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WMU graduate students Steven Srivastava, Sean Derrick and Gary Nola and undergraduate Ryan Kamm performed a series of process assessments for Landscape Forms. PHOTOS: JEFF HAGE

By Joe Boomgaard | MiEnergy
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WEST MICHIGAN — Like many manufacturers across the region, Landscape Forms Inc. has tried over the past couple of years to identify how best to apply principles of sustainability within its operations. The Kalamazoo-based maker of landscape furnishings has little room for error.

“Our customers – landscape architects – wrote the book on sustainability. They’ve been in it forever,” Becky Fulgoni, VP for people and manufacturing, told MiEnergy. “Whatever we do in the sustainability arena, (it has to be) with integrity and genuine and on a sophisticated level. They know this stuff. We’ve gone from sustainability is a project to all the way through the gamut to where it’s a part of our DNA and how we think about decision making.”

Part of that emphasis on sustainability has led the company to track its energy usage. But just tracking energy consumption doesn’t tell managers very much because orders change over time, Fulgoni said. Electricity usage might vary from one month to another because of a large order, but that might not show up until after the energy bill is paid, for example.

Fulgoni said what’s more useful is to examine processes within the plant. Manufacturers like Landscape Forms have energy intensive processes like powder coating where making tweaks can have a significant bottom line impact.

“Actually getting into processes, that’s more effective and much more enlightening,” she said. “We could just keep going using all the energy, but this is important stuff to do.”

Last year, Landscape Forms joined the Western Michigan University Green Manufacturing Industrial Consortium, an offshoot of the Manufacturing Research Center and the Department of Energy-funded Green Manufacturing Initiative. Western got about $1 million to fund the GMI, which provided seed money for the consortium to get off the ground. The membership-driven regional consortium engages its member companies in projects of mutual interest in a non-competitive way, said David Meade, associate director of the consortium and a professor of manufacturing engineering at WMU. Companies pay $25,000 in dues to join.

“GMI is the seed money, but it will eventually run out of money, and we wanted this consortium to have a 5-10 year lifespan,” Meade told MiEnergy. “Hopefully, we end up multiplying the strengths of all the companies to improve the abilities of all these companies.”

Fulgoni said the company’s prior positive experiences working with WMU’s engineering program and the promise of collaborating on common problems with other companies in the region drew it to the consortium.

“As a company in Southwest Michigan, there’s a lot of good going on in this area. It makes sense to not all spend money if we can share some of it,” Fulgoni said. “We’d love to have the chance to do primary research, but that’s hard to do when you have so many specific things we’re working on.”

WMU is also piloting the first E3 program in West Michigan. E3, sponsored by the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center, is an evolution of the EPA’s Green Supplier Network that incorporates energy efficiency into the GSN’s lean and green assessments.

The program starts with an energy audit completed by the Industrial Assessment Center, housed at the University of Michigan. Engineering students at WMU provide a process assessment, the data from which is run through a new tool and tracked over a specified period. Then the traditional GSN lean and green assessments are completed on a single value stream or product line.

All the results are given to the project coordinator of the E3 program – in West Michigan, that responsibility falls to Bill Stough, CEO of Sustainable Research Group LLC – who identifies the three main opportunities for the company. WMU’s professors and students then develop and implement an improvement plan for the opportunity the business selects to pursue. The project manager oversees the entire project, providing leads to funding mechanisms and other opportunities along the way, said Bill Small, west regional director of MMTC and VP of technical services at The Right Place Inc.

In other parts of the state and across the country, the E3 programs are standalone projects paid for in equal parts by the company, the local electric utility and another benevolent organization. But no single utility company covers all of West Michigan and the group has yet to find a philanthropic or other group to cover the remaining third, Small said. A total of 10 assessments have been optioned for the MMTC West region, a 17-county area.

“They’re giving us the whole picture and this is the best project to do first and this is why,” Fulgoni said. “It fits with our lean manufacturing mindset to remove waste from our process movement, transportation and materials. When you look through our process, you can tackle energy in the same way and look at ideas through a lean philosophy. … We used kaizen in other areas, but we hadn’t applied it to the energy questions. I think we’ll be able to (move) pretty quickly. We understand the methodology and can put that filter on the energy question.”

Importantly, Fulgoni said the project has kept the company accountable for paying attention to energy issues because employees know students are tracking the usage. Landscape Forms is only in the early stages of the WMU assessment and won’t know what to realistically expect from any specific project implementation until getting those results, she said.

“This group has given us a way to attack (energy) that we haven’t been able to find,” she said. “We expect to end up with some meaty project, and we’re excited to get started, actually. Manufacturing engineers want to do things.”

While the company funds kaizen projects throughout the year, it hasn’t set aside a specific funding stream for project implementation. Fulgoni expects, however, that the recommendations will be too strong, and the payback too great, to pass up.

“In most cases, these things end up funding themselves,” she said. “You’d be nuts not to do it. Some that come up, maybe we plan for into the horizon for a year. Some may be easy no-brainers.”