Continuous improvement: Lean Manufacturing and other continuous improvement methods have been in place at many converting plants for up to a few years. Here's a progress report

Lean Manufacturing was first implemented in the previous century, so the story goes, by Toyota. Taiichi Ohno was a Toyota executive who abhorred waste, and developed a program called the Toyota Production System, now world famous and the model for many an improvement plan. The word for waste in Japanese is muda, and one of the best descriptions of muda comes from Lean Thinking by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones:

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"Muda. It's the one word of Japanese you really must know. It sounds awful as it rolls off your tongue and it should, because muda means 'waste', specifically any human activity which absorbs resources but creates no value: mistakes which require rectification, production of items no one wants so that inventories and remaindered goods pile up, processing steps which aren't actually needed, movement of employees and transport of goods from one place to another without any purpose, groups of people in a downstream activity standing around waiting because an upstream activity has not delivered on time, and goods and services which don't meet the needs of the customer."

Lean Manufacturing was developed to attack and eliminate the above obstacles. Though it has been in practice for some decades, the label converting industry, and printing in general, has expressed interest only since the turn of the century. Lean is one of several continuous improvement strategies being pursued today by a fair number of converters, and a few have shared their thoughts about the process and the results that they, their employees and their customers have experienced. Opinions are also provided by a few consultants to the industry.

Hub Labels

"We tried to implement Lean in the 1990s, but it was a miscalculation," says Thomas Dahbura, vice president of Hub Labels, Hagerstown, MD, USA. "We thought that people could self-direct in teams, but it didn't work. They liked not being the boss, or didn't have the skills to be the boss."

Dahbura underwent training in continuous improvement strategies after that experience, and instituted a Lean program in one of the company's two print production areas in 2006. Everyone involved undertook kaizen events, which examine a problem in detail with the goal of continuous incremental improvement.

"We wanted to decrease our setup times, so we defined the setup function as a series of 'touches'," Dahbura says, adding that a touch is every operation that goes into setting up the press. "After the kaizen event and implementation of changes, the touches went from 12 minutes per touch, in some cases, to five minutes. That's a significant reduction."

"Since then we have reduced our setup times 30 to 50 percent, and our run speeds have increased easily by 30 to 40 percent."

Luminer Converting

Inventory control was a major problem at Luminer Converting, Lakewood, NJ, USA, according to President Tom Spina. "Even though we had a system, it was not functioning properly. We had too much inventory, too much money being spent on it, too much cash outlay, not enough spent on other things.

"We attacked that area viciously, got everybody involved, did as much as we could to cut out inventory. In three or four weeks we removed four 30-foot Dumpster of crap. Then we took two tractor trailers and put in it the stuff we didn't want to throw away but probably wouldn't use. We opened up 2,000 square feet of floor space and put the packaging area there. We had been looking for more space in an outside building, and now we don't have to do that. We put in a bar code system for inventory, and now we can see every item we have on our computer.

"The dollar ramifications are huge. We pay bills in 10 days now because we have fewer bills to pay, and now we have discounts. We made back the money we paid last year in interest on our credit line because we have so much less inventory. In 18 months we took our inventory from well over $400,000 to under $200,000, and in those 18 months the company grew 20 percent.

"It was an enormous undertaking, but it was worth it," Spina says. "This Lean is a bunch of sayings, and one of them is: If you have too much inventory, you probably don't have what you need when you need it."

While some companies focus directly on print production as their first targets for continuous improvement, that's not a requirement. "You can apply Lean to specific aspects of your company and get great results," says Spina. "There's another Lean saying: 'Pick the low hanging fruit, and you'll get the biggest rewards.'

"The next area we focused on was our press benches. We got rid of everybody's tool boxes and standardized. No other tools in the building. We went on a shopping spree at Home Depot, we moved out extra work benches, set up shadow boards, and mounted all the new tools on them. If a tool is missing at the end of a week they pay for it. We cleaned up the floors, and now the shop is really open and clean looking. The next step is to put up modular walls and install air conditioning."