you have a lot of variety in your job.

Finally, you likely have little if any redundant equipment. If you have only one punch press, shutting it down for a kaizen event or total productive maintenance may be difficult.

You can’t take a one-size-fits-all approach, but this is true no matter what size company you work for. Be sure to develop a well-thought-out strategy and take care picking places to implement lean so that you use your small shop’s limited resources wisely.

Still, I believe the small fab shop has the overall advantage. Why? Working at a small company, you can move quickly and focus sharply—without the inertia of the larger organization.

Good Communication is Key

Good communication applies regardless of company size. You need to explain why your small shop initiated the lean journey and the pace at which you expect changes to take place, along with what you hope to achieve. Keep everyone informed of the company’s progress. If, for example, you conduct a kaizen where you saw substantial improvement, let people know, describe why it worked, and celebrate successes.

Teach and hold everyone accountable to standard work processes. This could include anything from 5S to defined weld sequences and material movement strategies. Employees should use and maintain shadow boards; welders should follow a sequence of weld steps in a uniform way; and material handlers should move materials in the right quantity, time, and fashion—to designated drop zones, in certain dunnage types, at defined intervals.

If you or your company leaders don’t communicate effectively, expect backsliding. Leaders must set the tone and then let people do their jobs. The better the communication, the better the follow-through.

Focus on Flow

Understanding how products and information flow is essential. Use the spaghetti diagram to illustrate. If the shop is loosely run—meaning schedules are not followed and operators pick their own work—material movement will be haphazard; parts will get lost; and operators, welders, and assemblers will spend too much time looking for the next job.

Encourage and empower employees to hold one another accountable for good material and information flow practices. Get the shop floor and office employees involved in maintaining the shop flow.

To ensure everyone keeps their eye on flow, you need a healthy 5S system. Divide the plant evenly so that everyone in the facility can focus on specific areas to organize and clean. Regular 5S audits keep everyone on task and reveal when an area is drifting from expectations.

You could argue that people in a small shop just don’t have time for this “5S stuff.” But before you assume 5S isn’t worth it, watch your shop floor workers to see how much time they spend looking for fixtures, rummaging through work-in-process (WIP), or moving things out of the way to make room for what they really need. All that non-value-added activity quietly steals productivity every day. 5S doesn’t require a major time investment, and the payoff—greater throughput and shorter lead times—is huge.

The more you make everything visual, the more effective the operation will be. You might say, “We’re not a big shop, so we don’t need signs, floor markings, and labels. All our people know what they’re doing.”

But take an objective look. Do your employees really know where things go? If skids of parts or fixtures land wherever there is open space, then you really do not have control over the operation. Making things visual can be a powerful way to get things under control. Signs and labels help people know where work is coming from and where it’s going.

Without 5S, people end up thinking about things they shouldn’t have to think about. Say you put tape on the floor to show where WIP goes. A person in a small shop may say, “Hey, I’ve been here for years. I know what WIP is, and I don’t need tape on the floor to tell me.”

All the same, that person still must think about where to look, and that takes his attention away from flow—that is, producing products and sending them downstream. Even in the smallest of fab shops, a little tape on the floor can work wonders.

So what should the roadmap look like? At a high level, it really mirrors the roadmap of any organization that tackles lean. The most difficult thing, particularly for small organizations constantly busy getting jobs out the door, is turning the ignition switch to start the lean journey.

But once you’re on the road and you realize the first gains, the workday becomes easier, and people get hungry for more. Lean is no longer something “we’ll get to one of these days.” Eventually it becomes a fundamental part of everyone’s job.

Step 1: Educate

Where should you start? The same place every company does, no matter its size: education. Everyone should understand the basic lean terms and ideas. This knowledge will be the springboard for the rest of your lean journey.

In a 15-person organization, your leadership team might comprise only two or three people, but it’s still critical to invest time to teach the basics of lean. How these people teach the staff will set the tone for the entire organization.

Still, even though you have a small group to teach, don’t treat it like a classroom, with one or two people lecturing to everyone at once. You need to cascade the education. For instance, two or three leaders teach two or three supervisors, who in turn teach three or four shop leads, who teach the rest of the staff. Why? Because even among a small group, the content will vary depending on a person’s job. A front-line person learns and applies lean manufacturing differently than supervisors and managers do, even at a 15-person shop.

Step 2: Execute Pilot Projects

Put ideas to work. Free people up so they can get out of the day-to-day grind and think about how to make the processes flow better, reduce defects, and eliminate waste. Get creative in how you organize the improvement teams. Maybe two welders perform 5S in the weld cells. Perhaps a cross-functional team of five people address how shop orders are planned, issued, and reported.

Step 3: Define What and How

Develop the operating principles to define what’s important, guiding everyone’s improvement ideas. If the idea doesn’t help your operating principles, it’s not important. Also define the improvement strategy, how you intend to achieve results. Think of your operational principles as the “what” and your improvement strategy as the “how.”

You’ll also note that this step comes after the pilot project—and for a good reason. A pilot project shouldn’t be all-encompassing, of course, but it should give everyone a taste of what lean thinking can do and how it can make their workday easier. Think of the pilot project as the ignition switch to get the lean journey started. That initial boost gets people ready to take a deeper dive.

Step 4: Map Your Processes

Define your end-to-end process, from the initial customer contact and order entry to delivery and the receipt of cash. Use value stream maps and process maps to define how work is done. Identify the work flows, constraints or disruptions, and the non-value-added activities.

Eliminate as many of those non-value-added activities as you can and identify improvement opportunities, and you’ll see lead times shrink, leading to greater customer satisfaction and a competitive advantage.

Step 5: Get Everyone Involved

Invest in workforce education and training, and get everyone involved in the lean journey. Give your front-line employees the opportunity to be leaders in process improvement. For instance, you could have a welder lead a team of supervisors and managers. This turns the table and helps put the focus on where value is created, on the shop floor.

Step 6: Let Lean Evolve

Finally, let your lean journey evolve, and keep it going month after month, year after year. The more people learn, the more they can do, and the better your operation becomes.

Early on the lean journey is tactical, later it gets strategic, and eventually it changes the way your company is organized. This applies to even the smallest of companies. So does lean apply to the small shop? I say yes. What’s your answer?

Jeff Sipes is principal of Back2Basics LLC.