Building a "Lean" Kitty

Lean manufacturing is a strategy. Essentially, it's about reducing waste wherever it occurs in the organization. Lean wastes include excess inventory, excessive movement, over-production, and the list goes on... The goal of "Lean" is ridding the system of these wastes, along with the costs associated with those wastes.

During these tough economic times, and skyrocketing commodities costs it's essential to begin the journey of being lean, especially in the boat industry. It's what allows us to hold price increases to a minimum while operating profitably, and most importantly stay in business while others are not.

At World Cat we are committed to running a lean organization, and that includes our product development process too! The goals of eliminating waste are especially important in PD and is what has made companies such as Toyota not good but great!

The results of a lean PD process are getting the product right the first time, less rework and engineering changes, shorter lead times and most importantly designing and building with the customer in mind up front. Customer value drives the PD process from start to finish... if we don't build what the customer wants, then why are we building it at all?

I receive many questions on how we take products from concept to production from readers of this blog. I've tried to detail the steps of what we do in this blog and will continue to do so in the future. Additionally, I'm going to widen the scope of this blog to talk about our manufacturing and lean initiatives as well.

The next 6-18 months will be an exciting journey for us as a company, hopefully you'll come meets us for a factory tour and learn firsthand about the journey we're taking to be not just good, but great!

Project Updates - Happy 4th!

I hope this post finds everyone happy and healthy, it's been a while since I posted an update on the projects that we're working on. It's been a busy couple months with finalizing one boat and getting another design off the ground... we should have lots of updates over the next couple months.

We're finalizing the 3rd prototype 290 Express Cabin, it will soon be handed off to manufacturing for full production status. In order to get vendor parts approved, work instructions written, and associates up to speed we build three prototypes using resources from product development, manufacturing support, and manufacturing. The 4th boat is built by manufacturing with assistance from manufacturing support (including quality assurance), and is the milestone for product development that the project is complete. We're almost there! We'll have a video review done by Dean Travis Clarke of Sportfishing Magazine soon...

The 290 Center Console is moving along nicely, the deck plug arrived Monday during our annual factory shutdown and looks good. I'll post a photo once we return to give everyone an idea of the layout better than the renderings provided. We are finalizing our systems layout and vendor parts, and will start building mock-ups and tooling once we return from break.

We're also starting to work on concepts for our first cruising-oriented 290 model that is intended for customers who wish to cruise 1st, and fish 2nd. We're really excited about this project and we think it will be a great product that introduces the benefits of catamaran ownership to a new segment of the market.

Have a great 4th of July celebrating the greatest country in the world! The flag I attached is a photo I took while at Chimney Rock Park in North Carolina, schedule a visit and be sure to drop by and see us for a factory tour. Now vacation starts for me!