You’re driving by a refinery and notice a large number of silver pipes – but it’s not actually pipe, its aluminum cladding that protects the insulation which surrounds the pipe. The aluminum cladding is the visible part of what Tracer Industries, an Edmonton based services delivery business, provides. More generally, Tracer Industries provides products and services to ensure that pipes for industrial processes are able to maintain a certain temperature.
“When someone asks me for the elevator speech I tell them we sell warm pipes,” says Bob Holmes, a vice-president of Tracer Industries. “We put on the heating, the insulation and the electronic controls and all of the background technology that keeps it running.”
The last economic boom tightened the labour supply for every business, including Tracer Industries, the services division of Tyco Thermal Controls, a global leader in heat management systems for industrial and commercial applications.
With the supply of skilled engineers at low ebb, Tracer managed to get more — way more — out of the same number of people by using lean principles.
One of the challenges facing Tracer is common to many businesses - hurry up and wait. With jobs coming along in discrete intervals, the office vacillated between very quiet and very busy. One of the best ways to address this problem is to improve your throughput or to make the time spent on each unit as fast as possible. The other component to smoothing this out was addressing the lead time. That is, not starting the project until absolutely necessary and limiting the amount of work inside of the system.
The deliverable in this case was an isometric heating circuit drawing. These are engineered drawings and are the first step in the manufacturing process for Tracer. The process of completing an engineered drawing might not be your typical lean case study but Holmes bristles at the stereotypical association of manufacturing with lean.
“We’ve been practicing lean for almost 20 years now and it still frustrates me when people think lean, they think manufacturing. Lean is not restricted to manufacturing per se. Lean is about eliminating waste, period. It applies to everything we do.”
So with the ambitious goal of improving throughput by 50% they set about reducing the lead time and increasing the output of the system.
Tracer used single piece flow to get the drawings done as fast as possible. Single piece flow means that when you put a piece into the system (the drawing) it goes all the way through and comes out a finished product. It never stops and sits in someone’s inbox or sits in a pile with a batch of other drawings. Holmes acknowledges that this can take some getting used to.
“It’s counter-intuitive. I’m a bit of a handyman and when I work in my garage I fight the instinct to batch. It just seems right that when you make a part you do the same step to every part and make a little pile while you’re doing it and then switch to the next task. It just seems like it must be better but it’s usually not.”
Holmes emphasizes the importance of having the people who are implementing the new process own the new process. They struggled with this part of the exercise, finding what Holmes called “silent dissenters”, that is people who appeared to be participating but weren’t buying into the new process. They addressed the silent dissenters with a powerful method.
“What you have to do if you want this to be successful, is you have to bring the people who are going to run the process into changing it. If you don’t, you don’t get that base ownership.
They addressed these negative dissenters by having them fix the problems they brought up in what was called a “Yeah, but,” exercise.
You put all of the participants in a room and you let them air their “Yeah, buts,” when it comes to the process you’re implementing. These “yeah, buts” can be legitimate obstacles that have to be overcome or they can be what’s called negative branches. A decision tree is formed with this negative branch at the top and the person who spoke out owns this particular decision tree. They’re responsible for finding the solution to their own complaint.
“It’s a very, very powerful way to implement change,” says Holmes.
They also created a tool that allowed them to follow the work as it proceeded. It effectively tags a drawing as it starts so every time someone touches or uses it that data gets stored and is instantly available to anyone who wants to look it up. With this tool they know at any moment who has the drawing, where it is, and how close it is to being finished.
Through these measures and others Tracer was able to outdo their own goal. They were aiming for a 50 per cent increase in throughput and ended up getting a 65 per cent increase in the first week of implementation.
“I’m an absolute believer in this kind of improvement and I couldn’t believe how successful such a small change could be,” says Holmes. While this particular change saw fantastic results, the process has continued to evolve. Holmes takes pains to emphasize that this is “a never ending process. This is a journey.”
Potential productivity is everywhere; all it takes is the know-how of motivated employees and owners to bring it into place. Check out the rest of ProductivityAlberta.ca to increase your productivity IQ and to see if these solutions could work for you.
