Bouncing back

Sixteen months ago, Bill Cofield was hired away from his management job at Avery Denison in Meridian, Miss., to come to the Rubbermaid plant in Jackson and make some difficult decisions.

Among his first tasks as director of operations may have seemed the most brutal -- trimming the work force by more than 300 people, going from 760 to 435 workers, the first round of layoffs in the local plant's history.

Cofield, who has tackled similar restructuring projects in two other plants in his career, had to tell employees who had worked for the company for years that they were being let go.

"It was not the easiest thing to look in those people's eyes and say 'You don't have a job here anymore,'" Cofield said.

But it was necessary, Cofield maintains. The Rubbermaid plant, which makes wood and metal closet organizers, had become a bastion of what Cofield refers to as "muda," the Japanese word for waste.

And it wasn't just people. Along with his management team, Cofield had to rethink the entire plant layout, removing $2 million in excess inventory from the building, including a $1 paint line that had become unnecessary.

The production process, which manufactures 250,000 feet of wire shelving a day and 15 million square feet of wood shelving a year, was streamlined, creating a better and more efficient flow.

Freed up space

No longer was material scattered throughout the plant. Finding your way from Point A to Point B in the production process wasn't going to be akin to finding your way through a maze.

In the process, 30,000 square feet -- about a third -- of the plant was freed up.

"In the last 12 months, I've seen more changes here than I saw in the first 11 years that I worked here," said Brian McCallister, the plant engineer and member of the leadership team. "We've really seen a movement toward a lean environment. It's been incredible."

It was what Cofield was hired to do and the directive of David Lumley, the new president of Rubbermaid Home Products, a division of Atlanta-based Newell Rubbermaid Inc., a global marketer of consumer and commercial products with 2004 sales of $6.6 billion.

A new philosophy was taking root.

"I knew I had to make some organizational changes," Cofield said. "Dave Lumley said we had to assess how profitable we were -- and in some areas we were not as profitable as we needed to be."

After making a thoughtful pause, Cofield added: "If I could, I'd get rid of a lot more."

One of the reasons for the changes, including the layoffs, was that Rubbermaid had made the gutsy decision to walk away from two high-profile customers: Wal-Mart and Lowe's.

When the price of the materials that Rubbermaid uses suddenly spiked, they tried to pass the costs to Wal-Mart and Lowe's. Both retailers refused to pay the higher price. Faced with the dilemma of selling products at a loss or losing some business, they chose the latter.

"When you lose clients like that, you're going to see some reductions," Cofield said. "That's just part of the business cycle. You can't dump a lot of business and not make some cuts."

While Rubbermaid was redefining itself on the inside, on the outside some rumors began to circulate. Rubbermaid was going to close. There were going to lay off more workers. Workers were going to have to take a pay cut or lose their jobs.

The rumors were perpetuated by the fact that Rubbermaid held a "garage sale" of sorts, in which it sold off some equipment and other items to the public and its employees.

Some saw it as a going-out-of-business sale.

To combat those rumors -- which surely had found their way to employees -- Rubbermaid invited a group to visit the plant last week. The group of city officials, economic developers, state. Sen. Jason Crowell and the media took a tour of the facility and got to hear Rubbermaid's side of the story.

"People have heard a lot of the bad things, but there are a lot of good things going on," Cofield told the group. "We've improved our capabilities, created free space and now have room to grow the business."

Now that the plant has been freed up of waste, Cofield said they are looking at adding new product lines to the plant.

The company is in negotiations with Home Depot, the world's largest home-improvement retailer, to become the sole proprietor of its wire and wood shelving.

They're even testing new products that the Rubbermaid plant would be involved in manufacturing, including a garage organization kit and a new shelf unit. Cofield even made assurances that he didn't foresee any changes in the work force -- up or down -- for at least three years.

So things are looking up at Rubbermaid.

"They're on an upswing," said Mitch Robinson, executive director of Cape Girardeau Area MAGNET, a business recruitment organization. "They're just doing what all American companies are in the process of doing in today's marketplace -- they're working smarter and more efficient."

Cofield said it's just a start.

"It's a continuing journey to get lean," Cofield said. "But we've made some of the changes that we saw as necessary. But our intent here is to let the community know that we're alive and well."

smoyers@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 137