The record behind the practice

The situation

Former site leadership proposed a $1.5M capex, approved by management, to solve what was not actually the problem.

Flagship site. 12-month mandate: improve or close. Filtration downtime was attributed to equipment inadequacy. The actual constraint was a detection-delay and single-housing architecture problem.

The outcome

How it happened

• 100% elimination of filtration downtime via GUI-integrated alarm and backup housing deployment
• Redesigned PM routines and developed an in-house filtration modification
• OEE up 20%; efficiency up 38% to a company high of 125 gallons per man-hour
• Worst to first across all company rankings, eclipsing Johnstown, previously taken from 3rd to 1st under the same leadership approach
• OSHA recordables down 50% year over year; company-best 344 days without a lost-time accident
• Corporate divestiture decision reversed; the plant remains operational today
• Led SAP go-live and the Century luxury paint line scale-up

• 5 Why
• 8D
• Process mapping
• Control charts
• Spaghetti diagrams
• PFMEA

The situation

On-time shipments at 85% and changeovers averaging 45 minutes.

Scheduling and changeover performance at the Johnstown plant. The fix was sequencing discipline: combine like runs, dedicate lines, and schedule against what the field actually needed.

The outcome

How it happened

• Built daily sequencing to combine like runs and reduce washouts and changeovers
• Dedicated lines to specific product families and situations
• Prioritized production against field inventory need
• Wash generation down 45%
• PM program redesign delivered a 16% efficiency gain
• Site set its 2013 annual output record
• Site rose from 3rd to 1st in company-wide engagement ranking in six months

• Daily sequencing
• Campaigning
• Line dedication
• PM program redesign

The situation

The coating baseline in place could not support commercial production. The unit economics did not work.

The coating baseline established at process launch was economically unviable: triple the optimal application rate, with over a gallon of overspray per unit. Unit economics could not sustain commercial production at that specification.

The outcome

How it happened

• Systematic process analysis established correct application parameters from first principles
• 45% reduction in material consumption, eliminating excess application at the source
• 66% improvement in cycle time through process redesign
• Doubled production rate while restoring unit economics to commercial viability
• 25-point thickness measurement across an 80-unit sample; the heatmap guided spray robot pass sequencing, turning overspray into a controlled coverage advantage
• Oval spray chamber identified as the root cause of repeatability failures; moving to a round chamber eliminated the issue

• First principles
• Thickness mapping
• Heatmap analysis
• Robot pass sequencing

The situation

Collector bushings were failing air test and failing in the field.

Ran the Field Wind and Test departments, served as NDT Test Lead for the site and led MRP for Field Wind. The o-ring was ruled out first; the failure was in the fiberglass itself.

The outcome

How it happened

• Eliminated the o-ring as the failure mode
• Designed a fixture that pressurized the bushing while exposing the non-sealing surfaces
• Isolated micro-fissures in the supplied fiberglass
• Traced the defect to a supplier process change three years earlier and recovered more than $1M through back-billing
• Air-test and field failures eliminated; created a portable field test
• Production output up 50% while DPMO fell 30%
• Moved from second-shift to first-shift Operations Manager, absorbing MRP and NDT lead responsibilities; GE backfilled the role with three people

• Situational deconstruction
• 5 Why
• 8D
• Process mapping
• Control charts
• Standard work
• Audits
• Kanban
• Poka-yoke

The situation

Nobody had noticed because nobody was looking at the data against the prior economic model.

500 employees, 24/7, 19 nationalities. A prior CI initiative had replaced economic run quantity discipline with make-to-order, breaking the sequencing wheel and collapsing cost absorption.

The outcome

How it happened

• Mined SAP data to reconstruct the pre-CI operational baseline and identify root cause
• Sequencing-wheel break identified as the cause of absorption collapse; returned to economic run quantity discipline
• Machining moved from red to full cost absorption virtually overnight
• 50% reduction in scrap and rework across the value stream
• Beat the Boss Challenge deployed; workforce engagement reached record-high scores within 90 days

• SAP data mining
• Economic run quantity
• Sequencing wheel
• Workforce engagement

The situation

Five hundred people. Seven shifts. Nineteen nationalities. Assembly output not moving.

Three years of data showed assembly routinely planned at up to twice the available headcount, with excessive changeovers. The operation needed a new floor layout, a new planning system and a new operating model.

The outcome

How it happened

• Led a combined maintenance, warehouse, engineering and CI team
• Replaced roughly 40 line-side component racks with a controlled component library and water-spider replenishment
• Converted circular lines to linear flow with dedicated staging; output up 20% per line overnight
• Inventory and commingling errors down 95%; wasted motion eliminated
• Defined capacity and capability controls; moved from hour-by-hour scheduling to monthly planning with weekly control limits
• Headcount 150 to 72 while output more than doubled; stocking positions restored on key items within weeks
• Workforce took ownership of the new model and executed without management dependency

• Layout redesign
• Component library
• Water spider
• Capacity planning
• Control limits

The situation

Neither the supply chain director nor the manufacturing director could see the pattern from their own seat.

Plant Manager scope: x-ray lines, digital detectors, NDT and pooled-asset refurbishment in an FDA-regulated, ISO 13485 environment. Material outages were paralyzing production. Directed elsewhere for months; root cause identified in 20 minutes once the right data sets were overlaid.

The outcome

How it happened

• Cross-domain overlay of workforce hire dates against parts outages surfaced the root cause
• No field supply chain experience in the role; institutional vendor knowledge had no foundation to build on
• Legacy SAP recovery rebuilt procurement discipline; cross-training reduced single-point dependencies
• Process flow and scheduling optimization in the test labs improved throughput and delivery reliability
• 71% OTD improvement and 30% reduction in escaping defects, sustained through a CEO-change restructuring

• Cross-domain data overlay
• SAP recovery
• Cross-training
• Scheduling

The situation

A greenfield that had failed to launch for two years. The operational foundation believed to exist did not.

120K sq ft facility stalled at launch. Week one surfaced cascading installation failures, a critical resignation and a looming FM Global audit failure. A senior leadership restructuring 30 days after arrival added instability on top of operational failure.

The outcome

How it happened

• Promoted to VP of Manufacturing at month 5; operated at de facto COO scope
• Absorbed seven executive-level functions: manufacturing, R&D, quality, procurement, logistics and more
• Brought HR, compliance and procurement platforms to full operational readiness
• Custom ERP architecture: 57 tables across 8 functional phases, designed and deployed

• Greenfield launch
• ERP architecture
• FM Global readiness
• Org build