MELTER: TOWARDS A LEAN CULTURE

March - April 2020

Melter is a Mexican exporting company with 30 years of experience in the metalworking industry. They shared with us their process for becoming lean through operational transformation.

About 18 months ago, Melter set a five-year goal: to transform to become a lean organization. The first step was to create its Melter Operating System, which operates under the TPS philosophy and consists of seven foundations of continuous improvement defined by the company.

Before sharing the fundamentals, it is important to know that Melter is made up of four divisions. The steel company, which serves the main companies in the sector in the United States and Mexico approximately and exports 85% of its production; the trained division, which primarily serves the railroad industry; the heavy manufacturing division, which serves one of the largest manufacturers of heavy mining equipment, and, finally, the heat exchangers division, which serves the chemical, petrochemical, and oil & gas industries in Mexico and southern Texas. .

Each division has its own plant – all in Apodaca, Nuevo León – and operates according to an independent production structure. Currently, the company employs 700 employees, including operation and administration personnel.

Getting back to Melter's lean fundamentals:

• In the first foundation, a VSM is carried out to identify waste in the production line and the best way to take advantage of it is established through the Kaizen system.

• In the second, the operator is supported and his line of work is designed in such a way that he can carry out his work more easily.

• The third involves the quality part from a “Zero, Zero, Zero Policy”, that is, not accepting, not generating and not passing defects between the processes of the line.

• The fourth lies in implementing the tpm (total productive maintenance) philosophy and ensuring that operators keep their equipment in optimal conditions.

• The fifth is the visual factory foundation. Here, the production line must visually explain everything that is happening: bottlenecks, quality or maintenance problems, or key indicators.

• The sixth lies in twi (training within the industry, for its acronym in English). In it, operator leaders serve as internal coaches to train their colleagues in best practices, measure their performance and ensure that they reach the expected level of productivity.

• The seventh and final foundation gives way to the renewal of the cycle. “The line begins again to identify waste, to provide support to the operator. The model becomes cyclical, it never ends,” says Luis Alfredo Ramírez Cabrera.

THE DETAILS OF THE MELTER OPERATING SYSTEM

This system is born from the four values of the company: 1) the customer is the reason for being, 2) always doing things well, 3) promoting collaboration and mutual respect, and 4) promoting knowledge and experience . Each foundation of this model consists of a period of incubation, execution and maturation. So far, the most advanced pilot line at Melter is in the fourth base.

For each foundation of the operating system, Melter designates a person in charge, that is, an expert who is responsible for distributing the knowledge of that tool to the entire organization. As responsible for Organizational Development and Continuous Improvement, Ramírez Cabrera is in charge of integrating these managers and coordinating the implementation of the Melter Operating System in the four plants. Likewise, the company appointed a court lean team, made up mainly of the directors of the company's business units, in charge of integrating advances in the implementation of the model.

FOR EACH FUNDAMENTAL OF THE OPERATING SYSTEM, MELTER APPOINTS A MANAGER, THAT IS, AN EXPERT WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR DISTRIBUTING THE KNOWLEDGE OF THAT TOOL TO THE ENTIRE ORGANIZATION.

For Melter, one of the fundamental areas for the implementation and correct functioning of this model is the development of its staff. This led the company to approach the Monterrey Competitiveness Center (CCM), a subsidiary of CAINTRA Nuevo León, to request the Lean Business Certification, which teaches companies, in a practical way, to improve their profitability through the correct implementation of the principles and tools of the Toyota Production System (TPS).

TOWARDS LEAN BUSINESS CERTIFICATION

The objective is that these collaborators, who have a vital role in the implementation of the operating system, were trained to have better bases and knowledge of the lean philosophy, to then replicate them in the operation. So far, three collaborators have taken this certification, among them Ramírez Cabrera. However, the company already plans to send more people for training. “We need more people to be part of that knowledge to be able to have a multiplier effect in the different business units,” says Jorge Alfredo González Molina, head of Human Resources at the company.

To achieve certification, it is necessary for participants to present a pilot project within their company. “The project was precisely about how we have been implementing the Melter Operating System through the pilot lines,” says Luis Alfredo Ramírez Cabrera.

For now, the company has three lines working with this system in the heat exchanger plant, two in the steel plant, two in the forming plant and one more in the heavy manufacturing plant, which will soon start with a second line.

Despite this progress, Melter does not seek to replicate the methodology in the other lines until it has all the fundamentals of the system mastered and all the personnel trained for it.

Although Melter had already come a long way before taking the ccm's Lean Business Certification, Luis Alfredo Ramírez Cabrera assures that participating in it and in the Lean Organizations Meetings, carried out by Caintra, has allowed the company to see further from the world of metalworking, open its panorama and learn how organizations from other sectors have managed to implement the lean philosophy in their processes.

RAMÍREZ CABRERA ASSURES THAT PARTICIPATING IN THE MEETINGS OF LEAN ORGANIZATIONS, CARRIED OUT BY CAINTRA, HAS ALLOWED THE COMPANY TO SEE BEYOND METALMECHANICS AND OPEN ITS PANORAMA.

Ramírez Cabrera and his colleagues had the opportunity to visit companies such as Parker, Cyan Labs, Daltile, Carrier and Prolec. “They all make completely different products, and from each one you take ideas that can be adaptable to your company. That is very valuable,” he says.

TRAIN AN ENTIRE TEAM

Along with the Lean Business Certification, Melter has developed a training department focused on maintaining the preparation of its staff. Based on the detection of needs, this department carries out improvements both in skills and in the technical professional part.

For Melter, it is important that knowledge transcends and remains within the organization, which is why the company has chosen to develop its own instructors and that they themselves transmit the knowledge to the entire company, says González Molina.

For the moment, the most important thing for Melter is to take care of the training of his staff to achieve a cultural change. “We don't care much about savings right now,” notes Ramírez Cabrera. For him, one of the mistakes that some companies make is to immediately think about savings, since in this way it is easy to neglect the cultural part and the efforts are more likely to fall through. However, he assures that the methodology is focused on shortening equipment delivery times. Since the implementation of the lean methodology, each company plant has managed to improve the delivery times of its equipment by 10 or 15%.

Today, Melter is breaking paradigms within the metalworking industry. Being a project industry, where the products or services delivered are tailored to the client, there is little standardization and for a long time it has been thought that it is impossible to work in it with the lean philosophy. However, by re-educating workers to change their thinking and way of operating, “we are demonstrating that these types of methodologies are really applicable in any line of business and in any company,” says González Molina. Although the company has faced some resistance to the new methodology, it is convinced that this cultural change will lead to success.

by SILVIA SÁNCHEZ DE LA BARQUERA