The Aurora Casket Company, A lean performer

Manufacturing in Action, Source : The Manufacturer US

The Aurora Casket Company is the largest privately-owned casket manufacturer in the country. Linda Seid Frembes finds out how the company is using lean manufacturing tools to remain competitive in the industry

Founded in 1890, Aurora Casket Company is named after the small Indiana town in which it operates. Founder John Backman started Aurora Casket Company with 30 employees making wooden caskets by hand. One hundred and twenty-five years later, Aurora Casket is still based out of Indiana with more than 850 employees and 54 service centers nationwide. As one of the largest privately-held casket manufacturers in the country, the company sells about 200,000 caskets annually, a little over 10 percent of the total US volume.

Aurora’s product line includes burial products like mahogany, bronze, or stainless steel caskets; cremation products like urns and containers; and e-business products like a Web site for funeral planning and web templates for funeral homes.

The staff at Aurora Casket includes many third- and fourth-generation employees who continue the family tradition of quality workmanship. The company leverages technology in order to maintain good quality management. Each part can be tracked throughout the facility and managers can look up the location, status, and who has worked on the unit. All employees scan the unit’s bar code once they are done with it. “Our customer comments are shared with employees, both the good and the bad,” explains Norman Miller, plant manager of the Vanguard metal manufacturing operation for Aurora Casket, who has been with the company for 25 years. “It helps deepen our relationship with our products and with our customers, most of whom are family-owned funeral homes. It is a family atmosphere with very little employee turnover.”

Aurora Casket runs two metal plants (one is Vanguard and the other is referred to as Aurora) that are located five miles apart in Aurora, IN, as well as a wood plant in Bristol, TN. The wood plant, which is currently split into two buildings, is soon moving to a more modern manufacturing facility in Piney Flats, TN, that will allow the manufacturing to operate on one level and in one building.

The two metal plants share some common operations like press operations for stamped parts and hardware for all caskets. The procurement area at the Aurora plant is where the manufacturing operations receive metals in either roll coils or flat sheets. The raw materials are then sized and stamped to the needed shapes. To manufacture a casket, the raw materials go to the welding operation where the four body sides are welded together using mig welds and then finished for smooth corners. The body is moved to painting where the lid and the casket body meet and are painted to match. Then it’s off to the assembly area where the interior details are finished. “At the Vanguard plant, we can produce a casket on average every minute depending on the model,” says Miller. “Our production lines can work on multiple orders at one time.”

Aurora Casket uses batch production to maintain inventory levels at the warehouse, although its flexible production line can accommodate a special order on the production schedule as well. The company uses a combination of lean tools like 5S and visual management to keep production efficient and on track. Real-time information is distributed using electronic production boards located throughout the facility. These boards are constantly updated with the latest order information. “Lean has been integrated in over time,” explains Miller. “A bit more than five years ago, management staff started going to lean seminars. We learned we were actually using some of lean’s principles but just had not made it part of the culture.”

What the company did learn was that being in an extremely competitive industry meant that it had to be smarter about costs, and that only comes with employee involvement. “We need a group that understands the end goal and that using lean is a tool to get to that goal,” says Miller. “We decided to propagate lean across the company, by integrating it piece by piece. We gained faster and better acceptance that way.”

The lean team at Aurora Casket Company is headed by the senior vice president of manufacturing Len Weber and a team of managers across all disciplines. The group shepherds lean initiatives throughout the company. Miller adds: “This is not textbook lean manufacturing. We told the employees to grab a hold of it and make it their own.”

That innovative spirit has led to several public recognitions for the company. Aurora Casket Company was a tour site for the 2004 annual Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) conference in Cincinnati. AME is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to cultivating understanding, analysis, and exchange of productivity methods and their successful application in the pursuit of excellence.

Aurora Casket Company was also recently named to the Cincinnati Business Courier’s first annual “Fast 50” list, which profiles the fastest-growing private companies in the tri-state area. Each firm was asked to provide revenue figures for the years 2001-2004, and was selected based on the best two-year growth period during that time. Aurora was ranked No. 45 on the list. The company experienced a 28.81 percent growth with revenue of $118 million in 2001, $154 million in 2002, and $152 million in 2003.

“Success does not happen overnight, and neither does a process like lean manufacturing,” Miller concludes. “We are proof that good things can happen when you keep a forward thought pattern and strive to constantly improve. I really do feel like the hard work we’ve done over the last few years is now paying off.”

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