How to start a manufacturing business from scratch with lean

Planet Lean: Can you introduce Cranfield Foundry to our readers?

Dariusz Dziuba: We are a modern, eco-friendly iron foundry that was recently built from scratch in sunny Macedonia. We cast quality ductile and gray iron for customers in Europe and are currently expanding to serve customers in the Middle East region. Our goal is to be an “easy to work with” foundry that customers can rely on.

PL: What was the reason for turning to lean thinking?

DD: To succeed as a foundry, especially in Europe, you have to get a lot of things right. It is virtually impossible to run a profitable business if the foundry is inefficient and does not continuously adapt its way of working to customers’ changing needs. In the beginning, we did not have enough know-how and soon realized that the only way to succeed would be to build a team that could continuously learn and solve problems quickly. So we decided that lean could be the best option for us.

PL: A lean greenfield! How is lean enabling you to develop your business?

DD: As a kind of startup, when we began our journey, we didn’t have much – no customers, no facilities, no team. It was a blank sheet. The only thing we had was the desire to build a lean foundry and the capital to do it (although, as we later realized, we had far less than we actually needed). We truly believe that, although capital and technology are incredibly important, at the end of the day it is people who can make things happen – especially when they work as a team. Our biggest and hardest challenge was trying to become lean without having a fully developed lean culture.

PL: How has lean thinking helped so far?

DD: We are only at the beginning of our journey, but even the fact that we still exist as a company, despite Covid-19, the war between Russia and Ukraine and skyrocketing energy and raw material prices, is proof that lean thinking has allowed us to build enough agility into our company to navigate an extremely challenging environment. Something we are very proud of is our LeanShaman system. We see that it is helping us implement changes and improvements at a speed we don’t see in other companies. Thanks to this very smart software, many decisions at Cranfield Foundry are made by team leaders and supervisors.

PL: In your opinion, what leads to a cultural transformation?

DD: Culture is the result of so many factors and is so complex that, in my opinion, trying to manage or change it directly is almost impossible. What we can change are the processes and systems that shape that culture. Perhaps that is why we decided to follow the lean path. Lean allows us to shape our thinking, environment, standards and way of working. Over time, little by little, this builds the culture. LeanShaman also helps us here, as it gives us countless opportunities to train, learn and build culture. This process will never end.

PL: What are the main lean tools and techniques you are using?

DD: We tried many things at the beginning, and that was a mistake. After a while, we began to think that we only needed two things: open-minded people and a handful of basic tools. So we started using 5S, problem solving and standardization. But even that did not work well. That was when we decided to follow the advice Mr. Masaaki Imai gave us at a conference: “Just focus on small improvements”, he told us. And that is what we did. We introduced a system called DAMIS – Daily Micro Improvement System (in retrospect, that was another mistake) –, which later became LeanShaman. Today, this is one of our most powerful weapons. We use LeanShaman to build our 5S and our problem-solving system, to standardize and to improve.

PL: What do you hope participants learned from your presentation at the Lean Global Connection?

DD: Our approach to lean is very pragmatic and we believe people appreciated our presentation, especially those who run or work in smaller companies like ours (50 to 500 employees), with physical operations and an uncertain business context. We tried to show how – contrary to what most consultants will tell you – a good “sensei” (in our case, Malgorzata Jakubik, from Lean Enterprise Institute Poland) and a smart system, such as LeanShaman, are more than enough to start your lean transformation, building efficient yet flexible operations and embedding lean thinking in the organization.