Spooner's Woodworks

Spooner’s Woodworks was established in 1980 in Poway, California, focusing in its early years primarily on fine woodworking for the residential market. As more opportunities to compete in the commercial market emerged, the company decided to move away from the residential market and focus entirely on commercial woodworking. Over the last quarter-century, Spooner’s Woodworks has gradually grown into one of the premier millwork firms in Southern California. This strategy of steady, controlled expansion has allowed Spooner’s Woodworks to constantly grow in terms of capacity and capability while providing stability and reliability for clients, vendors, suppliers and employees.

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Challenge

Spooner’s Woodworks recently combined operations from two separate buildings into one state-of-the-art 60,000 square foot facility to support growth and maintain its reputation in the industry for quality, reliability and customer service. Additionally, a new line of doors and door hardware was launched. The company wanted to position itself to be able to take advantage of key opportunities for growth in the near future and was ready to implement a Lean initiative to reduce overall costs and improve customer satisfaction by streamlining operations.

Solution

CMTC worked with Spooner’s Woodworks in March, 2018 to plan and implement a company-wide Lean training program that would enhance its process improvement journey. The goal of learning and implementing Lean principles and tools was to develop the skills of employees to be able to eliminate waste in document processing and increase the company’s speed to market. The program consisted of training and implementation of Lean Office and Six Sigma principles and tools specifically in the customer service area. The project was completed in August, 2018.

Impact

With facilitation by CMTC, the implementation team set up by Spooner’s Woodworks’ executive staff created:

  • Work teams that began or further developed Lean culture habits
  • Waste and variability was identified and analyzed with recommendations for their reduction or removal
  • Key staff was educated in the identification, selection and prioritization of Lean improvement opportunities
  • A pilot implementation was successfully completed to improve workflow

“CMTC has been outstanding. They helped our team embrace the process and worked in teams that began the process of developing lean culture habits.”

Tim Spooner,
President, Spooner's Woodworks

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