Debourgh Reduces Overtime by 33%
DeBourgh Manufacturing is a family-owned and operated business started in 1909. Throughout the last century, DeBourgh fabricated a variety of metal products from pedestrian bridges to construction equipment to lockers, in Bloomingdale Minnesota. In 1989, faced by shrinking of the metal fabrication unit and rising overhead, DeBourgh moved the business to La Junta, Colorado to focus solely on locker manufacturing. Today, DeBourgh Manufacturing is still owned and operated by the original Berg family and employs over 120 workers in Southeast Colorado.
DeBourgh embarked on an aggressive five-year growth plan in 2007, and needed to ensure the expected increase in demand could be met. The DeBourgh manufacturing facility was virtually at capacity, and as orders increased they were forced to implement mandatory overtime of each employee. With the facility, employees and management stressed nearly to the maximum, DeBourgh needed outside help to reorganize manufacturing processes to free up capacity and lighten the stress load of its workforce. DeBourgh asked every single employee, manufacturing and front office associates alike, to attend an introductory course in the basic principles of Lean Manufacturing. Then a vast majority of plant floor associates participated in 5S training, and several departments worked on the reducing the changeover and down time of primary manufacturing machines. CAMT also helped to establish a visual plant floor using visual devices to inform manufacturing processes.
After the nine-month roll out, DeBourgh’s shop floor is better organized to accelerate an efficient flow of their processes through departments. Several changes were implemented such as in facility layout and inventory storage. Previously DeBourgh stored work in progress in different stages on racks in multiple locations across the production floor. To facilitate decreased material handling, in addition to wasted employee movement and time, mobile carts were built to allow associates simply move and stage the parts at the next process without intermittent storage. Several machines were moved closer together to facilitate this solution. Implementations like this in conjunction with a $150,000 investment in plant equipment to further increase production capacity have resulted in a manageable workload and happier employees.
DeBourgh's customized Lean Enterprise training plan allowed the company to increase its capacity in order to hire over fifteen new employees and meet a 25-35% demand increase in one year. Overtime hours have decreased by 33%. The need for extended periods of ten hour shifts has turned in to a temporary need for nine hour shifts during demand peaks. With another 20% growth projected for next year, DeBourgh is confident they can meet the demand by continuously improving their processes using Lean.
“Using Lean, we were able to shine a spotlight on the bottlenecks and problem areas holding up our processes. We no longer have inventory hiding our problems and can more easily identify future constraints before they happen.” Jorgen Salo, Vice President of Operations
Results:
- $150,000 plant equipment investment
- 33% reduction in overtime hours
- 25 - 35% increase in peak capacity production