Near the end of 2005, Jim Nairn, vice president of supply and logistics at Harper Brush Works, realized he had a problem: Significant business growth for the broom and brush manufacturer had subsequently led to a severe space shortage at its manufacturing facility in Stockton, Calif.

The cramped quarters and poor layout in the facility required multiple moves for each pallet manufactured, stored, and shipped. And many times during any given day, finished goods would have to be moved in order to jockey raw materials to the locations where they needed to be used.

“When the production line needed additional raw materials, a system was in place to notify forklift drivers to bring raw materials to where they were needed,” says Nairn. “And as we became more crowded, it required more and more pallet moves in order to dig out whatever the production line might need.”

This resulted in downtime on the production line, and a workforce that was often standing around waiting for goods to show up. “We tried to alleviate that by stocking the goods at night that we planned to handle the next day,” says Nairn, “but the crowding got to be so much that we could not even stock at night since there was no room.”

The cramped quarters contributed to the lack of a first-rate inventory system, which created both inventory shortages and overflows at inopportune times. “Managing this issue required scheduling work flows at odd hours and utilizing storage in the parking lot and anywhere that we could find space,” says Nairn. “Internal work flows required continual movements of the same goods.”

So, rather than continue to deal with the ongoing space limitations, Nairn elected to explore options for a new facility. After vetting potential locations from Nevada to Los Angeles to Oregon, he found a facility right in Stockton, much to the delight of Harper Brush’s staff.

And with the new site, came a fresh plan for manufacturing, storing, and shipping the company’s brooms, brushes, and mops. The plan centered on a few different concepts, such as installing lean thinking into the company’s material flow, building agility into the manufacturing process, and cutting costs and inventory.

To better streamline the flow of materials and goods—such as yarn, rope, and rubber—in the new facility, Harper Brush took a few proactive steps to avoid multiple moves.

The first move was to implement a visual scheduling methodology to create a simple replenishment system. This system, according to Nairn, had goods arriving on one side of the building, raw materials stored at the point of use, and manufactured goods moved to a shipping lane and shipped out on the other side of the building—allowing for a better use of space compared to the previous facility.

At the shipping dock, dock doors are on the left-hand side, with accompanying staging lanes on the right-hand side 12-feet away. When a truck pulls up to the dock, finished goods from the staging lane are loaded onto the truck. Four of those staging lanes are dedicated to a specific customer, and each lane holds about 10 days on average of what that customer will pull.

According to Nairn, the five lines with visual scheduling methodology saw 100 percent on-time shipments and 100 percent fill rates over the course of 2007, with a maximum of 10 days of finished goods inventory at any one time.

Nairn and the Harper Brush team revamped the replenishing process that revolves around a simple “red line.” “A red line is painted on the floor that is partway back from the end of the staging lane,” says Nairn. “Whenever pallets are pulled away and loaded onto the truck and the red line becomes exposed, our production lines switched the next day to refill that lane. The distance from the red line to the end of the staging line represents two days of production, which is an economic order run.”

This method has brought about significant improvements for Harper and its customers, with finished product moving just twice—from the production line to the staging lane then from the staging lane to a truck. And Nairn adds that its lowered freight costs by three percent on average due to reduced waiting time for trucks.

To better handle raw materials movements on the inbound side, Harper deployed what Nairn describes as a dual line utilization model to handle demand volume for increasing shipments. This model is best viewed as a form of “light manufacturing” that Harper does for various products, including brooms, handles, and mops.

For push brooms, for example, different products are added to the conveyor belt at different stages of the production process on an order-by-order basis. Broom handles are fed down the production line from an elevated platform. Once the handles move down the line other parts like the handle and brace are attached, and the broom is screwed, bolted, and assembled and ready for shipment. What makes this a true “dual line” operation, however, is that one person on an elevated platform is feeding two parallel production lines.

According to Narin, these processes have helped Harper see its order inventory accuracy improve from 98.4% to 99.7%, while its order cycle time from order receipt to shipment was reduced by 567 percent. “This is a steady process, but oftentimes orders will spike and what we normally do in two weeks has to be done in a week,” said Nairn. “This process makes it less time-consuming with fewer people.”