CASE STUDY – KAIZEN BLITZ – Unleashing the Storm of Empowerment A growing number of companies are discovering that highly focused "kaizen events" can be a great way to unleash employee creativity and upgrade manufacturing operations--in a hurry. By Joseph Turnbull In a good year, the U.S. manufacturing sector might chalk up a 4% overall increase in productivity. At the plant level, some top-flight production operations have achieved gains of 20% or more in a 12-month period. But you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone with a more impressive productivity story than Dino Clark in Building 102 of AlliedSignal Inc.’s jet-engine manufacturing complex on the south side of Phoenix. Kaizen Case Studies Caterpillar Logistics: Adapting kaizen activities to a warehouse Clark, a veteran machinist, is one of six multi-skilled production workers who operate a nine-station manufacturing cell that produces fan discs, a critical jet-engine component featuring highly contoured grooves. In the last year, the productivity of that operation has soared by 885%. That’s not a misprint. The increase was 885%. Before," says Clark, "we were lucky to get out one part per day. Now, we’re getting 10 out in a day--and we’re doing it with fewer people." On display near the cell, is a "spaghetti chart" depicting the circuitous 2,686-ft route that parts once travelled through the plant, not including trips outside the building for special processing? Now, the travel distance is just 667 ft, through a simple loop, and outside processing has been eliminated. "We’re now doing one-piece flow," Clark says. One result: work in process (WIP) in the cell has been slashed by 89% and cycle time by 79%. AlliedSignal Aerospace: Anatomy of a kaizen event. “At the business-unit level, our productivity goal is a 6% improvement each year—and we’ve been exceeding that. At the factory level, it has been much higher. Most of our buildings are getting about 20% year-to-year productivity improvement.” Marc Hoffman, vice...