Lean Practices Deliver Growth for Kastalon, Inc.

Investment in lean training boosts gross revenues

Over the last 18 months long time polyurethane products manufacturer Kastalon, Inc. of Alsip, Illinois, has enjoyed improved product delivery times, more satisfied customers and increased sales.

Kastalon President, Bruce DeMent, credits these benefits to the results of lean manufacturing principles and practices his business adopted about 18 months ago.

“Our gross revenue has increased about 18 percent in the last year, and about half of that increase is due to new services lean manufacturing has made possible,” DeMent said.

Kastalon was started by DeMent’s father in Chicago Ridge 43 years ago as a one man operation out of his one-car garage. Today the company has 76 employees.

Known best as a designer, engineer and manufacturer of customized polyurethane products like conveyor rollers and the like for industrial applications, Kastalon recently had a mixed reputation in its markets. “We were known for quality products, but slow delivery,” DeMent said. “We knew we had to change the latter.”

DeMent said the company’s first pass at improvement was to respond to its customers’ requests that it become iso 9002-2000 certified. The challenge was that ISO certification would in effect “freeze” the company’s processes as they were. The decision was made to table ISO certification and instead streamline Kastalon’s processes first.

Kastalon, leveraging programs sponsored by norbic and the Chicago Manufacturing Center (cmc), had several managers participate in Lean courses taught by cmc specialists at Moraine Valley Community College.

Next it brought cmc lean specialists into its own facilities to instruct its supervisors, foremen and lead people about lean and the “5S” organizational philosophy -- sort, straighten, sweep, standardize and sustain.

There, the Kastalon group also participated in a “hands-on” simulation of Lean manufacturing that illustrated the value of single part lot-size manufacturing.

These lessons helped Kastalon understand the process of value stream mapping, which helps management and others review every movement involved in a business, from handling paperwork to making a product. If any action involved doesn’t add value from the customer’s perspective it is waste and should be eliminated.

“In our business, much of our work is maintenance and repair of parts that are used in our customers’ processes,” DeMent said. “When one of those components breaks down it will generally come back to us for service.

“In this operation customers value fast turn-around. Therefore, our goal in Lean implementation was to compress our delivery time. In maintenance and repair operations the delivery times we quoted were meaningless – if a customer is ‘down’ or has exhausted critical spares they want quicker service,” he added.

“When we started our evolution to Lean the satisfaction of our customers’ requested delivery date was around 20 percent. After one year of Lean discipline throughout our operations I am happy to say that level is up around 76 percent.”

Kastalon found assistance for its improvement initiatives through the Small Business Development Center (sbdc) program that norbic offers in partnership with the us Small Business Administration and the Illinois Department of Commerce & Economic Opportunity. The sbdc helped Kastalon leverage norbic’s Employer Training Incentive Program (etip), which can reimburse Illinois companies for up to 50 percent of the cost of training their employees. norbic administers the etip program on behalf of the Illinois Department of Commerce & Economic Opportunity.

In total, Kastalon utilized training grants of about $8,500 to train all of its employees -- from the corner office to the custodial department -- about Lean principles and to implement Lean practices in all of its operations.

“That money was well spent because from it we were able to make an additional investment of $90,000 in repositioning our shop facilities and in purchasing new equipment to further implement additional Lean practices,” DeMent said.

“Today,” he added, “the market knows Kastalon in a new light – now the word on the street is you not only get quality from Kastalon but now you get it fast too!”