Good Business eGuide for South Australia

Industry sector: Manufacturing and retail
Core activity: Clothing and footwear manufacture
Size (ft employees): 320
Other activities: Product retail
location: Salisbury, Adelaide 

Background

Results

Through its Lean initiatives, RM Williams is saving $15,500 in electricity per year, 123 tonnes of CO2, reduced the amount of waste to landfill by 76 tonnes annually and reduced their leather and cardboard consumption with effective recycling programs.

Action Undertaken

Over the first 18 months of its Lean program, RM Williams Chief Operating Officer and a Project Engineer met weekly and worked with a consultant from the Department of Trade and Economic Development to undertake a broad set of steps:

1. Develop a Current and Future Value Stream Map (VSM) of the manufacturing processes.
2. Establish an environmental committee and 5S (Lean process) teams across the plant.
3. Perform ‘Kaizen Blitz’ within areas indentified during the VSM process as a bottleneck. ‘low hanging fruit’ for were prioritised for improvement first with the savings potentially funding later projects.
4. Changed production scheduling processes and reviewed finished goods inventories to reflect new manufacturing capabilities.
5. Established Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to control processes, and ‘Visual Factory’ processes to enable production processes to be controlled by shop floor staff.

More recently, RM Williams employees have found opportunities to engage with suppliers and distributors to implement joint efficiency and waste minimisation projects such as box and materials recycling. A detailed account of some of the actions and outcomes within RM Williams Lean 5S program in cooperation with ZeroWaste SA can be found here.

Learning

• The Lean Manufacturing Program started with a VSM process which illustrated the position of the business and created a broad vision for future objectives. As the program progressed it became clear that it was important that staff were constantly engaged, and that clear improvements were established for the business before progressing to the next step.
• Sharing the lean vision with staff, empowering them to finding solutions to problems encountered throughout the program, and having the support of senior management in the program has been critical to ensuring the success of the program across all levels of the business.
• The Lean Manufacturing Program has created a significant competitive advantage in what RM Williams can provide to its customers. The capacity to provide a large diverse range of products to customers within a short lead time off a small finished goods inventory distinguishes rM Williams from its competition.