Wiremold\'s Success With Lean Manufacturing Evaluating Wiremold\'s

Wiremold's Success With Lean Manufacturing

Evaluating Wiremold's Success with Lean Manufacturing

Wiremold successfully transformed itself from highly inefficient production and manufacturing processes that had centered on batch-and-queue methods of scheduling to be one of the acknowledged global leaders in lean manufacturing. So great were there accomplishments that they were mentioned in the book Lean Thinking and have consistently been used as a case study of how the adoption of lean manufacturing frameworks and principles can transform the financial performance of a company (Fiume, 2004). Previously to implementing lean initiatives, the company earned $100M in revenues and had an enterprise value of $30M. Within just ten years of operating with lean manufacturing processes in place the company had revenues grow to $450M and a value of $770M, which is the price the company was sold at in that year. For a transformation to be this successful and pervasive, a cultural shift is involved in how a company views itself as part of its broader value chain, including a complete shift in the expectations and actions of subordinates as well (Day, 1995).

What Wiremold did was make lean a strategic initiative, not a tactical one. This ensures that their CERO would lead the lean initiative and show through example why making significant changes in daily processes and procedures, when taken over time, could lead to exceptionally strong financial results (Fiume, 2004). Most powerful of all, the CEO mandated that the company would be successful in migrating to lean by stating that employees must support the transition from previous-generation manufacturing techniques and frameworks, showing how each aspect of the process would benefit them, and if they did not participate they would be shown the door and given assistance in finding a new job (Fiume, 2004).

Wiremold next set strategic goals and objectives across the systems, organizational structure, product lines and policies of the company (Day, 1995). The intent of this decision on the part of the CEO and senior management staff was to align lean manufacturing strategies by product, support area. And also by specific management level and department. The essence of any effective lean manufacturing system implementation is the alignment of responsibility and accountability by product line, division or department (Cottyn, Van Landeghem, Stockman, Derammelaere, 2011). This also allowed for much greater analytics and reporting of progress on lean initiative performance corporate-wide; there was no ambiguity anymore about which system was reporting the most accurate performance levels, or what the performance levels were. Analytics, when combined with effective lean management strategies, eliminates confusion and chaos by bringing order and focus to even the most complex manufacturing initiative (Cumbo, Kline, Bumgardner, 2006). Wiremold had succeeded with their lean manufacturing initiative by transforming the culture and bringing in an entirely level of accountability, transparency over results, and in so doing, infused the culture with a motivation to change and continually improve -- which is critical for the success of any lean initiative (Lee-Mortimer, 2006). With all of these elements in place from a cultural standpoint, the company went out to completely re-invent and optimize their production processes (Day, 1995). With change management firmly in place, Wiremold began the process of using value stream mapping to completely redesign their core manufacturing processes (Fiume, 2004). This included the development of an entirely new demand-driven manufacturing process that removed much of the waste generated from the batch-and-queue methods of the past. All of these strategies were then orchestrated together, measured against financial metrics, and a cycle of continual improvement began, which lead over ten years to exceptional profitability and growth.