Lean can be good for you and for your customers

Lean is an intensely customer-centric way of doing business. Lean is doing only what the customer wants. Lean is not necessarily about “doing more with less.” It’s primarily about reflecting the voice of the customer in processes and product.

Lean affects an entire greenhouse operation from the bench or field all the way up to the office. Failure to engage your entire organization in Lean will result in unused savings opportunities.

Lean has application, not only to production, but to production planning, sales, marketing, logistics and accounting. You’ll want the participation and creativity of your entire organization to turn Lean improvements into cash flow while simultaneously providing your customers with exactly what they want, in the amounts they want, at the moment they want it and at the price they want to pay. Here are some of Lean’s pivotal characteristics and philosophy.

Lean philosophies

Value and waste

Lean looks at every activity in terms of value and waste, as defined by the final customer. Value is defined as any activity that changes the form, fit or function of a product, and is something the customer desires.

Waste is everything that is not value. It must be eliminated or reduced.

Waste comes in eight forms: Excess inventory, unnecessary transportation, over-processing, waiting time, unnecessary motion, production defects, overproduction and employees unengaged in problem solving.

Kaizen: continuous improvement

Kaizen is a Japanese word for change. It usually refers to continuous improvement of an entire value stream or an individual process to create more value with less waste.

A Kaizen team or Kaizen event is a workshop, usually lasting one week, where members representing all functions of a company learn the principles of value, waste and flow. The team then moves to the production area and makes and tests large-scale changes in production processes. The week concludes with the team developing an implementation plan, standard work and an outbriefing to senior management.

Since 2003, Yoder Brothers has conducted nearly 50 production Kaizen events on 14 different processes, including new product development, growing and harvesting stock plants, order assembly, transplanting, sticking cuttings, propagation, pinching, shipping and laboratory processes. The company found every process could be improved and could benefit from a team approach.

When Yoder first began to implement Lean, it used large Kaizen team events. Over time there has been a shift from large events to daily purposeful, incremental Lean improvement efforts by the workers closest to the value-added activity.

5S builds stability

5S is a Lean tool that stands for sort, set in order, shine, standardize and sustain. 5S is a team approach to creating a clean and orderly work environment that builds a foundation for visual controls and product flow by eliminating waste.

The golden rule of 5S is if it casts a shadow and is mobile, anyone should be able to return that item to its home within 30 seconds. A deliberate, organized work environment promotes the sequential flow of product into the propagation process and ultimately to the customer.

When 5S is applied to machinery, it creates opportunities for another Lean tool known as Total Productive Maintenance. Total Productive Maintenance empowers equipment operators to perform routine maintenance to increase the equipment’s useful life cycle. It also frees maintenance employees to concentrate on troubleshooting.

A Lean example: The vegetative cutting harvest process

Here’s how Lean applies to a vegetative cutting harvest process.

How does a new employee know what a cutting should look like?

Cuttings are placed in a holder, against a background with a picture of a ruler. This makes the instructions very visual for all employees no matter what language they speak.

This Yoder employee who is taking hibiscus cuttings, has carried several boxes and a plastic liner into the stock plant bed. As the cuttings are taken, the employee moves farther away from the box and liner, increasing unnecessary motion and decreasing the amount of time she has to perform the value-added activity of actually taking the cuttings.

Each bag of cuttings contains 305 seconds of labor. Only 185 seconds (60 percent) of the total labor is spent taking cuttings. The other 120 seconds are spent in wasteful activity. That 120 seconds, across that product line for one year, totals more than 2,400 hours of doing an activity that adds no value to the product, but is passed on to the customer as cost.

By setting up a mobile workstation, simplifying packaging and reducing the required manual writing on labels, the Yoder Live Oak Kaizen team, lead by Walt Elrod and Jose Alvarado, was able to remove $25,000 of annual waste from this product line. Employees in the process work no harder than they did before, they just spend less time doing wasteful activity.

A Lean example: The vegetative cutting stick process

Here’s an example of what Lean might look like in a vegetative cutting stick process. Let’s say the customer demand for hellebore cuttings is 2,057 flats. The time available to get the product into propagation is four days. With this information, Takt Time can be developed. Takt Time is the rate of speed or output that the collective voice of the customer requires employees to work. You don’t want to pace your employees at a different rate than customer demand or you will create inventory waste, which will reduce product quality.

The formula is: Takt Time = Available time/Demand

Using this formula, the Takt Time for hellebore cutting stick at Yoder is 56 seconds per flat. That means every 56 seconds, a flat should output from the process.

The cycle time (amount of time) to stick one flat is 10 minutes. This now enables us to calculate the number of employees required to perform the activity.

Manning = Cycle time/Takt Time.

This shows that 11 people are needed to stick flats to meet customer demand.

This is the calculation that Andrew Bishop, general manager of the Yoder Smoketown, Pa., facility, and his team developed to support the hellebore project.

The team set up 11 stick stations, in a cell formation, right outside the propagation houses.

Once the workstation setup design proved effective, permanent tables, markings and fixtures were made.

Support processes, like the flat-filling machine and cool cutting storage, were placed in close proximity to the work cells. Four support associates pick up flats, deliver empty flats and deliver tubs of cuttings to the 11 workstations.

Because the speed of the process matched the rate of customer demand, schedule requirements were met and quality was ensured.

No plant was exposed to ambient temperature more than 10 minutes, which improved cutting yield. The grading process was also built into each workstation, so grading and uniformity of the cuttings were better. This helped the propagator better manage the crop, so he could meet the crop quality requirements and propagation schedule.

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- Andy Rogish

Andy Rogish is quality systems manager,Yoder Brothers Inc.,(239) 728-2535, Ext. 211.