Pleasant Mattress has fully implemented lean manufacturing principles into its manufacturing operations, which has enabled the company to increase output by 30% and to ship 95% of its orders within a one-week lead time.
During the lean implementation, Pleasant Mattress examined its workflow to identify areas that could use improvement, focused on waste reduction, reorganized its factory, and transitioned from single-man operations to teams to increase throughput and improve ergonomics.
The company also invested heavily in raw material inventory to achieve supply chain stability.
“Last year, we began the first phase of our transition toward lean manufacturing, which enabled us to increase throughput to meet continued demand from our customers,” says Rion Morgenstern, CEO of Pleasant Mattress. “Our President Carter Gronbach and our Plant Manager Brian Rivera, who is Six Sigma certified, led our production center in its transition and played key roles in the tremendous success of this initiative. During the second half of this year, the focus has been on accelerating this effort to increase quality and efficiency to help our dealers keep up with continued sales momentum.”
Pleasant Mattress has also been able to broaden its product mix to offer more options for its customers with the debut of its 10-bed Spring Air-branded line and the launches of the company’s McRoskey and AirFlex brands.
“The practice of applying a lean flow has been extremely beneficial,” Rivera says. “The solutions we’ve implemented are meant to be sustainable and continuously improved upon as gains are made throughout the value stream. We have an extraordinary leadership team with Rion and Carter at the helm. The support they have provided for our team and for us to become an even stronger partner for our retail customers has been incredible. Our future looks very bright.”
