Bristol Compressors is recognized in the HVAC and refrigeration industry in North America and globally as one of the leading manufacturers of reciprocating compressors. Chief operating officer Randy Jacoby tells John O’Hanlon why he wants to be the person who provides the reciprocating option to the HVAC market better than anyone else.
Bristol Compressors was founded in 1974 as an offshoot of Sundstrand in the days when that corporation was in growth mode, and it was purchased by York International in 1988. Johnson Controls acquired York in 2005 but spun off Bristol two years later when it passed into the hands of private equity group KPS Capital Partners.
Although he is too tactful to say so, the company was looking somewhat old-fashioned when Randy Jacoby joined it in 2007. He is a seasoned manufacturing manager with the advantage of knowing this industry—and Bristol’s major customers—like the back of his hand, having run production facilities for Carrier and Danfoss to name but two. To him the opportunity to bring modern manufacturing principles to Bristol, Virginia, was irresistible.
Over the last three years or so, Jacoby has had a lot of fun. The factory had been run along “batch and queue” principles, and the infrastructure designed to support this approach. “The plant reflected the traditional way of doing things, when materials were cheaper and everyone was holding too much working capital,” Jacoby says.
He enjoyed the opportunity to introduce lean principles to a company newly released from corporate control. It enabled him to develop site-specific programs, fast-track decision making, and measure the things that are significant to the operation without having a lot of paperwork and bureaucratic oversight. “We’ve developed our own template that is specific to what we do in this business,” Jacoby says.
Reciprocating compressor technology has a secure future in the HVAC value chain, Jacoby is convinced, and the most competitive suppliers will be the leanest. “The program was named the Bristol Business System [BBS] because we recognized that operational excellence must also include expediting the handling of information and support. We see it as all-inclusive.”
At the cornerstone of the BBS process was a covenant with the employees that improvements would not mean layoffs. “Our strategy is to husband our natural attrition, and we’ve been able to reduce headcount year on year without compulsion. We participate with the employees so they feel they are part of decision making,” says Jacoby.
The year 2008 was classed as the foundation year, training all employees from the top down; 2009 was the deployment year, when projects were introduced; and 2010 is focusing on the supply chain and standard working. Lean concepts like 5S, TPM (total productive maintenance) and the “visual factory” were explained in ways that people could understand. “There’s not much point in using Japanese terms here in Virginia,” Jacoby says. “I explain 5S by telling the employees that it’s like what happens in a well-run kitchen: you organize your tools so the ones you use every day are ready at hand, and the ones you use on special occasions are packed away somewhere. ‘Standard work’ is no more than the recipes your mother uses, and kitchen cleaning is not for guests but for hygiene. We keep our areas clean because it helps us function better; looking good is just a byproduct.”
In the first year Jacoby encouraged all his managers to apply 5S in their offices. “We multi-task, so we change over a lot. If we’re organized then our changeovers are faster, and that’s really the essence of reducing cycle time and of successful manufacturing.” He didn’t want to hear managers saying they were behind the transformation, he adds. Like good military officers, he expected them to lead from the front.
IT was harnessed to drive the transformation. An entire component line was changed from MRP planning to demand pull—a touchscreen virtual kanban system was devised so that when a location became depleted, an icon would change from green to yellow or red and alert the machining line. Another IT-supported project resulted in the process of closing the books coming down from five days to something close to a same-day operation.
But lean transformation means nothing unless you can measure the result. “We had to have deployable and scalable metrics,” says Jacoby. The first metric he chose was safety. “The Overall Incident Rate is an OSHA quotient of recordable injuries [lost-time injuries or injuries requiring medical treatment] over increments of 10 man-years. We chose safety because I’ve always thought safety was a leading indicator and a good metric. If your processes are designed properly, your workplaces aren’t cluttered, your operators are trained and your machinery is running well, then you will be safe.”
Next came quality. The metric chosen here was First Pass Yield (FPY). “We defined that very strictly,” says Jacoby. “It has to go through first time, as designed, as advertised and with no stops. Again, it is deployable and scalable. I can look at FPY companywide or in a specific operation.” Quality was followed by productivity, where inventory turnover was put under scrutiny but adapted to the shop floor. “We used the ratio of the number of units scheduled each day in a given area to how much inventory was available,” he explains. “We wanted to keep that as close to 1 to 1 as possible.”
Finally, Overall Equipment Effectiveness was measured. “OEE is really just productivity but with a little more detail. It looks at efficiency, and it starts to look at interruptions, even planned interruptions like changeovers and periodic maintenance or tool changing, and sets targets for these.”
The metrics were expected to show results, but the actual gains even took Jacoby and his team by surprise. “In the first quarter of this year our safety performance had improved by 54 percent, our FPY had improved 30 percent, and our OEE was up 36 percent. In the first quarter of this year we produced almost double what we did last year, and our working capital has remained essentially unchanged.”
Continuous improvement is just that, so when 2011 is called the year of perfection, it just means the year when the pursuit of perfection becomes possible. And that can’t be done in isolation. “My vision is that all the businesses in a value chain need to work together to reduce the aggregate working capital needed to produce a product,” says Jacoby. He is working at both ends of the supply chain to achieve this.www.bristolcompressors.com
