Leelanlau Industries, Traverse City, Michigan
Unique tooling storage racks for Leelanau Industries' #1 customer.
	Keith Scott point to a job ready for set-up.  The casting, pallets and the tooling on top of the parts waiting for the set-up man.
Keith Scott, Leelanau Industries, Right, Don Cooper, President, Interface Machinery.
	The Leelaunau Shop Floor.

July, 1993

It is a mouthful, I know, but I have visited thousands of job shops in the United States, Europe and Japan throughout my career and I have seen none more productive that Leelanau Industries of Traverse City, Michigan.  Keith Scott, Founder, President and current Owner of Leelanau Industries has structured a system that allows his machines to run 8,592 hours per year out of a possible 8,760 hours with very little manpower.  In other words, he runs his machines 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 368 days a year.  Also, out every 24 hours, for 5 hours, the machines run on an unattended basis.

This story is difficult to communicate.  My initial reaction when I visited was that it was a nice job shop as job shops go.  Even the fact that if is run lean and mean escaped my immediate recognition, but here then, is the truly unique story.

Keith started his company in 1977 as a job shop concentrating on servicing his immediate geographic area.  In 1988 he had 80 customers and 46 employees, but decided to begin concentrating on five customers, one of which is currently  providing about 90% of all his business.  Now he has just 19 employees (three of them in management)!

The turning point for Keith came in 1991 when invested in three Mazak Multiplexes (6-axis CNC multi-tasking machines with gantry loaders that allowed for unattended manufacturing), for a capital expenditure that exceeded $1 million.  The real decision for Keith was that he realized he couldn't implement his systems with just one machine.  He had to start with three.  I have seen these types of plants in Japan, extremely high productivity, high capital investments and high revenue dollars generated, but I have never really understood how they worked.

After spending a day with Keith Scott and Don Cooper, the President of Interface Machine Tool Sales in Grand Rapids, Michigan (the company from whom Keith purchased the machines), I now understand how a systems like this can work so effective.  It's the systems and the integrating and managing of the 3 elements - high technology equipment, job management system and employee scheduling - that make it work.  His shop people work 4 days on and 4 days off, 1600 hours per year.  These hours are down significantly from the 2000 hours they used to work.  They now earn as much, or even more in some cases, than they did when they were working 2000 hours per year, and Keith is getting more productivity than he was when his people were working more hours.

Keith has created a truly impressive system - the type of system that I have been talking to MSI customers about.  If you want to know more about this incredibly productive system, please give me a call.  I will be happy to share with you what I have learned!