CCI Conveyor Pulleys On Track with Lean

ALBEMARLE – Lean as a concept wasn’t new to the management team at CCI Conveyor Pulleys in Albemarle, but using lean tools and techniques to make their industrial conveyor pulleys hadn’t been tried. That first tentative step into lean has snowballed into a lean culture on the plant floor, including a full-time lean coordinator promoted from within.

“We’re still not a pure lean facility” said Jimmy McSwain, vice president of manufacturing. “I’d read about it for years. I knew it would work.” But less than two years after lean became real at CCI, the company has made rapid progress in streamlining their processes and eliminating waste in time and motion. Many mistakes have been eliminated and the entire work area improved.

Steven Forrest, a lean specialist with IES at NC State University, said he has never seen a workforce embrace change so quickly and enthusiastically. “It was pleasantly refreshing,” he said. “They were all fired up and gung-ho.”

Sometimes results came quickly, such as the 4-day kaizen (rapid improvement) event that is expected to eventually lead to savings of $1.4 million by improving the work flow, reducing inventory, increasing floor space, and ultimately increasing sales. CCI management is still adding up the value of all their lean initiatives.

CCI began the lean journey, as many companies do, with a couple of employees attending a Lean Overview. In February 2007, plant manager Tevis Burleson and production manager Paul Smith attended a lean seminar offered by IES in nearby Charlotte. The two men returned inspired.

“We almost had to pour a bucket of water on Tevis,” McSwain said. “His brain was running faster than his mouth for two days.” Ideas for using lean principles to improve the plant seemed to be everywhere.

Owner and president Bill Harvey caught their enthusiasm. He called his local IES extension specialist, Gene Beneduce, who brought in Forrest and also managed to get a matching grant scholarship to help pay for the lean coaching. (CCI was one of the first companies to take advantage of this program, which ended in 2007.)

CCI had grown quickly from its birth in 1992 with Harvey and McSwain as a two-person company. They started slowly, but gained momentum until now about 90 employees produce customized industrial pulleys. CCI Conveyor Pulleys carry coal out of mines and aggregates out of rock quarries. They pull those “log” cars up that first steep hill at amusement parks’ water rides. They come in an array of sizes to suit varying requirements. This variation is CCI’s strength to its customers and also a challenge to its processes.

Over the years, different employees had created slightly different ways to make the same pulley. Work cells grew with sales. Lean requires slowing down to take the time to find the wasted motions, reorganize, clean up and streamline. And then it takes unending dedication to standardized work and continuous improvement from everyone.

Harvey and McSwain shut down the plant for two days to get the entire floor staff trained in lean concepts. They used the classrooms at the Stanly County Cooperative Extension Office to learn the lean basics including value stream mapping (which maps a process to visualize issues) and 5S (sort, straighten, shine, standardize and sustain). After these two days, IES facilitated a series of on-site improvement activities spread out over the next several months.

IES coaches companies into winning concepts, Beneduce noted, and then serve as resource when needed.

To the surprise of the management team, lean was embraced enthusiastically. “Everybody really got into it,” McSwain said. “They accepted it whole-heartedly.” Usually new initiatives create complaints, but not this time. Quite the opposite, workers wanted to bring all areas up to lean standards.

CCI is well on the way to lean self-sufficiency. Michael Thompson, a drum fabricator, was promoted to the company’s first lean coordinator in February 2008, just a year after that first introduction to lean. Thompson began measuring processes and found more ways to improve.

For example, in the lagging department, where rubber is cooked onto a steel drum to make a pulley, Thompson counted quality issues in April. By a wide margin, the reason a pulley was rejected was due to air bubbles. The only solution is to start over, which means melting the rubber off in a costly hot and unpleasant procedure. Thompson traced the cause of the problem to pulleys being left in the oven too long. By systematically setting the proper time and temperature each time, problems with air bubbles fell from 16 in April to none in June.

Lean requires input from everyone, and management appreciates the help. “They help us with long range planning now,” McSwain said. “Lean is a people-driven thing. And we’re using the brain power of our people.”