How a Continuous Improvement Fair made a Factory’s CI Culture Go Viral! When I led the Lean Six Sigma program for Plexus, a manufacturer of printed circuit boards and “high level assemblies” my goal was to create a culture of Continuous Improvement. The first 2 years we made critical improvements in material deployment and production quality solving some of the headaches that prevented us from hitting our numbers. But I was failing. The goal of creating a Continuous Improvement culture evaded me. My desire to have everyone in every department leading Kaizen events eluded me. Process improvements were being made but with enormous effort and time on my part. If I wasn’t involved, the factories continued to do business as always. Yes we could firefight and react in an emergency but we were not proactive. Problems were not being identified and solved organically. We had so much going for us. • Holding monthly Lean and Six Sigma trainings. Check • An incredible 5S program and a shop where you could eat off the floor. Check • Brilliant people throughout the company that wanted to succeed. Check • Multiple Kaizen Events (process improvement projects) with real, measurable results. Check With all this success the soul crushing truth was this, I knew if I left the company the Continuous Improvement efforts would die. So what was missing? I took my management team to Autoliv, a Shingo Prize winning manufacturing company, to find out. We learned many things during that visit but one of the biggest takeaways was the idea of holding a Continuous Improvement Fair. On a regular basis, Autoliv would get the entire company together to see short report outs (think Jr. High Science Fair) of their Continuous Improvement projects.
PDCA, 5S, or Mistake Proofing, to make a poster board summarizing their project. We put the posters on easels in the break room and shut down the plant for an extended lunch. Every employee walked through the cafeteria and learned about a process improvement from the leader of the team who did it. It was weird. Introverted engineers who never said 2 words were suddenly explaining the process changes they made and showing off new mistake proofing devices with an energy seen only on late night infomercials to people they didn’t even know! (We had over 600 employees). People were asking questions eager to learn more about the progress other departments were making. Teams were smiling at each other, and giving high fives. I think we had 7 projects for the first CI fair. The next fair it doubled. Then it doubled again. Soon we had to ask each factory to only submit their top projects in each category because there were too many Continuous Improvement projects to fit in the cafeteria.
So we tried it. We held our first Continuous Improvement fair and asked everyone who had solved a problem using a structured approach like DMAIC, 17
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