Generally speaking, Lean Manufacturing is pegged to mass production. Toyota itself, proud parent of the Toyota Production System, says it will manufacture more than 9.2 million vehicles in 2007, and that is a pretty hefty mass. Almost anywhere you turn for a company-specific picture of Lean principles in books and articles, you will more than likely find the principles applied to mass-produced goods. Little wonder then that Lean tends to be more or less automatically linked to production that involves hundreds of thousands, millions, even hundreds of millions of units.

Pearson joined the Lean revolution more than three years ago, and the results are impressive. “Final assembly is down to 70 hours from 180,” says Michael A. Senske, president and chief executive officer. “Delivery lead time is down to 35 days from 70. Best of all, since we’re in a price-sensitive segment, we’ve been able to pass substantial cost reductions along to our customers.” Senske says the company’s 80 percent increase in sales over the last year is in part related to those cost reductions.

The more dramatic improvements ascribed to Lean usually involve rooting out habitual (if wasteful) work patterns. Patterns are seen most easily in large arrays of data. They generally emerge from masses of production information, or at least enough data to determine the impact of certain repetitive work activities on costs. But when almost nothing is habitual, very little is 100 percent repetitive, and production levels are (by mass-production standards) minuscule, how do you proceed?

Lean permeation

“We are well aware that we’re in a low-volume, high-variability business,” Senske says. “We either build to very specific customer specifications or modify existing designs to handle new types of packaging. We build-to-order or engineer-to-order, as opposed to build-to-forecast, the way a high-volume, low-variability manufacturer would.”

Pearson’s impetus toward Lean—or better, its tendency toward Lean thinking—began as fallout of building a highly customer-oriented executive staff over many years. “Our equipment goes to major players in pharmaceutical, food and beverage, consumer durables and key chemical suppliers,” Senske explains. “For many years, we’ve recruited key staff with specific experience in those industry segments.”

The main driver for this was to build Pearson’s intellectual capital around specialized industry needs, allowing the company to talk the language of its customers and to understand first-hand the roles and requirements of packaging for each customer’s operations. Lean thinking came with the management who brought this industry knowledge. “Because nearly everyone came from operations that depended on Lean Manufacturing, either to maximize throughput or minimize costs, Lean more or less became an undercurrent here,” Senske says.

This undercurrent never really reached the surface until an eager intern brought Lean systems into play a few years ago—and even then, the processes almost failed to move beyond a single experiment. “The intern worked with people on the floor around the assembly of new type of case erector,” Senske says. “Together, they developed assembly processes that literally took hundreds of hours out of assembly. Unfortunately, the new methods fixed one set of things but threatened to break some upstream activities. Manufacturing took a look at that situation and backed away. Later on, we reached back into this experience to develop what has turned out to be a rule with a huge payoff—we don’t stop any Kaizen event focused on an improvement simply because other operations might be affected.” (Kaizen, a Japanese term that translates to “continuous improvement,” is a core methodology of Lean Manufacturing.)

Outside influence

Around the same time as the intern’s efforts, Pearson personnel were informally gathering best practices from Buck Knives, just over the border in Post Falls, Idaho. Pearson and Buck came to know each other through local Chamber of Commerce and regional Workforce Development Councils. Buck’s Lean practices—and their benefits—brought yet another level of influence on Pearson. “In the end, everything kept pointing to what we might gain through Lean and what we were losing [by not doing it]. We decided to move forward with a formal program ...