Can You Use Lean for a Turnaround?

PAS was one of the bottom rung players in providing cost-effective repair and overhaul solutions for the aerospace, oilfield and industrial markets. In the first week of taking over, Bob Weiner implemented Lean training and started weekly Kaizan events with the key metric of turnaround time.

Excerpt from Podcast with Bob Weiner:

I came on board about two months ahead of that in prepping for the closure. What we did is basically we planned everything. It’s an amazing story. We literally planned everything ahead of time. When July 3rd hit, it was basically we were PAS, and we were PAS running.

To put that into perspective, the organization was put in place and announced on July 3rd or July 5th I guess, the day when we actually started.

We put an organization in on that day and knowing how poor we were from a delivery standpoint, we basically we started in two ways. We were going to put the organization in place, and we were going to go after bringing in new business on the first day knowing that we had a very poor track record.

Lean, I can get into a little detail later, but our Lean system actually started one week later. It was off and running really on the very first day. The very first thing we did is we got all the employees together, laid out the plan and started as soon as we thanked everybody for being part of PAS.

It was amazingly accelerated. My background, I ran engine services for Pratt & Whitney. I ran their engine assembly and test for all their large commercial, military.

I had three other opportunities prior to that where I implemented global Lean Six Sigma systems. And, you could go back over these, and where typically in the beginning, you go back 10 or 15 years, these things take six years to do and then you get them down to four years and then you get them down to two years.

Our implementation was absolutely about as focused as you could ever see anything. And we were done, well you’re never done in Lean, but essentially, we had a turnaround of the whole company in six months. And, it was as accelerated as you can imagine.

We went from industry worst ?? well I wouldn’t say worst. There’s always somebody worse. But one of the worst in the industry to the industry best in all our product lines in ten months and six months on turnaround time which is really the core of it.

And the way we did it and I’ve done Lean Six Sigma, its limitations, and you kind of get caught up into having ten metrics and you get caught up into all different ways of measuring it. And, we did it totally different. This was totally focused on turnaround time. And if you perform in this industry, you grow, and you win. And so, everything was based on turnaround time.

And, turnaround time is basically the time it takes for me to get the part in until you get the part out. And so, it’s very simple, if you reduce the amount of time it takes to turning the part, you’re going to reduce your cost, you’re going to reduce all the waste that’s in there, and then you’re going to grow your business, and you’re going to reduce your cost of the business. And so, it was all centered on that. So, it was just totally focused on turnaround time.

And so, how we did it is basically we just, on day one, which was really one week later, we started. I had to bring some outside help in, and we had our own group that we brought in. Outside was the name of the group. And, we had them and we had our own team. And, my own team was really, I brought in some people, and so we handpicked kind of the people, the key people around the company which we assessed prior to that.

And that and some outside help, what we did on day one is we did training. So, we did the first thing. We did plant by plant. So on the first week we would take our main plant, we did week long training; we broke for a week, and then we did Kaizen events, a couple of Kaizen events in each plant. And, we focused on turnaround time on our main product lines.

And then, we would repeat that every month within that plant. Then the next week we started the same thing in another plant. So, we hit all our plants basically training, Kaizen event, training, and Kaizen event, and then Kaizen event, Kaizen event, Kaizen event in every plant.

And so, the training became off of the Kaizen event, and the Kaizen event became the means of getting the results. And so, that’s how we drove this thing.

And, we just did it for six months straight. And, we may have done Kaizen event after Kaizen event in the same area but ultimately we just focused right across. So, it’s almost too simple but it was very elementary how we did it.

So, it was training, Kaizen event, and Kaizen event. And, every Kaizen event was a follow up behind it. So, it was training, Kaizen event, follow up on the Kaizen event, next Kaizen event, follow up. So, every month there was another Kaizen event and the follow up was a couple of weeks after the first Kaizen event. And so, it became just a routine.

And, you might ask how do you do it, how do you get so focused on it? My role as the CEO was to attend and drive every single event. So, I was at the Kaizen event close out every Friday. And so, it was very regimented close starting at Monday the kickoff, 4:00 every day, a daily report out Friday morning, the report out of the team, very straight forward but no letup in terms of how you did it. So, that’s kind of the high level of how we did it. And, it was just relentless, to say the least. And, it was extremely effective, and it worked very well.

So January one of 2007 we were on our own. And so, I would stack it up against anybody who’s ever done Lean on a global basis to how fast you could do something, how focused you could be in getting it done.

Lean Sales and Marketing: Learn about using CAP-Do

Special Marketing with Lean Book and Program offers on Facebook