The Continuous Improvement SIGs have become the 'place to be' as the latest SIG at Lance Canada had 20 EMC Members participating!

The session started out with an overview by a sleepy, yet highly informative Plant Manager - Nathan McLaughlin (new and proud Dad) of the efforts Lance has undertaken over the past 18 months.  They have some specific challenges, as a food sector manufacturer, in driving out waste in their processes to continue to provide high value while maintaining or reducing costs to the customer.  They realized that raw materials costs are fixed or regularly increasing so the challenge was to find ways to make the same product more efficiently with less waste and higher productivity.

Some of the areas that Lance has focused on this year:

• develop job specific training
• develop Physical Demands Analysis
• achieve SQF II & III
• drive out waste using Kaizen and Employee Communication

Their Kaizen events take place using a team approach, that have most departments represented. These events can last 4-5 days with implementation done by the team to give them ownership of the process.  An area that was studied in order to become more efficient was in changeover times, where training was given to line operators and best practices shared between the Cambridge and Guelph plants.  They have achieved great success with this initiative while they still indentified challenges going forward - getting more buy-in from senior operators, sellling that changeovers and TPM are the responsibility of all operators not just the maintenance staff, continued training and communication to develop trust in the system and maintain momentum.

We then reviewed the 7+1 Deadly Wastes in order to give us perspective prior to heading to the shop floor for a tour.  This SIG tackled a new approach to the benchmarking exercise, the group was divided up so that as we were on the floor some groups had to take the role of a customer and others as a supplier.  The goal was to generate new CI initiatives that we can then present to Nathan and his team. 

The question to those assuming the role of a customer was: What reasons/concerns would prevent you from buying product from the host?  What would provide more value for a customer?   Those assuming the role as a supplier were asked: What innovative/collaborative ideas could position the host to better attract more business?

This turned out to be a well received format as it narrowed our focus to specific areas of their operation. The folks at Lance were given a number of new ideas that can be implemented with little cost and minor re-structuring.  I don't think we hit on the "million dollar idea", sorry Bruce, but some great conversation took place nonetheless.

If you haven't been out to the SIGs in Guelph for some time then you are missing great opportunities to benchmark with your local peers!  Every manufacturing is looking for ways to be more productive and drive out unnecessary waste and this couldn't be more true than during these tough economic times.  This venue gives you a HUGE opportunity to find 'new ideas' to 'old challenges'!

I am looking forward to some new opportunities to get more folks from your facilities involved in the SIG activity.  The Guelph Consortium will be adding regular Senior Manager SIGs that will focus on the business side of things and tackle specific challenges that face this group.  I look forward to the growth of this group as rapid as the CI activity has been.

I wish you all a healthy, happy and memorable holiday season!  I look forward to seeing ALL of you in the new year.

Tim