Massachusetts MEP: Massachusetts Manufacturing Extension Partnership

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 5, 2003

For more information please contact:
Jack Healy
MassMEP
Tel: 508-831-7020
Kerstin Forrester, Stonebridge
508-429-5944

Stonebridge President's Dream Goes to Work
By Andi Esposito
BUSINESS EDITOR

A high-ranking executive at Saint-Gobain Abrasives Inc., Kerstin E. Forrester was traveling so much that one night when she got home, the dog growled at her. "She didn't even know who I was," said Ms. Forrester. After 26 years with Saint-Gobain and its predecessor, Norton Co., including service as Norton's first woman general manager, Ms. Forrester knew it was time to pursue her dream. By the time she reached 55, Ms. Forrester said, she either wanted to own an industrial manufacturing business or be enrolled in a doctoral program so she could teach.

In a way, now, she is doing both.

On a Friday at the end of December in 1998, Ms. Forrester bought Stonebridge Corp., a small precision machining and welding company in Holliston whose diverse markets - oceanography, electronics and medical instruments - attracted her. The following Monday morning, just before Stonebridge shut down for the holidays, she walked onto the factory floor.

"The owner hadn't told employees that the company was sold, and in walks a woman," she recalled. "It was awful; I became the villain."

Soft-spoken, determined Ms. Forrester, whose first change was to ban smoking from the factory, enlisted her workers in a journey that has remade Stonebridge and its culture. Another big break from the past will come late next month when Ms. Forrester moves the company to Worcester, where she says it will have easier access to customers and suppliers, to manufacturing services and academic partnerships, to a pool of skilled machinists that will be critical as Stonebridge grows, and to more affordable housing for employees.

At first there was grumbling about the smoking rule (only two of 23 employees didn't smoke), said Ms. Forrester. But not for too long. When the men wanted to keep their four- day, 10-hour work schedule, she obliged. Out went tons of obsolete equipment that cluttered the factory floor - and dirt.

To make sure the factory was safe, Ms. Forrester got help from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which identified 150 mostly minor safety infractions that were immediately corrected.

She enlisted WPI graduate engineering students to revise the layout of machines and equipment, creating process cells to improve product flow and eliminate as much movement of material as possible.

Encouraged by Ms. Forrester's management style - her books are open, she meets regularly with employees, and a colleague said she has a knack for phrasing ideas about change so people aren't offended - workers who had been discouraged from talking to each other, or at all, under the old owner, slowly began offering up their thoughts and ideas.

An important stopover in Stonebridge's journey was the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, a nationwide network of nonprofit centers committed to helping manufacturers succeed. Through the Maine MEP, Stonebridge was one of five companies selected for the Pathways Shipbuilding Supplier Pilot program operated by the Office of Naval Research, Bath Iron Works and MEP.

The Maine program was designed to help Bath Iron Works reduce the cost of building a destroyer by helping suppliers become more efficient.

Through it, Ms. Forrester competed for and won a training grant that allowed her workers to learn "lean" manufacturing: squeezing waste out of production processes, identifying where value is added, insisting upon quality and committing to continuous improvement.

Through lean, she said, Stonebridge has cut the time from order to shipment to one to three weeks, compared with eight to 12 weeks. Parts are shipped 95 percent on time, up from a dismal 17 percent. Productivity has soared by 55 percent. Most importantly, lean kept Stonebridge alive while Massachusetts has lost thousands of production jobs. "If we hadn't done lean, we would not have survived the recession," she said.

A more recent Massachusetts Workforce Training Fund grant will allow Stonebridge's 16 employees to work on team-building and problem-solving skills, and building quality control into work stations, she said.

Richard E. Emmons, project manager with the Massachsetts MEP in Worcester, has worked with Ms. Forrester for three years. "She brings a lot of experience to the plate. First, she was a high-level woman in manufacturing at Norton. She approaches everything analytically and she is a very controlled person. I have never seen her get upset about anything."

Mr. Emmons said that with lean practices in place, the company has "actually given customers money back on a job because she has saved money with lean. That's a pretty nice way to hold on to a customer."

The company also created an EMT - Emergency Manufacturing Team - workers can take their problems to. "The intent is to solve it, move forward and make money on the part. They are very skilled, and if they put their minds and capabilities together, the results can be dramatic," she said.

The task of another group, the Renaissance Team, made up of Ms. Forrester, two machine operators, an engineer, production manager and quality control manager, is to look beyond the day-to-day and foster communication.

Lean isn't about saying, "If we only had this, we could do this," said Ms. Forrester. "Lean is learning to use what you have to maximum efficiency," then looking ahead to ask, "What do we need to improve our capabilities, to move into biotech, for example? What do we need for equipment? Skills? Environment? There are parts we cannot quote because they are beyond our capability. So what do we need to do to say yes?" (One example of using what is available: precision parts fresh from a milling center lie nestled by the dozen in cardboard egg cartons.)

Mr. Emmons said workers were initially skeptical of Ms. Forrester. The previous owner didn't encourage discussion "so when she said, "What do you think about this?' it was a foreign concept. It took time for them to see that their opinion counted."

He said Ms. Forrester is "strong at motivating and supporting her people so they understand why they are doing what they are doing."

Stonebridge's biggest customers are in defense (Raytheon is No. 1), medical instruments and oceanography, a market Ms. Forrester has worked hard to recover after missteps prior to her ownership led to a loss of sales. (Stonebridge makes a fanlike part that scoops silt from the ocean floor.)

She is also growing the company's electronics and high-tech markets, gaining nearby EMC Corp. in Hopkinton as a customer, and is working with several fuel cell developers.

Growing with growing markets is a target she has set.

In 1999, Stonebridge posted a big loss, said Ms. Forrester; 2000 was break-even and since then "we have been struggling to stay afloat with small losses. Our biggest challenge has been the impact of the long recession. But we are not the only ones; a lot of companies have gone under."

Stonebridge is now poised to take advantage of any recovery, and in the past month things have started to pick up, she said.

The second Christmas after Ms. Forrester bought the company, the men on the shop floor bought her a framed photograph of an evergreen tree alone against the hard gray stone of the mountains. Titled "Leaders," the inscription on the picture reads in part: "True leaders act with courage, stand tall in the face of adversity and go where few have gone before."

Ms. Forrester, who said manufacturing is sometimes a lonely place for a woman to be, cried when they gave it to her.

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