Karl Walinskas is vice president of the Engineered Material Handling Solutions division at O.A. Newton, a Delaware-based firm that specializes in delivering smarter material handling solutions for manufacturers in the plastics, composites, rubber, food and other powder-challenged industries. He is a former trainer in lean manufacturing techniques.

How do you explain lean manufacturing?
Lean manufacturing is just a nice name for smart engineering in all facets of the business. It starts with the lean philosophy - you want every step in the process to add value to your product, and you want to eliminate the steps that don't.

What companies are most likely to benefit from learning lean techniques?
It can be beneficial for manufacturing businesses with $5 million to $50 million in revenues, anywhere from 20 to 500 employees. These companies are often behind the curve because they don't have large teams of engineers to keep them ahead.

Some of these companies have been around since the days of Henry Ford, essentially doing the same thing year after year, then all of a sudden wondering why they're challenged and their profit margins are eroding.

When you take a closer look, you find antiquated systems, antiquated processes and people who basically spent their entire life inside the same company and don't know any different.

What's the risk to companies that resist lean techniques?
They can fall behind, and start losing market share. If they have to start laying people off, employees get confused and angry. They might think management screwed up but they don't see that it might have something to do with the fact that it takes three days for them to bend a piece of metal instead of three minutes.

Every company thinks they're different, that they have different problems, that their process is sacred. Very little of that is true. All companies make stuff, whether it's a product or a service, hardware or software; you can rip out the inefficiencies, get rid of waste, get rid of useless paperwork.

When you worked as a trainer, was it hard to convince employers and managers to make the transition to lean?
Sometimes it takes a lot of time. It's particularly difficult when you've got employees who've never worked anywhere else, who haven't seen that there might be better ways to do things. If they don't know any better, they think that everything is working fine.

Tell me what O.A. Newton does and why it adopted the lean philosophy.
Our business is moving stuff, large quantities of stuff. About 75 percent of our business is in bulk solids. When you see great big silos along the side of a plastics plant, the silos are ours, and so is the entire system that takes raw materials out of a rail car and puts them in the silo and mixes them and blends them inside the plant. We also have an irrigation division that provides systems that moves large quantities of water for farms, schools and horseracing tracks.

I brought lean from my prior life as a trainer, and we used outside consultants to help. We had the great traditions of a family-owned business but recognized that there were many things we hadn't changed in years.

What were some of the changes you were able to implement?
We streamlined and simplified the way we engineer our drawings. These improvements allow us to spend more time on engineering, and that has cut manufacturing time by 50 percent. We also figured out that it was more efficient to outsource our manufacturing -to someone who leases space on our site. Even in the offices, we've reorganized our layout, even the way we label our file folders to make them easier to find. We also got rid of the packrat stuff. We had records from 1955, just in case a customer wanted an old part. It would have been a major research project to sell a $100 item. We decided that we didn't need that business.

How are you doing so far?
We're getting there, but it's always a work in progress. You're never all the way there, because there's always something you can do better.

How are customers responding to the changes?
We supply a product to companies. We're trying to give them a better experience. We're learning that customer demand for faster, getting the same product in less time, is always there. We're making strides in delivering more rapidly by reducing wait time, queue time and process time.

Where can companies go for help in transforming to lean?
Most states have groups like the Delaware Manufacturing Extension Partnership (DEMEP). There are seven in Pennsylvania, including the Delaware Valley Industrial Resource Center (DVIRC) in the Philadelphia area.

DEMEP tells me that every dollar spent on training brings an average $50 return in savings. Can we believe that?
If the companies embrace and implement the concepts that training in lean manufacturing brings, then it's believable. However, the reality I've experienced is there's only so much you can do as a consultant and most organizations tend to lapse back into some of their old habits. When you go lean, you need a manager driving the process, an internal champion who makes sure it's going to happen.

For more information on lean manufacturing, go to www.demep.org.

To learn more about O.A. Newton, go to www.oanewton.com.

Write to Karl Walinskas at karl.walinskas@oanewton.com