Industrial + Specialty Printing

A culture shift at VMS helped the company overcome serious challenges

By Tim Ryan

VMS’s culture has changed over the past few years. Improvements in data collection, evaluation, and classification have lead to this transformation. Employees, from managers to press operators, are all involved. Communication with employees is constant. However, it wasn’t always like this. VMS was at a crossroads in 2005. These are some of the questions the management staff needed to address: How do we reduce operating costs, improve delivery lead times, and lower reject rates? How can we get more people involved and use existing resources? VMS took some innovative approaches to answer these questions.

Production at VMS is not limited to the same parts in set quantities. Operations and systems must handle multiple parts daily, through multiple operations, and in widely varying quantities. For example, one job could be for ten pieces that are printed, embossed, treated with adhesive, and cut to shape, as compared to a 10,000-piece job that is printed and cut to size. VMS averages between 1200-1800 line items or unique parts to be shipped in a given month and processes between 25-40 jobs per day. It is challenging in time and resources to address all problems and to make sense of them, why they are occurring, and what can be done to correct and prevent the problems in the future.

Where we were
Prior to 2005 there were modest attempts to record and track internal nonconformance, and, in most cases, it was left to the quality department—specifically, the quality manager—to record and track. In many cases, insufficient time and personnel were available to address the issues, so they would go unreported. In 2005, there was some reporting to the senior management staff on a monthly basis and to all employees on a quarterly basis. Reports included the records of customer complaints, internal complaints, and the cost of the nonconformance.

As an integral part of our quality-management-system review for ISO 9000, the management team would meet once a month to review the performance of the organization. Topics in this review included financial matters, resources, customer feedback, delivery, and process performance. Further reviews were held as quarterly meetings with the entire organization. From a strategic planning perspective, little or no attention was given to quality.