Kamps Pallet is a lean manufacturing success story. As a manufacturer of pallets, the company serves as a good model for infrastructure manufacturers seeking to improve profiability in a low-margin business.
The pallet trade magazine Pallet Enterprise is running with a theme of continuous improvement in its April edition. It featured the Kamps Pallet lean manufacturing experience in an insightful article entitled Lean Games, Continuous Plant Improvements. The article describes how Kamps has produced a 30% improvement in process efficiency by establishing a lean manufacturing culture. They:
1. Use metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success and identify areas in need of improvement.
2. Identify and standardize best practices.
3. Identify and eliminate waste in every aspect of the manufacturing process.
The key to Kamps' success has been its priortization of a lean manufacturing culture and implementation in a user-friendly way. Lean practices are overseen by a Director of Continuous Improvement, which speaks volumes internally and externally about the company's lean priorities. He consistently engages the workforce to "think lean" by engaging in lean exercises, planning and even game playing.
As we wrote in our last post, lean manufacturing is not simply doing more with less. It is a constant search for a more productive way of being.
We'll be discussing lean principles more in future posts and will continue to present case studies of manufacturing productivity solutions. We'd like to crowd-source best practices, so we invite you to subscribe and contribute your experiences.
We developed the Idencia product tracking solution because we understand the value of information tracking to productivity throughout the entire infrastructure value chain. (See our earlier post Why Product Tracking Wins DOT Bids.) If you would like to learn how Idencia can help your company, please download the Idencia Primer or schedule a conversation.
Comments