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When
that buyer is Colgate-Palmolive, one is quite enough.
By
Mark Davis
Staff
Writer
(The
Kansas City Star, November 18, 1995)
After
seven years in business, Les Davis has
one customer for his company -- the only customer he
wants.
Focus
Packaging, Inc, which Davis and his wife jointly own,
makes soap boxes for Colgate-Palmolive Company. Each shiny
cardboard carton becomes home to a bar of Irish Spring or other
soap coming out of Colgate's plant in Kansas City, Kansas.
The
21 workers and one high-speed press at Focus turn out 18 different
cartons for Colgate. Nothing else. Focus Packaging is a focused
factory." I'll never have a plant
with more than three customers" Davis said. "You're
always sacrificing one for the other."
Davis
found the focused factory concept in a 1974 report by The
Harvard Business Review. Show a little interest,
and he'll produce a stapled photocopy.
The
report outlines a U.S. response to foreign competition. Focus
a plant on a few products, Wickham
Skinner wrote, and it will "out
produce, undersell and quickly gain competitive advantage"
over any that divides its attention.
Twenty
years later, Davis offers Focus Packaging
as
proof to Skinner's theory.
The
Kansas City, KS plant will generate between $5.5 million and $6
million in revenue this year. Business has grown enough that Focus
hired its own accountant last year and adds a print manager to the
payroll today. A third shift is being formed.
Davis
counts many advantages to serving one customer.
Crews
don't need retraining because they do the same thing, for the same
customer, all of the time. A typical large shop might run a
customer's order every two months. Meanwhile, workers have shifted
their focus to another customer's tastes and demands. "So
the guy's going through a learning curve every time you do a
job," Davis said.
The
folding and gluing machine at Focus packaging handles
only one size box, so it never has to be
reset. The press stops only to install a new roll
of the thin cardboard on which it prints.
Close
attention to Colgate's needs helped Davis wrest its
business away from his former employer, a company in Richmond, VA
for which he had been a sales manager for 15 years. |
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Jeff
Warthen (from left), Richard Williams and Dennis Mueller
work on a press at Focus Packaging, which is printing
Irish Spring soap boxes at the rate of 150,000 per hour.
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Colgate
had begun shifting all of its North American
bar soap production to Kansas City, KS. And, by Davis'
account, kept asking its Virginia supplier to consider moving
production westward.
"They'd
done that actually three years in a row," Davis said.
"It became obvious Colgate was dead serious about that."
Les
and Claudia Davis funneled their life savings into Focus
Packaging. The plant was running by June, 1988.
Today,
Focus supplies 90 percent of the soap
boxes Colgate needs, and Davis is pushing for 100
percent.
He
is also scouting for another large customer. But, said Davis,
a second customer will mean a second focused factory.
(Epilogue:
Les & Claudia Davis recently sold their company after many
years of success)
The
Focused Factory Series
Focused Factories & Lean Manufacturing
Characteristics of Focused Factories
Key Manufacturing Task
Focused Factory Example
Benefits
Plant-Within-Plant
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