Lean Tour: Via Seating

eta consulting has collaborated with Extended Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, to deliver a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certification class since 2016. Earlier this month, eta took fourteen Green Belt professionals on a tour of Via Seating, a Reno-based maker of seating systems for the gaming, hospitality, and corporate markets.

The tour was led by Adam Cilonis, Via’s Vice President of Production and Order Management, who earned his Green Belt certification in our inaugural 2016 class. Adam conducted fifty tours last year, and this year he is on track to exceed that number.

Via’s tours are open to anyone who wants to witness Lean in operation — and to Via’s clients. Via has discovered that becoming Lean and sharing what they have learned has had a positive effect on sales, to the point that they have discontinued their advertising in trade magazines and now treat Lean as both their operations strategy and their marketing strategy. The tours are open even to competitors; this is the Lean culture, and a competitor that tours without reciprocating is unlikely to be able to develop the kind of culture that would threaten the firms it tours. Toyota helped GM set up an entire plant — NUMMI — by exactly this principle.

Via’s results, after about two years to get the implementation going and four years since:

People: Wages for production associates have increased by 81% — nearly doubled.
Process: Via builds three times the chairs with the same number of people.
Customer trust: Lead times have been drastically reduced, made predictable, and consistently met.
Pricing: While competitors raise prices by 8% annually, Via has been raising prices by 4%.
For Via: Sales have increased 2.5x.

The tour-takers shared their observations and suggestions with Via at the end of the visit. Worth noting: their observations were process-focused, while their suggestions were people-focused — which is exactly what one would expect from a Lean tour. The discipline trains the eye to see process clearly first, and to think about people in the place where they actually live, which is in the work and not in abstractions about the work.

· · ·