The Workday of One of Whirlpool’s Youngest Plant Managers
Whirlpool’s Clyde, Ohio, washing machine manufacturing plant—a facility the size of 30 football fields—is run by one of the company’s youngest factory leaders, a 39-year-old Michigan father and volunteer kids’ football coach (The Wall Street Journal, subscription).
What’s going on: Plant manager Ryan DeLand oversees a team of 3,000 workers and more than 25 miles of conveyors at the Clyde location, which “can pump out 22,000 washing machines in a day.”
- Although his motto is “stable and predictable,” in such a big place with so many moving parts, “[a] lot can go wrong.”
A typical day: A routine workday for DeLand, who has a 70-minute commute to Clyde and arrives before 7:00 a.m., starts with a meeting “to review the previous day’s numbers.”
- Next, he might discuss staffing. “Labor is a challenge in this corner of northern Ohio, about 70 miles west of Cleveland, though DeLand says the company can usually find the workers it needs.” Something workers love about the Clyde plant: DeLand never schedules production for Sundays.
- DeLand makes time each day to engage in the Japanese concept of “gemba,” which “translates roughly [to] ‘on site’ and means that managers should walk the factory floor to learn what is really going on.”
- Before lunch, DeLand might deal with a snafu or two at the plant, such as a conveyor stoppage caused by a broken coupling.
- The afternoon might see him traveling to another nearby Whirlpool factory to help resolve problems. Recently, he traveled to Whirlpool’s Fall River, Massachusetts, site to look into problems with a plastic sleeve that gives access to a new front-loading washing machine.
Finishing up: A typical workday concludes with one last meeting, in which DeLand “stays mostly silent as his staff chews over the day’s issues.”