This past year has been an exciting year of change for IPI. Leadership recognized that we must actively focus on ways to produce our products more safely, more efficiently, with better quality, and with shortened delivery times. To accomplish this we developed and communicated to everyone in our organization across the state the Prison Industries Manufacturing System! PIMS is based off the Toyota Production System and relies heavily on standardization, daily visual metric board reviews and people involvement.
Our objectives for the implementation of PIMS are:
- To make everyone’s job safer and more efficient.
- Develop skills and teach everyone the benefits of Lean manufacturing tools.
- To become a better supplier for our customers.
Just one year into our Lean journey, we have made some outstanding progress!
- We have 32 active teams reviewing safety, quality, delivery, cost and people engagement metrics daily! As we identify opportunities, we develop visual countermeasures to openly communicate them and get the resources and leadership support they need to resolve problems.
- We have started developing standard work documentation to reduce variability and provide a base from which we can improve our processes for 77 different jobs so far!
- We have worked on office and shop organization and waste elimination with six teams by holding 5S events in their areas with more areas scheduled before September!
- And we are continuing training for everyone with eLearning modules, process improvement design, and kaizen events as we uncover issues. Developing a continuous improvement culture through the implementation of PIMS is our goal.
Want to learn more? Check out IPI's other blog posts regarding various lean events throughout IPI.