Ping Golf’s lean journey began with a seemingly unreachable goal: to continue producing the highest quality golf clubs in the industry, while building and shipping these custom fit clubs within 48 hours of receipt of order. It was certainly a formidable goal, one that might just take a miracle to accomplish.

For more than 40 years Phoenix-based Ping Golf has hand produced custom fit golf clubs that precisely match the desires of the individual golfer, with a manufacturing process that typically took from 10 to 14 days from customer order to shipment. Remarkably, after adopting a variety of innovative Lean concepts and practices, Ping met its target, reducing the time in most cases down to 48 hours or less - with significant improvement in product quality. So what had Ping done to alter its manufacturing process and how had they learned about it?

In the final analysis, it wasn’t only about implementing more efficient production processes, it also meant changing the way the company viewed and maintained its manufacturing equipment and worked with machine operators. And much of that know-how came as the result of Ping’s leaders attending and later hosting what are known as Maintenance Miracle training events sponsored by Productivity Inc.

Total Productive Maintenance

Productivity’s Maintenance Miracle Kaizen Event is a proven, hands-on training program which teaches the steps necessary to involve operators in maintaining their own equipment through daily inspections, lubrications, detecting abnormalities and precision checks. The result is restoration of equipment to its ideal state, establishment of basic conditions for maintaining it, and preventing equipment deterioration. When properly implemented, this “Autonomous Maintenance” conservatively eliminates the causes of 40-60% of unplanned downtime, freeing skilled trades for more specialized activities, like major overhauls, upgrades, predictive programs and new equipment planning and design.

The Beginning of Ping’s Lean Journey

Ping’s initial foray into Lean methodologies began in new product development (NPD), which led to the elimination of non-value added activities in the NPD process and helped compress “product time to market” from 24 months to only nine.

The next major focus was the factory floor with the adoption of cellular manufacturing. This cellular flow approach gave Ping the ability to complete any style club within a single work area and track the flow out of each cell, while quickly identifying and resolving potential problems. Cellular flow has enabled Ping to move towards one-piece flow rather than the more wasteful and time consuming batch production process, dramatically compressing lead times, increasing flexibility, increasing available floor space and significantly reducing inventory.

“Lean has increased the velocity of materials and information that flow through our processes, which in turn has improved our ability to respond to our customers,” says Anthony Lipari, Ping’s Director of Lean Enterprise. “It has truly provided us with a significant competitive advantage.”

The Miracle is in the Maintenance

Even before attending Productivity’s Maintenance Miracle event Ping understood the need for launching improvements in equipment maintenance, especially given the tremendous demand put on the equipment with the newly compressed production time frame. But once Ping officials attended the Productivity session, they recognized just how significant Total Productive Maintenance would be. During the 3½ day workshop, held on site at Rockline Industries, another Productivity client and an industry leader in the manufacture of innovative, high-quality, converted paper products, Ping learned how Autonomous Maintenance supported lean manufacturing and how it maximizes equipment effectiveness.

“In less than four days we had a terrific understanding of the techniques and skills necessary to begin an autonomous maintenance effort in our own facility,” says Ken Kays, Facilities Manager at Ping. “We learned that machine breakdowns are preventable through proper maintenance and through teamwork between engineering, maintenance and manufacturing, with strong support from management. It was obvious that TPM was going to be critical to the success of our Lean implementation.”

Recognizing the value of a Maintenance Miracle, Ping asked Productivity if it could host its own MM event. Productivity worked closely with the company during Ping’s Maintenance Miracle event and immediately Ping began viewing their equipment and machine operators through TPM eyes. The event, which combines classroom training with hands-on implementation and includes attendees from other companies learning and working alongside Ping employees, highlighted the significant accomplishments that could be achieved with teamwork. Divided into work teams and assigned to specific equipment on the facility floor, attendees took the concepts they learned in the classroom and started to put them into action. “The program teaches a simple approach to equipment restoration that is summed up as clean to inspect, inspect to detect, detect to correct” says Ellis New, Senior Management Consultant at Productivity. “Over the course of the program, the teams will go over the entire piece of equipment cleaning, documenting, and looking for abnormalities. Abnormalities will be tagged for correction by the improvement team or the maintenance department. As part of the process the teams are also looking for ways to improve the equipment, making it easier for it to be maintained in the future” reports New. Attendees fed off of each other’s ideas, as the hands-on sessions generated improvement suggestions and non-stop questions, many of which had never been asked before about seemingly commonplace maintenance procedures. Productivity helped pinpoint a few “show stoppers,” potential safety or other problems that could have caused an unscheduled manufacturing stoppage within an upcoming 30-day period. The session also confirmed that operator involvement is key and helped the maintenance staff understand and appreciate the concept of teamwork even more.

Ping’s golf club serialization process saw unscheduled downtime reduced from once-a- day to once every 3-4 weeks as result of the collaborative effort between engineering, maintenance, and operators to solve the inherent problems in the process and equipment. And the team expects further improvement, with zero unscheduled down time being the goal.

“The Maintenance Miracle workshops at both Rockline and our own facility were first rate,” continues Ken Kays. “These are people who obviously have a wealth of hands-on knowledge and experience. We gained a great deal of insight from the event and are genuinely looking forward to hosting another workshop soon.”

Successful implementation of Lean is not possible absent reliable equipment. And, understanding that equipment maintenance is not solely the responsibility of the maintenance staff is critical to achieving and sustaining equipment reliability.

If you have a seemingly unreachable production goal reaching it may just require a miracle -- A Maintenance Miracle. ◊