Last summer a group of noncompeting companies located in Northeast Ohio got together and decided to enhance their Lean Six Sigma journey by benchmarking the internal strengths and expertise of each member company. The Association for Manufacturing Excellence Cleveland Lean Consortia, which started out as an intimate group of four member companies, has doubled in size, with more expected to join soon.
Value in numbers
What is the reason for such growth? Simply put, there is a substantial amount of value in the consortia. This is a benchmarking organization where members share, learn and grow. By implementing best practices, members become lean and flexible through waste reduction and achievement of flow.
When work flows uninhibited (office productivity as well as manufacturing), lots of good things happen — flexibility is increased, lead times are reduced, costs go down and employees are engaged in continuous improvement. Companies simply become more competitive. By reviewing best practices, members are able to take what they learned back to their respective companies and implement the new knowledge.
Learning often comes not from what went right, but what went wrong. Consortia members are encouraged to be humble and reveal their struggles as well as the big wins. Each benchmarking event is followed up with a learning summary and a constructive critique of the host company.
All about lean
The organization not only does benchmarking, but also holds workshops, roundtable discussions, special interest events and member breakthrough presentations. Members study enterprise wide lean, lean in the office, lean in research and development, and of course lean manufacturing.
Members have seen presentations on Yokoten Hoshin strategic planning, a production system that incorporates world-class work cells, and a high level look at lean applied to a research and development environment. All this knowledge came from internal experts within the consortia.
An example of consortia learning is how a constituent member revealed excellent use of visuals relative to total productive maintenance at their work cells. Members learned how Goodyear keeps a balanced portfolio of new products via application of simple lean concepts. Each event is already being considered for implementation within other consortia members, and social event is scheduled for this summer.
At the time of this writing, members include Rockwell Automation, Goodyear, GrafTech, Tremco, SGS Tool, SSP, Qualtech Technologies and Preformed Line Products. There is strong interest from several other local companies and the expectation is to double again in the next year.
Cleveland is the optimal place for this organization. The region is on the rebound, insourcing of manufacturing is on the rise and the workforce is top notch. Companies that are pursuing lean, engaging their associates and eliminating waste are poised to take advantage of this surging economy — good news for Northeast Ohio.
Richard Wiltse is the facilitator of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence Cleveland Lean Consortia.
