Company
Continental Teves, N.A is a leading supplier to the global automotive industry for quality automotive systems contributing to driver safety, comfort, and convenience. The Culpeper plant is responsible for the manufacture of total brake and chassis systems and components, and employs over 200 workers. CT is a publicly traded corporation with American headquarters in Michigan and world headquarters in Germany.

Situation
VPMEP hosted a series of Lean 101 workshops aimed at extending the awareness and understanding of lean methodologies by the leadership and employees, while addressing current production issues. One such issue was identified and confirmed by a previous value stream map. A bottleneck at the CNC machining centers became the focus as evident by excessive downtimes at changeover. Plant management wanted maximum productivity from existing operations by minimizing these set-up times at changeover.
The long-term goal stated by management was to improve plant performance to be more competitive and to become world-class. In addition, plant management recognized the need of supervisors increasingly taking the lean initiative in getting employee support.

Response
VPMEP's efforts to aid Continental Teves were two-fold. The primary objective was to reduce set-up times for bottleneck processes, while increasing plant capacity and improving flexibility by allowing quicker changeovers between products. VPMEP utilized an experienced set-up reduction team of project managers to provide on-site analysis, followed by orientation, education, and implementation of a proven methodology for successful set-up reduction initiatives. The secondary objective was to address a human resource issue of internal leadership training. Author, Emily Sterrett led a supervisory training program called Leadership Foundations: A Dialogue at the Front^SM. Sterrett facilitated the twenty four-session program aimed at supporting a culture of increasing responsibility and teamwork among supervisors and within teams. VPMEP Project Manager, Paul Zirkel adds, "Working with Continental Teves has been very rewarding. The enthusiasm of the teams plus the involvement and the support of management has nurtured an environment of improvements."

Results
Setup reduction efforts paid off with:
• Increases in line and machine capacity levels by almost 20,000 more parts per year
• Increase in sales capacity by $367,000
• Labor reductions costs of $44,000
• Decrease in cycle times contributed to improvements in on-time deliveries.

The Leadership Foundations program was found to be a good complement to the lean manufacturing training. Improvements were noticed in employee morale, supervisors’ relationships with direct reports, problem solving amongst teams, and trust between management and employees.

Testimonial
"Continental Teves - Culpeper began its Lean Manufacturing journey about two years ago and has been using the services of VPMEP to help facilitate us along that path. To date we have trained 80% of our workforce in Lean 101. We have also trained teams in Value Stream Mapping, Mistake Proofing, Leadership Foundations and Set-up Reduction. The team that worked on reducing the changeover time on CNC machines was made up of associates across all three shifts and had team members from Engineering, Quality and Manufacturing. These types of projects are helping the plant maintain its competitiveness as well as building a workforce that looks for waste elimination and quality improvements."
-Steve Sautel, EBS Manufacturing Manager

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