La-Z-Boy Lean

Richard K. — More about the Dayton plant

Nice example of the process of transitioning to lean manufacturing.

Two years ago La-Z-Boy embarked on its lean journey, moving from batch and queue to cellular manufacturing. The Dayton (TN) plant is about 25% of the way.

Then we want to do everything we can to sustain the progress. That’s why we’re training the supervisors with the simulation. The TPM (total productive maintenance) teach is another way to sustain. It gives us a checklist to ensure that once we have made the changes, we know how we are keep them in place?

It’s pretty exciting stuff. We’re just going to roll with it and see what happens. If this model works, we’re definitely going to look at deploying it in other plants.

Sustaining improvements is very important – making the improved practice the standard way of doing business going forward. And testing out their practice of lean manufacturing at one plant to then role it out at other plants is a method of piloting changes and using the concept of pdsa (irregardless of if they use the actual pdsa cycle).

It is better to move more slowly, in a way that is sustainable and builds upon success than rapidly moving from one fad to another.

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