Success for Edstein through Green Lean program

Edstein Creative Stone is one of the largest manufacturers of stone products in NSW, providing stonework for a wide range of uses - from kitchen benchtops to masonry for landscapes and monuments. The company joined the NSW Government’s Sustainability Advantage Program in 2009 and helped set up a Manning Valley cluster of businesses in the program.

The Sustainability Advantage Program provided several benefits. It helped Edstein improve energy efficiency per benchtop from 170 kWh to 98 kWh; save $67,500 per annum by diverting 100% of potable water use from the mains supply; save $24,000 per annum by diverting 32 tonnes of stone offcuts per month from landfill; and save a further $66,000 from rework, energy efficiencies and increased productivity.

These savings ($157,000 this past financial year) enabled Edstein to remain competitive and expand the business into new regions. When the Office of Environment and Heritage offered the Green Lean program in 2013, this helped the company to further streamline processes, reduce waste, improve energy efficiency, increase throughput at lower cost and increase profitability.

Edstein CEO Nigel Ferguson said the best outcome from the Green Lean initiative has been the change in culture, stating, “The previous culture of a manager or supervisor directing operations was transformed to one where our employees owned the process and felt empowered to make decisions.”

The second major positive outcome at Edstein was also cultural. Root cause analysis of problems revealed flaws in the firm’s theories of installation issues; Edstein staff had believed customers were at fault. However, said Ferguson, “we discovered that the real causes had more to do with our own scheduling, capacity planning and lack of standard work”.

Other lean tools - eg, value stream mapping - identified bottlenecks, waste, causes of rework and how they each relate to scheduling and capacity issues. Fixing these problems not only reduced field rework, lead time and labour, but it also revealed opportunities to reduce power consumption.

“The compressor, which drives our cutting machines, is a major consumer of power,” said Ferguson. “By rescheduling shift times and machine sequencing, we can achieve a larger throughput with the same labour and machine time, but less compressor ‘on’ time. This has been a major contributing factor in us exceeding our goal of a 10% reduction in energy per benchtop unit of production.”

A major challenge for any continuous improvement project is time to implement change. Green Lean breaks the cycle of rework and troubleshooting by establishing baseline metrics, making improvements and allocating some of the time gained for further improvements.

Also vital for success was letting go of the old ‘them and us’ manufacturing culture.

“We have new buy-in from employees, which comes from positive team experiences in implementing lean tools,” said Ferguson.

“People don’t blame someone else for a problem. They fix the process by identifying, quantifying and reducing waste.

“We are all constantly seeking ways to improve processes through daily and weekly operational meetings, workplace organisation audits and the occasional brainstorming session.”

To find out how to join the Sustainability Advantage Program, visit http://environment.nsw.gov.au/sustainbus/sustainabilityadvantage.htm.