Small shop wins big award

The Micron Manufacturing team

Editor’s Note: This is the first of a continuing bimonthly series of conversations with shops taking novel approaches to manufacturing parts and managing their operations.

In October, Micron Manufacturing Co., Grand Rapids, Mich., was notified that it had won a 2009 Shingo Silver Medallion, one of several companies to be recognized for world-class lean manufacturing practices. The Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence, created in 1988, honors Dr. Shigeo Shingo, a legendary Japanese industrial engineer. Most Shingo awards are given to large manufacturing companies, such as Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. With 30 employees, Micron is one of the smallest—if not the smallest company ever—to win a Shingo award. Alan Rooks, editorial director of Cutting Tool Engineering, spoke with Dan Vermeesch, plant manager for Micron, to find out how the company was able, with just 30 people, to win a Shingo award.

Micron specializes in making complex parts up to 2 ” in diameter using Acme Gridley 6-spindle and Brown & Sharpe screw machines, Swiss-style Escomatics, Swiss-style CNCs, vertical milling centers and conventional CNCs. The company serves the hydraulic pump, oil and gas exploration, heavy truck and furniture industries. It is moving into assembly work and hydraulic testing as well.

Rooks: How did Micron get started with the lean manufacturing process?

Vermeesch: We started on the lean journey in 2000. We had been a good company since our founding in 1952 and in 2000 we began the steps to become a great company. We’re really glad we did because 2000 was our best year ever and then we ran into 3 tough years, like most manufacturers in Michigan. We became more efficient at the very time we needed to become more efficient. I worked for a company from 1994 to 1996 that had started down the lean path. I joined Micron in 1996 and from 1996 to 2000 we did lean unofficially and pretty crudely. In 2000, the general manager, Mike Preston, and I decided to bring in a consulting group to help us with lean. They interviewed every person in the shop and their first recommendation was for the management team to learn how to work together and then pick a project to work on. We decided that our goal was to reduce setup in the Acme department by 25 percent in 6 months.

Dan Vermeesch

Rooks: What was the shop’s reaction to the initial project?

Vermeesch: We started with an off-site meeting where we explained the process and laid out the setup reduction goal. And everybody in the Acme department said it was impossible. Some of the guys were even offended by the idea. One guy had spent 40 years working on Acme machines and he felt we were telling him that he wasn’t doing his job right and wasn’t working hard. I told him that wasn’t the case at all, but that there had to be waste in the process. After the meeting, I walked around the company until I found seven people who said they had no idea if the goal was impossible or not and I said “great, you’re on the team.” Of those seven people, only one had ever touched an Acme Gridley machine in his life. We gave them the training, support and tools they needed and in 6 months they pulled out 37 percent of the setup time. I went back to the 40-year veteran and told him that if he wanted, we would roll back the clock on everything we’d been doing. He said, “don’t you dare because I don’t ever want to do it that way again. The new way is so much easier and better.” I wish I’d had a tape recorder. After that, people elsewhere in the company said “I want to be on a team,” and that led to a real change. It used to be we had two or three people in an office that were in charge of everything, but everyone became involved in deciding how to improve things.

Rooks: Did you apply lean to management as well?

Vermeesch: Unfortunately, it took us 2 years to apply the lean concepts to the management structure, and that was a mistake. People who try to implement lean often don’t think it applies to the guys in the corner offices, but it does. When we did that, it made a huge cultural difference. For example, when the managers go home now, there isn’t supposed to be a thing on our desks other than our staplers and our phones. Every day, you come in to a clean desk. When we started the process, I went out on the floor and told the folks that we were going to have a different person from the floor come in every week and audit the managers. If we didn’t pass the audit, we had to correct whatever the error was. People loved that idea! It made it clear that everybody participates.