Lean Marine Thinking

The Boating Industry Training Organisation (BITO) has adopted ‘Lean Marine Thinking’, a process improvement system that places a high premium on employee engagement, efficiency and increased productivity regardless of a company’s core business.

BITO has contracted QCD Systems to work with local boat building companies and already they’re producing some spectacular results. After implementing Lean Marine Thinking in 2008, Formula Cruisers delivered a boat three weeks ahead of schedule. At the same time they reduced labour time by 2300 hours and overall saved $300,000. Another company was able to reduce invoicing time from three hours to five minutes because their Lean Marine Thinking approach devised ways of ensuring the necessary information was more easily accessible.

When a company adopts Lean Marine Thinking, its staff attends a two and a half day workshop that requires teams to build 15 model cars in a succession of production runs. It’s not really about building a car of course; it’s about developing a process, which the team fine-tunes to maximize speed of productivity while maintaining quality. The facilitators from QCD Systems ask the employees to set targets for appearance, production, and quality and to document the time it took to achieve these targets. The results are marked on a chart. At the end of each production run the team records any mistakes or defects and writes a programme to correct them.

Documentation of each step of the process is crucial as is an emphasis on what went right. QCD facilitator, Peter Paola, says that employees meet each morning to discuss the previous day’s results.

“They don’t want their success to be a mere fluke. They want to control what went right so that it can be replicated, and fix what went wrong,” he said.

Valuing employee’s ideas, creativity and experience is a key driver behind the concepts success. By involving employees in creating benchmarks for each task in a boat building process, for example, the company can more accurately cost projects. This contributes directly to their profit margins. It also lifts morale because employees understand the process and feel their ideas are valued.

Peter Paola says that most companies spend a little time planning, a lot of time building, a little time checking and a lot of time fixing. Lean Marine Thinking turns all that on its head. Boat builders are graduating the programme with strategies that put much more emphasis on planning the process of building a boat and less time actually building it. And, in order to embed successful processes and ensure that productivity gains are solid, the BITO contracts QCD systems to implement and monitor each participating company’s progress for a year following their exposure to Lean Marine Thinking.

Website - www.nzmarine.com