By Mike Puckett, Journeyman, Shipping & Receiving Manager, Scovan
It’s no small feat Disrupting for the Better. It’s a calculated mix of continuous improvement, challenging your own processes, and equipping yourself with a sharp pencil and open mind.
A little over a year ago, myself and the other team leaders at our Ponoka facility went through a crash course of Lean – 5S to begin the start of asking the whys, figuring out the hows, and implementing healthy much needed changes to the ways we operated. We learned that structure would drive efficiency, but we had to introduce it where we weren’t necessarily looking. We learned that when we did find a gap or a shortcoming, the fundamentals of 5S and collaboration can fill it.
5S is broken into five elements to give each task flow. Sort – Determine the essential tools required to do your task. Set in order – Arrange tools, information, and your work area to guide task progression. Shine – Clean and keep it clean. Standardize – Each task station and process should have the same rhythm and familiar layout. Sustain – Maintain the flow.
It’s a circular effort that makes it easy to find issues by listening to the people who carry out all the functions it takes to complete a module. No one can tell you how to better improve a task than the person who does that task every day, and nearly all tasks at our facility are carried out by a team member who has done the task enough times to master it. It’s become an exercise in accepting the fact that maybe the way we do things isn’t the best way and encouraging everyone to challenge the status quo.
Over the last year, our team has been injecting 5S into our day to day. From putting up broom hangers to end the hunt for a broom, to completely restructuring our warehouse to give team members more room to work. We’ve answered problems with the simplest solutions like “why is it so hard to keep track of the same thirty tools we use throughout the week?”. It turned out the reason was we only needed about ten tools, and they were just getting buried by all the tools we didn’t need.
Our facility has always had its own structure, and we’ve always been high performers. At the end of each day we’ve always cleaned our work areas, we’ve always turned a challenge into a success, and we’ve always made whatever was on our plate work. But now, we clean less because we don’t need to make such a mess, we’ve solved challenges so they can’t come up again, and we put things on our plate in a place they belong and in the order we want them on it. Things still go wrong, but as 5S seeps deeper into the fabric of Scovan we have stronger tools to fix them instead of just dealing with them.
With the adoption of Lean – 5S, our warehouse team has seen great benefit from standardizing processes from data entry to material distribution. During our busiest year to date fabricating multiple projects and expanding our manufacturing line, we saw our material deliveries rise from an average of 2100 deliveries per year, to just over 3500 deliveries for our fiscal 2025. During this period, we not only improved our average material release time from 4.72 days for receipt and data verification to an average of 3.79 days, but we did so without increasing the team’s size, and without sacrificing our facilities high quality and safety standards.
Lean – 5S makes us more efficient, and it gives us cost savings by eliminating redundant problems, but the best win I’ve seen from this shift is how it’s been eliminating the daily frustrations and stress from my team along the way.
