PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

Make Work Cells

Work for You
by Richard J. Schonberger

ispersion of productive processes among

geographically separated shops or departments once was standard practice.
That mode of operations creates a mishmash of
flow pathsfrom any of five presses in the press
shop to any of five welders in welding, for example. That simple case yields 25 possible routings,
each loaded with its own set of potential quality
problems. Those problems and their root causes
hide among the large between-shop inventories
and the sheer number of flow pathways. And as
various shop-to-shop delays expansively stretch
out total flow times, true causes of variations and

In 50 Words
Or Less
Ordinary production processes allow for a large
number of defects.
Making the switch to work cells can increase
quality assurance by decreasing the number of
interacting variables in a process.

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nonconformities become contaminated by the large

numbers of variables that stack up over time.
Cellular organization and layout create compact,
highly focused work environments that release a
host of benefits, including increased quality. A work
cell is a grouping of manual or machine processes
that can produce a complete item or family of items.
Cellular work stations are placed close enough
together to squeeze out nearly all buffer inventories.
No stockrooms loaded with potential defects intervene. Since products keep moving with little rest
from process to process, misfits and nonconformities
show up quickly while the trail is fresh. Identifying
and rectifying root causes are much easier.
Quality related benefits of cellular processing are
summarized in Table 1. The first two benefits concern variation and capability. Cells improve product uniformity because minimal delays expose
nonconformities before they can do much damage.
Cells lower throughput time variation by keeping
work moving with minimal queues and therefore
minimal queue time delays. That puts a clamp on
high-side variation.
A cell reduces process and method variation,
because one process delay or failure quickly halts
others; that plays up the need for well-characterized processes and well-defined methods with
well-trained, certified operators. By the same token,
low tolerance in the cellular mode for delays and

failures punctuates the need to upgrade process

capability and reliability and to keep processes in
tiptop shape by employing a system such as total
preventive maintenance.
The third and fourth benefits in Table 1 deal
with root cause containment. Cellular processing
can attack and rectify ripple-effect problems that
accumulate with processing delays. This effort is
enhanced by the tendency for cells to pull together
multifunctional minds. In labor intensive cells
such as assembly-test-pack, best practice is to
cross-train everyone and move engineers, technicians or other specialists close to the cells they
support. With operatives cross-trained and jobrotated, and with expertise close at hand, root
causes get suffocating attention.
The fifth benefit in Table 1 is documentation.
Moving productive processes out of shops and into
cells cuts out assorted documentation for scheduling, dispatching, labor and scrap reporting, pick
lists, move tickets, costing and lot inspections
and the potential errors that go with such administrative processing.

TABLE 1

Firestone and the Ford Explorer

One example of how shifting from standard production process to work cells can increase quality
assurance involves a quality issue that became big
news in 2000: the rollover deaths, tire recalls, lawsuits and recriminations involving Ford Explorers
equipped with Firestone tires. Based on an experience I had with Firestone manufacturing years earlier, I could not help but think cellular manufacturing might have saved the day. It was 1984, and I
was scheduled to conduct a seminar at a Firestone
radial tire plant in Albany, GA. The following book
excerpt tells my tale:1
I had been invited to conduct a one-day seminar for 56 managers on a Saturday in June. It was
a typical batch and queue factory, in which quality problems are mostly invisible to the workforce.
Upon my arrival on Friday, I was given a thorough tour, which provided ammunition for devising a cellular plan for most of the tire making
processes. (Tire making is discrete production,
which is fed by batch production of the rubber
itselfdone in earlier production stages in the

Quality Dividends of Cells

Quality benefit

Explanation: With cells

1. Reduce variation:
a. Product variation

Minimal interprocess waiting exposes nonconformities that can be rectified before they accumulate.

b. Time variation

Limited inventory accumulations put upper limits on process times, thereby reducing throughput time variation.

c. Process/method variation

Closely linked processes leave little latitude for time variation and press for well-defined processes and
methods and operator certification.

2. Increase process capability

Intolerance for process failures and downtime presses for high levels of process maintenance with
upgraded capability and reliability.

3. Identify root causes

Minimal-delay processing raises chances of catching nonconformities at the next process while the audit
trail is fresh and root cause possibilities few.

4. Attack/rectify root causes

Intolerance for process failures encourages multifunctional, experienced and expert people to be ready for fact
based problem solving.

5. Ensure documentation validity

Intolerance for failures presses for highly relevant and accurate process documentation; also, much reduced
flow distances, throughput times and organizational entities, along with the elimination of stock rooms and
overall process simplicity, greatly reduce administrative documentation and attendant processing mistakes.

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PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

same plant.) I found the plant built tires in four

steps, also known as departments or shops: first
stage, third stage, press cure and final finish. About
20 first-stage machines produced carcasses that
went into racks holding, typically, 12,000 units.
From there, 40 third-stage machines converted carcasses to green tires, which filled racks awaiting
next processing in 200 press cure machines. Those
racks held 10,000 to 12,000 green tires.
For someone like myselfpredisposed to see
manufacturing through just in time (JIT) and total
quality eyes12,000 carcasses and 10,000 to
12,000 green tires were a fantastic opportunity for
improvement. My Saturday presentation included sketches on acetate of conversion to multiple
cells. For good balance, each would have two
first-stage machines feeding one second-stage
machine, feeding four press cure machines, feeding one final finish station.
Plant manager Dick Clarke and his staff were
enthused and bent on implementing the idea. Did
it actually get implemented? It did not. Contrary
to what Clarke wanted to do, corporate pumped
in some $20 million for automation, then shuttered
the plant a year after I visited, idling around 2,000
people. [Finally, this new century is bringing forth
the cellular mode of building tires. Most tire makers are experimenting with small plant designs
made up of compact cells, plus new process linking equipment that largely avoids fork trucking in
and out of storage racks.2]
Whether the cellular plan would have saved
the plant from extinction is not the reason for this
discussion. Rather it is this: Work cells give operators, supervisors, technicians and engineers
whole process visibility and reveal quality causes
while trails are still fresh. By rejecting the cellular
formula, this and many other plants in the industry seem to have set themselves up for the kind of
debacle Bridgestone/Firestone experienced with
its radial tires 15 years later.

The lesson here is clear, and it applies not only to

manufacturing but to services, too. Department-todepartment flows to approve loan applications,
perform order entry or process invoices have the
same characteristics.

Cells at Microsoft
And Hallmark Cards
A service industry example of the benefits of
cells took place at Microsoft around 1991. At that
time, Microsoft was buying about 2,000 personal
computers a month because its many software

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products under development had to be tested on

every brand of PC.
Despite that volume, the company had not been
taking advantage of quantity discounts because it
took too long for accounts payable to receive and
process the paperwork. The processing steps involved buyers in one building, receiving in another
building miles away and accounts payable in yet
another distant building. The responsibilities of
receiving included several steps, ending with delivery and installation of the PC for the software group
that ordered it.
The solution, worked out in a breakout session
at an off-site seminar, was a cell dedicated to PC
acquisition and processing. A PC buyer and an
accounts payable person were simply moved to the
receiving building, where they became the PC
acquisition cell team. The quantity discount issue
may have been sufficient reason to go cellular, but
the trump card was the likelihood a co-located cell
team would be face to face with root causes of processing errorsthe quality dividend, which was a
main topic of the seminar.
A similar situation occurred at Hallmark Cards in
the 1980s. Processing errors were acute, and the main
cause, as at Microsoft, was geography. Producing a
new greeting card took two years because designs
bounced from building to building at Hallmarks
Kansas City, KS, home complex. A cards multiple
digit stock number had to be entered 13 times on 16
documents. Getting a digit entered wrong, a high
probability, could result in a store receiving
Valentines Day cards for Mothers Day.
Key members of the planning team included
Gray McMonigle, group vice president of operations; J.D. Goodwin, vice president of manufacturing; Wayne Herran, vice president of graphic arts;
Dennis Hobbs, vice president of order distribution;
and Soma Coulibaly, director of industrial engineering. They selected Hallmarks popular Shoebox line
of cards as the first project. Instead of housing artists
in one building, verse writers in another and production in a third, the whole Shoebox team moved
into a single building. The artists and writers shared
a single floor, with production below.
Stock number entries fell from 13 to one, and the
number of documents fell from 16 to five, wiping
out most of the chances for miscoding a stock number (see Table 2). Shoeboxs time to market fell to

about three months. Placing the three departments

in one building yielded an overly large cell, but it
was still a move in the quick response, root cause
revealing direction.

Bad Medicine
Hidden root causes and their much delayed consequences are bad business when they involve PC
acquisition or greeting cards. They can also be bad
medicine when they involve the production of medical devices. Cellular assembly of medical products
creates clear responsibility chains and clean, simple
audit trails. However, medical device production
typically goes from gang to gang, resulting in a confusion of process flow paths.
Consider the production of IV bags, which I
observed at Baxter Internationals North Cove
plant near Asheville, NC. The process starts with
an extruder that forms the bags. Extruded bags
drop onto a moving conveyor belt where one
gangassemblers positioned on either side of the
beltattaches components such as valves and
plugs, and another gang down the line installs
more components, including tubing. Other gangs
further along perform testing, then packaging.
If, for example, a bag is found to have an incorrectly installed valve at the testing stage, attempts to
trace it back to the responsible assembler would run
into finger pointing among the assembly gang. The
problem begs for breaking up the gangs and reorganizing them into cell teams, each with the same
process steps. In that mode, the extruder deals out
bags to each cell team, and from then on, processing
goes from hand to hand within each cell. The first
cell member installs plugs, the next one installs the
valves and so on, creating a one-to-one responsibility chain and audit trail.
The top panel of Figure 1 illustrates the conventional gang to gang way of producing IV bags, and
the lower panel illustrates the cellular alternative.
In each of the three cells, processing is done person
to persontheres no need for a conveyor belt
here. Ideally, each of the cells would have its own
small extruder. But costs rule the day, so the single,
large extruder is used to feed all three of the assemble-test-package cells.
Usually, a cell is U-shaped, serpentine or L-shaped,
as shown here. These configurations, unlike linear
flow lines, put cell team members in close quarters,

Card Design, From Dispersed

To Clustered Operations

TABLE 2

Dispersed

Clustered

Number of documents requiring

stock number entry

16

Number of stock number entries

13

2 years

3 months

Time to market

where its easier for them to communicate, learn

each others jobs, trade jobs and quickly react as a
team to solve any quality issue or process problem.3
Medical device manufacturers must adhere to
strict regulatory requirements, including extensive
documentation, to permit traceback when there is a
problem. The effectiveness of all the record keeping
is badly compromised in gang-to-gang processing,
since root causes are easily hidden among the crisscrossing flows. It is a travesty that the regulations
fail to require the clarity of traceback that comes
with the cellular mode.

Virtual Cells
The benefits of introducing a cellular workflow
are applicable across the boardnot just in relatively simple cases of labor intensive assembly through
packaging. The majority of medical devices, pharmaceuticals and food products involve departmentto-department flow patterns in which multiple

IV Bag Production:
Gang-to-Gang vs. Cellular

FIGURE 1

Extruder

Assembly
gang 1

Assembly
gang 2

Testers

Packaging

Extruder

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PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

productive units in a feeder department can go to

any of multiple units in the next department. While
breaking up the departments and moving the different kinds of equipment into several physical cells
can be technologically nonfeasible or prohibitively
expensive, all is not lost. Virtual cells to the rescue.
Returning to the Firestone tire plant, movement
of equipment to form cells would not have been all
that expensiveprobably a small fraction of the $20
million worth of automation that went down the
drain. In other cases, machines are monumental,
and moving them to form physical cells is extremely expensive. In these situations, virtual cells can
help unleash some of the benefits of physical cells.
Take, for example, the Cometarsa integrated steel
mill I toured before giving a seminar at the plant in
Campana, Argentina. One building houses the melt
shop (or department), consisting of a number of
melt furnaces. From there, the melt goes to a nearby
building for casting on any of several continuous
casting lines; then it moves to another building for
downsizing on any of several rolling mills. All the
equipment is massive; it stays put. The process
flow, however, need not go from any of the melt
furnaces to any of the continuous casters to any of
the rolling mills. The virtual cell concept designates
single, parallel flow paths, with no crossovers
(alternate flows) allowable except in special cases.
During my afternoon seminar, I had been
explaining the virtual cell concept, remarking that
it probably would not apply at your company.
The engineers in the audience were quick to correct

FIGURE 2

Coping With Process-to-Process

(Shop-to-Shop) Variation

Shop-to-shop:
192 value
adding steps;
traceback
impossible

One-to-one
flows: three
value adding
steps per
process flow;
clear traceback

62

Melt

Cast
1
2
3
4

Process/
team
A team
B team
C team
D team

I APRIL 2004 I www.asq.org

Mill
1
2
3
4

Melt
A
B
C
D

1
2
3
4

Continuous
cast
A
B
C
D

Rolling
mill
A
B
C
D

me, pointing out what I should have noted on my

tour through the facilities that morning: multiple
melt furnaces in one building, multiple continuous
casters in the next one and multiple rolling mills in
a third. So why couldnt they designate equipment
for one-to-one flows? Touch.
Figure 2 demonstrates the conversion to virtual
cells, assuming each of the three buildings contains
four of each type of equipment. The top panel
shows the profusion of shop-to-shop flow paths.
They add up to 192count emso many that
traceback is virtually impossible. In that mode,
there is kinship among the operators in each building, but no kinship or teamwork horizontally along
the flow paths.
The lower panel specifies straight flows with no
alternate paths. Instead, virtual cell teams form
along each of the four flow paths. Team A includes
the operator of melt furnace A, the operator of continuous caster A and the operator of rolling mill A.
Their joint responsibility is for continuous improvement across the total A flow path. The same is true
for the B, C and D teams.
Though their machines are geographically separated, the teammates meet frequently to attack
variation, nonconformities, wastes and delays.
They define problems, collect and analyze data,
call in expert assistance as needed, isolate causes
and solve problems. For each cell team, any dip in
performance stands out, and tracing it to its source
involves only that teams facilities and methods.
If a days production of steel pipe fails porosity
tests, whats the cause? In shop-to-shop production, no amount of statistical analysis is likely to
determine the causethere are simply too many
variables. However, the number of variables
plunges when pipe making is channeled through
four virtual cells. Instead of searching galaxies for
causes, you just have to search a few planets.

Cashing the Dividend

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, planeloads of
Western manufacturing people went to Japan on
study missions. Cellular processing, a foreign idea
at the time, was prominent among their observations. The simplicity of the idea and its fast throughput were apparent. The tendency to make use of
smaller, simpler equipment, so each cell could have
its own, was harder to understand.

Quality, per se, was far easier to appreciate,

and the quality movement, led by W. Edwards
Deming, Joseph Juran, Philip Crosby and others,
began to soar in the early 1980s. JIT, the centerpiece of the Toyota production
system that placed high emphasis on conversion to cells, took
flight as well. Since JIT was
famed for slashing throughput
times and inventories, the quality
dividend of cellular manufacturing tended to be underappreciated. That dividend makes all the
difference. It is waiting to be
cashed in wherever cellular operations are feasible.

Please
comment
If you would like to comment on this article, please post your
remarks on the Quality Progress Discussion Board at
http://www.asq.org, or e-mail them to [email protected].

REFERENCES AND NOTES

1. Richard J. Schonberger, Lets Fix It!

Overcoming the Crisis in Manufacturing,
Free Press, 2001, pp. 143-144.
2. Timothy Aeppel, Mounting
Pressure: Under Glare of Recall, Tire
Makers Are Giving New Technology a
Spin, Wall Street Journal, March 23,
2001, pp. A1 and A8.
3. Cellular layout of IV bag assembly
was discussed, but not implemented, at
North Cove. However, the plant did
adopt a recommendation for a considerably larger project in which three product focused cells were created involving
large-scale equipment, including sterilizers and packaging machines.

RICHARD J. SCHONBERGER is president of Schonberger & Associates Inc.

in Bellevue, WA. He has also worked
as a professor at the University of
Nebraska, Lincoln, and the University
of Washington, Seattle. Schonberger is
a member of ASQ and the author of
World Class Manufacturing: The
Lessons of Simplicity Applied,
Building a Chain of Customers and
Lets Fix It! Overcoming the Crisis
in Manufacturing, both published by
Free Press.

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