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Zimmer employees have grilled each other, cooking up new ways to do their jobs better.
Tuesday, their innovation and hard work were recognized by the company with a Quality Expo that featured a free cookout starring the world's largest grill, sponsored by Johnsonville Food Co.
"About 10 years ago, Congress passed a resolution encouraging companies to focus on quality," said Jim Simpson, vice president for quality and productivity for Zimmer. "In doing that, they declared October National Quality Month. Today's expo is just one of the events we've scheduled this month to focus on quality.
"The importance of improving the quality of a firm's products and service is important for more than just keeping their customers happy. It's also a basic bottom line issue," Simpson added.
"Our management team really believes that quality and productivity go hand-in-hand," he said. "You can't have one without the other."
Tuesday's exposition featured displays from 25 different employee groups, each of whom developed new procedures within their departments to improve the quality of work their sections turn out.
"The employees took it upon themselves," Simpson said. "They worked evenings and weekends to develop the new, improved procedures."
One such improvement was developed by Rich Miller and his colleagues in manufacturing the Gemini tibial component in Zimmer's knee replacement product. The metal plate that is affixed to the tibia had unacceptable variation rates in terms of smoothness and flatness. Miller's department developed new gauging and set-up techniques that significantly reduced that variation rate.
"With the old way we gauged the parts, we would only get 56 out of 100 parts within the tolerance range for those variations," Miller said. "With the new technique, we get 91 out of 100."
Simpson said that improvement has increased the reliability of their replacement knee and saved Zimmer a significant amount of money through reduced scrap material.
Increasing the quality of training for employees was the thrust behind the efforts of Zimmer's Patient Care Services division, based in Dover, Ohio, according to Dee Metzger. Her division developed a more standardized way of providing Zimmer employees training on the manufacturing process of the various products.
"We developed a new way to train our employees, through filming the manufacturing process, then making those films available through our internal on-line computer network," Metzger said.
"This takes out the variability in the training technique you have when as many as 12 different people would be teaching a particular process."
According to Julio Ortiz, manufacturing supervisor at Zimmer's Puerto Rico screw manufacturing facility, his group developed a new verification procedure that reduced the rate of defective screws through a series of checks.
"We would have variations in the screw length flute and setup," Ortiz said. "We improved our quality from 55 screws per 100 being acceptable to 99 out of 100."
The new technique also allowed the division to increase the quality of their product while reducing the number of employees involved in the manufacturing process from 12 to three.
According to Brad Bishop, Zimmer spokesman, the cookout Zimmer hosted Tuesday was the company's way of recognizing the employees' work in achieving exceptional quality throughout the year.
"We do different things throughout the year. But we just use this month to highlight the employees' achievements," he said. "The employee response has been very favorable. People appreciate the fact we're taking time to stop and recognize the good work they do all year."
