Transforming the Business One Step at a Time

McNally Joinery is an Irish award winning family owned business. In operation for over 40 years at Lusk, North County Dublin, the team of over 30 staff specialise in the manufacture of bespoke timber Staircases, Internal & External Doors, and Windows for the commercial and private market. Offering a complete customer joinery solution, they are also winners of Irish Joinery Awards and a Plan Expo Award.

Identifying an Opportunity

In March 2020, McNally Joinery completed a Lean Business Training course with ETAC.   During this course, the company identified a workflow problem that was having a significant impact on their business.  The main issue was cost and time over-run on the jobs.

Many days got off to a slow start as vans were late leaving the premises.  This in turn delayed their starting time and had a knock-on effect for the rest of the day.  In addition, when the vans arrived back at the business premises in Lusk, they didn’t have enough time to load the vans for the next day.

The team reported a number of key areas to be addressed:

• Jobs were being changed at short notice.
• Information on the job was not always readily available.
• Materials from the job sheet was missing.
• Some materials were not ready or were not all in the one place.
• There was no dedicated loading area.

Evaluating the Situation

Bringing all the team together to look at each issue was a key component of this exercise.  Solutions to the situation were identified, evaluated and implemented.  Simple but effective solutions worked best.  All staff members used their creativity to provide important and useful suggestions to eliminate this problem and improve the value stream.

A whatsapp group was set up to share information among the relevant team members.  One person was tasked with co-ordinating and preparing the jobs for the following day.  The schedule for the following week was circulated to the fitters.  A loading bay area was set up with all the materials ready for each job.   All company vans were stocked with the required equipment.

I attended a Lean Program which was supported by Fingal LEO (Local Enterprise Office).  During the training and mentor sessions, I found brilliant tools that I can use to make impactful improvements across the business.

Implementing the Changes

After implementing the changes, McNally Joinery saved at least 30 minutes per fitter per day.  This equated to 5.3 hours per week resulting in additional revenue of almost €12,000 per annum.  Management have acknowledged that they have invested in tools that they believe will contribute to further time savings.

Although daunting at first, you get out what you put into the program.  A special thank you to Martina Murphy for her fantastic mentor skills which she put to use at our mentor sessions.  We have begun our next Lean project and are truly driving towards a Lean culture across the organisation.

Are you interested in applying Lean thinking to your business and putting these ideas into practice?

Click here to contact the team at ETAC or enquire about our next Lean Business programme.