Hampford Leans In

Lean manufacturing strives to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Simply, Lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources.

A Lean organization understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a value creation process that has zero waste.

One of the key practices of Lean, Value Stream Mapping, enables a Lean company to eliminate waste through an entire process, not just at problem points in production, creating processes that use less time, less money, and with greater flexibility to respond to changing customer needs.

Lean processing is also used to great advantage in information transfer, creating more efficient and less wasteful office processes.

Since 2015 Hampford has worked with Connstep, Connecticut’s leading manufacturing consulting firm, building a culture of Lean thinking and Continuous Improvement. Using Lean practices such as 5S, Value Stream Mapping, Kaizen, 5 Whys, and Root Cause Analysis, Hampford has sought ways to improve our processes to bring increased value to our customers while eliminating unnecessary waste.

Hampford has graduated 10 employees from Connstep’s Lean Championship Training, helping us save over 1,000 hours per year of time waste in our production processes; time and dollar improvements that we are able to pass along to our customers.

“What really makes Lean work is our culture and employee engagement here at Hampford. Everyone throughout the organization from top to bottom has ‘bought in’ and supports our efforts.” Tim Jenkin, HRI Lean Steering Committee Chairman.