Batesville Casket CompanyManchester Operations2006 AME Award ofExcellence Winner

Robert W. Hall

W inning the AME 2006 Award ofExcellence was not a suddenachievement for Batesville

Casket Company’s Manchester, TN opera-tions. The drive toward becoming leanbegan more than ten years ago, and likemost conversions, the heart of the story ishuman change, warming both staff andworkforce to take it seriously. At the outset,Batesville Casket had a corporate directiveto get lean, along with some directives onhow to do it. United Steel Workers Local9137 and many of the staff greeted this withabout the same receptivity as most corpo-rate directives.

The forward ooze began in 1998when a revamped Batesville managementteam realized that all implementation islocal. To change the local work culture,leaders on site have to work with the peo-ple there, area-by-area, work station-by-work station, and person-by-person. Theycalled that change in perspective, “A NewBeginning.” All rivers have similarity, butevery rock in the water is unique to thatriver in that spot.

Plant Manager Mary Jo Cartwrightand everyone on the Manchester team saythat their journey will never be finished.Problems to be overcome are endless, butthe team relationship among everyone atManchester is like day and night com-pared with ten years ago, and especially,with 21 years ago, when the workersvoted to unionize. During their journey,Manchester leadership evolved the guid-ing principles in Figure 1. When read, thislist seems like platitudes, but the people ofManchester now live by them.

In BriefBatesville Casket is taking the slow, culture-building road to processexcellence in a mature union plant. Now more than ten years in theirjourney, the outstanding feature is Creativity before Capital; processkaizen eliminates the need for much capital. Manchester has astrong quality orientation in a business in which high quality is a mar-ketplace must. A story old union shops can relate to.

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Developing People

To make lean a way of life, the leadersat Manchester took time to bring everyonetogether as One Team. Previously, man-agement had not always stayed the course,so to demonstrate seriousness, earlychange emphasized safety and ergonom-ics. As work life improved, associatesgained confidence that lean is not old-fash-ioned, despised speed-up.

Today, Manchester is proud of its safe-ty record. And the safety program had sidebenefits for both productivity and quality.Being more careful at work, doing things“the right way,” made people more carefulbuilding the caskets “right” too.

The One-Team feeling requires man-agement to constantly communicate by anymeans available: regular meetings, bi-weekly round tables, union leadershipmeetings, copious postings, and quarterlyWe Care surveys. Everybody gets a birthdaycard, for example; “little recognitions” addup. Management takes pains to tell peoplebad news as well as good, and promptly.On both shifts, every supervisor has a DailyContinuous Improvement Meeting in abreak area, as shown in Figure 2.Communication consumes most of the timeof Mary Jo Cartwright, the plant manager.

In the 1980s, Manchester’s myriad jobclassifications made people wait on eachother to do their bit on a task. About 40 jobclassifications remain, but the waiting hasnearly stopped. All associates must be ableto perform all the jobs in their area. Thatnot only permits job rotation to help pre-vent ergonomic problems, but multi-skilledworkers can fill in for anyone else absenton a team. Time off has long been regard-ed as an entitlement for those working atManchester, so absenteeism is high. Onsome shifts supervisors struggle to allocateavailable people to jobs. Fortunately how-ever, many associates have experience inmultiple departments, so they can crossbetween departments. The average age is45. Manchester achieved this increase inflexibility without negotiating a specificpay-for-knowledge component into the paysystem.

Figure 1.

• Never compromise on safety

• Treat people with dignity and respect

• Diamond standard quality

• Lean manufacturing principles

• Creativity before capital

• Repeatable, reliable processes

• Making fact-based decisions

• Keep it simple

• Just do it• Make tomorrow better than today

(for customers, associates, Batesville Casket Company, and all processes).

Figure 2.

This meeting lasted about five minutes. Safety and quality announcements, asalways, led off the meeting, followed by updates on special orders or machine con-ditions. The primary question was what time they might finish. If Manchester cas-ket completions get behind the number of units scheduled by takt time, they maywork overtime to finish “must do” orders.

Batesville Casket Manchester’s Guiding Principles

A Typical Daily Continuous Improvement Meeting at Manchester-Batesville

7Sixth Issue 2006

Over time many workers came to likekaizen. Many now consider it an honor tobe on a kaizen team; a few really eat it up.Mechanically minded, they like devisingideas and devices to make things better.Most why-didn’t-I-think-of-that ideas comefrom the floor.

Kaizen activities reduced stock. Cellsand one-piece flow additionally shrank themanufacturing floor space. The big oldplant now has huge swaths of unusedspace, even after converting some of it tothe distribution center. Manchester is look-ing for a new complementary product totake on to absorb space, and to providemore jobs, for no one is laid off because ofkaizen. After productivity rose dramatical-ly, many extra people were slowly dissipat-ed through attrition, but they would like theentire floor space to hum with activity andbecame a source of new jobs in theManchester area.

Creativity Before Capital

This catch phrase in the list in Figure 1is considered the most significant ongoingbenefit of lean manufacturing. “Keep ItSimple,” and “Repeatable, ReliableProcesses” are also part of the spirit. Thebasic idea is to never spend money on newequipment or expensive fixes until aprocess has been thoroughly worked overby kaizen. Avoid spending money unnec-essarily.

This idea was also partly driven by theneed to reduce the number of lost cycles inproduction. A lost cycle is time that couldhave been used to make a casket, but forwhatever reason, it did not get done.Quality problems were part of the reason,but the big one was unreliable equipment.Manchester started getting rid of expensivemachines, hard to maintain, that seemed tobreak down at the most inopportunemoments.

Batesville Casket Company Manchester Operations

The Manchester Operations are part of the Batesville Casket Company, wholly-owned by Hillenbrand Industries,Batesville, IN. Hillenbrand also owns Hil-Rom, a well-known manufacturer of acute care hospital beds. The casket com-pany is descended from the Batesville Coffin Company founded in 1884.

Today Manchester is one of six Batesville Casket Plants; four in the United States, and two in Mexico. Openedin 1970, the Manchester property is huge, 169 acres, with 428,000 square feet under roof. Manchester produces stan-dard-size 18 and 20 gauge steel caskets, 1200-1400 units per day. There are 207 total models in 22 base colors.The hourly workforce has been represented by United Steelworkers Local 9137 since 1985. The total workforce is 493people, of whom only 40 are exempt staff and management. Each supervisor averages 34 reports.

Manchester primarily produces to stock. The site is also home to one of seven Batesville Distribution Centers,plus a partnership logistics operation. The distribution centers feed about 80 local customer service centers nationwide.Funeral directors are the primary customers. Batesville Casket caters to the 75 percent of funeral homes that are inde-pendently owned, and to customers that prefer quality products and quality service at a competitive price.

Widespread distribution is important for prompt delivery. When a funeral director calls for a particular casket,delivery may be wanted next day. Almost any casket can be built in a few hours, but shipping time from a plant to mostlocations is too long. Manchester’s schedule must promptly replace items taken from stock. Despite needing to stock afull line of finished goods, corporate inventory turns are about ten, and Manchester has three-to-four days of WIP andraw materials.

The casket market is flat. Dying, fortunately, is not a growing business. The cremation ratio is up to about a third,slowly rising. This squeeze presents a strategic conundrum. Batesville prefers to sell more caskets by beating com-petitors on quality, delivery, and service. Besides caskets, Batesville has an Options® line of cremation products, funer-al home retail displays, and software including funeral planning packages. Manchester supports about 155 field repre-sentatives engaged in personal relationship selling. It has learned to do this so well that in 2004, it was one of IndustryWeek’s Ten Best Plants.

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An intriguing example of this, shownin Figure 3, came out of a kaizen effort toreduce the setup time for a roll formermaking brackets. Coils had to be mountedon a de-coiler to unwind into the roll for-mer — or they thought they did — and thisrequired a lift and eight minutes of down-time between each coil. Upon thinkingabout this, operators and engineers fig-ured out how to just uncoil from the palletwithout the thing twisting into a knot.

Tried the idea, and it worked; got rid

of the de-coiler, the cage around it, and thelift. Now a new coil feeds through theprocess attached to the butt end of the oldcoil, with little or no downtime. Even ducttape is sufficient to tack the two coilstogether.

In addition, the same project estab-lished fixed stops for the length of differentbrackets so the time to measure and adjustlength during changeovers from onebracket to another was eliminated. Hereare three more ideas:

Figure 3.

Before:Coils were changed on a de-coiler. Averagedeight minutes of downtime between coils, andthe de-coiler required a guard cage; needed ahoist to lift the coils too.

After:Figured out how to un-coil straight from the palletwithout the strip twisting. Seldom have downtimebetween coils. Even duct tape will hold the feedend of a new coil to the butt end of the old one tofeed through the press. A capital request wasunnecessary.

This was part of a setup time kaizen. Besides eliminating the de-coiler, the kaizen also greatly reduced the time toclean loose dirt from each new coil and fabricated stops for the different lengths of angles to be crimped, thuseliminating measurements to set up for each new length.

Example of Creativity Before Capital: Eliminating a De-Coiler

9Sixth Issue 2006

•Automatic tape dispensers were installed just above the casket body rim moving on an assembly line. The tape isadhesive holding the insulation strip between the body and lid of the casket. This eliminated a human process not easy to replicate time after time, and it cost practically nothing, $500.

•Space-eating conveyors feeding attach-ments to casket assembly were eliminated.Just put the attachments in the moving casket body. It’s a good box for holding things.

•A simple chain and pulley arrangement pulls caskets to the rear of trucks after loading them in the end of semi-trailers.It takes less time and labor to load, plus a trailer can be loaded without being parked at a dock. Because of this, no new docks needed to be built.

The Manchester plant does not displayany advanced automation. Even in thepaint department, simple devices do thework that many companies would userobots to perform. Robots weld casketseams; they don’t get tired or become dis-tracted, so consistency improves. Somepick-and-place robots position material.And that’s about it. Before buying a solu-tion to a problem, Manchester mandatesthat a process go through kaizen to find asimple alternative. Usually, the kaizenteam finds one.

Management can make a rough esti-mate of how much money has been savedby this, but it is nebulous. You don’t knowhow much was saved if no thought wasgiven to buying a solution; you just did it –solved the problems. And the big problemwas unnecessary downtime due to unreli-able equipment.

Preventive Maintenance

Planned maintenance is now regularlyover 90 percent of the total, which meansthat reactive maintenance is less than tenpercent of the total — outstanding.However, Manchester’s preventive mainte-nance is not complicated. It was boostedconsiderably by replacing or simplifying

equipment until it became more reliable.The theory is simple. Equipment less com-plex and easier to access is more likely tokeep running, easier to fix when it isn’t, andif it is strictly mechanical, it usually givesearly warning of a problem. Much of thetime an attentive operator senses whensomething is working improperly, or start-ing to wear. Just respond to early warn-ings, perform anticipatory maintenance,and over time, the system creates its owndata for routine scheduled maintenance.

Operators do routine maintenance,cleaning, and lubricating, for instance, butdon’t tinker with machines if it takes muchmore than a screwdriver. Maintenancepersonnel pull most of the routinerepair/replace work. Tool and die makerstake care of the dies, but rarely build a newone — takes too much of their time. Cross-functional kaizen teams look for ways tomake the equipment simpler and safer. Justdo it (or do-it-yourself) is now embedded inthe work culture. The workforce knowsthat little ingenious ideas are the key tokeeping work in Manchester.

All this simplification improved qualitytoo. Fewer process interruptions and work-arounds automatically have that effect. Ingeneral, Manchester’s lean initiative hasthe effect of simplifying things so that thereare fewer opportunities for error.

Diamond Quality

Batesville Casket depends on qualityof service as well as product for marketingadvantage. Manchester Operations has thebest quality of its sister plants. They attrib-ute this partly to the rigor of their DiamondStandard audits.

At Manchester, quality is built-in, notinspected in. Fail-safe and associates’checks while doing the work assure qualityup to the point of doing a pressure test tocheck weld integrity of an assembled unit.The next check is the finish quality of acompleted unit. The exact color is quanti-fied by matching a spectrometer readingwith a standard color spectral profile, socolor is not judged from the eyes of humanswhose aesthetic perceptions may vary.

10Target Volume 22, Number 6

This final check is under white lights,somewhat as the final visual inspection of acar just off the assembly line.

Only after all this is done are a fewcaskets randomly pulled from finishedunits, ready to ship, and subjected to theDiamond Audit. Auditors check dimen-sions, color, general appearance, and forflaws whether they appear in a “spec” ornot. They look for tiny scratches, imper-fections in metal forming, traces of weld-ment, or anything else that might attractthe eyes of anyone staring at a casket witha loved one in it for a long time. It has tobe “just right.”

Most audits are performed by man-agers. Feedback is quick, both to the qual-ity system and when helpful, directly toassociates. The Diamond Audit area is onthe shop floor, so it is easy to have associ-ates come by and begin to run through“why” questions immediately. Manchestercredits their quality performance to thisrapid feedback of “picky squawks” to themanufacturing process. Nothing shipsunless it is just right. Customers are almostalways funeral directors, and indirectly, ofcourse the bereaved families who are thefuneral directors’ clientele. In the past year,“customer disappointments” for any reasonwere 1179 ppm, and many reasons occurafter the casket leaves ManchesterOperations. The goal for 2006 is to cut cus-tomer disappointments to 888 ppm. So farthey are ahead of this goal.

All managers perform Diamond Auditsat least once a month. Some do auditsmore frequently. Besides the fast feedbackto operations, this exercise certainly sharp-ens all managers’ eyes for quality. With theDiamond Audit station on the shop floor,no employee can miss the importance ofthe Diamond Audits, so it sharpens theireyes for quality too.

Evolution of Lean at Manchester

Changes did not occur quickly andpainlessly at Manchester. Twenty yearsago, union associates and managementwere often at loggerheads, so big changesin this relationship were needed before

people gained confidence and becameready for more aggressive stages of processimprovement. Transformation took placein a progression that roughly parallelsFigure 5. The phase emphasizing safetyand ergonomics lasted several years. Onlyafter the workforce understood that thiswas a serious long-term effort from whichthey were going to benefit, couldManchester begin to undertake kaizensthat required their input.

The second stage began around 1999,as Manchester developed the emphasis onreducing lost cycles, and the pattern ofkaizen activities that led to capital avoid-ance by substituting process improvementfor capital spending. That, coupled withtightening the quality expectations, led tothe state of Manchester today.

As the flow streamlined and floorspace shrank, hours per unit dropped. Theplant cost per unit dropped in almost thesame pattern. Improvements more thanoffset the added cost of steel the past two

Figure 4.

Scott Brothers performing a Diamond Standard Audit at Batesville Manchester. He’smeasuring the lap length of the lining cover over the lid. Auditors perform manymeasurements, and are sticklers for general appearance.

A Diamond Standard Audit at Batesville Manchester Operations

11Sixth Issue 2006

years, and many more kaizen opportuni-ties beckon. For example, the grinding ofcasket covers needs attention; steel hand-ing around the presses needs it too. Themore kaizen they do, the more opportuni-ties they see. That, and constant develop-ment of all associates and constant com-munication with them, is what it is allabout. They keep thinking broader anddeeper, and more as One Team, followingthat last platitude in Figure 1, “MakeTomorrow Better than Today.”

Robert W. Hall is editor-in-chief of Target anda founding member of AME.

Figure 5.

00.20.40.60.8

11.2

59916991 91

791

8999991

0020

0210 02

20 0230 4002

5002

Lost Cycles Hrs/Unit LWDI Cost of Q

All figures are indexed to show improvement from the “peg in the ground” on each measure before startingsustained kaizen. Key:

Lost Cycles: Of all takt time opportunities, the number times Manchester failed to complete a casket.Hours per Unit: Labor productivity is based on total site headcount.LWDI = Lost Workday Incidents; One a year or fewer since 1999.

Cost of Q: Manchester better labels this as Cost of Quality Non-Compliance

© 2006 AME® For information on reprints, contact: AMEAssociation for Manufacturing Excellencewww.ame.org

Progress of Batesville Manchester Operations

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