by Tom Mason

The cardboard box. It ‘s one of the most basic objects in modern manufacturing, a perfect, zen simple solution to a host of shipping and packaging problems. And just try to imagine an economy without them: no containers for our DVD players, our computers and Ipods, no handy carryouts for our groceries, no place to store our old Men’s Fitness magazines. For Robert Wainman the idea is a no-brainer. As director of manufacturing for Maritime Paper Products Ltd., Wainman spends plenty of time thinking about how to make cardboard boxes, or at least how to make them better, faster and stronger. Lately, he has been turning to a Japanese business philosophy for advice – a blueprint known among its western practitioners as lean manufacturing.

“Lean is more of a verb than a noun,” says Wainman. “It’s not a program. It’s a process, a culture, a way of thinking.”

What that means is that there are no great eureka moments in lean manufacturing. The process works slowly, incrementally with hundreds of small changes that all add up to a better way of manufacturing boxes and a better way of thinking, he says. “In the past we worried about a lot of things that we thought were important. Lean showed us that they really weren’t very important at all.”

The corrugator is a case in point – a huge machine that cuts and folds raw cardboard into boxes. In the old days, success for Maritime Paper was measured by the corrugator. If it was pumping out finished boxes at a respectable rate, all was well on the factory floor. That all changed soon after the company adopted lean philosophy five years ago, says Wainman. “We realized that the corrugator’s output was a rather poor way of measuring our success. Now we look at how much product we are shipping out the door and how efficiently we’re doing it.”

The lean process works by eliminating all sources of waste from the manufacturing process – not simply the waste products left over after the product rolls off the assembly line, but also less tangible waste that can take the form of unnecessary movement of people or supplies, unprocessed inventory, overproduction or employees standing around waiting for the next widget to roll into their assembly station. Wainman uses a series of lean tools to reduce waste – tools that come complete with Japanese names like kanban, seiri, seiso and poka-yoke. The tool of Five S allows his company to sort, straighten out, sweep, standardize and sustain the factory floor to insure that processes and systems run smoothly. Another tool, value stream mapping, allows him and his staff to map the progression from the time it arrives on the loading dock as a series of raw materials until it leaves as manufactured cardboard boxes. “Lean is all about identifying your value stream and then concentrating on what you can do to improve it and add value throughout your operation.”

At first reading, lean manufacturing sounds a little abstract, but the cost saving and increased profits can be immediate and dramatic, says Newfoundland-based lean consultant David Haire. If a bricklayer stoops to pick bricks off the ground, for example, the time wasted is ultimately added to the cost of building the house. A simple scaffold that raises the bricks to waist height reduces the time it takes to build the house and increases the profits of the company building it. By eliminating that kind of waste, organizations can see a substantial increase in profits, as much as 70 or 80 percent in the first year in some cases.

Haire is vice president Atlantic Lean Best Practices for Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters. As part of his mandate he frequently conducts lectures, seminars and workshops about lean practices for businesses across Nova Scotia. It’s that continuous learning process that is the key to lean success, he says. “What separates lean companies from the rest is that they invest a lot of time in coaching and teaching everyone in their organization, from upper management to the workers on the floor. They are constantly looking at ways to solve problems and eliminate waste in the manufacturing process. For lean to work, you need commitment from the top and involvement from the bottom.”

You only have to look at the nearly legendary rise of Japanese business to gauge just how well lean philosophy works, says Haire. “Thirty years ago Japanese cars were considered to be junk by most North Americans. Now any product coming out of Japan is accepted as good quality.” But before we heap too much credit on Japanese business acumen we must realize that lean philosophy is not really Japanese at all, he adds. It’s a more of a Japanese reworking of a very old American idea, one that can be traced as far back as that venerable old business guru Benjamin Franklin (remember “a penny saved is a penny earned?”) Henry Ford was the first great industrialist to put the concept of lean into practice when he invented the assembly line at the turn of the 20th century to churn out his revolutionary Model T automobiles. But then Toyota Corporation came along, and studied, dissected and codified Ford’s techniques into the much-studied Toyota Production System (TPS) in the 1940s. Two other Americans, James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones coined the term “lean” after outlining the TPS in their 1990 book “The Machine that Changed the World.”

For more than a decade lean was passed over for other emerging business systems, like the ISO 9000 system and Total Quality Management. But lately innovative Canadian manufacturers have begun to see lean as an effective way of fighting the gremlins of manufacturing: the wildly fluctuating Canadian dollar, the unstable economy, increasing environmental demands and the rising siren song of cheap overseas labour and manufacturing costs.

Ultra Electronics Maritimes Systems in Dartmouth Nova Scotia was one of the first Nova Scotia companies to sign on to lean. Ultra is one of only two companies in North America manufacturing sonobuoys, high-tech sensors designed to descend into the ocean depths to detect enemy submarines that might be lurking in deep thermal layers, a defense niche market it has excelled at for a long time. About eight years ago the company added lean manufacturing to its management strategy. Jim Evans, Ultra’s former head of manufacturing operations, spearheaded the program. “Ultra was different from a lot of companies,” Evans recalls. “Our management didn’t need convincing. They could see that lean was pure common sense and they embraced it.”

For the first year or so, Ultra’s lean program consisted simply of education. Evans brought in consultants to train everyone from upper management to design engineers to the workers on the factory floor. Every employee was encouraged to study things like materials flow, the distance between operations, the way the factory was laid out to identify and eliminate waste in all its insidious forms. The whole process took about five years to complete, but the results were dramatic. Ultra reduced the length of time it took to build a sonobuoy from around six weeks to about a week, reducing work-in-process inventories by around $1.5 million as a result. Even more impressive was the fact that the factory workspace was reduced by about 75,000 square feet. “If you’d said to me before we started that we would reduce our floor space from 120,000 square feet down to around 45,000 square feet, I would have said you were crazy,” says Evans. Ultra now leases out the extra space, a revenue stream the company never envisaged when it signed onto the lean program.

Today Evans works for Nautel Limited, another local electronics manufacturer. He’s now guiding his new employer through the early stages of the lean program. “You don’t have to convince me of the value of lean,” he says. “I’m sold on the concept.”

Adopting lean is easy, according to David Haire. Lately, dozen of books have been published about the subject, and most business organizations have a lean seminar in the works. There’s also plenty of information on the Internet, and your web browser might be the quickest way to get started. “Just type the phrase ‘lean management’ into Google,” says Haire. “You’ll be a month of Sundays getting through it all.”

Robert Wainman admits that he’s still learning about lean manufacturing and probably will continue to learn about it for the rest of his business career. Every month he finds new ways of saving money for Maritime Paper Products and streamlining the company’s operations. “We started with this four or five years ago and we’ve only scratched the surface. There are a lot things we can do with lean that we haven’t even attempted yet.”