A Lean Journey Starts as a Team!

Crafts Technology had the honor of hosting John L. Van Fossen, Hyperion’s Global Director of Operational Excellence.

John spent a few days with Crafts conducting lean transformation group training and facilitated planning and related activities leading to value stream mapping, Kaizen event, etc. John helped Crafts identify process inefficiencies and waste while building employee engagement and ownership of process improvement results.

One of the critical elements of John’s visit was a hands-on lesson on one-piece flow. The entire shop got involved in two different sessions to be a part of the lesson. Within the lesson, each individual was simply to write their name on a piece of paper.

The first part of the lesson was conducted as a batch process with each individual writing their name on 6 separate pieces of paper, before handing that stack of pages to the next person. This first trial pointed to significant issues within the process. For example, many people seated at the end of the process we’re doing nothing for the majority of the test. This also leads to a significant amount of WIP in the process.

The second part of the lesson was conducted using a one-piece flow method. With the first person handing off each sheet of paper after they finished writing their name. This trial allowed for everyone to be doing consistent work for a majority of the time.

The lesson demonstrated the inefficiencies between batch processing and one-piece flow. As the second trial showcased dramatic improvements in first piece completion, WIP reduction, and quality.

The best part of the lesson is that the entire operation experienced these results first hand, as a team! We cannot wait to better our shop by harnessing these types of lessons and lean principles.