Justo a tiempo

Full Text (1679 words)
Copyright Chartwell Communications, Inc. Dec 2003[Headnote]

Absecon Mills, a textile manufacturing company based in southern New Jersey, is thinking differently these days. It's thinking in ways that will make it more competitive against offshore operations, more efficient and more profitable.

It's thinking lean.

Textile manufacturing remains mostly mired in thepast; it clings to methods at odds with the demanding but proven tenets of lean manufacturing.

That makes Absecon Mills, which sits only a few miles from the gambling playground of Atlantic City, something of a pioneer. It's only months into lean manufacturing, yet its collective thought processes have already started to change. So has the look of its factory floor. One example of the results:Absecon is already seeing a 70-percent reduction in the waste material it needlessly stored.

"I've heard people say lean manufacturing is applicable to every industry but textiles," says David Adair, Absecon's executive vice president

"With the textile industry being assaulted by the Chinese, and the trade agreement expiration in 2005, we need everything we can get. The textiles industry isstill very much in the 1970s and '80s. We think that has to change if we're going to stay competitive, or thrive, which is what Absecon is going to do."

Challenge beliefs

There are five fundamentals of lean manufacturing:

* Value must be defined from the standpoint of the final customer, not from the next point down the production process, not from accounting, not by old-fashionedbeliefs such as batch and supply or economies of scale, and certainly not from the CEO's mindset. Keeping big machines running isn't necessarily efficient.

* All activities needed to design and produce a product must be thoroughly understood and mapped.

* Product must move without interruption. Lean manufacturing requires that materials must keep moving. They must flow.

* Organizations must bestructured so customers can pull from them. Under lean manufacturing, organizations can no longer afford to "push" product wastefully at customers. This is what happens with batch processing, where product is made in big batches only to sit and wait for the next step. This only results in oversupply, waste, price fluctuations and other problems.

* The final Zen-like step is that the wholeenterprise must pursue perfection instead of pursuing its competitors.

Any activity that doesn't create value is muda. Mistakes are muda. Transport of goods without purpose is muda. People standing around is muda. Huge piles of material waiting for the next step is muda.

Relearn your business

So how is Absecon finding the muda? First, by looking for it. To do that, it has defined all steps inits process, including everything from raw material acquisition to its finishing companies and shipping to customers.

A flow chart listing every step of the Absecon process is scribbled on the wall of a conference room. That was the first step. The next step, Adair says, was to find low-hanging fruit so that his company got a vital psychological boost by quickly - within weeks - implementinglean thinking and seeing immediate returns.

Adair is in charge of implementing lean thinking. He's been with Absecon 15 years and came up through the ranks. Having done many of the jobs there, he knows where the waste lies.

But his flow chart found things that surprised even him. One was the wastefulness of storage mistakes. He found some 100,000 pounds of obsolete inventory, and so far thecompany has jettisoned some 70 percent. The gains: increased space, saved manpower (no more moving it about from place to place so people could get to things) and less time wasted during inventory.

"That was very quick, simple and effective," says Adair,

The company also is making progress with housekeeping -the organization of work areas. This makes the workplace more efficient and boosts...