When the dust settles

Darren Wilson makes no bones about it. When, as an apprentice engineer, he first walked into what was then BPB (British Plaster Board) 23 years ago, it was a mess. The thing is, says Wilson – now operations manager at what has, since 2005, been Saint-Gobain of France subsidiary, British Gypsum – "gypsum is a rock; we mine the rock, grind it into a powder, heat it up, bag it with a few ingredients if it's [to be sold as] plaster and if it's plasterboard we slap it between two sheets of paper. We make millions of tonnes of dust a year." It is an industry, he says, indicating a distance of several inches between two hands, where it was once customary to work in plaster "that deep" with most people thinking "we make dust, so it's acceptable for it to be around". So deeply ingrained, if you'll excuse the pun, was this culture that the company was happy to have a picture of its dust strewn production line featured in a motor manufacturer's advertisement extolling the robust, dust-resistant virtues of its products. Contamination was everywhere, says Wilson (right). It was a culture in which accidents and breakdowns were inevitable; where a yield above 95 was impossible; using machinery was an art form and each production team made the product differently. There was a macho culture of "our job is just to keep things going so we go in and fix things". Wilson explains: "The kind of people who were held in high esteem would come out in the middle of the night, get the plant going again and then make sure they stayed until 8 or 9 in the morning so that everyone coming on the day shift would see them. They'd get a pat on the back and off home they'd go, heroes." Most of the time this was done without finding the root cause of the problem. It was all about fixing things rather than repairing them. "People's jobs were boring because all they did was press a button to switch [the machine] on and off and if it broke they'd clear the mess up and an engineer would come and fix it. "For all the sophisticated tools that are within lean and you read about, our main issue was around basic conditions. A bearing that is supposed to last for five years if you lubricate it correctly, will last five years if you stop contamination getting into that bearing and if you operate under the correct conditions. But if you don't lubricate it, operate it at the wrong speeds and in wrong conditions, it will fail. Not only will it fail before five years, you don't know when it will fail – five weeks, five months or two years." Worse still, high levels of operator intervention, including people climbing into machines to clear blockages, was a major cause of accidents. There were blocked aisles, lots of scrap and wasted energy (like much process manufacturing, making plaster and plasterboard uses vast quantities of energy – around £1 million-worth of it a month at Wilson's current East Leake, Leicestershire facility). Things had bumped along, broadly unchanged for 50 years, and why not? Despite the inefficiencies and waste, BPB was actually a very profitable company. Everything it made, it sold. "To convince people there was actually a problem was a real challenge," Wilson says. "Fortunately though, we had a global operations director who came in and thought that really wasn't right. He brought in our sensei." Professor Yamashina from Kyoto University had worked with the likes of Pirelli, Fiat and Volvo, and was renowned for his methodology. Wilson picks up the story: "He has been working with us for 10 years now and one of his favourite words is 'disaster'. I took him around East Leake proudly thinking we were doing quite well. But he showed us we were a million miles away from where we wanted to be." British Gypsum called the programme it was embarking on 'world class manufacturing' but, says Wilson, "the bulk of our issues were around TPM [total productive maintenance]". It's about the autonomous maintenance that the machine operators are doing; professional maintenance by craftsmen and focus improvement using root cause analysis tools and techniques backed up by the application of those techniques in a safe environment; customer service; quality; process control; people development; and cost reduction. "It was necessary to change a culture that had been in place for many years," he continues. "We had low staff turnover; many of our operators and middle managers – the kind of people who often block this sort of change – had also been there for years. We started with what was a systematic brainwashing in all parts of the plant – plant managers, engineering managers and production managers went off on very intensive practitioner courses." Wilson was among a few who went to Japan with Professor Yamashina and visited plants the sensei believed were the best in the world. "It gives you the absolute belief that everything is possible," he says. "For people [back here] who run into difficulties, I still tell stories of what I have seen in Japan to prove it is possible [for them to overcome their challenges]. I believe in having a core of people who believe in change and who can really drive the programme through." On getting British Gypsum's policy deployment from strategic level to the shopfloor, he says everything that happens operationally has to link into the overall business strategy. Policy deployment at a company level sets the major strategic drivers for the business based on market conditions that will break down into must-win battles. To reconcile all of this at plant level, integrated business management (IBM) is deployed to manage strategic and supply chain planning via a product review, a demand review and a supplier review that looks over a 36-month horizon with monthly reviews along the way. What Wilson describes as an F-matrix is used for cost deployment – how it looks at losses and puts in correctional improvement programmes. There's a route map to facilitate more reactive measures that mitigate the risk of failure when looking at new tools and techniques, and a compliance module for "all the legal things that all of us have to do". These all feed into pillar plans, with pillar owners and pillar teams, and break down into highly detailed departmental plans and various levels of balanced scorecards to review the whole process. "Our methodology was to apply the tools where you get the biggest bang for your buck so [it is necessary] to be very clear on what the biggest issues are and break those down and establish a very clear linkage back to policy deployment." One of the principles Wilson works to he calls '30:20:6'. Instead of asking his managers for, say, a 6% cost reduction over the year, and risk getting delivered maybe 4% after discounting the things that didn't work, he starts with the assumption that 30% of the cost base may be a 'loss'. "If you stretch your mind to [attacking] 30% you're much more likely to achieve 20% of 30% which is 6%." All this is displayed in some detail and visually on boards on the shopfloor. Tools from a simple tag (if a machine may be broken, it is 'tagged' and an operator or first line manager comes to repair it) through to very complex root cause analysis tools utilised by senior chemical process engineers, are deployed in the problem solving processes. Wilson emphasises the importance of putting sustaining activities in place, "something we've got wrong on a few occasions over eight years. We were driving pace and we wanted to go quicker and quicker and get more savings but were not putting rigour into sustaining activities." He advises investing time in making previous improvements right and robust rather than starting lots of new projects. "Those we did first were done first for good reasons – because they were our biggest losses. It seems almost criminal then to allow them to fail." Plants are a lot safer now, he says, with both unsafe acts and unsafe conditions being dealt with. The root cause of nearly all incidents was related to someone having an unsafe behaviour in overcoming an unsafe condition and ending up having an accident. "Management standards were changed," says Wilson. "When I started with the business 23 years ago, it was normal to see a manager jumping over a guard – doing anything to keep the plant going. We had a workforce who were quite sceptical and believed production came first. Around 2000, the message really got through that managers must now lead by example and set themselves very high standards in the way they conduct themselves and always challenge anything that's unsafe. Auditing is key to that process. "I don't believe you have a factory that is safe but not very productive, or a factory that is productive but not very safe. Ten years ago, most of our plants were having a lost time incident every month. At East Leake we've had one lost time accident in the last two years which was a guy who was going up some stairs, decided he'd forgotten something and turned round and turned his elbow." Reliability has been the key to machine performance with the programme having eliminated key losses like early bearing failures due to contamination. All the machine stops – those down to supply problems, direct human error, start up delays due to process or engineering, electrical and mechanical breakdown – are measured and have been driven down from nearly 40 to less than 10 between 2006 and 2008. Elsewhere, emissions to air and starting and stopping major items of equipment have largely been eliminated or reduced, and all manufacturing waste is recycled. The plant's £1m-a-month energy bill may be large, but one project alone that dealt with fixing compressor leaks saved £50,000 a year. There has been a significant improvement in service performance driven by taking action on delivery errors, loading errors and delivery time. By such actions, the East Leake plant has taken 10% off its cost base in the last two years. That may be the best performance among all the British Gypsum plants, but Wilson says he isn't finished yet. Along the route to hitting yet higher world class manufacturing benchmarks, he has his eye on extending component life from three to five years. He wants to see further improvements in product quality by examining what he describes as the chemistry of the effect that inputs have on outputs that will result in ironing out product fluctuations. And he wants to take the fear out of communications. That further success will come from the persistence of management – the energy to keep the thing going, he concludes. The British Gypsum case study was presented at Works Management's annual Lean Conference, sponsored by DAK Consulting and Productivity Europe