Where there’s a weld, there’s the ESAB Welding way. Tim Mayhugh talks about the commitment to improvement and how it is improving performance
By Ruari McCallion
It’s over 100 years since Oscar Kjellberg invented covered electrode welding and followed it with the establishment of ESAB. Its history since then has followed and built on the foundation of innovation in welding, both improving existing methods and materials and developing new ones.
Investment in R&D has made it a global leader in welding and cutting processes and applications, supplying users across the range, from small jobshops and garage operations to large applications in railcar, shipbuilding and offshore construction; wind towers and pressure vessels; pipelines; process and refining industries; bridge and civil construction; auto industry and general fabrication.
“We manufacture welding and cutting power supplies, by which we mean any piece of equipment used to provide the electricity used in welding functions,” said Tim Mayhugh, vice-president, operations, at ESAB Welding & Cutting, part of ESAB, Inc., which is based in Florence, SC.
The first page of the online catalog gives some idea of the breadth and depth of its range of products, from filler metals and mechanized cutting tools, through gas apparatus, to arc and plasma welding equipment, automated and large gantry systems. The company employs around 600 people at the Florence production facility, with others in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Mexico, and offices in Toronto, ON. Its focus of operations is essentially North America, with South America for cutting equipment. The Florence facility has been in existence for around 35 years and owned for over a decade by ESAB.
Best in class
Welding is competitive and ESAB is not alone in seeking to supply and support customers across the globe, and it would be foolish to rely purely on innovation. To avoid falling victim to low-cost competition, ESAB has to constantly upgrade its operations and it began a formal program – the ESAB Way – in 2005.
“We recognized that, in order to stay best in class, we needed a strategy to sustain our efforts,” said Mayhugh. “The leaders of the company had already decided that the tools and processes within Lean manufacturing and Six Sigma would achieve the goals of remaining best in class. I was brought in to accelerate the process.”
It was quite a tough task they set themselves. ESAB identified five areas that it was determined to achieve or remain best in class: quality; customer service; innovation (in products and process); global competitiveness; and people development.
“Any time you take on initiatives this challenging, there has to be a good reason,” he said. “To succeed in our chosen marketplace, we believe we need to be best in class – to be as good as or better than our major competitors – in each of those areas, to ensure we are on a par or better than anyone else in those five areas. And I will not accept we cannot be best in class in those five.” Lean and Six Sigma were selected as the means to achievement because of their holistic approach and business-wide relevance.
“It is a step process. Even today, we continue to do more with Lean than with Six Sigma but it’s about the appropriate blending of the toolsets,” said Mayhugh. “We focus on eliminating waste through Lean, then eliminating variability through Six Sigma – after all, there’s no point in improving processes we can actually eliminate.”
People development
The first focus was on value-stream analysis, concentrating on areas within the company that were likely to have the greatest impact in the five key areas. That led naturally to the manual plasma cutting area.
“We were able to address the need for improved customer service and productivity. It is also highly visible, both to the factory and to customers,” he said. “There would have been easier places to start but it was important to us to have the impact, both internally and externally.” Inevitably, there was going to be resistance. Long-established methods of working were being challenged, as the company moved from batch-and-queue to single-piece flow with Lean and Six Sigma. The resistance – which often springs from worry and fear – was addressed head-on with training.
“Under the banner of people development, we developed a four-hour course, leading to white belt status, and an eight-hour, yellow-belt training program. They were developed specifically for ESAB and used our own processes and production in the examples.” The course wasn’t mandatory – indeed, it wasn’t even conducted during working hours. Those who wanted to attend had to give up their own time. It can be said to have been a huge success, in demonstrating the commitment of the workforce.
“Nearly 100% of our people went through the four-hour course, and three-quarters have completed the eight-hour, yellow-belt course,” Mayhugh said. The conflict between early adopters and CAVEs – citizens against virtually adopters – which is crucial to improvement success, was resolved by nurturing the early adopters, with highly visible support from him and his staff. “We didn’t completely ignore the CAVEs but the patience level and attention given to them was minimized. My style is to have my door open to everyone, even CAVEs, and I do all in my power to ensure that these tools take us from being a very good company to a great, world-class company. In the final analysis, I want our people to recognize that I’m not asking them for their permission: we are going to change, we are going to improve.”
The rest of the workforce quickly became eager to get on board itself and it isn’t hard to see why. Over a six-month period, assembly became paced to takt time; TPM and stop-assembly were introduced, as was standardized work. Defects were no longer passed on – they were dealt with before moving to the next cell. One way of ensuring they weren’t passed on was to remove the re-work area, so there was no-one to pass any problems on to. The workplace was remodelled with the participation of the workforce – it is they who are going to spend eight hours daily working there.
“Our targets were, in quality, to improve first-pass yield; in cost, to increase the units completed per shift; and in delivery, to drive for 100% takt time attainment,” said Mayhugh. “We’ve seen quality improvements in excess of 30% and cost reductions at the same number. Delivery wasn’t a problem, as such – you can always achieve delivery targets by working overtime. It’s expensive but it can be done: now, we have achieved a slight improvement with a huge cost saving, because we aren’t reworking, we’re operating on strict one-piece flow and everything is being done properly. Oh,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “we’ve seen tremendous inventory reduction, too.” ‘Revert to default’ – the tendency to go back to the way you’ve always done it – has been made impossible, so the improvements will sustain.
“We want to make it painful enough to stop, painful enough to correct, that people will do it right in preference,” said Mayhugh. “Pain is part of the gain.”