S•K: A strong new grip

One year after buying itself back, a revitalized S•K Hand Tool is recommitted to being “Made in the USA”

by Tom Hammel
 

McCook, IL — In 2001, S•K Hand Tool Corporation was struggling. Sales were declining, few new products were being launched, and its manufacturing plants were dark, dirty and inefficiently churning out batch after batch of the same products they had for years.

S•K’s then-parent, French tool manufacturer Facom, tasked Michel Moulin with reinvigorating the company. In prior assignments in France, Malaysia and Mexico, he had directed turnaround projects based on Lean tools and principles and in S•K he saw a Lean transformation begging to begin.

“When I came to S•K at the end of 2001, only three percent of our sales were based on new products, which we define as those less than two years old,” Moulin, now owner and CEO of S•K Hand Tool Corp., explains. “A key point in our interviews with our users and customers was that S•K needed to innovate, so in 2002 we focused our energies and money toward introducing new products.”

S•K accomplished this by expanding existing lines, such as adding 5mm sockets to lines that previously had started at 6mm; by launching others that had been on hold in R& D; and by rededicating itself to developing innovative new products.

One such product, a spark plug socket for the Ford F-150 pickup, was being manufactured by only one company. S•K quickly launched its own to fill the gap. Others, like a ratchet with an offset handle to reduce “knuckle busting,” suggested by a worker in S•K’s Defiance, Ohio plant, was the result of pure invention.

Company-wide Kaizen
Since its push for innovation began in early 2002, S•K has added more than 1,000 items to its master catalog, and new product now accounts for roughly 24 percent of S•K’s annual sales. How the company accomplished such a dramatic turnaround so quickly is a story of wholesale — and concurrent — reinvention across every department and function within S•K. To Moulin, this is the true secret of revolutionary rapid improvement.

“Kaizen is not a manufacturing tool; it’s a company tool. But many companies only think of it as a tool for manufacturing and that is where I think they are wrong,” Moulin opines. “Why should leadership apply these tools to manufacturing but not to finance, marketing or HR? That’s not fair. So in February 2002 we introduced the 5-S program throughout the company, not just in the workshop.”

Growing pains
But launching and sustaining an enterprise-wide transformation was easier said than done. Some members of S•K’s management team and sales force were either unwilling to accept or unequipped to adjust to the company’s new mission and direction. As a result, Moulin estimates that 50 percent of S•K’s management team and “about 99 percent” of its sales force have turned over since 2002. However, turnover rates among S•K’s unionized factory workers were far lower, and Moulin credits this group with embracing Kaizen tools and philosophy earlier than many of their supervisors.

So, while top-to-bottom cleaning and painting efforts were taking place in S•K’s Chicago, Illinois and Defiance, Ohio manufacturing plants, similar projects were underway in the company’s administration, distribution, marketing, finance and human resources areas, too. Kaizen centers sprouted in every department of the company and vast amounts of excess material ended up out on the curb. Some managers and salespeople ended up there, too.

In the manufacturing facilities, the initial clean and paint phase took three months. Moulin proudly notes that all the changes made at S•K, starting with the wholesale cleaning and painting, were made by employees themselves; no outside contractors or consultants were ever brought in.

A few miles away from S•K’s McCook, Illinois headquarters, in the 150,000-square-foot Chicago facility, manufacturing manager Tim Herrick was up to his eyeballs from the start. After an initial three-month flurry of cleaning and painting (while maintaining production, of course), S•K’s 5-S program began drilling down through the plant’s departments and work centers, continually uncovering new opportunities for improvement.

Parts and PMs
One of the first areas to be addressed was the nature of work performed by the maintenance staff — just three people and one supervisor. Traditionally, all plant maintenance functions had been done by the maintenance staff, but no more. S•K created a “Level One” maintenance category, which includes daily and weekly equipment cleaning, checking and adding fluids, changing coolant and minor repairs, and assigned those functions to the machine operators. Freed from those chores, the maintenance staff was charged with creating and maintaining a schedule of weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual PMs.

“Our PM programs look at our most critical equipment from either a service or a historic cost standpoint,” Herrick explains. “We’ll put together a maintenance schedule of things we want to do either daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly. In general, the daily or weekly tasks tend to be done by the hourly employees, and the monthly, quarterly and annual jobs tend to be done by the maintenance department.”

Once the initial 5-S sorting was accomplished and the maintenance staff finally knew exactly what spare parts they had and where, they began analyzing the usage and availability of those parts. An informal system quickly developed.

“Frankly, it depends a lot on how readily available those parts may be,” Herrick notes. “If we can get a part overnight and it’s not for a critical machine, we generally won’t stock it. On the other hand, there are some parts that may take eight weeks to get; we have to stock those.”

Seeing it through
To help plant workers learn and understand their maintenance tasks and maintain the organization that S•K’s Lean initiative has created, a broad system of visual tools are utilized not just to comply with federal MSDS guidelines and HazCon communication rules, but also to simplify and standardize processes down to their lowest common denominators. Equipment lubrication points are identified by a system of color-coded dots to indicate which type of fluid goes where. Chemicals used in the plant are identified by color-coded buckets. Fixtures, jigs and tooling on racks are organized and maintained by a system of signage with a photo of each one, its tool number and a description of its usage. Workers can find and replace tooling more easily and efficiently — and quickly ensure it’s the right tooling for the task.

Adjacent to the maintenance office, a large sign with a system of white, green and orange magnets visually indicates the operational status of each fixed or mobile machine in the plant, and, in the case of mobile equipment, whether it is available for use elsewhere in the plant. Herrick proudly points out that every machine in the building is green — good to go.

On the floor, each major machine has an operator’s clipboard that shows — in pictures — the basic set ups for the different jobs that machine performs, the types of fixtures needed for each job and how to run the equipment itself. Each machine also has an operator’s checklist that must be completed at the end of each shift or whenever an operator leaves a machine idle. This ensures the machine is clean, safe and ready for the next operator who comes along.

Regularly placed Kaizen boards serve the dual purpose of displaying governmentally required signage as well as the daily, weekly, monthly and annual goals, productivity rates and staffs of each major department.

S•K’s maintenance department is bright, open and well organized. One of its features is a series of temperature sensors that sound an alarm if any area of the plant falls below a preset temperature. The sensor array also houses a master air pressure gauge that indicates at a glance the psi in the airlines throughout the plant.

“We use unattended testing equipment for cycle testing and other processes,” Herrick says. “Our maintenance staff installed monitors in the engineering department so when a test completes or stops for some reason, a light goes off in engineering and lets them know they need to reset that equipment. Now we get the maximum utilization of our testing equipment without having to have someone go and check it regularly.”

The Improvement Department
Of its three-person maintenance team, S•K assigns two men to equipment and one to facility maintenance. Of the two equipment technicians, one has the primary role of shop improvement. This can take the form of equipment, safety, material handling or other types of improvement.

“He has within the scope of his job the opportunity to walk through the facility and just look at things and say, ‘How can I improve this?’ ” Herrick says.

One such improvement is an air-powered parts handling chute. As the operator pulls finished parts from the milling machine, he drops them into the chute, where the excess cutting fluid drains back into the cutting machine’s reservoir. When the chute is full, the operator pauses to check part quality before pressing a foot lever to dump the parts into a bin below. This way no potential bad parts have the chance to hide in a large bin of good ones.

Telescoping parts chutes are another simple innovation that has saved significant time and operator effort. Operators can now fill small orders or entire pallets without ever having to touch the parts coming off the machines or lift even a single bin. When pallets are filled, a forklift removes them and drops an empty one in its place.

“That was a very good continuous improvement solution for this area, but then that skid would go to our Defiance, Ohio facility and someone over there would have to lift everyone of those pans off the skid,” Herrick continues. “Clearly that was an area in need or further improvement. Now we use specially sized containers that match their vibrating bowls in Defiance. When the product comes out of our machines it goes onto skids with the right-sized container for the machines in our Defiance facility: Nobody has to manhandle the product at all — it’s all moved by forklifts now.”

“Having this roving maintenance person is an aspect of our maintenance department that may be a little unusual compared to other companies,” Herrick admits, “but it has really paid off for us.

Still “Made in the USA”
That’s putting it mildly. Since 2002, S•K has reduced safety incidents by 50 percent each year for the last four years, grown sales 25 percent, achieved ISO 9001 certification, increased its channels of distribution from one to five, and now exports product to countries outside the United States.

In early 2005, led by Moulin, a small team of managers bought S•K Hand Tool Corp. back from Facom, making S•K once again fully independent.

The company commitment to growth is being reaffirmed everyday, and not just with rhetoric. S•K’s new management team, led by Moulin, has invested heavily in improved systems and equipment. One highly visible example is the recently installed three-station computerized parts carousel system, which has dramatically increased order fulfillment speed and accuracy.

Today, innovation and the pursuit of enterprise-wide improvement are ongoing. In the maintenance arena, S•K is developing its own TPM system: “Give us another year and we will be there, too,” Moulin states confidently.

“S•K is recommitted to being ‘Made in the USA,’ so we are working to survive and prosper in the U.S. and continue to manufacture in Chicago and Defiance,” Moulin concludes. “And to do this we are first, continuing to promote innovation and new products, and secondly, we are continuing to improve our productivity in the quality of our reorganization and in our workshop with Kanban, SMED and the Kaizenphilosophy. We are very happy so far.”

This article appeared in the April/May 2006 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright, 2006.

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