Decreasing production costs 73% for a manufacturer

Advising on organizational changes leads to significant behavioral and operational results.

The manufacturer’s managers had poor relationships with United Auto Workers (UAW), along with low employee morale, lack of innovation, silos within the organization, and poor communication.  Upon analysis, the company also had significant cost overruns, defects, reworks, lack of any lean processes, and a major bottleneck in production.   

Lean training was implemented, and included define, measure, analyze, improve, and control (DMAIC), value stream mapping, baselines, root cause corrective action, visual factory, dashboards, Gemba Walks, and Six Sigma.  Leadership was trained using alignment sessions, and team building and engaged union exercises.

The results were that leadership silos were eliminated, union relationships were improved, issues were resolved in a more timely manner, lean ideas were implemented across the company, and morale was significantly improved.  Financial and operational results included a reduction of processing time by 73%, cost savings of $2.2 million, 12 million work hours eliminated through processing changes, and a decrease of 67% in first pass defects.

Some client engagements shown may have been executed by NMS consultants at prior firms.