F.W. Murphy: Success Brings Broader Initiative

F.W. Murphy Manufacturing Co., a $50 million-a-year maker of instrumentation and control systems for the oil, gas, irrigation, and agriculture markets, has been using lean manufacturing for nearly three years. But the company is stepping up the initiative to cope with a rough economy and the ever-growing pressure from offshore competitors.

"We've always had pressures, but today's environment is much different," says Mitch Myers, VP of operations. "There's a lot of pressure to become cost-competitive, and if we're going to have any chance of keeping these jobs in the U.S., we are going to have to optimize."

F.W. Murphy ventured into lean manufacturing cautiously. It got hooked after participating in an industry event that featured what's known as kaizen, or continuous improvement, processes. "The things we saw were revolutionary," Myers says.

The first project took six months and involved rebuilding material-handling fixtures that relied on gravity to pass material from one operation to the next. There also were process improvements: Gauges used to sit in controlled rooms for up to eight hours to remove all traces of moisture; now each gauge is filled with a gas and dehumidified in seconds.

The changes reduced labor and labor costs by about 30% and cut the physical space the line consumed in the factory by 75%. "Suddenly, we've got an immense amount of floor space unoccupied in our facility. We see that as an ability to expand," Myers says.

What F.W. Murphy has its eye on now are software systems designed with lean in mind. "Traditional [manufacturing] software is designed around batch and queue and doesn't typically have very good support for kanban systems," Myers says. "We've found ways to make this discrete batch-and-queue software work with the lean-manufacturing processes we're putting in." Kanban, which is Japanese for signal, is a demand-drive process that relies on signals moving downstream through a production line; for example, when products are shipped to customers, a signal is sent to employees responsible for assembling finished goods.

Before, F.W. Murphy's factory production was driven by work orders created in batches that would then be passed on to the shop floor. Now, work orders are created when products are shipped to customers and bins are emptied.

That works, but F.W. Murphy would like the software to work faster. Employees still need to key a lot of data into each work order and then route the orders through a variety of systems--a process that takes three to five minutes. "Our vision is that the transaction takes less than 30 seconds," Myers says. He also wants the software to calculate how often the bins will be emptied based on demand fluctuations.

Illustration by Dave Plunkert

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