(WSJ) Ryan DeLand arrives at Whirlpool’s washing-machine factory at 6:53 a.m., not long after day shift workers have settled into their stations.
He steps into his office and is greeted by a whiteboard that bears the motto “stable and predictable.” He will spend the day chasing that goal despite a never-ending stream of complications in a plant that’s as big as 30 football fields put together.
A lot can go wrong.
The plant has more than 25 miles of conveyors and uses more than 2,000 parts. Robotic and human-piloted vehicles zip through its aisles, while an overhead crane carries huge coils of steel. Going full blast, the factory can pump out 22,000 washing machines in a day, but even a brief mishap can stop production cold.
At 39 years old, DeLand is among the youngest leaders of Whirlpool’s 10 U.S. factories. He has a trim haircut and the brisk, dynamic manner of a football coach—he heads up the St. Charles Centaurs, his 10-year-old son’s team—and he runs the factory like one. DeLand has divided his staff into units such as defense, special teams, and, in a fitting touch for Big Ten country, the run game—his term for operations, logistics, and maintenance.
“The run game is about grinding out wins,” he says. “My lane is the run game.”
Here’s a look at DeLand’s day:
7:15 a.m. The numbers
DeLand’s morning is off to an encouraging start. Just before beginning his roughly 70-minute commute from his home in Michigan, he learned that U.S. dockworkers had suspended their strike, meaning 206 containers of parts stalled on the East Coast would soon be on their way to Ohio.
He arrives and heads to a room in the center of the plant known as the hub to review the previous day’s numbers, picking up stray bits of litter as he goes. A company that makes cleaning appliances should have a clean factory, he says.
About 20 people, many wearing football jerseys in what has become a Friday tradition, gather around a U-shaped table and digest the figures. A line in the testing area shut down for seven minutes due to a problem that’s still being dissected. The factory just missed its daily yield goal, a measure of efficiency. Today’s labor supply is tight because many workers take personal time on Fridays.
DeLand sits in the back and says little. He sees his role as providing support, not second-guessing, and his team has everything under control. The meeting ends, and after a chat with parts-and-service specialist Jon Peters—better known as the Ohio State University superfan Big Nut—DeLand is off to talk about staffing.
7:49 a.m. Help Wanted
Welcome news arrives during a Zoom call: The plant is on pace to meet its goal of hiring 200 people to staff a new production shift. DeLand asks why, and it turns out that billboards, radio ads and a job fair appear to be paying off.
“This is the third good week in a row,” says Jen Meadows, the factory’s human resources lead.
Labor is a challenge in this corner of northern Ohio, about 70 miles west of Cleveland, though DeLand says the company can usually find the workers it needs. Meadows says people come to Whirlpool because they want a balance that’s missing from the 80-hour workweeks many other factories demand. People sometimes work Saturdays at the Clyde plant, DeLand says, but he doesn’t schedule production for Sundays.
DeLand’s boss, vice president of U.S. manufacturing Kristin Day, says thoughtfulness for the workforce is one mark of an effective factory leader. “It really isn’t just driving business performance, but it’s also understanding the people aspect of the job,” she says.
DeLand is from a blue-collar family, and after graduating from Grand Valley State University with a mechanical engineering degree, he worked his way through several factories. His experience with the quality regimen known as World Class Manufacturing caught Whirlpool’s attention, and the company hired him in 2018. He has been in charge of the Clyde plant since early last year.
9:07 a.m. Gemba walk
Manufacturing quality systems are heavily influenced by Japanese concepts, and one of them is “gemba.” It translates roughly as “on-site” and means that managers should walk the factory floor to learn what’s really going on.
DeLand does gemba rounds twice a week. Today, he drops in on the tool room, where the factory makes the dies it uses to press parts out of sheet metal. Toolmaker Mathew Thomas says he has figured out how to maintain dies so they don’t cause a breakdown. That technique has cut annual repair costs by more than half, Thomas says.
The innovation solved the tool room’s biggest problem, which DeLand says is in keeping with the World Class Manufacturing philosophy of giving priority to the most critical issues.
DeLand says approvingly that Thomas “wants to be a big game hunter.”
10:28 a.m. The $150 menace
DeLand regularly reviews emergency work orders to learn why the plant’s systems failed and how that can be prevented. The example he sees at midmorning today is particularly startling.
A production line backed up when the one-and-1/2-mile-long conveyor that sends boxed-up washing machines to the adjoining distribution center stopped working. A $150 coupling that connects a motor to a gearbox broke, and it took 20 minutes—an eternity in factory time—to locate and fix the bad part.
The plant is swapping in a new coupling model designed to keep working after it fails. It also makes a loud clicking sound that can be heard over the cacophony of the factory, alerting workers that it should be replaced. But with 250 conveyor motors to convert, it will be weeks before the threat is eliminated.
Whirlpool’s overall business has been down following the boom of the pandemic era when consumers loaded up on appliances to make home life more pleasant. Steep interest rates have hurt, too, as fewer people are remodeling or moving into new homes.
Not many homeowners want to go without a washing machine when it breaks, so sales in Whirlpool’s laundry category have bounced back faster than stoves, dishwashers, and even refrigerators. That demand is keeping the Clyde factory—and the leader who oversees 3,000 workers—quite busy.
2:30 p.m. A hill to die on
After a call with the head of Whirlpool’s factory in Fall River, Mass., and a staff lunch to celebrate the birthday of the plant’s logistics lead, DeLand heads to an assembly line to see whether problems with a troublesome part have been resolved.
The part is a plastic sleeve that provides access to the pump of Whirlpool’s new front-loading washing machine. The first iteration had tabs that made the sleeve difficult to install. After workers alerted him to the issue, DeLand did the installation himself for an hour and came away with sore hands and knuckles.
Retailers were waiting for floor models, and there was no time to re-engineer the part. But DeLand decided preventing injuries would be “a hill to die on,” and he agitated until his bosses agreed to a change. The tool room shaved down some of the tabs so the sleeve required much less force to install. A redesign should make installation easier still, DeLand says.
Melissa Tornow, who supervises the line, says workers appreciated DeLand’s intervention.
3 p.m. Final meeting
Five minutes after the day shift ends, leaving half-assembled washing machines on the line for the overnight crew to finish, DeLand ducks into the office of coordinator Mesha Shine for his final meeting. He logs in on his phone and once again stays mostly silent as his staff chews over the day’s issues, which include a crash in the paint system.
The glitch dented the factory’s yield goal, though it is still on track to make its weekly number. DeLand says the plant’s assembly lines are performing well but the back shop, which makes parts for the appliances, is lagging. Getting everything back into harmony will take a team-wide effort, he says.
“It’s so complex,” he says. “We have to be able to manage it together.”
