Lean ASAP!
The first case of Covid-19 in Norway was recorded on February 26. A few days later, on March 1, Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg and Health Minister Bent Høie began to voice their concerns about the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) for frontline healthcare staff in Norway.
Following an appeal from the Norwegian Ministry of Health on March 20, ASAP Norway – a producer of highly absorbent disposable sheets based in Skien, Vestfold and Telemark – committed to setting up a completely new factory that would use state-of-the-art ultrasonic welding technology to produce disposable protective medical gowns. The first gown was successfully produced just three weeks later. In total, the company was to produce and deliver 400,000 gowns, with an option for an additional 200,000 over the coming months.
“Everything happened very fast”, says Astrid Skreosen, founder and CEO of ASAP Norway. Astrid founded the company in 2007 to develop the next generation of highly absorbent, biodegradable disposable sheets. “On March 19, we met with the Norwegian Minister of Health, Bent Høie, and a day later we signed the contract to produce and deliver gowns to the South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority (Helse Sør-Øst). A few days later, we signed the lease for the building where we were going to install the new production lines, and by April 10 we had already started training new employees to make, assemble and pack the most comfortable disposable protective medical gowns on the market”, Astrid recalls.
Having produced only 300 gowns in the first week of production, however, Astrid and the ASAP team realized that a lot of work and a lot of learning would be needed to reach the target of 3,500 gowns per day. It was not long before they turned to lean thinking and practice to help them get there.
Creating clarity
As in many lean journeys, this one also began with a brown-paper mapping exercise to build an understanding of the material and information flow and to help managers and employees develop a deep understanding of the actual work content needed to make the product. The team used direct observation and standard work combination tables to document the current work patterns. This part of the lean puzzle was completed with a load-leveling exercise – heijunka – to visualize the current cycle time of each workstation compared to the desired takt time, with the intention of reallocating work content and balancing the workflow to the takt time. However, with an ambitious takt time of 17 seconds (212 gowns per hour), the team was still struggling to produce 600 gowns per day. Something more was needed.
In addition to training operators in the documented work standards, the ASAP team created a shared understanding of expectations in terms of quality and productivity. For quality, employees were trained to follow the “fix it from me” principle, taking responsibility for the quality of the products passed on to the next step on the line. Any nonconformities were visualized by marking a sample gown on the shop floor – which served as a full-scale chart. Productivity was also visualized through an hour-by-hour board, which showed the hourly production rates and thereby challenged the team to uncover and explore the problems that were keeping them from producing to takt.
One challenge the team encountered was managing the bottleneck process, which at the time was cutting and preparing the material for making the gowns. Feeding the line with enough raw material to keep it flowing was problematic, but the operators quickly implemented a series of simple improvements, including a kanban system to visually manage material replenishment to the line and the introduction of several work-holding fixtures to simplify and stabilize the cutting process. With these countermeasures in place, the bottleneck shifted to the welding process itself, which had been the overall intention from the start (based on machine capacity, ASAP Norway had bought enough units to make three lines in order to reach the output needed to deliver the planned quantity of gowns). From that point on, day after day and week after week, productivity began to rise. By mid-May, it reached 1,000 gowns per day. By the end of May, 1,500 gowns per day. It rose to 2,500 gowns per day in early June. On June 23, ASAP Norway received an e-mail from Helse Sør-Øst congratulating them on delivering “the best protective gown on the Norwegian market”.
Learning from failures
Things were going very well for ASAP Norway. With the Norwegian summer holidays approaching in July, the ASAP team managed to reach its productivity target – 3,500 gowns per day. But then disaster struck. Out of nowhere, the company received bad news from Helse Sør-Øst. “They told us that the last batch we delivered had not been approved by the Health Authority”, Astrid explained, disappointed. It seemed there was a possibility of defects due to weak welds in the biodegradable fabric. The team had to review the product’s technical specification, which until then had been satisfactory.
On closer inspection, the team discovered a technical concern with the new ultrasonic welding machines. It turned out that the machines had been neither designed nor intended for use on materials with a high viscose content, which is what gives the ASAP gown its biodegradable properties. Of course, at limited throughput, the problem went unnoticed. It simply did not exist. However, as throughput increased, the material began to melt and build up on the welding wheels, which had the potential to interfere with weld strength. The manufacturer of the ultrasonic welding machines was available to provide support, but due to Covid-19 travel restrictions, they could not provide in-person assistance. To correct this error, ASAP Norway had no choice but to temporarily redirect the factory to rework the previous batch of gowns – adding spot-weld reinforcement at specific places on the product.
Over the following weeks, the ASAP team reworked thousands of gowns to prevent product failure in the field. But instead of letting this unfortunate deviation from standard bring them down, the company simultaneously began redesigning the product to eliminate this potential failure mode entirely. With expert assistance from the machine manufacturer to develop in-house expertise locally, the company has now mastered ultrasonic welding technology to once again supply defect-free products to Helse Sør-Øst.
“Although this level of learning comes at a significant cost, it also has great value”, Astrid concludes. ASAP Norway is now looking to the future with ambitious plans to establish a large-scale sustainable manufacturing facility to ensure it can meet the requirements of the Norwegian health authorities, as well as the uncertain demand that future pandemics may bring. Lean thinking has certainly presented ASAP Norway with a challenging set of conditions to frame continuous improvement and achieve long-term business growth.
