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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
July 2017 #10216 Page #56
Houlihan, Efficiency, Lean, & The 5M’s Ben Hershey, President, Coach, & Mentor 4Ward Consulting Group, LLC
H
ow can we measure and improve employee productivity? It’s a common question now, one that I am often asked within the Component and LBM industry, but that wasn’t always the case. We’ve come a long way and learned a lot! Back in 1911, mechanical engineer Frederick W. Taylor, a machinist and foreman turned management consultant, recognized the national preoccupation with workplace productivity and published The Principles of Scientific Management. In it, he put forth the (at the time) revolutionary idea that production rested on variables related to men and machines. Therefore, managers could—in a scientific and systematic way—optimize these variables to produce more outputs with the same amount of inputs. In other words, businesses could make more money without any extra costs. You can just hear the wheels of the factory owners’ minds turning. They simply needed to figure out the right ways to train and standardize employee actions. By fixing blundering, ill-directed, or inefficient human efforts through systematic management, individual efficiency would rise, giving way to maximum prosperity for both employer and employee.
Now accelerate several years and the world is introduced to the Toyota Production System and Lean Manufacturing (with the key concepts we’ve been covering in our TIMWOODS series). Lean Manufacturing is a shift away from the traditional model of batch processing. Lean Manufacturing focuses on the process as a whole of manufacturing a single or several parts. In this way, steps flow continuously, allowing for the manufacture of a single part or thousands in rapid procession. Lean processes are designed to achieve a highly-efficient, waste-free operation, managing materials, manpower, and energy precisely. By cutting costs and freeing resources, lead times are reduced, and both productivity and quality are improved. By adopting techniques that create incremental improvements in the organization, a significant improvement in efficiency is seen overall and profitability is returned to the bottom line.
The Houlihan Labor Method You no doubt have heard the Houlihan labor method bantered about in the industry, but you may not realize how it was started. In the early 1960s, my dad, Don Hershey, asked a labor expert named John Houlihan to come and work with him to develop a new labor tracking method for the component and millwork operations at Imperial Components. Don and John worked for a number of years before they perfected this method, now referred to as the Houlihan method in our industry. So for my brother Keith and I, you can say the Houlihan method was instilled in our labor thinking at an early age.
In the 1960s, Don Hershey and John Houlihan developed the Houlihan Method for the Industry PHONE: 800-289-5627
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