Tailored Label Products Inc., a Menomonee Falls manufacturer of custom high-performance labels and die-cut adhesives that employs 50, was facing a good kind of problem – how to manage a 50% increase in orders. The challenge was to process this higher volume of orders using the resources they had.

The solution was a Lean Office project with WMEP to apply Lean to their order entry process. “We knew we were doing some things that were redundant inside the office,” said Jeff Kerlin, Tailored Label’s director of operations. “It took some time for orders to get out to the plant.”

They started with Office Value Stream Mapping, a Lean tool that identifies where waste is occurring. Initially, the task seemed overwhelming. “They felt that their order entry process was very complicated,” said Jim Fackelman, WMEP manufacturing specialist and portfolio manager for Tailored Label. “But once we put together the Product and Process Matrices, which we use to identify product families, they saw that it was not so complicated.”

They ended up mapping three order scenarios: an unmodified repeat order, a repeat order with minor modifications and a new order. “It helped them clarify their process,” said Fackelman. “They were so focused on all the exceptions, they didn’t recognize that 85 to 90% of their orders followed a standard process, and if they cleaned up that process, it would take care of most of the problems.”

The Office Value Stream Map revealed that it took an average of 41.5 hours to get a repeat order out into the plant, which was “extremely surprising,” said Kerlin.

“While it literally didn’t take that long for every order, in theory, it could, and in some cases, it did,” said Michael Erwin, Tailored Label president. The Office Value Stream Map revealed all the steps and nuances of their process, which proved to be cumbersome.

As a result, “people create their own, more efficient way of doing their tasks,” said Erwin. “But when they create an unofficial way of doing something, the shortcuts can cause other problems.” Their goal was to “provide engineering and customer care information in a consistent way across the board, rather than homegrown methods to shortcut a laborious process.”

They also were surprised to learn the distance that documents sometimes traveled – up to 4,700  feet. “We all had a bet on the footage. We had one employee guess 5,000 feet,” said Erwin. “We were laughing at him. He was exaggerating his guess to make a point, but he was close to being correct.”

To bring that distance down, they used Office Layout to create common areas and move printers to central locations. They also eliminated redundant activities and relocated people who tend to work together so that they could interact in a “more seamless way,” said Erwin.

Another Lean tool they used was Batch Reduction. “We had a lot of queuing going on,” said Kerlin. The customer service representatives would wait until a certain number of orders were on their desks, then process them. This created a bottleneck at the planner’s desk, who had four or five customer service reps feeding him work in batches. “If enough people are batching, then it compounds itself,” said Erwin. In addition to eliminating batching, they moved a customer service rep into a planning position to help Level the workload.

They made use of Standardized Work concepts by updating the tickets that relay order information to the plant. Previously, information on the tickets was not organized in any specific way. Now, there are separate sections for the pressmen, finishers and other workers, so that they can look at a specific area of the ticket and find everything they need.

They also realized that not all information was going on the tickets. Sometimes information was  written on the envelopes that the plates were placed in. This slowed down work as people searched for the envelopes to retrieve the information. Now the information is in the computer system. “If we hadn’t mapped that, we wouldn’t have found that,” said Kerlin.

They are continuing work on Office Layout and further automation of the order entry process. They also created a common bin for repeat orders so that anyone can process them.

 A related project they implemented was automation of their inventory. Their new system makes use of barcode scanners and software that allows for live updates of inventory. This saves time for the planners, who no longer need to make a trip to the shop to see if inventory is in stock. It also means monthly inventory is unnecessary, since only occasional spot inventories are needed, reducing waste and improving the accuracy and timeliness of raw material tracking.

The results of Tailored Label’s Lean Office work include:

• Lead time reduction of 86%
• Handling 50% more orders with a 5% increase in manpower
• 58% reduction in the distance documents travel (from 4,700 feet to 1,944 feet)
• Purged 80,000 old records from management software, improving the speed of the system
• Eliminated unnecessary or duplicate forms 

“Most of this stuff is common sense,” said Erwin. “The Office Value Stream Map showed us how to shrink the lead time by pruning the things that are unnecessary. Then we created trials to see how things would flow and to make certain that everyone’s needs would be satisfied.” Once they identified improvement opportunities, “They really ran with it,” said Fackelman. “They realized that Lean applies to the whole enterprise, not just the factory.”