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Bob Weiner, a senior vice president at Exide Technologies, recalls the time when he led the implementation of lean manufacturing at Pratt & Whitney in the 1990s. “One of the best implementations that I had ever seen,” he says. “And it took seven years.”

Weiner then explains how lean has taken hold at Exide’s GNB Industrial Power plant in Kansas City, Kan.

“It’s fascinating,” he says. “They started at zero and it’s taken them a year to get where Pratt was in seven.”

Exide rolled out its lean program, code-named EXCELL (for Exide’s Customer-focused Excellence Lean Leadership), to its 75 plants around the globe in April 2001. Serving as the pyramid of the program are five escalating certification levels. Plants must meet or exceed demanding standards in areas such as waste reduction, machine uptime, employee safety, inventory, cost of quality, dock-to-dock time and product quality in order to achieve Copper certification and then move up to Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum.

The Kansas City plant, which produces lead-acid vehicle batteries, surpassed its sister plants and amazingly achieved Copper in 10 months. It is leading the way to Bronze and expects to reach it in nine months (on Nov. 1).

How in the heck has the plant become so lean so quickly?

Plant manager C.J. DiMarco says there have been two key motivators.

First is friendly competition.

“We’ve always been known as ‘the scrappy plant,’ as ‘The Little Engine That Could,’” says DiMarco. “We have sister plants that are hell-bent on knocking us off the pedestal. There is competition. It’s friendly, but it’s fierce.”

Second is not-so-friendly competition.

“Our employees are bright, they are broad thinkers,” he says. “They see that organizations are dying, especially in the turbulent times that corporate America is in. Those that are constantly improving and competing are lighting the future. As long as we can improve our organization, improve our quality, reduce our expenses, we are going to be ahead and ultimately gain marketshare. It’s whoever gets there first, because the competition, all those competing with our company, are doing it, too. Whoever does it first and does it the best will win. So, if you sit back and take the position that you have to hold on to what you have, you are ultimately going to lose.”

It’s sink or swim time. DiMarco’s team decided to be Mark Spitz. How fast, how lean, how good of a swimmer is your plant team?

This article appeared in the October/November 2002 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright, 2002.

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