Creating Flow in High-Variety Environments

Adhesives and sealants manufacturers face unique challenges compared to other industries when undergoing lean or continuous improvement initiatives, including chemical reactions, vessels, batch sizes, curing times, long setups and required cleaning, regulatory mandates, and very technical processes that must be tightly controlled. None of these issues are addressed by the lean techniques that grew from the automotive industry in order to flow cars down a production line. So how can this industry create flow in its high-variety, complex environments? To start, operations must take a different approach to continuous improvement itself.

Traditionally, improvement activities consist of finding waste in the organization and eliminating it. Operations target areas for improvement, run improvement events or use lean tools to improve them, and then strive to sustain those improvements by implementing standard work, documenting, and measuring. While this seems like the right approach, a high-level look reveals it to be akin to the game Whac-a-Mole, where a company reacts to a problem area then reacts to a different area as problems arise. Over the long term, this process will, at best, result in only incremental improvements over time, which can be described as a staircase of continuous improvement. And at some point, organizations hit the lean plateau, which occurs when progress slows to a halt.