Glenroy implemented a formal lean initiative as the scope of its products and services grew.

There are many ways lean manufacturers stand apart from their competitors, but among the most notable is a commitment to continuous im­provement. A company’s devotion to systematic operational enhancements is not prompted by poor performance or customer dissatisfaction, Glenroy Inc. President Rich Buss explains.    

Rather, it stirs from an incessant urge to operate more efficiently and service customers more effectively.  

However, continuous improvement can be a difficult transition for companies like Glenroy that are accustomed to finishing a project and moving on to the next. “The mindset that many of us had was when you work on a project, the goal is to get the project done, and not have to come back to it,” he stresses. “The continuous improvement process forces us to make a small improvement and then go back and try to improve it again.”

Glenroy Gets Lean
Glenroy – a family owned flexible packaging converter – has been working on continuous improvement for more than 15 years, Buss says. Founders Edwin and Ruth Jablonka started the business in 1965 and named it after their sons Glen and Roy. Through the years, Glenroy’s product range expanded to include packaging, laminate and balloon films and EverWhite-brand dry erase boards. The company has preprint, flexographic printing, extrusion coating and finishing services.   

As Glenroy’s service and product scope grew, Buss and other key members of management decided to implement a formal lean initiative approximately eight years ago. Glenroy has close ties with the Wisconsin Manufacturers Extension Partnership (WMEP), an organization dedicated to instilling best practices in small to medium-sized Wisconsin manufacturers. One of WMEP’s areas of expertise happens to be lean manufacturing, Buss says.   

Under WMEP’s instruction, Glenroy’s first step was to perform value stream mapping of the entire organization and evaluate its pro­cesses from start to finish. The manufacturer methodically studied work flow beginning with sales and logistics, moving along to its printing, coating and finishing production processes, and concluding with the finished product being shipped out to customers. “In that process, we identified target projects and areas that we wanted to improve,” Buss says.

Endless Opportunities
Operations Manager Jim Costello joined Glenroy shortly thereafter, benefitting the company with his knowledge of lean, having worked for a manufacturer also linked to WMEP. “The value stream mapping was performed to identify potential waste reduction opportunities in our processes,” Costello says. “Over the extent of five years, all of the different projects identified in the initial value stream mapping have been worked on and reworked depending on the area.”   

One of the major areas Glenroy identified was to add specific capacity and improve work flow in the extrusion coating department, which led to the investment of a new extrusion coating/laminator. This and other changes resulted in a 50 percent reduction in lead-time. Realizing the possibilities for improvement were endless, Glenroy performed two additional mapping review processes and doesn’t intend to stop there, Buss says. “We’ve made tons of improvements in the organization these past eight years, but in my view, we’re really just getting started,” he remarks.

Employees on Board
Implementing lean initiatives at a company that has been manufacturing a specific way for decades can be challenging for its management and staff. “We spent the first six months taking everyone in the company through a class to introduce the principles and concepts of lean,” Buss says. “The challenges we faced initially were pretty typical, with a lot of employees feeling concerned that we were doing this to reduce staff or to make everybody work harder.”  

A weak economy helped Glenroy’s employees put things into perspective as other manufacturers nationwide issued layoffs. “That really put our em­ployees into a continuous im­provement overdrive mode,” Costello says. “Today, it is better understood that our continuous improvement efforts are keeping our operators at work. The biggest thing to me that lean teaches is trying to understand our employees to better utilize them. There are countless talents that we have internally and using those talents to improve our processes is our ultimate goal.”

Successes and ‘Learnings’
When it comes to implementing lean, companies should follow the age-old proverb, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” It worked for Glenroy, Costello says. “We’ve tried a number of different material flows and different storage scenarios and have had successes and failures,” he admits.    

However, Glenroy doesn’t think of them as failures. “We call them ‘learnings,’” Costello says. “We tried long-term scheduling of projects, which worked in some cases, but for others, blocking out portions of time and hitting it hard worked better. Each time we brought the team back to reevaluate all of the variables and map out a different direction, the project spawned a ton of learnings.”   

“I think people today are much more accepting of redoing something in a project and not being frustrated with it,” Buss adds. “We’re taking this at face value. We learned something, and now we have to go back and apply what we have learned. We are using the downturn in the economy to aggressively go after the things we learned in hope that when the economy does turn around, we will be poised to take advantage of some of these improvements.    

“From the company’s perspective, this is a long-term process,” he continues. “There are about a dozen lean building blocks, and we’ve done an adequate job of exploring half of those, so we have a long way to go. There is total productive maintenance, the extended enterprise – passing this knowledge to our suppliers and vendors – and frankly, from a cost reduction and work flow standpoint, we haven’t come close to ex­hausting those opportunities.”