Manufacturing News, Source : TheManufacturer.com
Published : 22 Feb 2006 11:00
Rexam, the global consumer packaging company and can maker, said today that it had maintained its record of operational efficiency by driving £35 million out of its cost base throughout the year using a continuous improvement framework provided by lean enterprise and six sigma. This helped to mitigate the impact of rising raw material prices.
During the year, Rexam grew sales from ongoing operations by eight per cent to £3.2 billion and reported a seven per cent increase in pre-tax profits to £307 million.
Commenting on the results, chairman Rolf Börjesson said: “In 2005 we improved results and maintained profit margins overall despite increasing input cost pressures in the second half, reporting good organic growth especially in beverage cans. We continued to generate strong efficiency savings, increase our presence in higher growth plastics and emerging markets and build further on our market leading positions by delivering innovative solutions to our customers.
“We are confident that our strategy for growth, both organically and by acquisition, is sound. Looking ahead, we are implementing price increases to offset the challenge of higher input costs and we will continue to deliver strong operational efficiencies. The integration of the recent acquisitions is progressing well and we anticipate that 2006 will be a year in which we will once again make further progress.”
By Max Showalter
mshowalter@journalandcourier.com
Although it can be seen from Interstate 65, Precise Technology Inc. is one of those companies many people don't know exists.
Tucked away on Swisher Road near Battle Ground, the 42-year-old firm that does custom plastic injection moldings is focusing much of its manufacturing processes in the medical field.
With a commitment to workplace improvements, the plant has 36 full-time employees and a new owner.
Rexam, a London, England-based consumer packaging company, acquired the 15 U.S. plants that comprised Precise Technology last December.
"Now we're part of a much bigger company," said Kim Koning, director of process improvement at the facility that has been renamed Rexam-West Lafayette.
Koning and plant manager Art Kelsey spoke Friday at the monthly Industrial Luncheon meeting sponsored by Lafayette-West Lafayette Chamber of Commerce.
With 21,000 employees and facilities in 22 countries, Rexam is the fifth-largest packaging company in the world. After the acquisition, it closed four of the 15 Precise Technology locations.
"What we've tried to improve at West Lafayette ... really tied in well with the Rexam way," said Koning, who noted the local plant has invested in a series of in-house improvements in production processes.
"Had we not implemented Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma, there's probably a pretty good chance this plant would have been closed and the work sent to Pennsylvania plants."
Wayne Reisinger, director of existing industry support for the Lafayette-West Lafayette Economic Development Corp., was one of 40 people who attended the luncheon at the Lafayette Country Club.
He said Precise Technology was quick to recognize the benefits that can be obtained through the improvement programs.
"They picked up early on Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing and it's been a success for them," Reisinger said. "Lean Manufacturing is the continued elimination of waste, which has to be done. It involves everyone in the organization."
NSWC Dahlgren improves business, saves $12.4M
by John Joyce
NSWC Dahlgren Corp. Communications
Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Dahlgren employees recently found 12 ways to improve their business practices and save the Navy's Aegis program a projected $12.4 million over the next six years.
The savings will accrue as a result of changes made to the Aegis Program by over 70 employees who used relatively new business philosophies to the Department of Defense (DoD) called "Lean" and "Six Sigma."
"This team's performance has been exceptional and played an important role in our support to the warfighter," said NSWC Dahlgren Division Commander Joseph McGettigan, who nominated the team for a 2005 DoD Value Engineering Special Achievement award. "Lean is a tool that can help us better serve the warfighter and the nation, and we will apply it across the division, everywhere that it makes sense to do so."
Designed to minimize waste within the production process and to give the customer what they need, when they need it, without defects and at the lowest possible cost, Lean Six-Sigma is one of several programs used by the Navy to re-capitalize its $115 billion annual budget. The speed and quality of production at Dahlgren are already improving with Lean Six-Sigma principles that have been sweeping throughout the private sector for the past decade.
"We maximized taxpayer value by achieving the fastest rate of improvement in customer satisfaction, cost, quality, process speed and invested capital," said Lisa Manley, Head of the NSWC Dahlgren Lean Office. "We also aligned the workforce in application of Lean Principles to the Aegis Program using standardized approaches; and provided for continuous improvement by the identification and elimination of waste."
The Dahlgren Lean Team is one of a host of Lean Six-Sigma teams working within the Navy, Marines, Army, and Air Force that are making fundamental changes at their activities to improve productivity, efficiency, and quality - with the goal of improving return on investment and generating savings to support the global war on terrorism.
Military officials, however, emphasize that "Lean Six-Sigma" changes are meaningless if the process does not change - processes must be changed in order to see significant improvements, or it's just business as usual.
Part of implementing Lean Six-Sigma changes throughout DoD has been overcoming the suspicion and reluctance of those involved in the programs selected for a value stream analysis that reviews all current actions that can be changed to meet customer demand and expectations.
The Aegis Program at Dahlgren was no exception.
"When the Lean events began at NSWC, the attitude in the program was that this was something we were being forced into conducting," said Dawn Murphy, Aegis Program Manager in the Surface Ship Program Office at Dahlgren after Lean's successful implementation within the Aegis Program. "Change in process and product is something that has been needed for quite some time, but it has been difficult to find the time to re-engineer."
Managers began to express their concerns after Task Force Lean, a command-wide initiative to expand Lean efforts throughout the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), was launched in August of 2004 to promote the application of Lean principles across NAVSEA and its eight Naval Warfare Center Divisions that includes Dahlgren.
Initially, managers believed that Lean Six-Sigma efforts would result in the removal of resources that they would rather devote to the real work, so they were not supportive of the initiative. But once they saw the rapid and sustainable gains earned when well-trained people worked on high-priority projects (linked to the managers' business goals), they quickly became enthusiastic supporters of the Lean Six-Sigma training and upcoming rapid improvements in their programs.
"The Lean effort was the forcing function to bring about these improvements," said Murphy. "For each of the 12 Rapid Improvement Events (RIEs) we have conducted, every participant has commented on how much they learned about our own processes, how many efficiencies they were able to find in our processes, and how valuable the Lean effort has really been."
The Lean Team participants - employees without "green belt" or "black belt" training - learned to apply Lean Six-Sigma tools to the Aegis Program with the assistance of certified green and black belts who acted as facilitators.
Lean Six-Sigma black belts are considered change agents, leaders of teams, and high potential employees. Green belts are contributors and highly motivated team members, "the leaders of tomorrow."
Dahlgren's black and green belts assisted with the facilitation and development of hundreds of efficiencies during RIEs they conducted from January to December 2005 to improve the Aegis Program.
"I believe the changes we are making will indeed make Aegis a better program," said Murphy. "They will make us more valuable to our customers, our sponsors and, most importantly, the warfighter, and will enable us to be more efficient with the decreased budgets that we are facing. The improvements brought about through the RIEs will provide many benefits to the program, which in turn will benefit NSWC as a whole for years to come."
Author: RP news wires
The Army’s growing Lean Six Sigma program has its roots in a corporate method of eliminating wasted time, money and material.
Lean Six Sigma integrates two independently developed improvement tools: Lean and Six Sigma. Lean is an outgrowth of the Toyota production system, and focuses on increasing efficiency and reducing cycle time by the elimination of waste. Six Sigma was developed by Motorola beginning in the 1970s as an approach to improving quality and effectiveness through statistical control. Its roots go back more than 150 years to a Prussian mathematician who introduced the concept of the normal curve.
Together, Lean and Six Sigma are powerful tools in transforming organizations, Army Materiel Command officials said. They said Lean Six Sigma enables a culture of innovation that continuously listens to customers, questions the status quo, and improves results through fact-based decisions.
Streamlining familiar goal for military
“It's essentially to take the work out of a process and to apply it both to a factory-type operation or repair, and also to a headquarters operation, like the Department of Army,” said Secretary of the Army Francis J. Harvey at a Pentagon press briefing March 23.
“Back in 1982 it was called Quality and Productivity Improvement. Then we called it Total Quality Management. Then we called it Business Process Re-engineering. We've had several different names for the same thing,” said Harvey. “You look at the way you do business, and you change it for the better.”
AMC first employed Lean in 2002 as a tool to better wage the Global War on Terrorism and enable transformation. By 2004, Lean evolved to Lean Six Sigma and AMC began a program to develop the workforce in the use of these tools.
AMC black belts to train others
“Headquarters AMC has trained almost 200 people since it began its Green Belt, Black Belt, and Master Black Belt programs in Lean Six Sigma in November 2004,” said Ron Davis, AMC deputy chief of staff for Industrial Operations.
Different levels of training and experience are awarded martial arts-like belts to show the level of the person’s certification. The AMC master black belts go on to mentor others in the command.
“In a nutshell, the benefit to training our own people rather than just bringing in hired folks from industry or academia is self-sufficiency,” said Rod Tozzi, AMC Industrial Operations directorate. “That’s the bottom line. If we’re going to do this and continue to do this, and we’re going to make this part of our culture, the only way to do that is to grow it in house.”
The financial turnaround Xerox made under CEO Anne Mulcahy has been well documented. What may not be as well known is that much of Xerox's recent success can be attributed to its adoption of a Lean Six Sigma program.
"Anne Mulcahy knew we could transition from being a good company to a great one by making Lean Six Sigma a strategic business initiative across the value chain," says George Maszle, director of Lean Six Sigma at Xerox, the Stamford, Conn.-based supplier of document technology and services.
Six Sigma is a disciplined methodology that uses data and statistical analysis to measure and improve a company's operational performance by identifying and eliminating defects in manufacturing and service-related processes. It equates to 3.4 defects per million opportunities. Lean, on the other hand, has come to be known as a methodology focusing on eliminating excess—whether it takes the form of time, activity, or inventory.
Xerox launched an initiative that combined the two concepts in 2002. "The heart of our Lean Six Sigma initiative is the equation that improved quality plus streamlined processes equals satisfied customers, lower costs, and increased capacity," Maszle says. "We've gone through a number of strategic business initiatives before, but this is the first time proven performers were pulled out of key positions so they could focus on the initiative. They were trained as Black Belts [Six Sigma experts] and put to work looking for ways to improve business processes."
Today, the initiative has more than 30 full-time deployment managers, more than 600 Black Belts and Master Black Belts; 2,500 Green Belts; and nearly 30,000 Yellow Belts. More than 1,600 Lean Six Sigma projects have been completed or are under way and contributing to the company's profitability.
Central to the initiative's success is a continued focus on seven key components, or "The Proven Recipe" adopted by Xerox senior leadership in 2002, says Maszle. Those components are:
1. Projects will be selected based on value creation opportunity with the number of projects in process kept to a manageable level.
2. Consistent approaches for tracking financial results will be used, and determined jointly by the deployment team and the financial organization.
3. Deploy and train resources in roles as defined—full-time Black Belts, full-time deployment managers, sponsors, Green Belts—using consistent training.
4. Assign demonstrated top performers to the full-time roles.
5. Adopt the defined organization's structure to enable success.
6. Operations leadership will be engaged in the process and will integrate Lean Six Sigma into daily business operations.
7. Commit at least 0.5 percent of employee population as Black Belts in 2003, and another 0.5 percent in 2004 to achieve critical mass toward transformation.
Maszle says Xerox has found the ideal software solution to support this initiative—the EnterpriseTrack solution from Instantis, which offers enterprise performance improvement solutions. EnterpriseTrack—used for Six Sigma and other structured, project portfolio-based business improvement initiatives—automates the execution, management, and reporting of those methodologies.
"EnterpriseTrack is a project tracking system that gives us project-management perspective to share knowledge. It's a common repository that people can draw from," says Maszle. "The result, for Xerox, is that people are able to search a database for project templates they can replicate. It also is the means to make financial benefits of projects visible for senior management."
Moving forward, Xerox is taking steps to sustain the Lean Six Sigma initiative. "Our next big challenge is to embed the design for Lean Six Sigma across all business units so we can fix problems before they happen," Maszle says.
By Sgt. Kenneth Hall
February 1, 2006
Finalists of the 2004 Army Performance Excellence Awards hosted by the Secretary of the Army, Dr. Francis J. Harvey, at the Pentagon, Jan. 27, 2006.
Leroy Council
WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Feb. 1, 2006) – Secretary of the Army Francis J. Harvey recognized three commands Jan. 27 for leading the way in improving business processes.
The Army Performance Excellence Award winners were:
• U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, Picatinny Arsenal, N.J., Gold Award;
• Fort Stewart and Hunter Army Airfield, Ga., Silver Award;
• and Minnesota National Guard, Bronze Award.
“The winners have led the way in the business transformation, improving the processes, sharing lessons learned, and provided continuous support to their customers,” Harvey said.
“For example, today’s Gold Award recipient, the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Center, is one of the Army leaders in Lean Six Sigma and serves as a benchmark for other Army organizations to emulate.“
The APEA Program was established in 2004 to recognize organizational performance excellence. The ceremony Friday at the Pentagon recognized commands which have transformed their business processes since then.
Army tempo on new ground
“The last year has been a very challenging period for the Army and the nation, but our Army has met every challenge,” Harvey said. “– From highly successful operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to disaster relief for Hurricane Katrina and Rita, to continuing transformation of the operation and institutional parts of the Army.
“It would not be a surprise to anyone that the United States Army is very busy right now, fighting a war against those who have declared their purpose – taking from us what is most precious – our freedom,” said Lt. Gen. Jim Campbell, director, Army Staff, “and transforming this Army, doing this at the same time – it’s what I call ‘graduate-level’ work.”
Campbell stressed the transformation period as a means to improve the business processes within the Army, how organizations operate, how they measure themselves and how they improve to ultimately better serve Soldiers.
Harvey also emphasized the importance of the process improvement strategy throughout the Army and that assessing performance is essential.
“We need to effectively measure how well we are doing relative to our objectives,” Harvey said. “If we are going to make changes of such magnitude, we need to know our performance posture.”
“The Army is creating a culture of continuous measurable improvement that eliminates non-value added activity and improves quality and responsiveness for Soldiers and missions of Army families in the nation,” said Harvey. “The three organizations we are recognizing here today can be extremely proud of their contributions towards business transformation.
Harvey said the key during the transformation is continuing assessment of the processes and the execution of incremental improvements and initiatives.
“ARDEC took decisive steps in achieving business transformation and developing a culture of continuous improvement,” he said.
ARDEC gets Gold Award
ARDEC, a subordinate organization of the Army's Research, Development and Engineering Command, or RDECOM, reports to Army Materiel Command. With more than 2,500 employees, ARDEC was recognized for its leadership, strategic planning, customer and market focus, measurement analysis and knowledge management accomplishments during 2004.
"Our objective is to be the best organization possible,” said Dr. Joseph A. Lannon, ARDEC director. “Through our dedication to an integrated approach to continuous improvement, we ensure that the real winners in this achievement are the war fighters whose lives depend on the best technical armament solutions and support to develop and field products in the shortest time possible."
Fort Stewart wins Silver
Fort Stewart and Hunter Army Airfield attribute their success in achieving APEA Silver Award status for 2004 to implementing the Army Performance Improvement Criteria and using the criteria as a tool to institute performance reviews and to analyze and monitor their progress.
“Our senior executives and leaders manage strategies, systems and methods that center on effectively designed measurable performance outcomes,” said Janet Blanks, director of Plans, Analysis and Integration, Fort Stewart and Hunter Army Airfield. “These outcomes are the organization’s strategic objectives. Our ability to accomplish these objectives is approached through key value creation processes and key support processes.”
Minnesota Guard takes Bronze
The Minnesota National Guard also used APIC and feedback reports as the foundation for improving processes that enhanced their overall performance and readiness.
“Commitment to performance improvement, focusing on what is important, and Soldier care are the key areas that have elevated our successes, said Col. April Corniea, chief, Organizational Development, Minnesota National Guard. “Today, the Minnesota National Guard uses the APIC in its day-to-day operations as an overarching guide for how we do business and implement change.”
“The upcoming year will continue to be a challenging period for the Army and for the nation,” said Harvey, “but thanks to the leadership and dedication of our Army Soldiers and our Army civilians, I am confident that we will continue to fulfill our solemn obligation to the nation to remain both ready to meet and relative to the challenges to the dangerous and complex 21st century security environment.
