Empowering Employees
Investments in training help Avicenna emerge from the recession stronger than ever.
In 2007, Avicenna Technology, Inc. was struggling to meet consumer demand. The only apparent fix for the laser welding and manufacturing company was a major— and costly—expansion. Fortunately, company leaders were presented with a second option: working with Enterprise Minnesota (then Minnesota Technology) to implement Synchronous Flow Manufacturing into Avicenna’s production system. They took it, and four years later, the company is still reaping the rewards.
Synchronous Flow Manufacturing (SFM) is a management technique that helps companies develop metrics for each step of production that help gauge quotas, and identify which areas of production need improvement. The method uses lean techniques to minimize inventory and production time, thereby increasing available cash. At Avicenna, SFM pinpointed the inspection process as a major bottleneck, and found it was causing other steps in production to run at half their normal speeds just to accommodate it. Efficiencies gained from SFM soon allowed the company to do 45 percent more business, even when three employees were lost due to attrition.
When the recession struck in 2008 and 2009, General Manager Chad Carson says SFM continued to bolster the company’s success.
“SFM helped us maintain a very strong cash position during the recession. When credit was drying up, we didn’t need to go to creditors because we had the cash to grow. That made us able to respond to customer demand in the market. We were a company that was able to say yes every time [a company] came to us and said, ‘We’re bouncing back, can you help us?’ or, ‘We want to grow, can you help us?’” Carson explains.
In 2010, Avicenna achieved 25 percent growth, and cashflowed a record year in capital expenditures while increasing its cash balance. Carson attributes all of these successes to the company’s “Synchronous Flow mindset.”
The company has benefited from a keen problem-solving mindset as well. With a grant from the Minnesota Job Skills Partnership, Avicenna worked with instructors from St. Cloud State University to train its managers in problem solving and project management skills. Carson says the new skills were particularly useful during a recent installation of a 1,000 square foot clean room.
“That project came in right on time and under budget. We were looking to capture some new opportunities in the marketplace and we couldn’t do it without that clean room. That was one of the first dividends we saw from our training,” Carson says.
Carson is quick to add that training investments have also helped instill a culture of learning at Avicenna that supports continuous improvement throughout the company.
“If you can adopt a mindset that doesn’t assume you know it all, that’s always open to learning new things, it will serve you well,” Carson says. “We’ve tried to do that here, so when someone says, ‘Here’s a new idea. Would you like to give it a try?’ the response will always be yes. That spirit of learning and always looking for better ideas and better methods and better metrics has served this company quite well.”
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