That way, we don't have to build a bigger building if we want to produce more coaches. Rabo admits that even for him, seeing was believing. The plant used to use large, heavy jigs to construct pine RV frames. We changed our way of thinking and made new jigs out of light material, 0.07-inch fiberglass skin. The new light jigs can be stored in little slots under each work station table.
Workers can pull the appropriate jig readily without leaving their work areas.
Just creating those new lightweight jigs saved floor space and time formerly spent looking for the right jig and improved safety by not making people move those heavy, cumbersome things around anymore. Resistance to these kinds of changes can be one of the biggest initial obstacles for such an ambitious project, but the teams' attitudes toward change evolved during Fleetwood's first public kaizen . It wasn't easy, because it's culture, not just behavior. You learn that in the first few days of a kaizen event. You learn that culture and behavior are hard to change because they're learned over a period of time of doing things a certain way day after day.