October 6, 2010  – National Safety Council 2010 Congress & Expo

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One common theme in successful organizations is that those that have challenged their company’s quality certification and manufacturing principles are more apt to emerge as a strategic partner with the military and tier 1 defense contractors, and sheet metal manufacturer ROC Industries Inc., has done just that.   For some time now ROC Industries has been engaging the defense industry for long term business relationships and project opportunities. 

As the military and corresponding defense agencies seek to find innovative solutions for incorporating new technologies or extending the life of legacy systems, they consistently look to an ISO certified and lean process driven organization.  San Diego sheet metal manufacturer, ROC Industries Inc. has incorporated this strategy into their daily sheet metal manufacturing business model which has proven to strategically align with government LSEM, (Lean Sustainment Enterprise Model), operating principles and procedures as they develop their private industry approach.

Greg Clark, President and CEO at ROC Industries Inc. stated “the ‘lean’ program has evoked positive changes in workers’ spirits, as well as a positive change in the appearance on ROC’s production floor.”  Materials are stacked neatly, aisles are clearly delineated and signs describing or naming areas are clearly displayed everywhere. Additional motivation is provided for the team by incorporating “whiteboards” showing daily production goals and actual production results. 

For more information on ROC Industries Inc., or custom sheet metal fabrication and ISO certification, please visit www.rocindustriesinc.com or call Jeff Glover at 760-740-2210.

Read full article…    ROC Article 9-20-2010

Weldrite’s Lean model for sheet metal fabrication is based on the Toyota Production System in which the quality culture is one of the two pillars. The other pillar focuses on flexibility and speed through the focus on continuous flow, pull and the balancing of work to takt time. These two pillars hold up the headstone that is the elimination of waste. The result is performance excellence.

We need to be very careful not to equate lean with eliminating waste, kaizen events, a group of tools such as 5S, kanban, cells and so forth, but as a whole operating system of which safety and quality are integral parts. To understand the interrelationship of the quality pillar to the other elements of the Toyota Production System and lean, we need to consider the following:

• Customers will not tolerate poor quality
• Just in Time manufacturing removes inventory and other slack that hides quality problems
• Lean’s approach to quality is to establish technical and human systems to build quality in to the process rather than inspect defects out.

Lean processes prevent human error in three basic ways. First, through the design of quality processes including testing for robustness, the creation of standardized work instructions with quality key points and the effective training of the people using a method at least as good as Job Instruction. Second, processes are error-proofed whenever possible.  The third way lean processes prevent human errors is by inspection. We have to accept that we are not smart enough to overcome the human ingenuity to make errors, and as a final protection for the customer, we must inspect.

In addition, the quality culture at Weldrite extends beyond manufacturing to include the checking of all work and auditing of all processes. This is done through an overlapping and linked series of source, self and successive checks. People check the work before, during and after the process. Managers, group leaders and team leaders not directly involved in the process check on a periodic basis, according to a standard time routine.

For more information about Weldrite’s lean sheet metal manufacturing capabilities, contact Jeff Glover at 760-743-4041.

At its core, lean manufacturing is about engaging the creativity of people in continuously reducing waste and improving customer satisfaction. This mentality produces powerful results in any business, whether it be a sheet metal fabricator, and car manufacturer, or a professional services business. It’s important to understand that, lean is not simply about one piece flow, cellular manufacturing, takt time and cycle time line balancing and kanban systems. Weldrite has employed all of these concepts in different ways within its operational model, and these concepts play important role in setting the pace of work, exposing problems and driving down costs associated with inventories and delays, however, there are other highly critical lean practices that are even more fundamental and can easily apply both in mass production and job shop scenarios. They are as follows:

Maximize Employee Engagement. This is really a basic condition for any lean and continuous improvement system. Without maximum engagement of people and their creative ideas, you can’t call it lean.

Walk the Walk with 5S. Any workplace can benefit from getting rid of unnecessary items, putting everything needed in its proper place and setting and maintaining a high level of cleanliness. It cant just be a flavor of the month, though. The management needs to be committed to 5S and practice it just as much as anyone in the manufacturing area.

Visual management is enabled by good 5S as well as the placement of simple visual tools to identify target, actual and a root cause analysis of any gap between those two. It is important to note that “management” is half or more of visual management. It requires the behavior of leadership at all levels to go see the situation on the production floor in order to address the problems that have been surfaced.

Empower Practical Problem Solving. The practical problem solving process is the glue that brings various lean tools together, brings people together in teams and engages them in thinking about their work and how to improve it.

Relentlessly Reduce Setup and Changeover Times. Most batch processes are in batch mode rather than small lot or one piece flow due to changeover times that are long in comparison with run times for one piece. Reducing changeover times can reduce batch sizes (and lower inventories) as well as increase capacity.

Error-Proof Everything. Within any of the countermeasures or improvement activities above, there are opportunities to error-proof the process. This can be as simple as manual process in which people set off alarms (andon) when they note a problem, or can include physical modifications to equipment or tooling so that incorrect installation is difficult or impossible.

The successful deployment of these basic concepts are extremely evident in all aspect Weldrite’s sheet metal manufacturing operations, from job-order processing, to manufacturing, to shipping. Our firm belief is that even though our work mix may not match that of the well-known leaders in lean manufacturing, such as Toyota or Caterpillar, we can still apply the core lean fundamentals to effect powerful, positive change at Weldrite Manufacturing, not to be the biggest, but to be the best manufacturer in our industry.

For more information, please contact Jeff Glover at 760-743-4041.

Weldrite’s primary channel to market has historically been to supply metal fabricated equipment to large OEMs in support of their contract requirements. Thus, the more successful and profitable our customers can be, the more work they can win and better it is for us.

As such, we embrace collaboration with our customers in as many aspects of their operations as possible. We aim to align our services with maximum precision to allow information, goods and services to flow freely and unobstructed between our team and their counterparts within our customers’ organizations.

The focus of this exchange is not only to get the job done, but also to maximize efficiency at all points of interface between Weldrite Manufacturing and our clients. In the past, we have participated in and led collaborative projects focused on reducing manufacturing and transactional cycle times, improving document flow within joint processes, and improving packing and material presentation to reduce labor required in downstream operations.

Other particularly powerful forms of customer collaboration are value engineering and design-for-manufacturability analysis. Weldrite has participated in numerous efforts to consolidate similar product designs (in some cases thousands of unique but similar systems) into a single solution set, optimized to ensure minimum manufacturing cost and maximum repeatability. Our expertise in sheet metal fabrication uniquely equips us to provide value in this area, ensuring that designs minimize scrap rates when using readily available material types and shapes, and achieve maximum compatibility with metal fabrication manufacturing equipment and processes.

A big part of being the best is helping our customers be the best. We look forward to the opportunity to work with you, our valued customers, to find ways to save you time, money and headaches.

For more information about past customer collaboration efforts and to learn what we can do together to help you business, please contact Jeff Glover at 760-743-4041.

As a medium sized contract metal fabrication services provider located in San Diego County, California, Weldrite Manufacturing knows first hand how powerful lean principles can be for reducing costs and improving safety, quality and process velocity.

Many US-based metal fabricators, especially small ones, are struggling to reconcile two critical needs that are equally important to their long term prosperity, but often work against one another.

On one hand, they must offer their customers an enormous degree of flexibility and responsiveness, aligning their quality assurance procedures, lead times and manufacturing processes precisely to the needs of their customers. These customers are often large OEM-type organizations who rely heavily upon suppliers to provide engineering and other value added services to ensure conformance to rigorous specifications.

On the other hand, they must remain cost competitive despite inflationary factors influencing many of their key inputs, as well as ever-increasing competition from service providers in low cost labor environments, such as Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia.

Thus, Weldrite’s leadership team believes it is of critical importance to relentlessly improve efficiencies in underlying manufacturing and transactional processes. As such, we have adopted a combination of practices, policies and philosophies that stress waste elimination, implementation of pull systems, establishment of standard work processes, and a safety-oriented, collaboration-driven business culture.

Though our overall lean manufacturing approach is based upon the Toyota Production System, as an enterprise focused primarily on supporting high-mix, high-complexity metal fabrication and electro-mechanical systems integration requirements from large OEMs in the energy, defense, high-tech and transportation industries, Weldrite Manufacturing’s lean production model is designed to maximize flexibility while maintaining standard work processes. To accomplish this, Weldrite’s sheet metal fabrication, welding, industrial coatings, and shipping operations have been cellularized, each with standard work and audit procedures, and an enterprise-wide system of scheduling processes, pull signals, visual management tools, and metric-driven reporting manages the flow of work through the plant. Beyond this, we have implemented a management system built around safety, quality, velocity, continuous improvement and rapid feedback to ensure that all aspects of the operation are functioning optimally, all customer requirements are met or exceeded, and opportunities for improvement are acted upon with urgency.

Though Weldrite may not be the largest metal fabricator in the Western US, through aggressive deployment lean manufacturing techniques and uncompromising focus on continuous improvement and customer satisfaction, we intend to be the best.

For more information about our lean manufacturing program, please contact Jeff Glover at 760-743-4041.