‘Unorthodox’ – A person’s behavior, belief or customs that are different from the generally accepted norm.
Unorthodox thinking may be the key to cleaner, leaner precision cleaning. This article investigates the assumptions behind many cleaning procedures and how a different perspective can lead to ‘greener’ manufacturing and inevitably greater profits. This report also presents two case studies where unorthodox answers produced important cost savings.
Unorthodox Thinking Can Make You Green
Success in your factory, as in life, often comes from challenging the orthodox. By questioning basic assumptions, the processes in your factory often can be improved. Just because “that’s the way we’ve always done it” doesn’t mean it is the best way today. Alternative thinking isn’t just a winning strategy — it’s the only strategy. Here are just a few examples of out-of-the-box thinking:
- A century ago astronomers did not realize galaxies were enormous, distant and separate from our own star systems until Edwin Hubble challenged conventional thinking and proved otherwise.
- 75 years ago, the concept of continental drift was a crack-pot idea of German geologist Alfred Wegener, but plate tectonics became a proven fact in the 1960s.
- Steve Jobs had a vision of a “computer for the rest of us” while the president of IBM had famously predicted in 1943 that the global demand for computers in the single digits.
- Perhaps most famously, in 1954, Ray Kroc was selling milkshake blenders to two brothers named McDonald. Realizing the power of the McDonald’s restaurant concept, Kroc turned the industry on its head with the original ‘fast food.’
These people challenged the standing assumptions and, in so doing, became leaders in their field. This style of energetic thinking can be used by any engineer, manager or company to improve what they do and the way they do it.
Innovate to Survive
This emphasis on the unorthodox has a parallel in the economic term “creative destruction.” The famous economist Joseph Schumpeter described creative destruction as the heart of economic innovation. Whatever you are doing today, he suggested, soon will be replaced by something better, faster, cheaper or more efficient, and either you make it better or your competitors will. In this sense, innovation is not risky but is essential; innovation is the key to corporate survival.
American strategy expert Gary Hemel summarizes this process nicely in his book Competing for the Future. He writes, “To discover the future it is not necessary to be a seer, but it is absolutely vital to be unorthodox.” Hamel notes that visionaries consistently seem to have an urgent need and willingness to constantly challenge long-standing legacies. Without this pressure to move forward, perhaps down a different path, the future of a company will never improve and the systems and procedures will stagnate.
Now here’s the unexpected finding: unorthodox thinking makes it easier – not harder – to take risks because unorthodox thinking exposes costly errors that have been unchallenged in the past. When engineers adapt to unorthodox thinking they will have an opportunity to move the company forward in new and unexpected directions. Unorthodox thinking gives the innovator the opportunity to rebuild and refurbish, replacing the old methods of conducting business and thereby generating new products, new markets, new processes and new profits.
Save Big By Looking Small
In today’s world it is often assumed that companies cannot grow and be profitable while protecting the environment. In other words, economic growth is inimical with environmental stewardship. This is exactly the sort of generalization that will attract the interest of an unorthodox thinker. But you can’t start with the big picture. To make big changes, companies need to look small. They need to examine the detailed nuts-and-bolts of their businesses, looking for very specific costs that can be precisely targeted.
A number of cost identification and management techniques are available, and one of the best is the so-called 4-Rs: “reduce, re-use, recycle, re-think.” Let’s take a look and see how an unorthodox thinker might use the 4-Rs to make a company more profitable:
Reduce – All stages of business consume raw materials and therefore are sources of waste and economic costs. Reducing the supplies used in any process lowers costs and prevents the generation of waste, so it goes a long way toward protecting the environment. By tightening sloppy manufacturing processes — for example, work in progress, unneeded inventory and scrap production — companies can produce instant cost savings that drop right to the bottom line. Energy is another hot-spot for reductions: reductions in energy consumption may require equipment upgrades or building improvements but usually offers a quick payback.
Reuse – There are endless opportunities to eliminate waste and re-use perfectly good resources, if companies are nimble enough to look for the opportunities. Henry Ford was famous for ordering that certain parts used in his Model T automobiles had to be delivered in wooden crates of a certain configuration. Those crates were torn apart and used as flooring in the finished automobiles.
Re-using products is environmentally prudent and a cost-saver. Starbucks coffee shops recently began posting signs suggesting customers bring their Starbucks mugs back to the shops when they are looking for a fresh coffee. This entitles those customers to a small discount, builds brand loyalty and, most importantly, saves one more paper cup from going into the bin.
Recycle – Recycling transforms materials that would otherwise become waste into valuable resources. Throwing materials into the waste bin is an environmental dead-end; those resources are lost forever. However, it is possible to recycle production materials so that the resources – material, energy, transportation and packaging – incorporated in those materials are reclaimed.
My own company practices this policy religiously. MicroCare® buys and fills aerosol cans by the hundreds of thousands. Simply as a matter of course, some of those aerosol cans are not suitable for use; perhaps they were dented in transit, or the paint was scratched or the can was dropped on the floor. In years past, those cans were binned and their cost written off. Today, those cans are collected and sold as scrap metal. They are returned into the economy while generating a tidy revenue stream for MicroCare. It was a radical idea at the time but is simply part of our normal business practice today. Every company has opportunities to recycle materials.
Re-think – Although the “R”s listed above are certainly helpful and ‘green’, the most powerful by far is ‘re-think’. The other three “R”s seek ways to fine-tune current processes, but with “Re-think” we begin to even question the process itself. It’s good to challenge the conventional wisdom. Don’t assume that just because something is being done a certain way that it is the right way, or the only way or even the best way. Conditions change, technologies evolve, opportunities arise; but factories have an inertia that keeps them unchanging.
You, the reader of this article, is the key to this change. Knowledge is power so re-educating your staff to re-think their processes can only be a benefit. Let’s look at two excellent examples of re-thinking.
Case Study #1 — Metal Finishing in Asia
MicroCare has a customer in the Asian region making small but very precise metal components. Water cleaning was their historical method of cleaning for more than two decades. Their equipment was getting old and needed replacement, which created an opportunity to re-think their processes.
There were several problems with their current cleaning methods. Water cleaning was relatively slow, and used two large machines which wasted factory floor space. The machines were noisy, labor intensive and had very high energy costs. The systems used water, which was relatively expensive in this particular city, as well as large quantities of an expensive detergent. Waste water treatment also was becoming much more expensive. Perhaps most critically, water and residues often damaged the components so drying was extremely complex and error-prone. Rust on the parts caused a very high scrap rate.
Company headquarters strongly recommended replacing the old aqueous cleaning equipment with new aqueous cleaning equipment, but far-sighted engineers predicted this would simply lock the company into the same procedures, costs and problems they always had.
That company now plans to switch to cleaning with nonflammable solvents, using an off-the-shelf closed-cycle vapour degreaser. This required them to go against the advice of their HQ which claimed the cost of the cleaning fluids is unaffordable. There’s no doubt that the cost of the new fluids is than the cost of water — the company expects to use approximately US$10,000 of solvent per month, which is hardly cheap. But solvent cleaning avoids all the hidden, indirect costs of water cleaning. By eliminating water cleaning, all sorts of savings become possible: the cost of the equipment drops approximately 50%, the waste treatment expenses drop 98%, electrical costs drop 39%, labour costs drop 69%, floor space requirements drop 80%, and scrap rates drop 75%. These are enormous savings.
The company selected MicroCare SDG precision metal cleaning fluid, a very aggressive nonflammable material with excellent degreasing capabilities. The solvent is nonflammable, has no aroma, very low surface tension and very low viscosity, so the solvent is able to wet and clean the parts. With a boiling point of around 40 degrees Celsius, this means the parts come out of the machine clean, dry and at room temperature.
The net result is an 80-95% reduction in per-part cleaning costs, a huge savings on a company producing very high volumes. This is ‘re-thinking’ at its best.
Case Study #2 — Anodizing in the USA
Anomatic Corp. in central Ohio is anodizing nearly a billion parts a year, mainly for the cosmetic industry. The factory spreads over 15,000 square meters and consists of eight anodizing lines. Each line processes as many as a half million parts (depending on geometry) in an eight-hour shift.
The primary cleaning operations at Anomatic were an aqueous cleaning system using synthetic detergents and deionized water. The three big aqueous cleaners had been in place for decades. Because of their large footprint, their energy consumption and their water usage, Anomatic decided to replace them. Near the beginning of 2010, the company installed the first of a custom-designed, closed-cycle vapour degreaser. With modern, new solvents and tight new equipment that recaptures (minimizing solvent costs) the company has significantly improved throughput while saving floor space and reducing its carbon footprint. The cleaning system has increased productivity by about 30% and uses only 10% of the energy of the old systems.
The unexpected benefit of this change is the ability to recover and re-use the stamping oils from the parts. The stamping oils on the parts is extracted from the new cleaning system and, after filtration, the oil goes directly back to the stamping presses — a huge cost-saving. Their new oil recovery module was designed with the help of MicroCare and DuPont®, pioneering a new design that nobody had used before but that has worked very well for Anomatic. Again, this is unorthodox re-thinking that gave Anomatic an enormous competitive advantage.
In terms of the solvent selected, Anomatic wanted a very aggressive cleaner to ensure the fluid had sufficient muscle to dissolve the oils. The MicroCare HDS fluid is a nonflammable cleaner with more than enough muscle to do the job.
The new cleaning systems deliver reduced consumables consumption, higher throughput, significant energy savings, quality improvements, and the recycling of the machining oils, all on a smaller footprint. Since the system also reduced Anomatic’s carbon footprint, it proves that a company can be ‘green’ while remaining highly competitive and offers Anomatic a handsome new advantage to pitch to its customers.
Thinking just that little bit differently to your competitors, and testing your skill in unorthodox thinking, can lead to greater profits as this article has proved.
Its Time to Eat Your Lunch
It’s just human nature — we all like to stick to what we know and not push the boundaries. But this way of thinking is not the best choice in business. Follow the 4-Rs and look for ways to save time and money to help your company’s future. MicroCare has helped many companies to change their way of thinking and adapt to new cleaning processes. These forward-thinking ideas and processes have helped to save time and money for businesses world-wide.
