Key City Goes Lean

An 82-year-old, family-owned Wilkes County furniture manufacturer with 152 employees is getting financial aid to sharpen its competitive edge.

The North Carolina Division of Workforce Development approved Key City Furniture’s [1] application for a $25,000 federal grant to fund lean manufacturing training at its two Wilkes facilities.

Key City’s niche is custom furniture work, in contrast to furniture manufacturers that create finished inventory for warehousing, says president F.D. Forester. “If it’s coming through the factory, we have a custom order for it.”

Key City ships products throughout the nation and abroad to upper level, price-point retailers, design showrooms, and designers.

This market segment generally doesn’t respond to small economic fluctuations, but recent sales reflect the severity of the recession. “Demand hasn’t dipped—it’s sunk—although special order product had been somewhat immune [to declining demand] until the last 18 months,” says Chris Reavis, vice president of sales and operations for Key City.

Key City plans to be poised to create and deliver its products quicker, easier, and better when economic conditions improve and consumers are able to satisfy pent-up demand and begin purchasing again, states Reavis.

Key City officials hope lean manufacturing training will help accomplish this goal through its focus on eliminating redundancy, cutting waste, organizing the workplace and streamlining workflow and setup times, continues Reavis.

Key City hopes to cut “throughput time,” which is the time between order receipt and finished product out the door, from eight weeks to four, Reavis explains.

Another goal is using materials, time, and labor better. Key City has an effective recycling program, but better ways to cut waste and increase efficiency are being sought to reduce costs and compete better with overseas manufacturers, adds Reavis.

Tom Comer, Key City’s manufacturing plant manager, emphasizes the training’s potential to save and perhaps even add jobs. Many of Key City’s employees have been there 30 to 35 or even 50 years.

David Beard began conducting the training in August and is continuing through February. Beard contracts with Wilkes Community College to provide lean training and has more than 20 years of manufacturing experience. He has worked as a lean facilitator and instructor at companies across the nation.

According to Beard, the training, typically intense three-day sessions with six to eight people, are “roll up your sleeves, get dirty, make change” work groups that focus on specific aspects of the production process and take concrete steps to improve them.

Workers are urged to discuss their ideas for modifying a process or streamlining an operation, he says. “They’re the ones doing the work day to day and I tell the management, ‘these are the ideas the team came up with; you need to listen,’” he adds.

Factory workers quickly see benefits of lean manufacturing, Beard says. “These skills and tools will protect your job,” he tells workers.

Key City Furniture employees participated in four rounds of a factory simulation during their lean manufacturing orientation on Aug. 17. In addition to decreasing floor inventory, reducing defects to zero, and moving from red ink to black, the participants in the exercises increased production of finished units by more than 1,000 percent. The company’s on-floor training began Sept. 1. Photo courtesy of Kathleen McFadden

“Lean manufacturing training is designed to build a culture in the workforce, a culture of continuous improvement,” Beard says.

Comer says Key City has the advantage of already being completely vertical. “We don’t weave fabric and we don’t make cushions, but 88 percent of what we do is in-house,” he says, which means agility and responsiveness. Key City workers created a custom furniture frame in under two weeks based on a retailer’s sketch.

“If we need to make a change, we can do it in an hour because everyone is here every day and we don’t have a large corporate structure,” says Forester. Key City officials say the company’s ability to make what it needs and its active, hands-on ownership gives it flexibility and quick response times necessary for successful niche marketing.

They say incorporating lean principles on the factory floor will augment Key City’s in-house advantages by decreasing costs and production times, thus giving Key City the competitive edge it needs to create distinctive furniture for many years to come.

This article first appeared in Wilkes Journal Patriot.