GM, Harley, Alcoa highlight lean reliability conference

Reliable Plant magazine’s next conference, “Lean Manufacturing 2008: Lean Tools for Maintenance & Reliability” is fast approaching. The event will be held October 6-8 at the Marriott Hotel in Schaumburg, Ill., just a few miles from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

This conference, our fourth annual Lean Tools event, will bring together industrial leaders from around North America to learn how companies can utilize lean (and specific lean tools) and apply them to increase machinery productivity, capacity and reliability, and raise the efficiency and performance of their facilities’ maintenance functions. It will feature 20 sessions delivered by some of industry’s most knowledgeable and experienced lean resources.

Confirmed speakers include:

• Dr. Klaus Blache, cost reduction manager, General Motors

• Wayne Vaughn, former director of maintenance, Harley-Davidson

• Samuel Bethea, director of North American reliability, Campbell’s Soup

• Dana Fluet, lead maintenance and reliability engineer, and members of the plant M&R team, Harley-Davidson

• Rick Fox, maintenance manager, and members of the Warrick power plant reliability team, Alcoa

• Todd Bennett, president, United Southern Industries, and Sam McPherson, lean enterprise and public sector consultant, Shingo Prize

• Mark Steward, Operational Excellence team leader, Eaton

• Mike Fisher, manager of EHS engineering, and Pat Bartholomew, director of EHS management systems, Baxter Healthcare

• Katie Benz, black belt, W.R. Grace

• Drew Troyer, CEO, Noria

• David Hicks, lean specialist, Auburn University

• Dean Jones, training supervisor, Grede Foundry, and David Townsend, manufacturing specialist, Wisconsin Manufacturing Extension Partnership

• Dr. Jay Lee, director, University of Cincinnati/National Science Foundation Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems

• Frank Bailey, plant manager, LAI International

• Mike Bresko, managing director and principal, General Physics

• Kevin Hartler, director of Grainger Consulting Services, W.W. Grainger

Here are presentation synopses for these confirmed speakers:

Implementing lean tools for long-term success – Are you ready?
Klaus M. Blache
Ph.D., CPE, cost reduction manager, General Motors Corporation
The presentation will begin with a brief overview of select events regarding the beginnings of lean, defining lean, its transformation over the years, and what it has evolved to – specifically what it means to maintenance and reliability today. This will set the stage for a sampling of lessons learned during lean implementation on waste reduction, continuous improvement, standardization, PDCA, flow, problem solving, OEE, ergonomics, maintenance and reliability. The keynote address will converge on topics focused on implementation for long-term success. Discussed will be lean culture readiness, thinking lean, using a total systems approach, assuring strategic alignment and sustaining the lean process.

General Motors has one of the most widespread lean manufacturing initiatives in place in the United States. GM grew interested in lean manufacturing in the early 1980s as it examined elements of the Toyota Production System that had been adopted by several Japanese auto manufacturers. In 1994, GM and Toyota formed a joint venture called the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI) to pioneer implementation of lean methods at an automotive manufacturing plant in the U.S. By the early 1990s, the success of NUMMI, among other factors, made it increasingly clear to GM that lean offers potent productivity, product quality and profitability advantages. Today, as one of the planet’s most experienced lean companies, GM’s manufacturing performance has remained strong (even in the midst of an economic downturn), and continues to reach new levels of quality, productivity and asset reliability.

Establishing a maintenance & reliability process for lean success
Wayne Vaughn PE, CMRP
principal consultant, Vesta Partners (and former director of maintenance, Harley-Davidson Motor Company)
It is essential that you start early in establishing a successful maintenance and reliability program. This keynote session will explain how you can get your trades and engineers involved early, and hold people accountable throughout the procurement and commissioning process. It includes a detailed method for creating an asset care program that will deliver the reliability that is expected. This process, a foundational element of any lean program, can be applied to existing equipment and to new equipment. The session, led by the recently retired director of maintenance of Harley-Davidson Motor Company (a role model for any manufacturer looking to go lean), will lay out the entire process, identify key success factors and identify pitfalls that must be avoided. It will also note where there are differences between applying this process to existing equipment and to new equipment.

Lean reliability at Campbell’s Soup: It’s ‘M’m! M’m! Good!’
Samuel Bethea
director of North American reliability, Campbell Soup Company
Thanks to focused lean activities that have impacted reliability, uptime and productivity, Campbell Soup Company is well on its way to realizing its mission of “building the world’s most extraordinary food company.” Simply put, the company aspires to be extraordinary in everything it does. Achieving this lofty goal requires disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined action in both the marketplace and the workplace. Over the past six years, this approach has lifted the company to the upper echelons of performance in the global food industry. In time, the firm believes it will become “truly extraordinary”. The company feels that is has the people, products, capabilities and plans in place to fully bring its mission to life. This keynote session will provide details of how Campbell’s, one of the most visible names in global manufacturing, pursues reliability every day. The company’s North American portfolio includes powerful retail and food service brands, including Campbell’s, Pace, Prego, Swanson, StockPot, V8 and Pepperidge Farm. Its North American business represents $5.2 billion in sales, with operations in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Latin America. On a global basis, the company has 40 manufacturing sites that serve customers in 120 countries.

Harley-Davidson and reliability: An interactive discussion
Dana Fluet
lead maintenance and reliability engineer, and members of the plant M&R team, Harley-Davidson
Harley-Davidson manufacturing is all about predictability. No surprises. No bottlenecks. No breakdowns. No downtime. No muda. What lies ahead is known. Just turn on the production equipment and create. It is the reliability image – the lifestyle – that is built by maintenance and embraced by employees in production, operations, finance, and plant and corporate management. Reliability-fostered predictability is the on ramp to increased output, productivity, efficiency and profitability at this truly American industrial company. Perhaps no Harley-Davidson plant embodies this spirit and vision like its powertrain operations factory located in the Milwaukee suburb of Menomonee Falls.

This keynote panel discussion session will feature maintenance and reliability leaders from this phenomenal site. It will be captained by Dana Fluet, who has helped implement projects and institute processes that have the plant on path “toward being 100 percent proactive and having zero fire-fighting.” Learn and ask questions during this interactive session!

You simply can’t be lean without reliability
Drew Troyer
CRE, chief executive officer, Noria Corporation
At its core, lean manufacturing is about the elimination of losses – usually called waste by lean practitioners. This is strikingly similar to the field of risk management, which is the focus of reliability management. Reliability practitioners specialize in defining and dimensioning risks to the organization using a variety of tools and techniques. These tools have been proven over the decades in industries where risk management really counts – aviation and nuclear power to name a few. In this keynote address, we’ll discuss how to define your losses in macroeconomic terms to define your Bold Outrageous Goal (BOG), then discuss how to apply modified versions of the same tools employed by reliability practitioners in the aviation industry to define and dimension – in monetary terms – specific wastes that equate to lost profit for your organization. Armed with this information, you’re positioned to prioritize loss areas for elimination, proceeding with confidence that you’re driving value for your organization.

Lean, clean and green: Baxter Healthcare at work
Manufacturing EHS Leaders
Mike Fisher, manager of EHS engineering, and Pat Bartholomew, director of EHS management systems, Baxter Healthcare
Baxter Healthcare is proactively addressing environmental issues by driving greater operating efficiencies, adopting new technologies, and collaborating through public and private partnerships. Such initiatives have helped the company achieve a 35 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions per unit of production and a 22 percent improvement in energy efficiency per unit of production. The company also estimates that the investments it has made in recent years yielded $80 million in savings and cost avoidance, with $9 million of that from energy savings alone. The benefits go far beyond cost avoidance and energy or raw material savings. Many of the initiatives the company has put in place have yielded higher quality levels, greater production output and flexibility, reduced waste, and improvements in workplace safety.

Tools to achieve zero-breakdown lean maintenance systems
Jay Lee
director, University of Cincinnati/National Science Foundation Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems
This insightful presentation will introduce state-of-the-art and prognostics technologies and most commonly used predictive maintenance tools for machine monitoring and failure prevention. Case studies in different industries (semiconductor manufacturing, automotive, transportation, power generation, etc.) will be presented. Attendees will be able to learn how to use these tools and technologies to:
1. Improve machinery reliability, manufacturing equipment uptime, production throughput and product quality.
2. Generate useful information from manufacturing equipment for real-time quality assurance, process degradation assessment, supplier evaluation and management, and closed-loop product life cycle systems.
3. Develop an integrated IT-enabled system for zero-breakdown lean maintenance systems.

Lean reliability pays off big for Alcoa power plant
Richard T. (Rick) Fox
operations and maintenance manager, and members of the plant M&R team, Alcoa Power Generating Inc.
Alcoa’s Warrick Power Plant in Newburgh, Ind., is old. Eighty percent of the equipment is original (vintage mid- to late 1950s and early 1960s). That creates some sizeable challenges for the plant and its maintenance organization. After many years of struggling with a reactive, chaos-heavy environment, the plant found a way to turn the corner. Waste and inefficiency were greatly reduced, in some aspects eliminated, by incorporating elements of the Alcoa Business System, including greater planning and scheduling, maximized planned downtime, asset history, standardized work, predictive maintenance and a focus on the root cause of failures. Alcoa has seen that if the equipment is more reliable, there is less downtime, fewer unplanned outages and fewer emergencies. Greater reliability generally means reduced maintenance costs and lower total costs for the power plant. And, if it can provide low-cost power as well as reliability (no off-line situations), the adjacent Alcoa smelting plant does not have to procure power from the outside market, where the costs are generally two to three times higher.

In this interactive panel discussion, maintenance manager Rick Fox and members of his maintenance and reliability team will explain how the Alcoa plant made this monumental change happen and answer your questions on a host of lean reliability related subjects.

Leading the lean reliability initiative
David Hicks, PE
outreach faculty member, Auburn University
Lean implementations primarily fail due to a lack of management support and clear connections between lean activities and bottom-line results. In sports, players are told to “keep your eye on the ball,” and then receive training and coaching in the basic techniques required for success. Maintenance leaders are expected to embrace lean principles and put them into action, often with only a brief overview of the principles. This Leading Lean presentation provides a systematic approach to leading lean transformations in all areas, including maintenance and reliability. The system starts with Leader Standardized Work, supported by Visual Metrics that make unusual situations obvious. The anomalies are then attacked using structured problem-solving techniques and communicated in an A3 format. Improvement ideas are placed into a visual accountability system that supports quick, effective status meetings to drive continuous improvement. Leaders using this system have seen improvements in throughput, costs, revenues, inventories, maintenance and employee involvement. This session is perfect if you have been given the task of bringing lean into your plant’s M&R functions.

Zone control: Laying the foundation for lean success
Todd Bennett
president, United Southern Industries, and Sam McPherson, lean enterprise and public sector consultant, Shingo Prize
The foundation of the House of the Toyota Production System is “Stability in the 4 Ms (man, machine, methods and materials).” Zone control is Toyota’s little-understood territorial management system that provides machine-intensive operations the same breakthrough performance that cellular manufacturing provides assembly operations. Zone control is a “severe way”, but it was the method for United Southern Industries to achieve basic stability in its machine-intensive custom injection-molding operation. During this session, USI president Todd Bennett and lean enterprise transformation sensei Sam McPherson will share how to: organize your operations for zone control; organize zone control’s “chain of responsibility”; organize the “chain of response” protocols; create zone leader roles and responsibilities; set progressive SMART goals for zones; and develop zone cadence management activities and zone leader standard work in support of zone control.

Lean streamlines maintenance planning
Mike Bresko
managing director and principal consultant, General Physics
This presentation will show how to apply the principle of lean flow to maintenance down-day and outage planning, and explains how some commonly held beliefs in maintenance organizations lead to planning rework and waste. It highlights how early cut-off dates for new outage work can paradoxically cause more work and poor planning when viewed through the lens of the lean waste of overproduction. It will explain how to group job types, and involve and manage functions other than planning to streamline the maintenance work cycle and achieve high readiness for the start of the outage.

Eaton Lean System increases productivity, uptime
Mark Steward
Operational Excellence team leader, Eaton Corporation
Eaton’s team organization provides an active Lean Six Sigma manufacturing process to reduce setup, increase uptime, reduce costs, reduce lead times and provide a superior product. This is achieved through, among other things, the: development of kanban programs with customer input; continual review of current state map to improve lead-times; setup reduction focus; 6-S plant cleanliness, organization and safety; TPM kaizen events; continuous flow methods; and, value steam mapping exercises.

Eaton’s Watertown, Wis., facility, the focus of this case study session, is part of the company’s Electrical Group. It employs approximately 290 people who manufacture printed circuit board assemblies, meters, relays and enclosed drives for the electrical industrial, commercial and construction markets. Eaton Corporation is a global leader in electrical systems and components for power quality, distribution and control; fluid power systems and services for industrial, mobile and aircraft equipment; intelligent truck drivetrain systems for safety and fuel economy; and automotive engine air management systems, powertrain solutions and specialty controls for performance, fuel economy and safety. Eaton has 62,000 employees and sells products to customers in more than 125 countries.

W.R. Grace’s changeover reduction kaizen event
Katie Benz
black belt, W.R. Grace
This session will explain how a cross-functional kaizen team at W.R. Grace used lean concepts such as standardized work, 5-S and the SMED methodology in concert with Six Sigma tools to reduce changeover times in a special building materials line. This one-week kaizen event resulted in gains in capacity, flexibility and productivity that enabled this plant to meet and exceed its ever-increasing market demands. Some of the results of this project include: reduced changeover time by 50%; reduced scrap and costs by 25%; reduced walking distances by 75%; eliminated 75% of the adjustments; increased productivity by 25%; and increased schedule attainment by 99%.

Revamping the plant through lean, Six Sigma
Frank Bailey
plant manager, LAI International
LAI International is a premier manufacturer of precision-engineered components and assemblies for aerospace, power generation, defense and other advanced technology industries. Its facility in Scottsdale, Ariz., is realizing amazing dividends from its implementation of lean and Six Sigma. The site has trained 57 percent of its employees in Six Sigma practices, and has technicians, engineers and quality managers certified as Six Sigma black belts. LAI has created seven project teams as a result of lean production initiatives, which focus on eliminating waste from processes. A recently completed lean project reduced data-entry steps and setup times for a production sub-assembly, producing projected savings of more than $100,000. LAI has initiated additional lean efforts, including adding visual management tools and implementing audited 5-S programs, a methodology to organize and improve the workplace. It also regularly utilizes kaizen events to examine and retool processes and eliminate waste.

Reliability tools in the lean journey – A practicum
Drew Troyer
CRE, chief executive officer, Noria Corporation
This session is an extension of the concepts described in Drew’s keynote address. In this practicum, we’ll learn how to deploy an integrated suite of reliability management in a manufacturing organization to define and dimension loss areas, then target them for elimination. These tools include functional/reliability block diagrams (F/RBD), failure reporting and corrective action system (FRACAS), dollarized process failure modes and effects analysis (DPFMEA), and root cause analysis (RCA). We’ll use live examples to demonstrate the power of these tools.

Improve your productivity and reduce your total cost
Kevin A. Hartler
director, Grainger Consulting Services, W.W. Grainger
In an increasingly competitive global environment, organizations must innovate to find opportunities to improve their productivity and reduce total cost. Initiatives that consider ALL aspects of process improvement and waste reduction will find the greatest level of success in improving efficiency. This session will provide you with a host of ideas to increase the performance of your plant maintenance and reliability team and offer up methods to work more closely and strategically with your distributors of maintenance, repair and operations tools and supplies.