Exploring Our Industrial Heritage: Introduction
Tools for the Trenches is setting out on a journey to explore our industrial heritage. Manufacturing has been my career home for over 40 years now. I started my industrial career when I was a teenager working as a machine rigger, moving large industrial equipment from one factory to another. Many of these factories dated back 80 years or more. Many were old, heavy industrial plants, cold, dark and dingy and they were closing shop due to industry technology advancements and overseas competition.
Westinghouse owned one of these large industrial complexes where they produced enormous turbines for electricity generation. Over the decades, Westinghouse employed thousands of people at this site. They hired many returning veterans of WWII and the Vietnam war. As I worked as a rigger, loading trucks with giant lathes, mills and floor plates, I would imagine the facility in full-swing operations. Cranes moving overhead, horns blaring for breaktimes, lines at the timeclocks, machinist turning large turbines on giant lathes, inspectors measuring part diameters with large micrometers, mechanics troubleshooting the latest breakdowns and engineers designing new machining processes.
What is interesting is that my career advanced in a way that reflects the advancement of manufacturing through time. As a young man, I spent many hours working in old industrial complexes. In the summers, I operated a lithography press at Congoleum Floors. After graduating college, I learned about Edwards Deming’s Total Quality Management principles at Frito-Lay and applied Deming’s principles to our production processes by having my operators hand-chart SPC results.
At Anchor Hocking Packaging I was on the forefront of the initial wave of Lean Manufacturing in the US. What many people don’t know was that Shigeo Shingo transferred Toyota’s manufacturing principles to Productivity Inc. through a copyright agreement. Productivity Inc. launched the concepts in the US in the 1980’s under an umbrella term "Total Productive Maintenance" (TPM), not the Toyota Production System (TPS) or Lean Manufacturing. Initially TPM encompassed not only TMP but SMED, visual factory and most of the lean tools that we use today.
I was formally trained in lean at the University of Michigan’s School of Engineering. U of M is located in the heart of the US auto industry, where lean was first implemented on a large-scale in the US. When GE strategically adopted Six-Sigma and the DMIAC process, I was fortunate enough to be working for Covidien Healthcare who quickly hired a group of GE Six-Sigma Master Black Belts to launch a Six-Sigma program at Covidien. I was in the early waves of training becoming a Black Belt and then a Master Black Belt.
I have managed plants consisting of a huge diversity of processes, products and markets served. As computers evolved and technologies advanced, I grew in knowledge and capability. I consider myself truly blessed to have experienced the progression of manufacturing technology advancements, from old industrial job shops, to state-of-the-art, high speed robotics manufacturing and everything in-between.
I was fortunate throughout my career to have been invested-in by my employers. They trained me in the latest manufacturing best practices, advancing methodologies and newest technologies. All of these experiences created in me a great passion for manufacturing and a high-level of appreciation for all the incredible employees who work in factories around the world. Manufacturing is excitingly dynamic. The diversity of products, processes and methodologies is amazing and something worthy of continued study.
I am excited to explore manufacturing as I travel and write a series of T4T articles called “Exploring our Industrial Heritage”.
Learn more about our industrial heritage and check out my other T4T articles, including, my articles about Oklahoma City, The Illinois River Valley and my personal favorite about Whiskey Country
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