When Tim Cook, president of Flotation Technologies, Inc., looked to find an organization to assist his company develop business practices and methods that would help make it more competitive and cost effective, his eyes fell on the Maine Manufacturing Extension Partnership.
A world leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of deepwater buoyancy systems using high-strength Flotec™ syntactic foam and polyurethane elastomer products, Flotation Technologies, Inc., provides products for the offshore oil, oceanographic, seismic and defense markets.
In business since 1979, the company is headquartered in Maine with sales offices in Houston and Norway.
The world’s largest manufacturer of oceanographic subsurface buoys for current meter studies and global climate change research, Flotation Technologies (www.flotec.com) also provides products for underwater robotic vehicles and offshore production and drilling.
In fact, syntactic foam manufactured by Flotation Technologies was used on the underwater vehicle used by director James Cameron when he was filming "Titanic."
"There are only five or six companies in the world that do what we do," Cook said, "and we are the oldest continuously operating company. But we have large competitors and it is difficult to compete on a cost basis alone."
"I decided our best chance is to compete on speed and quicker delivery," Cook said, "so that meant I had to reduce our lead time by speeding up the process of providing quotes and flowing the product through our plant."
That’s where the MEP project managers came in. MEP’s assessment process showed Flotation Technologies’ number one problem was throughput in the front office. "I had a very elaborate system of getting quotes out the door," Cook said, "but being busy isn’t the same thing as productive.
"I knew I needed to embrace the Time Wise Principles of Lean Manufacturing approach in my front office because I had way too many redundancies and I had a belt-and-suspenders approach."
Working with the management team and employees, Maine MEP set out to speed things up and ensure quotes were delivered faster, but just as accurately as under the old system.
An ISO-certified company, Flotation Technologies has plenty of processes in place to ensure mistakes don’t happen, but Cook is realistic enough to know "you have to balance speed versus making a mistake."
On the other hand, building quotations in the computer and not having people walk paper from one desk to another, or to the other end of the office to get a signature, improved things dramatically. "We are putting out twice the number of quotes in the same amount of time," Cook said. "It has made a huge difference."
In addition, as a result of the assessment project, Flotation Technologies has been targeted to workforce investment funding from two U.S. Department of Labor training programs. That means during the next several months, the company will receive assistance in workforce development and training in such areas as operations, sales and marketing, and engineering.
More importantly Time Wise Value Stream Management System mapping session outcomes showed a 30 percent reduction in time for the engineering-to-sales processing cycle at Flotation Technologies.
"All of these positive outcomes will allow Flotation Technologies to better respond to its customer needs in a very competitive global market and to withstand offshore competition over the next several years," said Cook.
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