The Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY), July 24, 2003

HIGBEE INC. WORKS TO CUT WASTE FROM ITS MANUFACTURING, OFFICE PROCESSES

By: Charley Hannagan

Staff writer

Over the past 18 months, Higbee Inc. came to an important decision about its office computers: It needed to go on a diet.

Cutting the data also cut the time spent typing it and saved the company money, said Greg Wrona, the company's vice president and director of finance.

"With computers, you can get a lot of information," he said. "You might not necessarily use everything you put in, but you can get it. So you tend ... over time to overfeed the machine."

Higbee took a look at its office processes as a part of the company's move to cut waste from manufacturing.

"What we really looked at was what information do we really need, and how can we streamline what we put in and then put in less," Wrona said.

Higbee, on Thompson Road in DeWitt, employs 48 workers who make gaskets and sealing products. A gasket is any piece of material that seals two things together. It can be made from a variety of materials, such as plastic, rubber, foam or felt.

The 71-year-old company makes gaskets for customers, including Carrier Corp. and Crouse-Hinds, a division of Cooper Industries Inc.

Higbee's order forms had 16 computer fields and took 94 key strokes and 30 seconds to complete, Wrona said. The new form has five fields and takes 13 key strokes and seven seconds to complete, he said.

Cutting 23 seconds doesn't sound like much. Multiply it by the 8,000 forms typed into the computer every year, and it adds up to savings of 51 hours a year.

At the same time, the gasket maker found some of the information on the old form was available in other places, or the company didn't need it anyway, Wrona said.

It's the little things, like calculating typing time or reorganizing tools so that workers on the shop floor can find them quickly, that have added up to big savings for the company, Wrona said.

The privately held company declined to discuss specifics about its sales and profits.

However, Wrona said Higbee suffered, along with many other manufacturers, when the economy began to slide in 2001. The company began its lean manufacturing initiative in January 2002 even as it cut 15 percent of its work force due to the economy, he said. He wouldn't say how many people were laid off.

Although it had the same sales in 2002 as it had the previous year, Higbee's profits went up fourfold as a result of cutting waste from its systems, Wrona said. "We don't use the word "lean manufacturing' so much, we use the term "lean implementation,' " he said.

Lean thinking was an outgrowth of the company's step into continuous flow manufacturing, said President Lawrence E. Higbee. Around 1992, the company switched its manufacturing methods from making products in batches that sat around waiting to go through the process, to making products that flowed continuously through the system, he said.

Higbee began implementing lean techniques with committees that reviewed the company's manufacturing and office processes. The committees included members from various departments because the company believed outsiders would look at departments with fresh eyes, Wrona said.

"You have to remember, too, all these processes are linked in the end," he said. "What the office does impacts the shop floor tremendously and the shop floor does things that it thinks the office needs fulfilling."

One change the company made was to move its purchasing manager, production manager and scheduler closer together. The production manager and scheduler's offices on the shop floor moved closer to the front office for easier access to both areas, Wrona said.

Another change cut hours of filing every week, Higbee said. For years, the company had printed acknowledgments of a purchase order, he explained. Some customers wanted the acknowledgments, but most did not, Higbee said. So clerks stapled the acknowledgments to purchase orders before filing them, he said.

"It was a batch thing, print them all and staple them to the back of the order. We never looked at it again," Higbee said. "We did that in the beginning because it made sense."

Deleting acknowledgment printing and filing saved the company an hour and a half to two hours a week, Higbee said.

The company considers itself in the middle of changing to lean thinking, Wrona said. It takes three to five years to "engineer lean" into a company, and it's a technique the company will use long into the future, he said.