Stuller, Inc. Pursues Lean Manufacturing

Stuller, Inc. is recognized as a business “jewel” in Lafayette Parish and throughout Louisiana. The company was founded by Matthew G. Stuller in 1970 and was originally a wholesale findings company under the name South Central Distributors. Today, Matt Stuller is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Stuller, Inc., one of the world’s largest manufacturers and distributors of jewelry products.

From its global headquarters in Lafayette - nearly 600,000 square feet of manufacturing, logistics and administrative facilities - Stuller serves an account base of over 50,000 jewelry professionals throughout North America and the world, representing over 60,000 ship-to locations. Affiliated companies operate manufacturing facilities in Chattanooga, Tennessee and Merida, Mexico. Sales centers and buying offices are located throughout the world. Through its innovative manufacturing and distribution techniques, Stuller has become known as the premier “just in time” supplier to the North American jewelry industry.

The company is in continuous pursuit of improving their manufacturing operations while meeting the demands of their customers. Ray Weiland, the executive vice president of manufacturing at Stuller, said cross-training played a large role when the company began its manufacturing operations.

“Initially, when we started going into manufacturing, we tried training people in all elemental tasks of portions of the manufacturing process,” Weiland said. “During this same time period, we were experiencing tremendous growth. We were hiring 50-70 people a year, and eventually grew to 500 employees in manufacturing. With a group that size, you can only train operators in one element of the process. This specialization was a hindrance to quality because the employees in the manufacturing process were not seeing the end product.”

In order to keep employees informed of various operations in the manufacturing process, Stuller created a team environment so that employees could understand the customer-vendor relationship within manufacturing. Employees were put into teams based on their jobs, and were taught about the processes that occurred prior to and after their job process. They worked together to eliminate waste, did line balancing utilizing time and motion studies, and encouraged communication and the input of ideas among teams. They were implementing principles of lean manufacturing in their processes, although many of these principles have been implemented to build inventory.

“Stuller is known for being able to deliver products to customers overnight,” Weiland said. “The customers will not accept anything less than that. Therefore, we have a pretty good queue of work in process and a depth of inventory. Most lean operations work best when there’s a customer order, which initiates an action - a pull system. We’re trying to learn more about lean to employ some of those concepts. We still need to have a good amount of inventory, but we think we can adapt many of the lean principles to our unique needs.”

In an article written by Stuller employees John C. McCloskey and Herbert Hermes for Gold Technology in the spring of 2002, they concluded that meeting the challenge of delivering a customer’s order the day after the order is made requires that inventory must be available in the finished form in order to ship immediately, which is contrary to the principles of lean manufacturing. However, by using a combination of the best of lean manufacturing and the Theory of Constraints management systems throughout the organization, customer satisfaction has improved and manufacturing cycle times have been reduced.

Currently, the company is receiving more orders for finished goods and custom work, which is driving their motivation to implement the cellular manufacturing concept of lean manufacturing.

“Our typical cycle time is 12 to 15 days,” Weiland said. “When customers would call for a custom order and we quoted them lead times, they would often look elsewhere. As the demand for finished goods and custom products has increased, we employed a pull system to get special orders through in 3 to 5 days, which we call Fast Track. We walk the order through the process so it never stops in order to get the custom order out in 3 to 5 days.”

Weiland said designing work cells and implementing cross training will help them improve the manufacturing process for finished goods and custom products.

“I look at it as an evolution,” Weiland said. “Work cells are the second evolution from the work teams we have set up... The whole idea is to get back to the way things were when we were small. We want to have operators become Goldsmiths who are cross-trained in most operations and trained in continuous improvement concepts. Basically have our operators do the job from beginning to end. We want to be more flexible, meet the requirements of the customer, and have better trained, more involved employees.”

Stuller has enlisted the services of the Manufacturing Extension Partnership of Louisiana (MEPOL) at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette to assist in value stream mapping and the design of a pilot work cell. MEPOL provides business and technical services to Louisiana manufacturing firms, with a goal of helping them increase productivity and profitability.

“When we found out that MEPOL was available to help with lean manufacturing, we jumped on it,” Weiland said. “We can use all of the help we can get, including cellular training and assistance in the layout of work cells. As we move forward, we’ll see how it works. We know we could reduce our inventory and work in process.”

In April, MEPOL held a “Principles of Lean Manufacturing” course with 18 of Stuller’s staff members with management positions. The course serves as an introduction to lean manufacturing principles and includes live simulation exercises so students can actually apply what they learn to a simulated manufacturing environment.

“I thought it was excellent,” Weiland said. “It is one of the best seminar-type courses I have ever seen. It was a wonderful way to get people to buy into lean manufacturing and get them thinking about it.”

As they move toward cross-training and cellular manufacturing, Stuller and its associates will definitely reap the benefits, Weiland said.

“The employees will become more active and involved,” he said. “They will have more variation in their jobs and will become more valuable to the company, producing higher quality at a reduced cost, which can result in promotions and increased pay. It’s a win-win situation for everybody.”