Silver Eagle is a manufacturer of converter dollies for tractor-trailers and tactical military trailers.

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When Ali Saalabian arrived at Silver Eagle Manufacturing from General Electric, both he and the company were familiar with the principles of lean manufacturing. However, their experiences with lean were far from similar. Saalabian watched GE implement lean to great success, while Silver Eagle struggled to make it work for the company.

A manufacturer of converter dollies for tractor-trailers and tactical military trailers, Silver Eagle faced many obstacles in its journey to become a lean manufacturer, Saalabian says. However, thanks to an openness to change, the participation of the entire company and some critical thinking, Saalabian was able to help Silver Eagle get the ball rolling.

Saalabian says the lean principles have only enhanced Silver Eagle’s strengths, which he says have kept the company strong in a market with ever-changing needs. Meanwhile, the company’s size and speed allow it to remain nimble. “We are able to respond much faster and quicker,” he says. “When things are changing, we are able to change rapidly. Our longest lead time is equal to the longest lead time of suppliers’ parts.”

Breaking Through
The biggest obstacle for Silver Eagle in establishing lean manufacturing was to break away from the past practices and to remove the walls and barriers between each team and department in manufacturing, Saalabian says. “The biggest roadblock was to expose everyone’s job and stop them from working in isolation,” he says. “We accepted the fact that every one of us is depending on up- and downstream function and lean is about harmony between each operation.”

Saalabian says previous attempts to make lean a part of the company’s culture were slow and met with confusion from many employees. After arriving at the company, he began the process of creating a system that would make lean stick. He says he spent his first three months at the company studying its internal dynamics and putting together plans to educate employees about lean more effectively.

“As soon as I understood the dynamics and the needs of employees and tried to put the right resources in place internally, we began to implement lean much more quickly,” Saalabian says.

Part of the process was involving employees in the implementation and education, he says. The entire company was given a book on lean to read, and employees were broken up into teams. Each team was given a chapter of the book to present to the rest of the company, which Saalabian says helped promote understanding of the material and made employees see how lean would impact their work.

Old Habits
Once Silver Eagle understood the ideas behind lean manufacturing, the next step was to break the old habits the company had formed over the years. Saalabian says that armed with the knowledge of lean, the company could take a step back and critically analyze its processes.

Building up inventory was a practice that used to be commonplace, Saalabian says, and was never questioned until the company began implementing lean.

“Making one unit at a time is faster than building several units at a time, and continuous flow is more beneficial and more efficient than batch processing,” he says.

Stopping the line occasionally was once considered wasteful, Saalabian adds, but lean helped the company see the benefits of pausing to examine the root causes of problems.
    
‘Better and Different’
Even though Saalabian says Silver Eagle has already seen improvements in its efficiency and production as a result of lean, the company understands that lean is a journey, not a destination.

“Every day we made sure we learned to do something better and different,” he says, adding that the process is still ongoing. “There is no magic [change] per se, it’s always continuous improvement.”

Setting lofty goals without paying attention to the smaller details runs counter to the philosophy of lean, Saalabian says, and is something Silver Eagle works to avoid now. “One of the examples I always make is that the worst enemy of better is best, because you try to be the best and you never get better,” he says. “We continuously make small incremental improvements through Kaizen events by empowering and involving our employees.”

Keeping Balance
Saalabian says lean manufacturing has been a good fit for Silver Eagle, because the demands of the transportation industry are often subject to change and specific to the customer. “The hardest part is being able to respond to variations that the customers are expecting from our industry,” he says. “The type of products we build are not standard products, and every customer has different needs.”

Lean has helped balance production on the line by making sure everyone can contribute in the same way, Saalabian says.

More Confidence
In addition to streamlined operations, Saalabian says lean manufacturing has given Silver Eagle confidence that it can fulfill customers’ needs more effectively than the competition. “We feel we are ahead of competitors in terms of understanding the industry, customers’ needs and being able to respond quicker than other people, and we feel this will allow us to grow faster,” he says.

“Everything we do differently and better will translate into better quality and customer satisfaction.”