Self-Directed Work Teams Improve On-time Delivery and Quality

For Farmington-based Connecticut Spring & Stamping (CSS), a manufacturer of close-tolerance precision metal parts, a long-term commitment to lean manufacturing has naturally evolved into use of self-directed work teams (SDWTs). With the help of a committed management team, a zealous companywide SDWT champion, dedicated team leaders/cheerleaders and, most importantly, participation of everyone on the shop floor, CSS is well on its to meeting its ambitious goals, just two years after launching the SDWT initiative. What began as an experiment with one pilot work team has been expanded to 21 teams addressing shop-floor and office processes.

Lean Sets the Stage

CSS’s pilot self-directed work team created this master-schedule job-tracker/work-flow board, charting all jobs scheduled for six months out. Using the board, workers can see how long a job will take, which machines it will run on, how much setup time is needed and which operators are responsible for the job. Scheduling personnel receive alerts when conflicts or issues arise. Before implementing the board, workers typically would make scheduling changes to 50 percent of the jobs; now they’re making only minor changes to about 10 percent of the jobs.

CSS embarked on its lean-manufacturing journey in 1994. Continually looking for s to embrace a cultural change that would help reduce waste and increase production, in 2006 the firm sequestered 34 key management and production personnel to brainstorm s to implement lean manufacturing. Since then, CSS has looked at a variety of different approaches (top-down and bottom-up) to help implement a lean philosophy. Management readily admits that some ideas succeeded and some did not.

In 2010, the company began to seek a new approach, and an increased level of commitment to help meet its goals: 100-percent on-time delivery of product to customers, with 100-percent quality, while also reducing internal waste and costs. Thus the use of self-directed work teams was launched. A SDWT is defined as a group of employees who combine different skills and talents to work toward a common purpose or goal, essentially without managerial supervision.

That’s where it got personal for Gaston Pelletier, CSS’s vice president of continuous improvement, who took on the task of implementing the approach as part of the firm’s 2010-2011 business plan. As step one, Pelletier sought training in SDWTs, and looked for a local company he could benchmark. Speaking to associates at the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, he learned of Dur-A-Flex, Inc., a nearby (East Hartford, CT) manufacturer of seamless commercial and industrial flooring systems, which had adopted the approach earlier in the decade.

Seeing the Light

After Pelletier and a small group of coworkers visited Dur-A-Flex, he read a book on the subject of SWDTs titled, “Leading Self-Directed Work Teams: A Guide to Developing New Team Leadership Skills,” by Kimball Fisher. Widely cited as the SDWT “Bible,” the book provided Pelletier with a much-needed road map to help him break down the approach into steps and guide the company’s efforts. He had “seen the light.”

Pelletier then began to work with a pilot group—the company’s auto-loop team of 11 employees that manufacture extension springs and complicated wire forms—to test the approach. As one of the more self-contained of CSS’s work groups, the team does not rely on many of the other departments within the company, making it easier to effect change by their own efforts.

“Leading Self-Directed Work Teams: A Guide to Developing New Team Leadership Skills,” by Kimball Fisher, is widely cited as the SDWT “Bible.” The book provided CSS with a much-needed road map to help break down the approach into steps and guide the company’s efforts.

Management’s job in getting SDWTs going: Set the initial objectives, and then provide all of the resources the team requests to accomplish them. The team also is free to develop its own sub-tier objectives—basically, steps it wants to take to attain the overall objective. Each SWDT team meets frequently to decide on achievable goals, and keeps working toward continuous improvement to accomplish the goals.

Management must provide each SDWT the necessary authority to do whatever it takes to improve the process and reach new heights in terms of delivery performance. It then must step aside.

“This is definitely the biggest step we have taken on our lean journey,” says Gaston. “We involve all of the shop-floor people to the ultimate level, and remove management from the picture.”

Coaching That First Pilot Team

For CSS’s initial foray into SDWTs, Pelletier himself served as a coach, initially guiding the team but ceding more and more latitude as the team got rolling. He notes that the team members immediately embraced the idea that they could make their own decisions and take charge of their own destiny.

Once they got going, they held numerous brainstorming sessions and the ideas began to flow. The shop-floor workers had als found that there was not an effective feedback mechanism between the shop and the front office. This often caused a variety of problems and issues, resulting in reduced performance. For example, the team often lacked sufficient detail on the jobs it processed. It did not als know which jobs should be run on which machines. As a result, jobs that required the same tools were scheduled to be set up on the same day on different machines. In some cases, work in process would sit for days; as many as three jobs with the same start date would be scheduled for one setup person, with no time set aside for setup during the previous week.

Although the work was getting done, production moved slowly and inefficiently. Rather than making required changes to synchronize the electronic schedule with actual shop-floor realities, changes were being made ad-hoc, without communicating with the master schedulers.

The SDWT’s first decision: Improve the business on the front end to make processes more efficient on the shop floor. For starters, the team radically altered the actual work flow and timing was synchronized with the master schedule and electronic systems. It developed a new master-schedule job-tracker/work-flow board, charting all jobs scheduled for six months out. Using the board, workers can see how long a job will take, which machines it will run on, how much setup time is needed and which operators are responsible for the job. Scheduling personnel receive alerts when conflicts or issues arise. The team also established a process to continuously provide feedback and changes to the master scheduler.

Before implementing the job-tracker/work-flow board, shop-floor workers typically would have to make scheduling changes to 50 percent of its jobs. Now, thanks to the new process, they’re making only minor changes to about 10 percent of the jobs.