Manufacturing Industry
Think lean for the long term: IT can make the journey smoother, but not without corporate commitment.(Business Performance)
Manufacturing Business Technology, June, 2005 by Wheatley, Malcolm
When Bridgeton, Mo.-based Hussmann Corp. set out on its journey to lean, things didn't go according to plan. One of lean's central tenets--pull-based scheduling--is typically achieved using kanban cards. But for Hussmann, a manufacturer of refrigerated display cabinets, its paper-based kanban cards were repeatedly getting lost in the 1,000-employee plant, resulting in production delays.
"In the end, there was a perception that a pull-based system would never work for us, because you couldn't transfer the responsibility for carrying out scheduling to hourly-paid staff," recalls Karl Yeager, material flow leader at the plant. And so, for a while, the lean initiative stalled.
It's not an uncommon scenario. While competitive pressures have prompted...
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