Shop Talk With the Publisher

How Good Companies Get even Better

by Carol Carman

Just when you think you have seen it all - the best, fastest, most efficiently run companies - someone does it better. On a recent visit to Greece, Italy, Germany and Austria with Stiles Machinery and the Homag Group Tour of Technology, one plant visit seemed to outdo the other. In plant after plant, one thing stood out... the lack of workers. It was almost creepy. Enormous plants, virtually all run by machines (it was difficult to find a worker on site), spitting out quality products at speeds unheard of before now.

True, these plants are panel processing facilities and thus lend themselves more effectively to "workerless" production and fast turnout, but the speed of production and delivery was the thing. For example, in Greece, Neoset, a virtually young office furniture and cabinetry manufacturing company, is already producing sales of $70 million a year, increasing by 35 percent year to year in the last four years alone. They have plants in Moscow and Bucharest and commercial activity in Africa, Canada, the Near East and other European nations. And they are only 20 years old!

Their secret to production? DFT® Demand-flow technology. Fast response to market demand without forecasts, and with short production cycles. How about a half hour in some cases? Once an order is received, it goes into production with no one item in the production cycle for more than a half hour. Normal delivery is three days. Competition demands it.

To get that three day delivery originally, Neoset had to have 6-8 weeks of stock with 80% of its demand filled by stock (2,500 items); but that wasn’t good enough, so now Neoset has stock of 2-3 weeks and some as little as 3-4 days. Sometime this year, they’ll maintain one week of stock. So how do they maintain so little stock and still deliver in three days? Investment in machinery ($10 million since 1998 with 90% of it from Homag) and most importantly - a plant that is set up for fast flow. The goal is to have no warehousing. Again, competition demands it. And this company works in both veneer and solid woods.

Speaking of efficiency, check out this month’s article on SMI Cabinetry, a Florida company that pulled its employees kicking and screaming into the new millennium with cell manufacturing, a move that is now creating new excitement for its employees. Credit Stiles Machinery with helping accomplish that. They took owner Russ Bergin to Europe to see how to make it work successfully.

To get workers excited about the woodworking industry these days you have to compete with the excitement that computerization and high tech possibilities are bringing to so many industries. Showing employees the potential and what they can bring to their jobs to keep them upbeat and growing is key. Stiles (and a few other companies) wisely takes its customers to the field for a show and tell that can’t help to make the heart beat stronger. Add to that their educational "university" and you get the picture. We’ll talk about more of the things we saw in these European companies in future issues.

Get out there. Talk to your vendors in America and abroad about success stories you can go to see. The 21st century begins in January, 2001. There will be new customer demands. Get ready for them.

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