WIKOFF COLOR CORPORATION
FORT MILL, SOUTH CAROLINA

THE OVERVIEW
Wikoff Color Corporation was founded in 1956 by Fred C. Wikoff, Jr. It has grown to 32 facilities in 22 states, with the headquarters and research & development offices located in Fort Mill. Twenty-nine of those facilities are manufacturing plants; the other three are sales and service centers. The company has 470 employees, 170 of which are located in the Fort Mill facility. The company is approximately 80% employee-owned.

Wikoff is a printing ink manufacturer that provides inks, varnishes, and coatings to high quality printers worldwide. The company manufactures thousands of individual products and has about 2,000 active customers.

THE CHALLENGE
The company has such a large number of facilities located near major customers because of a strong demand for quick supply of custom-made products on a daily, and sometimes hourly, basis.  The company uses batch processing, which allows employees to provide better and faster service to changing customer demands for rapid fulfillment. As a downside to batch processing, normal demand fluctuations mean higher inventories and more inherent inefficiencies in processes because of constantly changing customer demands. "It is harder to eliminate waste with all the peaks and valleys in the course of a normal day," says Phil Lambert, Wikoff president.

THE SOLUTION
Company management engaged SCMEP to perform a Competitiveness Review operations assessment to identify opportunities for improvement and to recommend an improvement strategy. The assessment team, led by SCMEP Manufacturing Specialist Rhonda Huskins, recommended Wikoff engage in a focused Lean Manufacturing implementation effort in order to reduce inventories and shorten turnaround time on orders. SCMEP Technical Specialist Lynn Weddle led the Wikoff team in a Value Stream Mapping exercise that was followed by comprehensive fundamental training in Lean principles.

After Wikoff staff learned the basic lean principles, SCMEP and Premiere Source Lean Manufacturing Group led company management into a policy deployment initiative, whereby they reviewed the company's 3-5 year plan to ensure all departments and individuals were doing the activities necessary to reach set goals. "Policy deployment is a lean tool that helps in the achievement of profitability through the coordination of all entities," says Huskins. With SCMEP's help, Wikoff started planning at the corporate level and the bulk manufacturing plant in Fort Mill. Since the process was a true transfer of knowledge initiative, Wikoff is now able to deploy the same principles at its other 31 locations and educate those plant managers on what kinds of tasks will enable the company to reach its long-term goals.

THE IMPACT
As a result, the Fort Mill facility has been able to reduce its inventory by $750,000, which equals about one-third. Through natural attrition and no layoffs, the company has been able to reduce its payroll by 15%, with no ill effects on output. Best of all, the company has not had to build an addition onto its facility as originally planned because of lean and policy deployment initiatives. "Our highest impacts so far have been in Fort Mill," said Lambert, "because it has one year of maturity over the other facilities and is by far our largest facility."