FilmX Learns to Fish.
Manufacturer Discovers Secrets to Growth
When Michael Quarrey was looking for his next career opportunity in 1997, he had great expectations. Quarrey wanted to become a part of a manufacturing company that could benefit from his expertise in employee owned companies. He had researched the relationship between employee ownership and corporate performance for his master’s thesis at Dartmouth, had served as Projects Director for the California-based National Center for Employee Ownership, and as Operations Vice President for Connor Formed Metal Products, a West Coast manufacturer that was 40 percent owned by an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). Quarrey knew that the average employee owned company out-performs its competition by 3-4 percent per year, but that the best ESOP companies can more than triple that advantage. Quarrey wanted to find an ESOP manufacturing company in New England and tap into the power of employee ownership.
Quarrey became the General Manager of FilmX Technologies (FilmX), a 100 percent employee-owned company in Dayville, Connecticut. From the outside the plant looks like a typical manufacturing company in any suburban industrial park, however, the progressive culture on the inside is on display everywhere. The brightly colored office and open spaces give visitors and workers the impression that they are in an open-minded think tank; it is a space that challenges convention and encourages creativity.
Since Quarrey joined FilmX he’s been moving his team forward by combining manufacturing innovation, high levels of customer service, and a progressive employee culture shift. CONNSTEP, Connecticut’s Manufacturing Resource, has been assisting in the growth at FilmX since 2000.
Founded in 1989, FilmX is a contract manufacturer of extruded plastic tapes and printed and coated non-woven materials whose clients include Fortune 500 makers of personal care, medical, and data communications products. The company specializes in helping customers speed new products from concept, through test market, into commercial scale production.
“Our best projects are when a customer is rushing to bring a new product to market,” Quarrey says. “Customers often have a great idea, but don’t quite know how to make it happen. That’s when FilmX pulls a team together and begins a series of trials using its flexible manufacturing technology.” The company has helped launch numerous new products for major diaper, wound care, and consumer electronics customers. The company also manufactures proprietary signal isolation tapes, Superbulk® flame retardant cable fillers, and PRIMAstrip™ tear tapes.
Quarrey takes pride in the fact that the company, with its 75 employees in a 60,000 square-ft. plant, has won numerous awards from its key customers. FilmX achieved its success thanks in part to the training the company conducted over the past several years using CONNSTEP’s manufacturing experts Bill Caplan, Judy Wlodarczyk and Bill Kirchherr, an expert team that Quarrey called “unbelievably connected and helpful.”
“The goal from the beginning was to have them teach us to fish,” said Quarrey. FilmX initially depended on CONNSTEP to provide continuous improvement training and facilitate Kaizen events. Their ultimate objective was to learn to use the tools themselves, contributing towards their philosophy of an employee-owned culture.
CONNSTEP helped the company conduct several Kaizen events, one of which was the “warehouse” Kaizen to improve use of space, increase safety, eliminate unnecessary double-handling of materials, and better manage inventory. Using a value-stream mapping exercise they achieved those objectives and more. All employees completed Lean Awareness training as part of the Kaizen.
“Working with CONNSTEP has made a huge difference in our employee ownership culture and truly empowered our employees,” said Quarrey. “Our Manufacturing Manager Todd Pihl has really helped to lead the culture change and has helped to bring together our employees as a team of owners.”
Todd Pihl became involved in the company growth efforts in 2000 during the first Kaizen events led by CONNSTEP. His responsibility as the manufacturing manager made him the perfect candidate to lead the company’s continuous improvement effort. In March 2005 he attended CONNSTEP’s 12-week course, the Continuous Improvement Champion Certification program. The course empowers businesses to chart their own course in the Lean journey. Attendees are typically upper managers, plant managers, and people who have been given the responsibility to help their organization adopt a Lean philosophy. The training includes class-room presentations, hands-on exercises, and on-site company projects lead by a CONNSTEP Lean specialist. The training helps take people with some Lean experience and gives them the ability to start leading Lean projects internally.
With his Continuous Improvement Champion Certificate in hand, Pihl went on to lead several successful internal Kaizen events that have helped to reduce company waste and increase profits. He also coached Group Leader David Hunt to lead Kaizen events that produced outstanding results. One such event was in the area of document management, where a team of eight employees analyzed the current state and future state of their paper processes. The team determined that documents used to process orders, check shipments, and verify procedures were out of order and duplicative in some cases. The event resulted in the elimination of 20 separate pieces of documentation and a streamlined document management process that has significantly improved workflow.
“They came up with some of the best ideas I’ve ever seen,” Pihl said. “And they were able to do it on their own just from the experience they had from working with CONNSTEP and the training I received from the Continuous Improvement Champion Certification program.”
Lean techniques were called into action when a major customer contacted FilmX about growing demand for one of its newly launched products: a specialty printed diaper lining. Quarrey, Pihl, and the staff had a choice to ramp up production or pass off the business to another company that could handle the extra demand. Employee owners Brenda Annunziata, Steve Bernard, Bruce Bumpus, Bill Dows, Mike Roby, Wayne Shaw, Robin Shears, and Shane Yater analyzed and readjusted their processes and were able to add 30 percent more throughput to the process and handle the extra business. The customer was thrilled.
FilmX has had such a great deal of success working with CONNSTEP and with Lean concepts, that they’ve encouraged their peers to implement similar techniques, though some have been more responsive to idea than others. To address critics who feel that Lean processes can sometimes be counterintuitive, Pihl argues that even the largest runs can still be Lean in one way or another. “If you’re not using Lean, you’re missing a lot of opportunities for improvement,” he said.
Pihl has a unique perspective regarding the few employees within FilmX who sometimes doubt the effectiveness of Kaizen events. “We have employees who are fully on board with this philosophy, and we have some employees who are a bit cynical. That’s okay, old habits are hard to break. Skeptics give us a balanced perspective of the project, and that helps us along the way,” said Pihl. Quarrey believes CONNSTEP has helped FilmX achieve “critical mass” with its employee involvement culture. “Our employees are running with Kaizens as a way to influence the company they own.”
Transportation Manager George Rose proposed the warehouse Kaizen; Weekend Supervisor Rob Guillette sponsored a mini-Kaizen to organize the recycling area; Quality Assurance Manager Allison Gormley applies Kaizen techniques to corrective actions; and the extruding department invited machine operators Jody Cameron and Bob Hardy to spread the results of their paperwork Kaizen.
Since working with CONNSTEP, FilmX has:
Quarrey’s next goal is to turn his entire workforce into a “marketing machine.” FilmXwill be using CONNSTEP to implement a project for sales and marketing, which will also help to reposition the company in the marketplace, enabling them to look for not just more opportunities, but better ones.
Quarrey already feels confident that the company, with its continuous improvement training, is well on the road to reaping the benefits of a ‘company of owners.’ Quarrey concluded, “The Lean philosophy can be a catalyst to growth for any company, but for employee owned manufacturing facilities it is an amazing tool that can launch them to the next level. The very nature of Lean tools requires that employees take an active role in how the company performs and respond like owners. In our global economy manufacturers need an edge to grow and CONNSTEP can help them get that edge.”