By Mike Boyer
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Bob Pierce watches an exhaust manifold on the turntable of a Lean Jet RT18 being built at Ransohoff Inc. (Glenn Hartong photo) | ZOOM |

WEST CHESTER - When machine assemblers at Ransohoff Inc. say they're heading to the supermarket, it's not to buy groceries.

The 87-year-old company, which is marking the first anniversary of a management-led buyout, has installed two parts "supermarkets" on its assembly floor. Assemblers can pick up pipefitting, other plumbing parts and electrical equipment for the machines that the company makes.

Racks of components that assemblers can pick as easily as walking down a store aisle replace the company's old system when an assembler would go to the stock room, fill out a paper requisition and then wait while the parts clerk located the fittings and brought them back.

"It's all just a supermarket," James T. McEachen, president, said. "The parts are out on the floor, the guys come and pick them up and there's no form to fill out."

After studying the time and cost of the old system, the company found it was costing almost $250,000 in labor and inventory.

The old system was designed to control costs, McEachen said.

"It's a classical case where we had great control, but it was costing us an extraordinary amount of money."

The new system implemented with the help of TechSolve, the nonprofit Bond Hill manufacturing assistance center, is one of about 10 major efforts at cutting costs and eliminating inefficiency. Popularly known as "lean manufacturing," the efforts by Ransohoff are saving it millions of dollars.

"Lean" incorporates just-in-time inventory delivery and other concepts developed as part of the Toyota Production System to continually eliminate waste and inefficiency - i.e. costs.

A key tenet is that the workers themselves, working in teams, plan and make the changes.

The Japanese say lean is a journey, meaning the process of eliminating waste is never-ending, and Ransohoff has been on the trail for five years and doesn't see an end in sight.

"Literally around every corner, there's another opportunity," McEachen said.

"We've had some low-hanging fruit, but there's just so much opportunity to improve."

The company, now a part of Cleaning Technologies Group which was spun off from Toronto-based CAE Inc. in March, hasn't totaled the savings from its lean projects, but here are some other examples:

• A stock room and pipe shop kaizen, a Japanese term meaning continuous improvement, in which employees redesigned those operations opening up 4,380 square feet of manufacturing space and saving $47,702 annually in travel time through the 100,000-square-foot plant.

• Implementation of a new cell-based production system for the company's 4-year-old Lean Jet, a family of four compact part-cleaning machines, that's cut assembly time, and hence labor cost, by about half.

Assembly times can vary, McEachen said, but "we are delivering machines in 14 weeks that took us 22 weeks a couple years ago. And in some cases, we've cut assembly time from 30 to 35 weeks to 20 weeks."

• Project Workbook, an information flow improvement system which captures all data on a project from the initial sales call to production, electronically eliminating a foot-thick file of paper documents.

Looking for areas to improve, Ransohoff found it took anywhere from two to four weeks from the time an order was received until the order moved into production.

"Because you've got to get everybody together, get engineering started, get manufacturing involved, that's pretty much shrunk now to a week or less," McEachen said.

• Most recently, an engineering "kaizen" where a team of engineers are looking at ways to implement standard processes across the organization, with a goal of saving up to $1.2 million.

Gary Conley, TechSolve president, said Ransohoff is typical of the mid-size manufacturing concern "marching down the lean path."

In an analysis of almost 200 projects TechSolve engineers helped implement for its clients in the year ended last June, the total savings was estimated at $44 million, or about $228,000 per company.

Ransohoff is on the cutting edge in taking its lean efforts from the manufacturing floor to the administrative and back-office functions.

"What we're seeing is an increase in the use of lean processes in the back office and service side of businesses," Conley said.

It's being fueled by the increasing cost and global competitive pressures business are facing, Conley said.

Ransohoff knows that pressure well.

"We sensed it at the time (in 1998 when it began looking at ways to be more efficient), and we still face it," McEachen said. "Delivery cycles are compressing, costs are compressing prices in the market, and we needed to focus on those things."

Even with its initiatives, Ransohoff hasn't escaped the slump in capital equipment spending.

The company, which doesn't disclose sales but had revenues of about $100 million before it was sold by CAE, employed about 180 a few years ago. It has since reduced it payroll to 120.

Ransohoff is the largest part of Cleaning Technologies Group, which includes Blackstone-NEY Ultrasonics Inc. in Jamestown, N.Y., and Ransohoff, Ltd. in Bradford, England.

Still, McEachen said that without the company's lean efforts, the cutbacks would have been more severe.

"Our efforts on lean, on the product and process side, have made us more competitive over the last couple years," he said. "It has allowed us to get business that we might not have otherwise gotten."

Reuben Chasteen, Ransohoff manufacturing manager, said most employees understand the situation.

"Most employees understand it's the time we're in," he said. "You have to `lean' the business to survive. I've heard comments from people on the floor: I'd rather be lean and keep my job than not have a job at all."

Bobby Pierce, who has worked at Ransohoff 15 years, says the lean process is working.

"This is so much better," he said. "Because we have an impact, if you see something that works better, you can fix it."

E-mail mboyer@enquirer.com