Community Spotlight-

Izzy Galicia

A Lean Manufacturing expert in Tracy.

The I had the pleasure of meeting Izzy Galicia while touring the Production Technologies facility for the April issue of The Tracy Business Journal. Izzy was involved in a week of Kaizen lean manufacturing reorganization at Production Technologies and the results of their work was nothing short of astounding. It seems natural to feature Mr. Galicia and introduce his work in helping companies in the Tracy area to adopt Lean Manufacturing techniques.

   Lean manufacturing is a continuing process of evaluating the entire manufacturing process with the objective of eliminating all unnecessary processes and improving those that remain. It appears to be the unending pursuit of manufacturing perfection with the intent of reducing all forms of waste while focusing on ways to dramatically improve the value to the customer.

   It is helpful to explain the background of our featured expert in manufacturing efficiency before attempting to explain how these processes work. Isidro "Izzy" Galicia’s path toward lean manufacturing began as an assembly line employee of the New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc in Fremont, California. New United Motor Manufacturing Inc is a partnership between General Motors and Toyota. He advanced to team leader, group leader, and then became a manager on the launch team that is responsible for setting up the manufacturing of new models of cars in the plant.

   The process of bringing a new model of car into production requires the team to assemble and disassemble a new model of car several times as they strive to improve the assembly process. The team looks at every step of the assembly process to see how things can be done better, faster, and more safely. Izzy points out that quality and competitiveness is in the constant attention to details.

   Izzy learned more about lean manufacturing through his training from Toyota Motor Corporation in Osaka, Japan. The Japanese auto makers have worked very hard to develop continuous quality improvement tools.

   After ten years with NUMMI, Izzy was recruited to work for RWD Technologies. RWD Technologies specializes in helping the Big 3 Auto makers improve their manufacturing processes. This required him to travel throughout the world to help companies improve their manufacturing processes and product quality.

   One of the clients Izzy worked with was a large rail car manufacturing company. Measurements of their mean distance between failures indicated the company products averaged about 20,000 miles of operation between failures requiring repairs. After working with the company to improve the quality of their products, the mean distance between failures was raised to over 500,000 miles. This represents an improvement of about twenty-five times more use of the rail cars between equipment failures.

   Traveling around the world and working with world-class organizations can be exciting, but living in hotel rooms and learning about new cultures can become a lonely existence. After five years of working with large clients, Izzy has refocused his life toward providing lean manufacturing services to the local businesses in the Tri-Cities area of Tracy, Stockton, and Modesto. To achieve this, he has joined the consulting team at Manex, which stands for Manufacturing Excellence.

Izzy (right) chats with Carl Banks of Production Technologies during Kaizen week .

   Along the way from the NUMMI assembly plant to the world-class consulting assignments, Izzy applied the improvement process on himself. As a graduate of Chabot College in Hayward, he enrolled in the University of Phoenix in 1998 to earn his Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, and graduated in 2000.

   So what is lean manufacturing all about? The best explanation we can give is to examine the history of manufacturing to see how lean manufacturing fits into the overall picture.

   Product manufacturing was traditionally done primarily by experienced craftspeople who served an apprenticeship until the quality of their work allowed them to begin working on their own. Although large manufacturing facilities did exist prior to the twentieth century, very little manufacturing took place in these large facilities.

   Large-scale manufacturing became more popular as we transitioned into the twentieth century and adopted more mass-production techniques. The growth of large corporations generated a need for efficient manufacturing methods, which brought about the concept of Scientific Management, or Taylorism, under the leadership of Frederick Taylor.

   Scientific Management principles regarded production workers simply as extensions of manufacturing machines. Efficiency experts used time and motion studies to develop the most efficient way of making a product. The assumption was that the Scientific Management expert developed the better way to do a job and the worker had to adjust to this best process.

   Scientific Management methods shaped much of our early manufacturing while management adopted the more efficient and structured German form of organizational structure known as a bureaucratic organizational structure. This organizational structure was developed by Max Weber in Germany and was intended to only utilize people who specialize in a narrow area of expertise. The combination of these two management principles has dominated manufacturing in the United States for over a hundred years.

   Around the middle of the twentieth century, we saw the adoption of a new discipline known as the Behavioral School of management, which recognized the needs of employees. This discipline evolved out of the Hawthorn Studies, which revealed that Scientific Management principals must accommodate the needs of the workers to be effective. These human relations concepts have become more important during the last fifty years and have dominated much of today’s thinking.

   Throughout the second half of the twentieth century we also saw drastic advances in the availability of higher education in the United States. The average education of the American worker has been rising during the second half to the last century, which has helped to allow the principals of the Behavioral School to be successful.

   While the business environment in the Unites States became more focused on quarterly profits and earnings for shareholders, the Japanese were rebuilding from World War II and preparing to compete in the new global marketplace. They studied the works of many of the business experts in the United States and adapted and updated these principles to the Japanese culture in order to improve production and quality.

   The basis of these Japanese management principles include the development of tools like Quality Circles, Just In Time manufacturing, and Lean Manufacturing. Many of these fundamental principles have been illustrated or shown by Tom Peters in his series of books about Excellence.

   One problem with the evolution of business and management theories is that one system of management proves to be less effective than the latest one and companies evolve into using the new method. Many companies abandoned the older time and motion studies as the Human Behavior movement illustrated deficiencies in the Scientific Management methods. What is needed is a management method that recognizes the benefits of each theory and adopts the best parts of each.

   A quick look at the principles of Lean Manufacturing might appear to be the return of Taylorism with its efficiency experts, time and motion studies, and the forcing of people to work harder in order to raise productivity, quality, and profits. Lean Manufacturing adds an additional dimension that was missing from older concepts: the recognition that the production worker is capable of replacing the efficiency expert.

   The key to the success of the Lean Manufacturing principle is that it focuses on the stream of value to the variety of customers found in the value chain, but ultimately to the customer who will own the product. It determines what the end customer values and establishes these values as targets in the manufacturing process. It develops metrics for measuring and evaluating the success in achieving these targets, and utilizes the people who do the manufacturing to develop many of the product improvements.

   Lean Manufacturing recognizes the need for time and motion studies, but also recognizes that today’s better educated production worker is well equipped to develop many of the production methods if given effective leadership and guidance.

   Izzy does not walk into a company to tell people how to better do their job. He works with the team to use the tools of his trade to help facilitate the improvement process with the team. He helps to map the value chain as a roadmap to the team on where improvements can be made. He then works with the team to help find better ways to produce a product while always remaining focused on the customer’s measure of value for the item.

   Lean Manufacturing methodologies recognize the value added by all methods of management. It recognizes the need to study time and motion in the making of products, it recognizes the need for efficiency in inventory, it recognizes the need for increased productivity, it recognizes the human element of manufacturing, and especially recognizes the need to break old habits.

   To learn more about Izzy Galicia and the Lean Manufacturing methods available to your company, contact Izzy at: Mannex Consulting, (510) 249-1499 or e-mail him at: igalicia@mannexconsulting.com.

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