Testimonials
Randy Griesbach, Partner & CEO
"If you look at our shop, you can tell we are very Lean and our machinery is up to date. We're not spending time trying to fix machines, we're actually making parts. We put a lot of investment into our company; we don't just put it into our pockets. We stick it back into the business to make it stronger. A couple years ago, we thought we were completely out of space. WMEP contacted us and suggested we look at Lean. At the time I said, 'no we don't really need that, we're doing fine.' We were looking at building a new facility, and thought maybe these guys know a little bit about laying out a new shop. I knew we had some inefficiencies, but I didn't know what we could do about them. After looking at it, we saw we had a lot of things we could improve here before we had to build a new building. The first thing we started with was 5S. It was very painful to eliminate things we didn't need, because we thought we needed everything. We decided that we would just do it. When we started digging in, we found lots of opportunity and created space we didn't know was there. We ended up throwing out 300,000 pounds of stuff we didn’t need. It wasn't easy to start; nobody likes to change. Now, everybody has embraced change. We like to look at pictures of how things were; it amazing how much has changed. People are very proud of the changes.
The biggest success in Continuous Improvement has been bringing people together, to think alike; to embrace a common vision. We're not worrying about all the things going on around us, we're looking ahead. Lean has been hard to implement in a job shop environment, but we've adapted the Lean concepts to work here and it has definitely paid off on the bottom line. It was amazing the opportunities we found during our Value Stream Maps. People who come through our shop are amazed at what we've done with Lean. It gets them pretty excited about G&G. Hard work and sticking to the program is what's made G&G successful with Lean. It's been an investment in time and money, but the payback has been very quick. We had difficulty finding time when we were getting started, but it was so important to us we decided we need to find time for this. Lean has also helped us realize we needed more structure, so we've been putting together a support team, people to do quoting, scheduling, purchasing; some of the things I've been doing myself so I can be more effective. Now we've hired a Continuous Improvement Coordinator to take us even further."
~ Randy Griesbach, CEO
