Just ask Val Zanchuk, president of Graphicast Inc., a 29-employee foundry and machine shop in Jaffrey, N.H. The entrepreneur was able to make this dream a reality by adopting the Lean Manufacturing philosophy.

He admits, though, that he didn’t have a choice. His business is built on the rapid turnaround of machined castings made from a zinc-aluminum alloy injected into graphite molds. Consequently, his people need a reliably fast way of changing over the machinery to make low volumes of a high mix of parts. “From any given customer, we may see orders three to five times a year,” he says. Retaining the flexibility necessary for quick turnarounds as the company grew would have been impossible without a continued commitment to Lean principles.

He began applying these principles in an orderly way as soon as he bought the company back in 2001. “When I walked in the door and sat at the former owner’s desk, I began looking at the paper flow, not only in the office and accounting, but also how information was flowing to the floor and throughout the operations,” he says. His goal was to streamline administration so that nothing impeded the flow of information to manufacturing.

Six months later, Zanchuk’s Lean agenda migrated to the factory, where he began applying various Lean methods and allied practices as they made sense. Among the first of these methods was 5S (for sorting, straightening, shining, standardizing, and sustaining), which strives to boost morale, safety and efficiency through organization and good housekeeping. Because frequent set-up was a key constraint for the business, another of those early projects was set-up reduction.

In fact, set-up reduction was so crucial that he enlisted the help of the New Hampshire Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), an agency in Concord that is part of the federal extension program organized through the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Patterned after the old agricultural extensions, this network of extensions provides small manufacturers with training in Lean and other manufacturing methods that could help them to be more competitive.

Variability sleuthing

Next on Zanchuk’s agenda was the variability that had been plaguing the casting process. “A part would run fine one day, and on the next, half the part runs would have to be scrapped,” he explains. “Everybody had a theory about the cause, but we really didn’t know what the problem was.” To solve the mystery, he got a research grant from the state to work with the Engineering Dept. at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H. The researchers conducted a series of statistical experiments to determine the process’s key parameters and to create an accurate model.

Based on their findings, they developed a flow chart for the operators to use for troubleshooting problems. “We were able to reduce our scrap rate considerably,” says Zanchuk. “We also found that we could increase our yields, and therefore our overall throughput, by running the process slightly slower.”

Perhaps the most stunning results came from the new Easy Lean scheduling module for the ERP Visual software that the Graphicast had been using from Infor Global Solutions, of Alpharetta, Ga. “As our business grew, lead times were getting longer,” says Zanchuk. “Our schedule was booked solid, two shifts a day, for two months out.” The daily schedules generated by the old module, moreover, did not tolerate disruptions well and required frequent human intervention to tweak assignments that did not quite make sense.

Dramatic change

The new module changed all that—quite dramatically—by using throughput accounting and applying the theory of constraints. Consultants at Infor had predicted that Graphicast would be able to cut its 16-week lead time in half, so the installation technicians programmed the software’s lead-time setting at eight weeks. By the end of the first day of the week-long installation process, however, it became apparent that eight weeks was way too long. So, Graphicast decided to go to six weeks on the second day and five on the third. A month later, after the company got comfortable enough with the shorter lead time, it dropped it again to the current four weeks.

“It was incredible to think that we were booked solid for 16 weeks and that we couldn’t expand without adding people and machinery,” notes Zanchuk. “And a month after the installation, we were running a four-week lead time.” Capacity doubled, and the work-in-process was cut in half. The change also saved about $100,000 a year in overtime.

Another benefit was that the module flattened the decision-making structure in the ...