The Journey Begins
How to steer your company into the Lean Manufacturing

The agricultural business is becoming more and more competitive. Pressures from North America and around the globe are making it tougher to be successful in business. Standard operations and consistent standard systems needed to be put in place. We needed to make a change.

After 2 years of careful consideration, Honey Bee Manufacturing decided to go Lean. This presentation will deal with the first year of a company’s journey towards becoming a successful lean enterprise. The presentation will identify some of the successes and learning experiences of Honey Bee’s initial plunge into lean.

Part one of the presentation will deal with educating the employees. Honey Bee is a perfect example of the importance of educating people before starting the lean journey. This initial phase has a huge impact on how successful you will be with Lean and its future implementation. Dale and Jamie will show you the dos and don’ts of this important first step.

In the second phase of the presentation the question of “How to get started?” will be answered. The presenters will educate on how Honey Bee took the basic theories of Lean and started to implement them into this rural based business. The focus of this phase will be on 5 S and how it has greatly improved the workplace while eliminating waste.

Lean thinking and value stream mapping (VSM) and its overall importance to the Lean Process at Honey Bee will be the third component of the session. Dale and Jamie will show how VSM helped us eliminate waste in some of the key processes at Honey Bee and improved Thier production by close to 100%.

Finally they will focus on some of the experiences that they have had in trying to implement continuous improvement. Without continuous improvement a company will take a step forward and 2 back. The focus will be on how to make sure you are stepping forward.

Honey Bee Manufacturing has many challenges to becoming a successful lean enterprise. The first year has shown that although the process appears to be easy, the implementation is hard work. This presentation is focused for companies who are considering becoming a lean company and to aid them at the start of their journey. This will be a completely interactive session followed by a question and answer session.

Honey Bee Manufacturing is a fully integrated manufacturing company developing and producing harvest equipment for the agricultural industry worldwide. There are over 160 people employed at Honey Bee which is recognized as an industry leader in the development of harvesting equipment for a variety of agricultural crops.

ocated in the rural farming community of Frontier, Saskatchewan – 172 km’s southwest of Swift Current and 22 km’s north of the Montana border - the company focuses on 2 main products Swather platforms and Combine Headers. These products make up a majority of the business. The plant is situated on a 35 acre site with approximately 130 000 square foot of production, assembly and office space and produces approximately 1000 tables and headers a year.

Dale Hughes, Plant Manager

Dale Hughes is the plant manager at Honey Bee Mfg. His 26 years of experience in the Agriculture industry has been a huge asset in understanding and implementing the Lean process at Honey Bee.

The first four years of Dale Hughes career were spent in design and implementation at Friggstad MFG. Following this time at Friggstad, Dale spent 16 years at Flexi-coil holding the positions of design and plant engineer as well as Technical service manager. Flexi-coil was taken over by Case New Holland (CNH) which gave Dale more exposure to some of the new models for workplace efficiency.

After 4 years at CNH Dale decided to accept the challenge of Plant Manager at Honey Bee MFG.

Jamie Pegg, Training Coordinator

Jamie Pegg came to Honey Bee MFG as a Training coordinator following a career as a Sales and Management training consultant.

t was while Jamie was training on the floor and learning the operation of the production equipment that he realized that there was a better way to accomplish this process. Jamie developed into a Leader for Lean Manufacturing implementation while coordinating these efforts with consultants.