In late May, Paranet approached Danfoss to participate in their annual Factory Crawl.
With over 150 manufacturing companies to choose from, Danfoss’ Milwaukee facility was hand-selected for the sold-out tour for four reasons:
1. Danfoss practices Lean principles each and every day.
2. Danfoss has an excellent visual management system that is owned by the employees.
3. Danfoss employees are well educated in manufacturing.
4. Over the years, Paranet has observed other things about Danfoss in Milwaukee:
a. The employees are engaged and happy.
b. The leadership is not ostentatious or domineering but rather strong and supportive allowing employees to be all they can be.
c. The senior leadership is thoughtful and willing to learn new ways to be the best leaders possible.
The six-station tour examined:
- Material & Information Flow Analysis (MIFA), Global Skill Matrix, Components of shop floor merit increases and bonus system (tied to continuous improvement results)
- Performance Management Boards and Root Cause Problem Solving (RCPS) process
- Wire Harnesses - built in quality checks, setup reduction which allowed us to build to actual demand, self-managed work cell, trigger to build
- Strategy Deployment - How we deploy our Must Win Battles & Plant KPI improvements throughout our organization (using Tactical Implementation Plan - TIP) down to each individual's performance agreement.
- Flow Line concept
- Safety, Environmental and Maintenance management as well as results
After the tour, Linda Kiedrowski of Paranet stated, “Al Drifka and his team raised the bar on conducting the factory tour. Tour participants got a solid view of this fine company and were very impressed with the problem-solving techniques that employees use to get to the root cause of problems to allow sustaining improvement.
Other companies featured in the crawl were Snap-On Tools and Broan-NuTone LLC.
