A Fine Polish

Abrasives-maker Glit/Microtron goes lean, wins big

When Rayne Johnstun took charge as general manager at Glit/Microtron in Wrens, Ga., he knew he had his work cut out for him. The business was losing money. Nearly 300 jobs were at risk.

“There had been a lot of turnover in management over the previous few years,” Johnstun recalls, “and a lot of newcomers needed to get on the same page.”

The problem wasn’t in the products made at the plant. Glit makes abrasive pads for the industrial market, in addition to a range of consumer products such as abrasive sanding items, sponges and scouring pads.

The problem was that production processes for making the popular items — from ordering the raw materials to labeling the end products — lacked the right amount of efficiency for the company to turn a profit.

Johnstun knew what had to be done: Go lean!

Johnstun decided to perform a complete assessment of all the factors shaping the company’s processes. He called Quick Start for help.

“We began our lean journey by coming up with an overall vision of where we needed to go,” Johnstun explains. “We charted our long-term objectives and linked those to what we needed to accomplish in 2006.”

To track their progress on the lean journey, Quick Start helped Johnstun’s team equip themselves with such tools as Microsoft Excel. The company refurbished rooms at the plant to serve as “command centers” for holding meetings and posting charts and graphs to track performance.

“If you’re not keeping score, you don’t know how you’re doing,” Johnstun says. “We had to start tracking our processes to get the data so we could measure performance and success.”

They then began training the team on the various conceptual tools needed to execute a lean manufacturing strategy: 5S, Six Sigma, and — central to their process — kaizen, the philosophy of “continuous improvement.”

“We presented the kaizen event process as a tool and vehicle for rolling out changes,” Johnstun says. “But we didn’t know where to start. We didn’t want a shotgun approach to doing things. There’s a better way, and that is to map the process and identify what you want to target. This is one of the first things we did. From there we created the value stream map.”

Value stream mapping is a key concept of lean manufacturing — users create a diagram to illustrate the flow of materials and information through the process. Glit’s value stream map identified all the spots in the process where value was added to the product, and, in turn, where there was wasted effort.

Once the company knew where they wanted to go, Quick Start helped them get there.

“We did a project study last April and began training at the end of that month,” says Eddie Fite, Quick Start training manager. “We sat with them for a whole week before we got started to see what we needed to include in the training in order to prepare them the best for the kaizen events to come.”

A series of “kaizen events” was held to focus on different areas in the production process. An essential part of the analysis is based on measuring performance metrics on a regular basis.

“We explained to our team that we measure performance every hour because, if you hit your target every hour, you’ll hit it for every day, then for every week, and then hit it for the month,” Johnstun says.

And hit the target they did.

In 2004, it took 21 days for an order to ship. By the beginning of 2007, it was down to five days. In 2005, the company was losing money. In 2006, they broke even. Today, they’re making money.

The improvements were so dramatic that Glit’s parent company moved the operations of another separate plant to consolidate with the Wrens operation.

“Quick Start has been a tremendous help getting our people ready to make these changes,” Johnstun says.

He concludes that the ultimate measure of success is that Glit/Microtron is still in Wrens, and still thriving.

“Looking back at where we started, we see that we might have had turnover, but now we have improved productivity,” he says.

“Today, we have 270 secure jobs, rather than 320 jobs at risk.”

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