As manufacturers grapple with rising transportation costs and an appreciating Canadian dollar, some companies are looking to trim costs by reviewing the way they assemble and package their products.

While reducing the amount of packaging used can create cost savings and reduce the amount of waste generated, other companies have found efficiencies by reviewing their use of the time-honoured assembly line.

Several years ago, the Crown corporation Royal Canadian Mint moved away from the traditional assembly line method of packaging coins in favour of individual workstations and quickly found the new method improved the productivity of employees at the for-profit Crown corporation, which increased its net income by nearly 93 per cent to a record $21.6 million last year.

However, the mint's Pierre Justino, director of continuous improvement, and Craig Szelestowski, vice-president of human resources and business transformation, say the new assembly line has also given the company more flexibility and improved employee satisfaction.

OBJ: What was your old assembly and packaging process?

SZELESTOWSKI: In the past it was very linear, your traditional assembly line. You needed eight to 11 people to staff the belt. You just needed that many to show up to begin work, whether you had a hundred items to package or a thousand or ten thousand in a day. So it wasn't very efficient. So what we did as part of our lean enterprise program, which was reviewing the value stream across all of our major businesses, we identified this as an opportunity to improve that would provide us a few different benefits. One, it would help us keep the work in-house and conduct the work at a price that was very competitive with outside suppliers. Two, it gave us flexibility to handle either a large order or a small order. And it also gave us a level of quality that we like to have. Because we were able to do it in-house, it reduces the transportation and handling (costs) and so on.

OBJ: What were the challenges of the traditional setup?

JUSTINO: Having all those people, the difficulty comes when one or two individuals are sick. That screws up the line because you need to insert seven coins into the package and you've set up to have one person lay down the lens, one person puts the insert in, one person puts in another coin and another person puts in another coin and so forth.

Having two people missing doesn't do it much good. We have to start pulling people from other areas and that creates delays in other areas. Obviously, it was not the best setup, but certainly a very traditional view of how to mass-manufacture.

SZELESTOWSKI: It wasn't just if an employee was sick. It gave us very little flexibility in terms of using employees from that area in other areas where there might be a bottleneck.