Optimizing continuous improvement at Bourgeois Guitars

Bourgeois Guitars, located in Lewiston, Maine, is a guitar manufacturer with a team of about 30 dedicated professionals. Initially, they had no official CI program, and improvements were made reactively without structured reporting. As the company grew, the need for a robust CI system became clear, leading them to seek a solution to support their expansion and boost efficiency.

The initial situation

In the early days of Bourgeois Guitars’ CI program, things were slow and clunky. All submissions were handled manually and individually processed, which placed a significant strain on the CI team. However, this experience taught them a lot about what they needed from a platform. With this knowledge, they explored their options and eventually discovered eKaizen, which not only checked all their project management boxes but did so at a reasonable rate.

Objectives

One of the top goals for the CI program was to implement a structure that was customizable, reliable, transparent, and user-friendly.

The solution

Implementation could not have happened without the full support of Bourgeois Guitars’ leadership team and their drive to push the company culture in the right direction. To facilitate easy idea submission, team members were provided with posters and stickers with QR codes. They quickly came to value the speed with which improvements could be processed and implemented.

As a bunch of guitar builders, much of what we do revolves around the skilled use of hand tools and old world processes. As beautiful as the artisinal culture is, it can sometimes come with a reluctance to engage with new technologies. eKaizen helped us overcome this barrier as our team began to recognize the ease with which their improvement ideas could be submitted and the speed with which they could be implemented.

The results

The Bourgeois Guitars team has submitted more than 300 suggestions and implemented over 100 improvements in the past year and a half. This achievement translates to roughly four new submissions and one completed project each week, a milestone they never imagined possible with their small team of craftsmen.

Without eKaizen, our CI program would not be what it is today. At the time of writing this, our team of ~30 has submitted over 300 ideas and implemented over 100 improvements in the last year and a half.

In the words of the customer

Jairus Paulus

Process engineer

“Prior to eKaizen, managing projects was a full time commitment that I would have to squeeze into my already packed work week. I would often find myself working long hours with few results to show for it. With the integration of the platform into our business, I now only spend about 20% of that initial time managing projects. This has allowed me to focus on the more technical aspects of my work and invest more energy into actually working on improvements.

Working with the Ennvea team has been a dream. Martin, our rep, has been immensely helpful in learning the system and ironing out any issues that have arisen. He always keeps us up to speed on the latest updates and has been an absolute pleasure to work with.”

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Optimizing CI at Bourgeois Guitars: Enhancing efficiency in a growing team