Johnson Controls Gives the OK to Empower Workers

It was the last year of the 1980s, Vicki Davis walked into the stocky, blocky YORK International HVAC factory to start work as a shop floor temp. And now, Davis, who has blossomed from painting sheet metal and bending copper coil to managing the entire plant. Davis earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree while working her way up to plant manager, a role she has held since 2014.

The plant still uses temp-to-permanent hiring and has 1,200 employees total, nearly 700 involved in manufacturing. Those workers are all grouped into 20-member High-Performance Teams (HPTs), who meet weekly in large conference rooms to discuss problems and recommend solutions.

“The idea of the HPT is to empower people to make changes, to not just rely on upper management and supervisors to make those decisions and look for improvements,” Davis says. She adds it helps find missing KPIs on the line without an engineer coming in to “gut an entire area”. In one instance, a team wanted to find out why coils were getting damaged. With the whole team in one room, they discovered that it was caused by operators struggling with screw guns and solved by the previous station leaving a screw on a panel loose. CI manager Janet Box says the simple fix took five minutes to discuss and saved several thousand dollars.

   Johnson Controls International

   Norman, Okla.

   Employees: 1,200 (700 manufacturing)

   Total Square Footage: 1 million

   Primary Product: Light Commercial HVAC fabrication and assembly

   Start-up Date: 1972

   Achievements:

• 25% increase in total productivity since 2009
• Annual safety cost reduced by $1.9 million since 2009
• Zero lost time incidents since 2010
• 60% Increase in machine utilization in the last three years
• 10% energy consumption decrease from 2015
• $5 million saved due to CI in 2018
• 7% improvement in plant defect rates since 2015

The Norman team also bear down on safety, reducing annual safety costs by $1.9 million per year over the last decade and recording zero lost time incidents since 2010.

These smaller meetings also help standardize the culture and ensure everyone hears the same thing, which wasn’t always the case in cramped rooms near the noisy machinery.

And all that machinery doesn’t work nearly as good without well-oiled workers to operate them, says Raymundo Sanchez, quality & CI manager for Johnson Controls Building Technologies & Solutions. “If you don’t have the right discipline and the right culture to follow processes, you can implement whatever system you want, but you will not get the output you want,” Sanchez says.

That discipline was formalized through the corporate-wide benchmarking via the Johnson Controls Manufacturing System in 2013, and by 2015, the efficiency started to show, with the plant making half the units as in 2011, but with the same profits. They also had 300 fewer employees than in 2009. Through last year, fabrication was 52% better, in part due to automation, though that’s not the case in assembly.

“The units still get screwed in the same way and we still wire them manually, yet our assembly lines are 25% more productive than in 2011,” Davis says.

A shift to data tools also empowered the workers. Installing an MES and connecting the ERP to the fabrication lines helped provide visibility and end frustrating material “black holes” and stop time-sucking “manhunts,” Davis says. The raw aluminum and copper can end up as 1,000 different parts, so tracking is crucial to drive production orders and keep track of inventory, Davis adds.

For those that come in, Davis makes sure to tell them her story and let them know the same success can be theirs. “We will put opportunities in front of you,” she tells them. “It’s your choice to grasp them and take the initiative and learn and advance.”

Productivity and Quality Office