New Lean Method Developed for Oilfield Equipment Manufacturing
In a preview to a talk to be given at SME’s HOUSTEX conference, Schlumberger manager Franck Vermet shares the concept of Adaptive Lean in this interview with Energy Manufacturing.
Franck Vermet, Testing and Subsea Manufacturing Manager for Schlumberger, based in Rosharon, TX, took time to share with Energy Manufacturing insights that helped his company greatly improve its efficiency in developing oilfield testing equipment.
Simply applying classic lean did not address all their challenges. They needed to try something different, and found the results they needed for drastic improvement in their backlog of oilfield test equipment manufacturing he manages for the company.
Energy Manufacturing: Can you explain why you felt you needed to create a new version of Lean that you call Adaptive Lean?
Franck Vermet: Lean principles were founded in the automotive industry, and deeply rooted in World War II TWI training program. Lean is designed for a high volume, low mix industry. However, in Oil and Gas we are the very opposite of that, a low volume, high mix industry.
At the same time, many companies struggle to implement lean. There is data from a survey conducted in 2007 by Industry Week that showed 74% of respondents had made little or no progress in their lean implementations, 24% made significant progress, and only 2% achieved world class improvement.
On the surface, lean facilities look very nice—but how you link that with actual performance is difficult to ascertain. Also, lean programs are difficult to sustain over time. All these factors contributed to our development.
EM: What was the founding principle you started with?
Vermet: Sometimes the simplest methods are the best. For example, people come to work in the morning to do a good job. But I think many are not happy at work. You would wish that workers feel and are fully empowered, but I have not observed this often. We felt this was a key element in our development.
EM: Can you describe briefly how you converted this principle into the Adaptive Lean system?
Vermet: The provocative message I would like to get across is that the practical solution is to create happy employees. We have an Adaptive Lean Framework that I will discuss in detail at HOUSTEX. It starts with creating organizational energy—defining purpose, beliefs and leadership principles.
When you have organizational energy, only then can you structure processes and stabilize them. Once they are stable, you can begin improving them, using a variety of techniques that are familiar to most, such as reactive and proactive feedback loops.
After that, implementing solutions is the next key step, and ties back to employee empowerment. You can take the theoretical way—open a lean book and take out all the standard solutions and push those solutions to people. Or, you can do the practical thing and develop happy employees. Empowered employees will pull practical solutions from the theoretical tools available, and they will implement those solutions by themselves.
Happy employees will develop their own solutions, which will create happy customers and happy stakeholders.
EM: What did you use to measure progress?
Vermet: We used weeks of orders on backlog. We started with about a year’s worth of backlog and reduced that to one week of backlog during an 18 month improvement program.
Note from Editors: Franck Vermet is scheduled to give his talk, with Mark Warren from Tesla2, at 2:00 PM on Wednesday, February 27 at HOUSTEX 2013.