ABSTRACT
People at Elgin Sweeper Company, Elgin, IL, literally cleaned up their act, discovered how to make employee involvement work well, and reaped the benefits of an enterprise-wide commitment to lean operations. At the start of the lean journey, most of the manufacturing operations were arranged in a typical batch process. The first lean pilot project was to create a weld cell to manufacture hydraulic tanks. The 5S (Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, company’s sweepers) have been cleaning roadways for many years. John Murphy of Elgin, IL noted the dusty, muddy condition of area roads, and invented a machine to pick up debris and collect it in a front hopper. A key element of Elgin Sweeper’s 5S program is that it was incorporated in a “blitz” format based on training received from an Association for Manufacturing Excellence 5S Blitz held at the company. The entire 5S process is accomplished in a targeted work area during a two- to-three-day focused blitz.
