Work in Process

Jim McPherson, who today is a Continuous Improvement Leader at our GreenHouse manufacturing facility, remembers the buzz that began swirling around IMT’s success with Toyota during the mid-1990s. “IMT suddenly became that part of the company that leadership came to saying, ‘What’s going on there? How can we scale this?’” he said.

One of those leaders was Herman Miller CEO Brian Walker. At the time, Walker served as President for North American operations. “Not only was the system making the work better for our people,” Walker recalled, “but as a result of the changes, we also began producing higher quality products—and doing so more reliably, resulting in great customer outcomes and better economic returns. So in 1999, we decided to use the same methodology across all of Herman Miller.”

That’s how an idea introduced at a facility in crisis became the new standard for a global manufacturer—all within five years. Such a rapid and successful adoption of the Toyota Production System is noteworthy, according to Jeffrey Liker, Professor Emeritus in the Industrial and Operational Engineering Department at the University of Michigan and author of the book The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer.

“Toyota doesn’t have a 100 percent success rate with TSSC clients folding the process into their culture,” Liker said. “A good number of project companies peter out over time—and even among companies that do stick with TPS, few are the size of Herman Miller, and fewer still have adopted lean practices across so much of their organization.”

Further, not only had the TPS principle of Kaizen—continuous improvement—spread to all of our manufacturing facilities, we also applied it to the Toyota Production System itself. By 1998, our continuously improving version of TPS had evolved into something unique to Herman Miller. Our version of TPS became known as “HMPS,” or the Herman Miller Performance System.

“We think it’s great that Herman Miller has internalized the system and that you’ve defined it for yourselves,” said Jaime Bonini, Toyota’s Vice President of TSSC. “Your values as a company predate any work with us. You already had a deep belief in value of your employees. What we’ve done was add to that the foundation of the high-performing operations you have built today.”

Of course, the elephant in the factory with most attempts at lean manufacturing is the fear that becoming more efficient will eventually mean employing fewer workers. But our HMPS journey has actually proven that the opposite can be true. Not only has HMPS kept our US factories competitive, but it also has provided a path for the growth and development of the people who work there.

HMPS has done more than simply protect jobs. It’s created new, high-value jobs that wouldn’t exist without it. Agustin Coronado’s job is one of them.

Coronado, who joined Herman Miller in 1994, was one of the original facilitators on the Aeron Chair line. He observed how operators were straining to grab chair bases from a conveyance cart and place them on the line. A tinkerer since his childhood, Coronado worked with our model shop to devise a new method for delivering bases to the line—one that not only reduced strain, but also shaved time off the Aeron assembly process.

Other facilitators began seeking Coronado out, asking him to build similar carts for their lines. Supervisors took note and promoted him to Fabricating Technician. Today, building carts, racks, and other mechanisms to deliver parts and packaging materials more efficiently and ergonomically is his full-time job.

“HMPS pretty much teaches you to look for ways to remove the waste,” Coronado said—that means wasted effort as well as wasted time. “I do what I can to make other people’s jobs easier.”

Like Coronado, Pierre Fowler works to find ways to help our manufacturing team remove waste from their workflow. He just works further upstream. Fowler spent time working on the Aeron line in the mid-2000s, where his knack for problem-solving caught the attention of supervisors. By 2010, they assigned him to a new product line that offered plenty of problems to solve.

The Sayl Chair was set to launch, but we needed to figure out a better way to attach its elastomeric backrest to its frame. In the prototyping stage, it took two operators more than one minute to complete that step. “We couldn’t go into production like that,” Fowler said. He and his fellow operators provided valuable input as our HMPS team refined the Sayl assembly process, and soon one operator could attach the backrest in less than 15 seconds without assistance.

Recognizing the value of Fowler’s feedback, the HMPS team developed a new role—Advanced Manufacturing Lead—dedicated to keeping design-for-manufacture at the fore throughout product development. Then they hand-picked Fowler to fill it. “I didn’t even ask what it was,” Fowler remembered. “I said, ‘Sign me up.’ I had been looking for an opportunity to move up within the company.”

A life preserver in a time of crisis, a ladder to growth and opportunity: HMPS has meant a lot to Herman Miller over the last 20 years. Looking ahead to the next 20, however, the most apt metaphor might simply be a clear path forward.

As offices become less uniform, they require a wider variety of furniture. The days when a furniture company could outfit a corporate headquarters with hundreds or even thousands of the same thing? They’re gone. So, to help us meet the demands of business today, we’ve re-engaged with Toyota.

“When you look at this new type of business—high product mix, extremely high variety, low volumes—it just happens to be something Toyota is very good at,” Matt Long explained. “That’s their market in Japan; it’s smaller, but they have to offer everything. So, they’re actually back on-site teaching us how to better adjust our process for these changes.”