Henry Lawrence, above, works on a product design at the Wyoming factory. At left below, Richard Foster finishes fabrication on a test table, while at right, Susan Heater assists in preparation for the paint shop. On the cover is Ricky Cole working on a vibrator.

Courtesy of Vibco Vibrators Inc.

Almost everyone at Vibco Vibrators Inc., a South County company in the Wyoming section of Richmond that makes industrial vibrators, has gotten lean.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re losing weight — lean is an approach, based on the system devised by Toyota, to identify and eliminate waste.

One of the goals of lean manufacturing is to create a culture of continuous improvements, mostly initiated by the workers themselves.

“If it wasn’t for lean, we wouldn’t be able to meet the deadlines our customers expect,” said Vibco president Karl Wadensten.

Industrial vibrators have a wide variety of uses in the manufacturing, pharmaceutical, chemical, food and construction industries. Vibrators can be used to help feed parts in tracks and trays for the automotive industry, empty rail cars and trucks, assist in the screening, separation and sizing of powdered material, settle and compact products for shipping, and control the flow of material through chutes and hoppers. Vibco’s products range in size from a few inches to the size of a suitcase.

The company was founded in 1962 by Ted Wadensten, Karl’s father. It moved to Rhode Island from New Jersey in 1974. With about 65 employees, Vibco won this year’s Workforce Innovation Award from the Governor’s Workforce Board. Wadensten, along with Vibco employees, said there’s been a dramatic change in the workforce culture in the past few years.

Spearheading the effort is Paul E. Cary, whose business card reads “Lean Champion” but who prefers the Japanese word “sensei,” meaning teacher or master. Cary, former lean manufacturing consultant for the Rhode Island Manufacturing Extension Services, came to Vibco full-time in 2006.

“The culture here was much, much different then … We started out educating people about what is waste. And how to listen to the voice of the customer,” he said. “After awhile, it just becomes the way you think.”

Not everyone bought into the new ideas, at first. Mike Woodbury, machine shop supervisor, has been with Vibco for 17 years. “I had at least three reasons why anything couldn’t be done,” he said. “I was kind of like the rock that couldn’t be moved.”

Eventually, he said, he went along with the changes, mostly to show that they wouldn’t work. But they did.

Some of the improvements are large, such as a change in Vibco’s relationships with its own suppliers. Rather than getting materials every few months, Cary said, Vibco now gets them every week or so on an “as needed” basis, reducing the amount of inventory that sits around the factory floor and allowing the company to receive what it needs when it needs it.

Another significant change concerns Vibco’s sophisticated, computer-controlled machinery and lathes it uses to build its vibrator components. In the past, Woodbury said, it took two hours or more to set up the machines when it was time to change tasks. To justify that amount of downtime, Vibco would make large batches of, say, turbine gears, far more than needed.

Using lean techniques, Woodbury said, Vibco’s workers now have the turnaround time on the machines down to about 10 minutes, and Woodbury is hoping to get the time into single digits soon. That allows Vibco’s machine shop to produce only the parts that are needed.

Some of the changes, though, are small ones that might save a minute here or 30 seconds there. Jamie Harvey, a machinist, devised a bracket to keep an air hose from constantly swinging around and getting in his way. Lucy Manley, who assembles small electric vibrators, used to send parts to be tested to an employee at the other end of the plant. Now she does it herself. So as she’s testing one unit she can work on building another.

Cary said each employee receives between two and four hours of training a week, but by now employees are taking action on their own. “They don’t wait to tell someone about waste; they just go take care of it themselves,” he said.

“Empowering the employees is the key,” said Woodbury. “It’s a switch from the typical, top-down management system. The person who knows the job best is the person who’s doing the job.”

Every morning, Vibco employees start the day with a series of stretching exercises that not only loosens up workers to start the day, but provides an opportunity for people to discuss what’s going on in the plant. The stretching is part of an overall fitness program at the company — so many employees are also getting lean in the more conventional sense of the word.

Vibco employees have taken “field trips” to other companies to see how they do things, among them Cumberland Foundry, North Safety Products, Central Tools and Orange Research. Other companies, in turn, have sent their employees to Vibco.

Sometimes, Vibco workers said, outsiders see things that they don’t. Some visitors from the Rhode Island chapter of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers noticed that workers were walking back and forth to get tools out of bins, and wondered why the company just didn’t keep them stored near the machines where they were used. So Vibco moved the tools.

“A lot of companies look to going to India or China to reduce costs,” Wadensten said. “But there are a lot of things you can do to reduce costs within your four walls.”

asmith@projo.com