PLANET Specialty Symposium: Lessons in Lean

Manufacturing is about optimization. It has been for decades. Through stringent quality assurance programs and audits, manufacturing plants strive to use the right amount of resources to deliver the right amount of product to the right location in the right time.

Over the last several decades, the Toyota revolutionized the manufacturing landscape with the Toyota Production System (TPS), it’s version of lean manufacturing. TPS’s goal is to eliminate waste by cutting out all non-value-adding steps in a process.

Some of these concepts have trickled down to the service sector over time, and service-related businesses are now more systemized and standardized than ever.

However, few have formally adopted the service sector’s lean manufacturing counterpart, known as lean management.

Lean management was, however, the topic of a two-part session at the Professional Landcare Network's (PLANET) Specialty Symposium, held Aug. 4-6 in Milwaukee. The session, “Eliminating Waste In Your Organization,” was part of the symposium’s landscape management track. Panelists Brett Lemcke of R.M. Landscape, Hilton, N.Y.; Jeff Joutras, CLP, The Bruce Co, Middleton, Wis.; and Jim McCutcheon, CLP of HighGrove Partners, Austell, Ga., shared their firms’ approaches to ridding waste.

Waste can be a problem in any organization, but especially one the size of HighGrove Partners. With locations in Charlotte, N.C., and Austell, Ga., the $15-million company employs about 225 workers. Last September, after a visit to Ariens Co.’s Appleton, Wis., headquarters, McCutcheon introduced the lean concept to his company.

“We wanted to make sure that as we grew we didn’t perpetuate any problems within our organization,” McCutcheon explained. He said lean management is appropriate for companies as small as two people and becomes more powerful the larger the operation. 

“I think ‘lean’ is actually a misnomer,” McCutcheon said, explaining that it gives the impression of cutting people and resources. Because of this common misconception --  and knowing that employee buy-in is essential for success -- McCutcheon guaranteed that no employee would lose his job during HighGrove’s lean transformation. “Lean is really about finding waste and looking at operations through the filter of what’s important to the customer.”

Kaizen is one tool companies use when going lean. Kaizen, a Japanese term that means “continuous improvement,” is a weeklong period of observation and solution-finding. One area of business is scrutinized at a time. Personnel from inside and outside that particular department analyze its activities from top to bottom to identify and augment wasteful activities – usually things that people do “because that’s the way they’ve always done them.”

McCutcheon gives an example from his design/build division. Prior to implementing lean, HighGrove’s landscape designers and architects used resources and devoted time to color rendering designs before submitting them to clients. HighGrove determined that most clients don’t value this feature, and that it’s not necessary to sell more jobs. Now, HighGrove will color render a design for a fee if the customer requests it. Otherwise, the designs go out colorless. Similar observations streamlined operations in maintenance and accounting – financial statements now go out on the sixth day of the month.

“The biggest challenge is you have to become a culture of execution,” McCutcheon said. “What we’re doing is trying to get everybody in the company everyday to find opportunities to eliminate waste.

“There’s a saying in lean that I learned early on. ‘In the beginning, lean has to be led.’ It literally has to come from me. Without a doubt, when you sign a team up for a kaizen some of them will grumble, but in the end they will tell you your praises. I have never seen anyone say ‘That was a waste of time.’”

McCutcheon answered many questions from contractors in the audience, mostly about how he is able to remove employees from their duties for a week to complete kaizen. One attendee insisted that his company “couldn’t afford” to do that.

To that, McCutcheon said: “I would contest that you can’t afford not to.”