A truck manufacturing company that has spent 35 years practicing Six Sigma provides an excellent example of how changing a company culture and focusing on continuous process improvement can significantly impact a company’s success.

How significantly? As pointed out in a profile of Mickey Truck Bodies by Trailer Body Builders (TBB), the company delivers 5,000 dry freight van bodies each year in a 75,000-square-foot manufacturing complex with just 100 employees.

The company has invested heavily in automation. However, it has not stopped them from investing in Six Sigma, including training people in continuous process improvement tools and techniques. They used that knowledge to make all operations – included automated ones – more efficient.

Not surprisingly, the company “quality credo” is: “Get it right the first time.”

What Mickey Truck Bodies Does

Mickey Truck Bodies started in 1904 and is family owned. The company builds a variety of truck bodies and trailers. The products include side loaders, van bodies, refrigerated trucks, trailers built specifically for beverage delivery, oil and gas trucks and trailers, and emergency vehicles.

Dean Sink, the current company chairman, told TBB that the founder, Carl F. Mickey, mentored him. “He always believed we could do more with less if we worked smart, not hard,” he said.

Sink studied manufacturing techniques at Toyota in Japan, where people such as Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo refined many of the modern tools of Lean Six Sigma in creating the Toyota Production System.

Sink said he always admired Toyota for its ability to make a car in Japan, ship it to America and “still offer superior quality and less cost than our own domestic automakers.”

A Commitment to Six Sigma

After learning about the Toyota Production System, Mickey Truck Bodies made a commitment decades ago to use Six Sigma tools and techniques at its own facility in High Point, North Carolina.

The company has practiced Six Sigma so long that they simply call it “The Mickey Way.” That commitment is seen every day at the plant.

Sink said one of those ways is the reduction in wasted motion, one of the eight wastes identified in Lean. Sink said that employees never have to walk more than 10 feet from their work area and never have to waste time looking for tools or parts.

The results can be seen in numbers such as the 98% on-time delivery rate in the company’s fleet business that operates out of High Point. Also, the company’s warranty rate is one-tenth of 1%.

The company now delivers dry freight van bodies in half the time it did just two years ago. Sink expects that in two years, delivery time will be cut in half once again because of “continuous improvement in team efficiency and manufacturing automation. We are making major improvements every year in our assembly process, continuously redesigning the workflow.

He said while automation is a key factor in process improvement, the company can’t make it work “without highly trained and motivated employees.”

An Emphasis On People

One of the major tenets of Lean and Six Sigma is to put customers first. Mickey Truck Bodies has taken that to heart. “Every Mickey employee understands that the customers – not the company – pay their salaries,” Sink said.

The company also puts employees front and center. On the Mickey Truck Bodies website, there are numerous articles about success at the business. Almost all of them revolve around treating employees well and including them in the company’s decision-making processes.

As Sink told TBB, “Nobody knows a job better than the person doing that job.” That’s why Mickey Truck Bodies has an Employee Feedback Program that allows frontline employees to share observations and make suggestions for potential improvements.

In an article on the company website, human resource leaders explain a system the company has in place to work with employees. The facets of the program include:

  • Follow up – HR leaders make a point to have face-to-face conversations with employees on any issues they have, comments they want to make as well as ideas or questions
  • Building morale – Employees are encouraged to offer feedback without any concern of reprisals or repercussions
  • Community involvement – Both the community and the company benefit when employees work together on improvement projects
  • Employee recognition – Employees are recognized for great work involving safety, quality and productivity

The emphasis on customers and employees are fundamental to success when using Lean and/or Six Sigma. Mickey Truck Bodies provides yet another example of how this approach can succeed in any kind of industry.