The Multivans Team is dedicated to providing our customers with cost effective truck bodies in the shortest time frame and at the highest quality levels. Whether your needs are for a dry freight body, cube van, refrigerated truck body, or a lift gate, Multivans will meet your needs. We manufacture and sell aluminum and FRP bodies, and our new Smoothside® aluminum body eliminates rivets to give you a smooth flat surface for decal installation. Multivans is a Canadian-owned and operated company that has been serving the Canadian transportation industry since 1962.

The focus of this month's SIG was to learn the effectivenes of Multivans' approach to solve challenges brought up by team members on the production floor.  The participants learned about an in-house developed approach to kaizen events.  Peter Almeida the Lean Change Agent at Multivans took us through their Rapid Improvement Event.

The challenge that lead Multivans to develop an RIE was because the found that full kaizens were too resource cumbersome and a disruption to production.  They realized that they were shutting down production on time sensitive operations and not always getting full participation due to the length of the kaizen events, because of this they ran kaizen events less often but longer duration that proved to be problematic.   What they found is that some of the easier solutions that were available wouldn't be realized due to the gap in between the challenge noticed and implementation.

• The team at Multivans felt that there had to be a better way so then came the advent of the Rapid Improvement Event.  Peter took us through how this program was developed and how effective this new way of achieving results has become.  Peter noted that for this to be successful it was important to educate the importance of the kaizen and encouraged all team members to ask "why" as many times as needed.  So now the focus shifted to, as soon as a problem is realized it is brought for discussion within a day or two and all of the stakeholders are brought in to discuss in a 1-2 hour session.

The scope of the RIE includes:

• what is currently taking place that is proving problematic
• identfying the problems and voting by the team on importance
• possible solutions and assigning of duties
• timeline and costs taken to complete task

These monthly SIG events offer immense learning opportunties and this event was truly representative of that.  This was a best practice that was shared by an EMC member in which regional manufacturing leaders had the chance to benchmark their own activities and/or develop a new approach for their own facility.  EMC takes an informal approach and offers a creative work study group in a short 2 hour timeframe so that participants can return to their facility and get to work on implementation.

If you are not a regular participant to this unique (more than networking) approach to sharing and learning from your peers then you are missing out on the next chance to expand your knowledge network.  I encourage all manufacturers to evaluate the benefits of 2 hours once a month to get involved in this process...I am certain that you will come away with at least one idea!

I hope to see you at the next regional event at IMBC Blowmolding in Orangeville where they will be showcasing their new building!

For more information on any SIG event, please contact Tim Smith tsmith@emccanada.org or 519-827-7811.