| Hart & Cooley: Staying Lean |
| Manufacturing | |||
| Written by Deborah Geering | |||
| Tuesday, 01 April 2008 | |||
 Bernard Roy explains how lean events help keep this 107-year-old HVAC manufacturer current.
Last year, the company sponsored 80 lean events—with managers and office staff, customer service and plant personnel, suppliers, and customers. In each case, the company gathers a small group of people who work as a team, adds a trained facilitator and an outside person who can offer an objective perspective, and asks the question, “Why do we do it this way?”  Bernard Roy, President It’s all part of his strategy for keeping Hart & Cooley, a century-old HVAC company, profitable during the most recent economic downturn. “Although we’ve been through them and survived, I think this will require a different approach than in the past,” said Roy, who holds a degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s degree in industrial administration. Factors such as limited resources for unlimited demand, shifting centers of economic activity, and new global industry structures (ideas outlined by Diana Farrell of McKinsey Global Institute) have made the business world, and the world in general, a very different place than it was during World War II or the Depression, Roy noted. To survive the latest recession, Hart & Cooley must take a close look at not only what it does, but also the processes it uses, he said. Continuous flow “In this market, we can’t increase the sales, and the sales minus the cost is profit,” he said. “The only thing we can control is our costs, so we go after that.” That’s where the lean events come in. Roy encourages the company (the first, in 1901, to manufacture warm-air registers from stamped steel) to explore new ways of doing things. The goal: continuous flow. “How do you get down to one-piece flow—that’s a short sentence with big impact,” he said. “You can reduce the amount of square footage, reduce the amount of indirect labor, which is waste, and you can pull your material through much more cost-effectively.” The company has plenty of opportunity to apply the principle. Owned by Tomkins PLC, Hart & Cooley manufactures air distribution and vent products for heating, plumbing, and air-conditioning systems. Its product lines include grilles, registers, and diffusers; flexible duct, gas vent, and chimney systems; commercial fans; and duct system components. The company recently relocated its headquarters to Grand Rapids, Mich.; it also has operations in Alabama, Arizona, California, Illinois, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, and Mexico. It imports some components from overseas and operates several regional distribution centers. Whether the system in question is customer service, administration, or manufacturing (the company addresses them all), Roy’s approach is to start at the end of the line, work on a small piece of the process, and then move backward. “When you’re hiking, if the person in the front goes the slowest, can you go any faster?” he asked. Buy-in from upper management is critical, Roy said, or changes won’t stick. He sends senior staffers to a weeklong lean enterprise program at the University of Tennessee, a tactic he also employed as general manager of Lennox Industries before he joined Hart & Cooley. Whenever possible, he attends lean event kickoff meetings to add a little glue. “I ask them questions, and to be honest, they can’t pull any fast ones on me. I can tell if they’re not taking it seriously.” It takes four or five events in any given system before you see a synergy, he said. “You do one, and you reduce the amount of space required. Then you do another and another, and in the end, you pull the operations together and you have more space available,” he explained. Eye on the product Roy’s ideas don’t end with the process. He plans to focus on long-term strategy, too. “If you’re not careful, one day you wake up and realize you’re just a good buggy whip manufacturer,” he said. “And you know how many of those they sell a year.” The company already offers several high-end, low-volume products, such as custom-built systems that can’t be matched by Asian exporters. But to keep up with customer demand, Hart & Cooley will have to find ways to go green with more energy-efficient products, Roy said. In the HVAC industry, the next big thing is indoor air quality. “People spend more time in their homes, and they build new homes that are pretty much airtight,” he said. Air quality is the wave of the future, but tapping into what is now a highly fragmented industry is a challenge. Roy plans to rely on his engineering background to lead the company toward new solutions. The company also has an opportunity to honor its founding tradition of innovation by staying on top of trends in energy efficiency, he said. In the meantime, the president is initiating lean events wherever he sees room for improvement. “If you improve, improvement turns into efficiency, and efficiency turns into profits,” Roy said. “The bottom line is you should see it in your financials.” And in the company culture, too. Deborah Geering, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , is a freelance writer based in Atlanta. |
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© 2008 American Executive - RedCoat Publishing. All rights reserved.
American Executive is a RedCoat Publishing publication.
American Executive is a RedCoat Publishing publication.
