Addressing Cyclical Sales
In addition to Fabrication, a small amount of batching still takes place in the heat-treating function and limited clam-shell packaging, but otherwise the entire production floor is organized into cells that are part of value streams. Each stream operates as a separate profit center and plans work according to a 30-day forecast that is produced at monthly meetings involving Sales, Accounting, and Operations. Prior to these cooperative meetings, Sales and Operations never communicated, and this fed excessive inventories of mismatched parts, overstocked finished goods, and piles of WIP waiting for the next process.
"When we started having joint meetings, we began to communicate in a new way," CFO Best said. "And now, Sales is responsible for the sales forecast, and Operations is waiting to do their planning based on that forecast."
Materials flow based on multiple kanban systems. Cells track performance on a white board, listing the production plan for each shift and metrics on how each cell is performing compared with the plan. The individual value streams manage their own costs.
To deal with the cyclical nature of the retail market, Buck decided to reduce finished-goods inventory to one month but increase flexibility with continuous improvement. It is also beginning to create vendor-managed inventory programs with some of its larger clients. Additionally, Buck began level-loading production for its largest client, Wal-Mart, which historically has been good at forecasting 12-month sales totals, but not so good at month-to-month forecasts. Buck takes Wal-Mart’s 12-month forecast and divides the totals into 10 equal amounts to be produced each month between January and October. Now, instead of scrambling when Wal-Mart’s monthly forecasts change, Buck relies on this inventory or its increased flexibility to respond quickly if inventory can’t cover the monthly order.
"Sales has taken responsibility for the forecasting, and we are holding the plants [the Post Falls plant and contract plants in China] accountable for anything that they build over the planned, level load, so there’s a little bit of tension there," Best said. "Sales might foresee a spike later in the year, and maybe Operations is just building to a kanban. So Sales might start to panic and say, ‘Maybe we should increase our forecast a little bit because we don’t see Operations responding.’ And manufacturing is standing back saying, ‘We’ve got plenty of time, we’ve got plenty of capacity. We don’t need to build that yet.’ We still build things we don’t need, but not nearly as much as we used to."
As an example, the company historically has held two ―clearance sales‖ each year to sell excess finished goods. In 2007, it didn’t have to hold any.
One way Buck increased flexibility was through a 5S effort that ultimately led to dispersing the packaging function (except for a small amount of clam-shell packaging) to individual cells within the value streams. The improvement began in 2007 when Sundahl launched a 5S initiative for packaging, which took place in one area outside of the cells. It was determined that more space was needed to address a bottleneck in packaging, and such an investment would cost "well above six figures," according to Sundahl. Phil Duckett, executive vice president of Operations, challenged Bruce Sundahl to come up with an alternative. His response was to work collaboratively with the value-stream managers and shipping manger to move packaging to the cells. By early fall, they had proved the concept in one cell and in one value stream. Despite the looming busy season, Duckett gave Sundahl permission to continue with the change.
"Rather than putting their foot on the break, they put their foot on the gas pedal, and I think that helped with how fast the change happened," Sundahl said. "Everyone knew that the busy season was coming, and we got it all converted in four months."
The packaging move did more than allow Buck to avoid an expensive capital outlay, it also:
- Allowed for the reassignment of several employees to other areas because the cell-based tasks require fewer people.
- Removed a bottleneck in the supplier kanban system because the signals to suppliers would get hung up — sometimes for days — while finished goods waited for packaging
- Helped the company to accept and complete all of its orders in the final quarter of 2007. Previously, the company would concentrate on filling high-volume orders and turn down smaller orders during this busy time. Because of the level-loading plan with Wal-Mart and because finished goods were packaged before orders came in, the company had enough capacity to complete all orders. It did not have to decline any sales opportunities.
Uncovering True Costs
Buck has increased flexibility in other ways and has reaped multiple benefits. Some of these opportunities, however, would have remained hidden had the company not converted to the lean-accounting practices taught by Maskell, whom it hired for training and consulting.
C.J. Buck gives this example:
The company uses a fine blank machine to cut blades from metal and was faced with having to invest in new customized tooling for the machine to produce a new product. Tooling would have cost as much as $80,000 and would have had a four-month turnaround. Maskell asked if the company had idle capacity elsewhere that could handle the increased demand. They did: a laser cutting machine, but it cuts blades at the rate of 60 to 80 an hour while the fine blank machine can produce 600 to 800 an hour.
According to traditional-accounting principles, the large-batch option would have been most profitable. But using lean-accounting principles, which favor flexibility over large-batch production, the laser machine was the better option, and that’s what the team chose.
"Looking at our capacity, we just don’t have that many products that need a rate of 800 an hour," Buck said. "We actually had excess capacity in the fine blank machine. We needed help in the smaller runs. Standard costing says the obvious solution is to buy the machine that can make the most product, but that’s not what we needed."
Best attributes the increased use of the laser-cutting machine and other changes with increasing flexibility enough to give the company a unique advantage. For instance, the company offers quick turnaround on customized consumer Web-based orders, something competitors can’t do. Additionally, the company expects to continue to save in tooling costs by using laser cutting.
"The laser is slower, but it allows you to have smaller batches and not invest in the tooling costs," she said. "In the past the sales people would be optimistic about sales, which meant we would invest a lot in tooling sometimes, and then sales wouldn’t come through. Now we’ve smartened up. Now we say, ‘If demand gets there, we can always order the tooling.’ ”
Using the more holistic lean-accounting approach also led to the company pulling some work back from being outsourced to six Chinese contract manufacturers. Using theories and methods learned from Maskell, Hubbard documented that handles that were being manufactured in China at $6 a handle would cost $2 a handle to make at the Post Falls plant. The production was moved in house, and now the company uses the variable-cost model to plan production for all new products. (Such a model accounts for actual costs and value created, not just a per-unit price.)
Chris Potts, cost accounting manager at Buck, said the model evaluates three factors:
1) Capacity and headcount,
2) Material costs, and
3) Additional incremental costs.
"The whole premise here is to look at cash flow and see what the real cost is, not the estimated cost based on a model that you built back at the beginning of the year when you had certain assumptions," Potts said. "In the past, we would have looked at a fully burdened cost regardless of whether we had excess capacity."
Recently, using this technique led to the decision to produce a $1 million order in Post Falls instead of China. The result was a much higher profit margin, Best said, because Buck used assets it already had instead of writing a check to a contract manufacturer and paying related import and transportation fees.
New Model, New Metrics
As Buck was adopting lean accounting and ramping up lean projects at its new plant, it also invested in a new ERP system. This provided an important lesson learned that Buck mangers repeatedly cite: Don’t attempt to install a new ERP system while starting massive lean conversions. Wait until you are farther along.
Buck Knives has had to invest countless hours converting the ERP system from its traditional-accounting focus to value-stream/lean-accounting focus. The work continues. Potts is constantly refining the reports he produces for value-stream managers that document costs and profits. He does this in conjunction with lean process changes. For instance, the company is in the process of creating supermarkets at each value stream that will hold production supplies, some of which are used by everyone and currently are warehoused in a central location. The supermarkets will allow for more accurate capturing of supply costs by value stream and reduce the need for warehousing.
"Each year as we go forward, we’ll get closer and closer to having a true, actual cost for all of these things," Potts said. "This will be the first year we’ll be able to take a look at this year’s actual versus last year’s actual. So we’ll be able to fine-tune our expectations."
In addition to the finance-oriented measures, Buck is recreating is performance metrics. This need has arisen from both the cultural changes that have taken place and the obliteration of the old ERP system. C.J.Buck said this is where most of his focus as a leader is these days — asking not just what are the answers, but what should be the questions. When the new