Driving manufacturing excellence: A Whirlpool case study

Whirlpool's North American manufacturing leadership team used LeanSuite to track every continuous improvement project across 14 plants in one connected system. The same system ran the Global Kaizen Power Pitch, a competition where teams presented their Kaizen and shared best practices.

There was no single place to see every project, so workload and status were never fully visible. Project leaders weren't matched to work by knowledge and workload, and successful Kaizen were shared piecemeal, which limited savings at scale.

84 Kaizen battles, 150 Kaizen presented, 612 project team members and 191 committee members, with $14.8M in hard savings and $17.6M in soft savings. Whirlpool was also a winner of a 2022 Manufacturing Leadership Award.

Hard savings show up in the budget, such as less scrap, material or overtime. Soft savings are real but indirect, such as hours freed up or costs avoided. LeanSuite records each Kaizen's benefits as hard or soft, so the two are reported separately.

The project tracking, savings roll-up and best-practice sharing Whirlpool used are LeanSuite's continuous improvement modules. You can test them on your own lines with the 90-day pilot: $3,000 per facility, set up by our team, with your first module live in under a week.