Andrzej Wrona, Fortaco Group’s Operations Development Director, loves to ask why. He’d like you to do it, too.

After graduating university as a mechanical engineer, Andrzej Wrona’s first job was in a company that supplied airbags to the automotive industry. He was asked to participate in continuous improvement programs, invited to Six Sigma, but his bosses never shared the big picture. The company had lean practitioners who played simulation games. “We referred to them as the Entertainment Department,” he laughs. “It was a very mechanistic approach. I did what was asked, but nobody ever told me why.” 

After a few years he moved on to Wärtsilä, which was just beginning to set up a lean program. “Since I came from that environment, and because we were supported by Professor Peter Hines, whose career was dedicated to understanding the true lean, I asked if I could join.” In the Wärtsilä culture, he learned why. “I understood that true lean is enabling people, getting a bottom-up commitment. That’s what I’d been missing before.” He studied the Toyota Way and learned that asking why was essential. “I loved that we were invited to question everything. Why are we using such a heavy tool for testing? Why are there missing parts for product assembly? Why do we have to spend time correcting the product?”

Small steps, big impact

From Toyota he learned that small improvements made every day can amount to major improvements. “Sometimes we have big dreams that never come true, but consistent small steps can have big impact. An organization is like an iceberg. Above water are the processes you can see, but what’s below is the culture. If it’s a good culture, then middle managers and production heads are very interested in what people on the line have to say.”

Wrona is a big fan of Toyota kata. “Kata is a Japanese word meaning form. In martial arts, it’s about practicing a set of movements until you become perfect. Say you have the goal to produce 10 pieces per week instead of four. The Toyota philosophy says give people the goal, then have reviews. Ask what experiments they did. Did they make progress? How much? What else could we try? It’s not about having a clear action plan that could lead you where you don’t want to be. It’s one action at a time. You see how it goes. If it’s not helping, you do something else!”

The 1 a.m. message

One day when Wrona was at work in 2013, Lars Hellberg, who had left Wärtsilä to run Fortaco, invited the Wärtsilä team to Fortaco to talk about their lean journey. “I pushed my superior to be in this meeting and I met all the reps from Fortaco sites. I saw that they were just beginning to think about how to build a lean program, which I’d been doing for five years at Wärtsilä. A couple of weeks later, I was changing planes in Sweden and thought of Lars. I sent him a LinkedIn message at one o’clock in the morning, asking if he needed any help. He called me the next morning.”

On March 1, 2014, Andrzej Wrona began work at Fortaco.

Let people play

Fortaco’s Operations Development team is seven members strong today, and it is active with all Fortaco factories, though not always with direct support. It also carries out group-level projects, and supports new factories, such as the greenfield project in Gilwice, Poland.

“Fortaco Group’s acquisitions mean that we have a lot of new colleagues, new regions, new cultures, and new technologies,” says Wrona. “Every business unit is different when it comes to volume and product complexity, and when it comes to lean each has a different level of maturity. We need to develop an appropriate approach for each site. Our job is to explain why. People will implement something if you ask them, but if they know why then it makes all the difference.”

Wrona’s leadership style seems to be a good fit in a modern Fortaco organization which is a merger of many cultures. “I hate micromanagement,” he says. “Like when you have top management talking about the color of the floor. I can’t tell my teammates how to make an app. I tell them the direction, the priorities, and I make sure they’re not overloaded with work, because multitasking is a fight, not development.”

The Toyota Way

Key in building a lean culture has been Fortaco’s collaboration with Toyota. “Toyota UK has a charity program where you pay a reasonable price per person whom you send to their UK factory to learn about the culture of seeking value. All that money goes to a children’s charity. We’ve sent over 100 people over the years. Toyota even came to our Holič factory to teach us their approach to problem solving on a challenge we’re struggling with. Everyone who works with Toyota comes away with the understanding that knowledge is in the people, and you just have to create an environment that allows them to make things better.”

Wrona is extremely proud of his team, as well as the entire Fortaco organization, for what they’ve been able to accomplish with this philosophy. In addition to the Kaizen culture, the OD team is pushing Fortaco to become digital. He says Fortaco’s progress with digitalization is partly a result of Covid when travel came to a halt. “We couldn’t go anywhere, so we started developing apps. It was just a trial, but now we have three full-time app developers. Top management at the business sites are big believers in what we do, and thanks to their support we’ve seen results in financials.

The future Fortaco?

If you ask Wrona to predict the future, he’ll quote the motto of the OD department: Make tomorrow safer and better. “Everyone has two jobs. One is their daily job, and the other is to improve their daily job. How do we do things differently and reduce losses? We want to challenge the status quo.”

He believes the current generation of people joining Fortaco has a different outlook than his generation. “They’re not the type to take a job if they don’t understand their place in the bigger picture. It’s in their nature to ask why. Today’s schools are producing Instagram people rather than welders. Robotization and AI are very interesting for today’s graduates.” These young people can be partly credited with the drive to automate at Fortaco. Wrona sees this as an opportunity. After all, if you want to make something better, just ask the people.