AME Fastcap Tour 11

hello everybody welcome to the ame everywhere international conference session with paul akers and his company fastcap oh gosh you know it's funny we're about ready to watch a fast cap tour because richard's doing that i'll just make a preface to everyone so they know you know we've been doing lean for 21 years now and it took us the first five years to finally figure out what was going on and that was really the ability just to be able to see waste and all of our people to see waste not just me not just the kaizen leaders so to speak but everybody's seeing waste and so you're going to see an imperfect company that has been stumbling through lean and making great progress and we still have a long long journey to go about another 300 years we estimate so without further ado we're going from atlanta where our conference was originally scheduled to be to fast cap in bellingham washington and here's fast caps wonderful wonderful sandbox so paul over to you okay well today our team is going to take over and with the lead of lucas holland he's my right-hand man at bass cap and he does an extraordinary job and along with the rest of the team and we're going to show you what we're doing and how we do it and i'm going to leave it right to lucas lucas it's all yours rock and roll let's have some fun thanks paul well hello welcome to fastcap my name is lucas holland i am the lead production engineer here at fastcap and first of all i want to say i'm sure you guys all tuned in because we're fast cap we wrote the book two second lien we must be perfect we're going to give you a perfect tour show you exactly what your company should look like well we're not perfect and we know we're not perfect and that's the important part we embrace that we're not perfect i believe it's mr amazawa that taught us the concept from toyota of no problems you have big problem because if you don't have problems you can't identify your problems how are you ever going to improve your problems you have to have problems and you have to embrace those and constantly improve that's the spirit of kaizen so as lead production engineer my job is twofold and most of both folds are to grow people and to help people have better lives so the first half of my job is to train people on lean to teach them what the eight-way star help teach them to see the ways help teach them to improve and get rid of those ways help them see that they can make changes to their job that makes it more fun it makes them want to come to work and makes them want to do the jobs that they were originally struggling with and then teach them that they can take those concepts home and they can improve their life at home as well as at work and make it better the other half of my job is well county battery said it best to work myself out of a job so i figure out what's the biggest problem at fast cap right now where are we having too many defects or what is running too slowly or what do people just not like doing and jump in there learn the process as it is figure out how to improve the process make it easier make it more efficient make it more pokey error proof make it fun and easy to do and then i take that job and i teach someone else to do it and i give them the reins so that they have the ability to succeed instead of struggle the way people have struggled before so we're starting the tour here in engineering at fastcap and engineering is where i'm currently working myself out of a job so some of you guys might be familiar with what i would call the two week crunch that's when someone puts in their two weeks notice and all of a sudden you realize they didn't completely buy into lean there's not standards there's not processes they had what they thought as job security because only they knew that and all of a sudden you got two weeks to figure everything out and everyone's running around like oh my god what am i gonna do if this machine breaks down and my job is to make sure we don't have the two-week crunch so that's what i'm doing here so i'm going to start off by showing you this is our haas cnc for example and on this if i was gone for the next month and a half we wouldn't slow down production because right where you ask the question that's where we have the answer right inside here i have qr codes notes everything you possibly need to know how to fill the coolant what to do if a tool breaks even down to an hour long qr code on how to write a new program for a new product and a list of people to call if there's any any major problems you know exactly what to do coming over here this is our engineering board and this is where we keep all of our kanbans for engineering so yellow ones mean they require a machine to produce them green ones can be done by hand it's the only difference but again right where the question is that's where the answer is every kanban card has a qr code right on it and that qr code shows you where to go to get the stuff you know how to set it up how to do the process where to deliver it to how to clean up everything you could possibly need to know to accomplish this task and the kanban card is really how we keep flow it keeps everything running just the right amount just the right time and we run everything off these physical kanban cards they are signals that work needs to be done so back here this is our engineering design area and this is where i'm still working on working myself out of a job this is where we do all our design work we have two stand-up desks and i'm working on standardizing that too so we got all our accounts and passwords which you obviously don't get to see or covered up but i'm also working on qr codes for how to do design work so that we don't have to hire a college educated design engineer we can do what we like to call being the university of fast cap we hire people for their personality who they are get the right people on the team and then we train them the skills they need to know so i'm going to make sets of qr codes for how to do all the design work you know standards for how they get saved everything like that and so when we have a design we want to bring to market first we design it on the computer and then we 3d print a prototype to test it out so right behind the computers here we have two 3d printers you can print out our prototypes on there and we send those to a group of beta testers that we have so our beta testers are contractors working in the field they're people that would otherwise be buying these products and we send them the 3d printed prototypes so that they can use them and then they come back and they give us feedback and they say you know this is too hard to turn and this didn't work because it didn't do this right then we go back we redesign it send them a new version and we work on it until we get it perfect once it's perfect then we get to manufacture it and sell it to fantastic people like you guys so for manufacturing there's a couple different ways we do it one we have a big flatbed wood cnc and the wood shop here it's back behind the wood bunk there so we cut pieces out on there and then we either ship them flat packed or we router sand assemble them and ship them out as full pieces and then we have our metal machining shop right here and this is i think the cleanest metal shop you will ever see let me just say and that's another way that we work on working ourselves out of our job is we make sure that all the tools that anyone needs are there they're clearly organized they have what they need to accomplish the job well and everything's cut into foam and then we love our gps tape we gps all our tools to where they should be you'll see some other uses for it too later in the tour but we've done something really cool here we have a warehouse evacuation plan it's required to be posted but we took our warehouse map and we actually color coded the entire thing so if you find a tool with that color gps tape on it you know exactly what department you need to bring that tool back to and we have a three axis haws here so this does all of our high production stuff we also have this old miltronics which is awesome because not caged in so on this guy we can do stuff that you can't do on a haws like mill down 64 inch long extrusions of aluminum that would not even fit inside that cage there and so then if we're not making something on one of our cnc's the other way that we manufacture stuff here at fastcap is we injection mold so we get an injection mold made comes back to our injection molding department here where we have three injection molding machines they all run eight hours a day five days a week and peter is our lead injection molder and he's going to show you around injection molding peter so welcome to injection molding so here at fast fastcap we have a lot of products and that means we have a lot of bulbs because we try to do as much in-house as we can to keep a tight controller quality so we have well over 100 bulbs and we try to keep small batch sizes so we can do things just in time which means we do a lot of mold swaps so in order to do that we need to stay as organized and efficient as possible and one of the ways we do that is by having zero ambiguity we have wherever you have a question the answer is right there so this is the pallet jack that i use to retrieve my molds and on it you can see the organization of our molds they're actually all our molds are organized by numbered pallets and then row and column so whenever i need a retrieval mold i can find it almost immediately and know exactly where it is you'll also notice that each one of our molds has a mold sheet that's magnetic onto it so this has almost all the information you need when running it with the program location um how to set it up and what we do and um so yeah we always are updating them and improving them we've even started adding on qr codes so one of the things we've also done recently is we've made some huge improvements to our kanban cards so you can see one of the old ones that actually doesn't have a whole lot information at all but we started adding in the tie-in system up here which machines it can run on which is color-coded and numbered also we start adding in the parts per hour and so we can figure out a run time so we can really organize the order of the runs that we want to do also the location of where we want to take it in production and even the mold location so we try and stay very organized now here injection molding we actually do something that's going to sound crazy but we don't focus on speed when it comes to mold swaps and our work we actually focus on reducing the effort of our tasks so with our new machine it's greatly reduced the effort we have big new magnetic platens on it so we don't have to use clamps or bolts um a new vacuum floating mixing system so no mixing but i want to show you that you don't need to spend money to reduce the effort of your tasks so we're still using our old machines running at 100 but we have all our tools exactly where you need them for mold swaps we have all the things that we need to do the swap magneted inside so this is an example of how we put our clamps when we're doing this swap so it's a bowl on top with the magnet right there with the clamp so it's actually just inches away from where you'll be applying it so now i want to show you a little journey that we had when adapting our new machinery to our old we went through a sort of a classic pitfall where we found that when we tried to focus on speed we really failed and then we switched our mindset and we started focusing on how we're gonna reduce the effort and we truly succeeded and ended up reducing this uh reducing the amount of time we're spending all together so this is a new dryer system that we have and what we use a blend of nylon so we're using two different nylons and we're filling them in two different dryers so it feeds into our new system but we're also using it to feed our old so we're doing is we were going down here and we're filling up a bucket getting just the right ratio from the first one and then the next one having to measure it out just right and then we were vacuum loading out of the bag so we're sucking it up out of the bag into the loader and we're spending just a ton of time and maybe the bag would fall over and then you spend time cleaning it up so we went to the pitfall of just dumping it in we thought we were saving time so we started just lifting these heavy bags oh such a strain dumping them in there we found oh man a lot of effort we gotta do something about that so we started using our brain so we did is we started repurposing and using our mynara wallet and putting our material in these bins we actually went one step further and started pre-mixing it so we don't have to spend time going from one to the other it's already just the right ratio what we did is we actually started we found a way to hook up our sensors just at the right level where we need it you can see here if you look around there a little bit further you can see a sensor it's right at 100 pounds for maximum dryness so you don't overfill it but as soon as i start emptying out into the bucket for what i need it automatically starts filling it up so there's no room for error 100 pokey gonna fill the right level way less effort and so much faster i'll need to get a ladder i don't need to start dumping it in it's doing on its own while i'm working so you'll also notice these little candy canes going up here this is our gps tape so we have a lot of wires and a lot of cables leading to our mixer so we have a lot of different sensors and i want to keep them organized for what controls what so you'll notice here you have a yellow sensor connected to our yellow vacuum loader to our yellow um vacuum tube leading over to here and then we have our sensor on off switch so i know exactly which one is controlling what so that's one including you can see the little tube so if anything can be rearranged it can be taken down and be put back together with zero ambiguity so one of the other things that we've been doing recently is we found a way to even just run overnight to keep our dryers on and we can actually even hook up into our material bin and we can come into parts and have even less effort that we're spending thank you and so now i'll hand you off onto lucas thank you peter that was an excellent job excellent job peter thank you this is peter's maintenance table too so peter does all his own mold maintenance any pins or anything breaks he gets those replaced and then we actually do a lot of mold modifications too so we'll run apart for a while come up with a way that we think it could be better we take the molds apart we put them on our cnc's we cut and modify them ourselves and some other cool things peter's doing right now he's been working on cutting up water lines that are going to be saved with every mold so when he pulls the mold out the water lines he needs are right there ready to go again reducing the amount of effort he has to put in and then he's also working on a set of qr codes that is going to show the entire process so if no one was here that knew how to run molding and i had a new kanban i'd be able to grab it i'd be able to come start the machine up get the mold in run it all perfectly and all of it the part he won't dude his horn about is that because his effort is so low he can really really focus on quality and the quality of parts that he can put out as a result is just amazing sometimes he'll bring me parts he'll be like really want to pack this better and get a better surface finish like see how it could look i'm like i i can't even tell the difference but it's amazing quality so once peter makes stuff yeah what have you reduced your changeovers to from two how much reduction have you done in changeovers we've reduced at least eighty percent of the time uh that it was taking seven or eight years ago when i started uh but each mold has its own change over time depending on what machine it's going in complications that might go along with that exact mold etc and like obviously changing into our new machine with the magnetic platens that saves three or four minutes but our changeovers i think range between eight and fifteen minutes depending on the mold incredible thank you and it is incredible is incredible because we don't have any crazy automation at all everything's still done with an overhead crane hoist which is not yeah you can show them right there the crane hoist over the maintenance table and so we lift all the molds in by hand right there but it's all about the reduced effort and reduced effort reduced time comes with it i think peter said that and he enjoys doing it more too because it's not a struggle to do it fast and that's the important part so once you make stuff yeah go ahead and i say a couple things i want to make comments of everyone should know number one lucas has enunciated this already but i want to make sure everyone knows we work directly with our customers to perfect our products so our beta testers are the very people who are buying our product are telling us what to do and how to do it we have a very close group of people everything happens at lightning speed literally we send them a video and within five minutes we're getting responses back from the beta testers instantly we're not waiting days weeks or anything every everything happens immediately which is very very unusual we don't have a sales force we don't have a marketing department we don't have an hr department we don't have a financial department we don't have all the things that a company of our size that does tens of millions of dollars worth of business because we have absolutely leaned out everything we deal directly with the customer and it just changes the entire dynamic that's one point the second point i want to make is they have said over and over again the ant wherever the wherever you ask the question the ant that's where the answer should be you should know that that did not come from toyota that came directly from fastcap 18 years ago this is the story that happened lucas probably doesn't even know the story we had a very sophisticated printer and everybody was flummoxed by running this printer in our printing department and john lucier our general manager said god this is so stupid what way does the paper go in the printer and and he said well we should have a picture right when you open up the tray to show how the paper goes in how it's supposed to be oriented he said the answer should be where you ask the question and that's how that whole concept came about 18 years ago it was birthed in the old fast cap and we use it prolifically throughout our facility every day on everything correct lucas oh yeah absolutely it's a profound it was a profound discovery by john lucia 18 years ago i'll never forget it for the rest of my life and here there all they do is talk about wherever you ask the question that's what the answer should be it makes more sense than anything else whenever you're stuck you're like what do i do and if the answer is right there staring at you in your face it's like you've got to be an easier yeah exactly once peter makes his parts uh he tries to keep you know small batch sizes keep flow going it's all run off kanban cards uh but once they're made they need to go into inventory for a little bit before they get assembled so we're gonna go over and show you a little bit of how our inventory system works and here at fastcap we have a huge facility and walking around slowly creates a lot of wasted time so you'll see that we use scooters here and we scoot around saves a ton of time makes it a whole lot more efficient and i mean who doesn't want to jump on a scooter all day while they're at work and scooter around just kind of like being a kid again we absolutely love it so right here we are now so it also encourages keeping our facility immaculate as you see it this is normal how clean it is because of this whole transportation method and so here we are we're right in the middle of the facility right accessible to anybody who needs anything and this is where we have our inventory desk and so with our inventory system we use a system called wasp and this is not a fancy expensive erp system this is a system we paid a one-time fee for years ago and i think it was something like three thousand dollars and it tracks a couple key pieces of information but we've had some issues with it in the past and this is another area where i've worked myself out of a job but we have the guy who was doing this the information attracts first it has the name of the item then it has the location so everything in our facility has a numbered location we call it a crumb trail it's kind of like hansel and gretel you can follow the crumbs to find anything you need and then it stores a quantity and a date that was added and years ago we had a guy who was just really really struggling and it was easy to say come on can't you get this right like don't screw it up because we'd have pallets go missing because he had to remember all the exact part numbers with the exact numbers of periods dots where they were and if you typed it in there wrong once the palette was just lost forever and so what we did is instead of buying a fancier better program we used our minds not our wallets and so we've used microsoft excel here and we used excel to make wasp run smoothly so when we're receiving something we come into our receiving checklist here and we can enter in the part number of what we're receiving so say it's glue bot you can just start typing the name and there's a drop down here and from the drop down you can select the exact part number it won't let you get it wrong and then if you look at the quantity coming in on your packing list you can just fill in that quantity and when you do using some vlookups etc it knows exactly what quantity we fit per pallet in our racking and then it calculates how many pallets are going to be coming and how many pallet tags do i need and then over on the left there's a print macro so when i hit the print macro out of my ups label printer on a sticker there's my label ready to go and freaking believable you'll see this work but when i go to enter it in there's a scanner just like this one right on our forklift so to enter the pallet in he just scans these there's no you can't type it wrong you can't do it wrong and when he needs to go pull a pallet out again we use barcodes so he'll go into wasp he'll take his kanban card again everything's run off physical kanban cards and it has a barcode on it so when he wants to remove this item he takes it he dinks it under the scanner and you can see it pulls up the top item on the list with a location and it says that's the palette that you need to go get and again he'll just scan the barcodes on there to remove it so we'll go show you how that turret forklift works real quick and so we have lines two on the floor we've marked out because this is a wire guided forklift so you can see this right here is actually an electrical wire that guides it it's about half an inch of clearance on the other side so pallets get staged like this right up to the line you can see the tags and then when matt goes to remove a pallet he can just fly down the aisle here he's got his laptop and his scanner right there on the forklift and you can see right there he just tags the pallet and then there's barcodes on every rack location so he dinks that that's where it is impossible to screw up again dinks the quantity on the pallet that he's removing then he can grab the pallet and he can pull it out and then everything that's stored in this aisle gets assembled in the front of this aisle so right here we are in our production area and this is where we assemble all of those injection molded parts that went into inventory and everything is laid out improvements everywhere and right at the front here is where we have our kanban board the kanban board shows us what work needs to be done so up here you'll see all our kanbans and again qr codes on every one show you everything you need to know how to do it and so alicia here is our production leader but she doesn't really have to manage people she doesn't have to tell them what to do because our process does that so alicia gets to lead them help grow them teach them improvements etc so alicia's going to talk to you a little bit about what her job as a manager actually entails alicia i'm not a manager i'm a leader so um i'm alicia hi y'all welcome to production hi paul this is our kanban board like lucas said on each kanban it tells you exactly what you need to grab for your build orange bin how many are going to build whether you need to get a cart stickers inserts etc and on the back are qr codes for an instructional video every kanban has a video so if you have any questions on how that build goes if the video doesn't explain it then you get a leader and we go through it with them as production lead i am responsible for prioritizing kanbans as they come in throughout the day so that we don't have to manage anyone they just go to the board and grab and go um i'm also responsible can i ask you real quick so and you're in direct communication with the shipping and see receiving department because they're telling you the bird that's coming to you so you're not just operating just your own little world your direct communication with the office and shipping and receiving that is correct yes i get emails from jordan who is the typer and anything that's an anomaly comes up i get it straight away from an email i fill out an anomaly card and that is a priority so so in other words it goes to you before it even goes to shipping and receiving saying that you need to produce it so that shipping and receiving is not going where's my stuff correct yes excellent and i also get the privilege of helping my fellow co-workers with finding improvements doing that all-important morning improvement that we want to find on any of our builds that we run across every build has an improvement somewhere in it so we get to teach them how to see the waste and to make those improvements as they come across them also iqc the first and last of the build that they do to ensure that quality is being maintained throughout the whole build and they are confident in what they're doing and they can be happy about it and have fun with it so right here is a great improvement that we've had this was built in-house and these are made from peter who we've already met uh made in the usa woohoo we love that so we used to have to hand count these in tins so all we have to do is push it on hold our bag underneath and it counts out 10 for us which we absolutely love this machine it saves us so much time and over here and alicia and lisa that was all made in the engineering department we didn't buy that or anything it was you can see they're everywhere in our facility we've developed this little system and we make it and we use them yep absolutely uh and right here we have a sister product euro doorstop with screws we also used to have to hand count the screws to go along with the 10 pack of your door stops and lucas found this awesome machine for us and it pre-counts all the screws for us 3d printed this in-house it was a brand new machine it wasn't up to par how we needed to use it so we improved it with adding a stand under it and the 3d printed dispenser so you just put it under here and tin goes right in and it already fills up ten more right it's already correct yep it's already got ten more yep you don't have to wait for it we love it and so where this little guy sits we got kaizen corners and we have a nice picture depicting how it's supposed to look when it goes back in its spot and we've also struggled for quite a while with garbage cans on them getting too full people aren't emptying them when they're supposed to be emptied so we pretty much poked it and put it on its side so if anything starts to fall out that is your signal to go and empty the garbage can and it's gpsed and label on each one so that it goes back to its spot every time alicia i'm going to interrupt you one more time i just want to make sure everyone knows this principle that we learned from toyota so on that counter that she just showed you toyota's principle that we learned from her is when they buy something new brand new a brand new forklift a brand new county machine it is the worst it will ever be because toyota will take everything and improve on it even if it's brand new and this is exactly the principle we adhere to we don't care if it's new we know we will change it and improve it absolutely continue on okay lucas what did i miss nothing at all those trash cans are a really good example of continuous improvement so we've struggled for years to get those to get emptied and always be where they're supposed to be when they're supposed to be there but just like the inventory system trash cans are another great example of it's really easy to ask someone to oh just do it right and not blame the process but blame the people but really it's all about the process and so if you have someone you think is underperforming as a leader you think they're not doing their job up to par i challenge you step in learn the process that you have them doing spend a month doing it and see if you can even do it right and maybe make that process better and set them up to succeed instead of fail now fast cap there's no red tape so we've gone through like six iterations of what to do with those trash cans lots of different people's ideas like i think this could work for me or that could work for me and finally we landed on one that totally works and that's the spirit of kaizen is you just keep improving until it actually works we have two principles at fast cap that go along with that one we learned from bob taylor is anything worth doing is worth doing poorly what that means is don't be scared to just try it if it works it works you can always improve on it from there and that's the other principle at fastcap is re-improve what you already improved for further improvement if there was something that needed improvement it's something that's a problem and that's the best place to look for more improvements and once you've used it you really know how to make it better and better and better and lucas lucas yeah two two things number one that last principle was ono's principle just so everyone knows we learned that one from ono and the first one was from bob taylor can you just explain to people what that build area was where alicia is so they know what's going on there because hundreds of products are made in these racking systems i don't think we covered that yeah so that station specifically is for our euro door stops which are little injection molded parts that we make on our molding machines and they are stops for european face frame cabinets and so we sell them in 10 packs and we sell them either with screws or without screws if you want to use your nuts not specifically that area the whole area the whole area explain them in the build area and how we build our products what do you mean exactly all the areas all the different cells that we're building all the stuff and people might not understand that those are all the areas where all the products are built behind yeah so yeah i think i covered that coming out of four but yeah each aisle we store all of the stuff that we're going to assemble in that aisle and so the front of the aisles we're thinking about our spaghetti trail here and the amount of transportation how far stuff moves so each one of these is a different build station and so everything that restocks the station is stored in inventory down this aisle it's like this is where we do quick mandrel this is where we do three-way clamp lyle here is doing tri-trimmers and euro door stops right behind you that alicia was just showing so these are all of our assembly stations where we put together all the inventory stored down this aisle and then when it's done comes out of this aisle so it can go to grocery and refill grocery and so grocery as stuff gets picked and packed and put into carts that's where the kanban cards get pulled from you'll see that in a minute to go on our kanban board here and give us the signal that we need to reproduce more for grocery and so everything that's produced in those when it's finished comes out to a finished pallet that actually sits right here and mitch just took it away to grocery he's probably filling it up right now he does that a couple times a day with his riding pallet jack and then there's always something there ready to pick but never too much because we want to keep that grocery area small lucas lucas have i'm going to spin around and explain there are like 50 or 60 build cells or isn't just that one aisle they're everywhere so she could probably explain all these are build cells everywhere yeah yes the front of every one of these aisles you don't even have to walk down them all just pan over to the side because they're everywhere there's build cells everywhere for all the different products there we go andrea all the way over all the way over all the way over there you go these are all build cells everywhere where all the products are built there we go and lucas just so you know you went over that in rehearsal you didn't go over it this time okay sorry all right well we're now going to take you up to the office and we're going to introduce you to jordan and jordan's going to show you a little bit about how orders actually come in get typed up and then how they get picked and packed and how we accomplish our goal of two hours between the time that you place the order and it's in a box in the ups truck ready to go so jordan hey guys my name is jordan i worked in the fast cap office for about five years now and today what i'm going to show you is how we receive orders from our customers and fill them so there's two ways that we're going to do that two main ways and the first one is going to be receiving purchase order forms from our customers that are going to resell our items uh so what we do is we receive that by fax or email and then we convert it in our system into a fast cap pick ticket and this is going to create standard work uh throughout uh the course of the order being picked the other way we do that is we receive uh online orders from our retail store online for end users that are displacing their orders with credit cards and melin over there she downloads those and converts them into the same exact form so once we have that created we're going to walk out to the warehouse notice there's no wall there's no walls between the office and the actual facility yeah exactly so i can walk out to office to shipping just like that and i can even i can even shout out to darla you know if we need something so the way this board is organized is in order of priority so down here if i'm a picker i'm going to come up and i'm going to see that all the next air expedited stuff is on the far left and i'm going to immediately i need to take care of that stuff right away down here we've got mail orders they pick up sooner than stuff down here just the normal today's orders so it's really easy to see what the priority is one other cool thing that we did is we color coded our paper so tuesday is purple if we walk in tomorrow morning wednesday when it's yellow and we see a bunch of purple paper here we're going to know immediately that we're behind and that darla's going to need to get some extra help over here to you know take away that burden and i'm going to interrupt you for one minute i always like to give credit to our creditors too we learned that color coding paper system from carl waddenston uh from vibeco on the east coast he taught that to us about 12 or 15 years ago when we visited his place it's an unbelievable system so thank you carl and then i also want you to just show jordan the poke system we have so we don't miss the next day air with the clipboard there's a spot for every clipboard can you kind of show exactly yeah so like i got this next day air one and it goes right in that slot and there's fast edge actually with the color coded again red for next day air and it shows how many of those we have if one is missing at 3 30 or you know 10 until 3 30 when the next air cart picks up darla's going to know right away wow we need to go find that right now and know what's happening we also have um well we they're taken right now but we have little cards that stay in office overnight so if i'm gonna have a next day or clipboard overnight i'm just gonna slide that right in there so that darla doesn't worry that we're missing something at the end of the day wow so wherever you ask the question that's where the answer is it's very simple yeah excellent all right so then we're just going to briefly show you how we would pick an order like this one first thing you do grab a cart you don't want to be juggling things around you want to grab a cart so you can put it in i'm going to sign my name so that we know who did the order and our grocery system is set up by bin location and the pick ticket the organization of that is also set up by bin location so you'll see right here we're in aisle or excuse me we're in section 425 and the idea is that if you have a big order it's going to snake you through these grocery aisles in order of bin location and spit you out at the shipping department where they're going to package up your order so for this one we've only got a one line order but we're in 425 like it says here row three and we're gonna go over one two three four section five i'm gonna grab that so that's what i need and this is really cool we built these roller tracks so that i took my product the next one is gonna slide right down so the next person can grab it really easy not have to fumble around reaching back there so that's really cool first thing i'm going to do is because we hit a kanban i have to engage with that right away walk it over here we never put that off right jordan right you do it right away before you do anything else because that's the most important so the first thing the kanban is the lifeblood of our company if the kanban system fails everything fails that's why we never ignore them explain the whole system the lighting system you just did because that's all lucas that developed that yeah this is awesome so this is the kanban on system so i'm going to walk this to the nearest one they're everywhere in grocery and that light is going to pop on that on don light that's going to signal that the water spider needs to come and grab this kanban take it to production for their slot that you saw earlier and produce more so that we don't run out in grocery so strong visual cues jordan i want to interrupt you one more time you can see this little thing you're leaning on right now that little board right there see the little board oh yeah yeah you lean on i want everyone to know how that came about so that came from michael altoff some of you saw the yellow tools uh tour michael has many times brought his team out and in the process of bringing his team to baskap he picked orders to kind of see if our processes were really good and he struggled with a place to put the clipboard and he said why don't you guys have a little board built into the trade which is actually removable if we need to and that is all michael altoff's idea so when you let people into your facility and actually work their processes you find out what's wrong with them and michael came up with that great idea and we have implemented it ever since yeah and this was really cool i don't know who came up with this but there's a magnet right there because we we have these uh big ass fans from that company and they were blowing our papers everywhere so we got these magnets and now oh incredible oh that's incredible i didn't know that yeah yeah i'm not sure who came up with that uh so basically what i'm gonna do is i've got three checks that i need to make on this to make sure i have the right thing so i'm gonna check the upc cross it off our part number cross it off and i need one quantity one all visually marked off check off that i've completed this order i'm going to set it here i'm just going to wheel it right back over to shipping where they're going to package it up and ship it out very clean process great job jordan yeah all those checks george is doing that's you know very detailed process but again it's a process that's set up to make sure people can succeed we want people's job to be easy we don't want them to be scared that they're going to make a mistake we want the process to be so good that they just love coming to work it works easy and so you can see again thinking about flow here carts come go into line here where they go to our packing and shipping table and at the end of the table there you see our ups truck so that gets dropped off every morning empty we fill that guy up every day they take it away every night and like i said two hours from the time that you place the order to the time that it's in a box in the truck that's our goal so we're next going to take you yeah i'm going to just interrupt everyone when then that pan shot andre if you could turn around and go back to the other way turn towards the shipping area i want everyone to notice how many things in our facility are on wheels this all came from japan when we we have been to japan so many times lucas has been in japan two or three times so many of our team have been there we noticed that in japan they put everything on wheels and we adopted that philosophy we learned it from there absolutely so next we're going to take you over to the graphics department uh mitch here is this is the finished palette i was trying to show you after production filling up grocery with it and you can see even this has been improved a ton of times this started as just a pallet on the floor but mitch look he's a tall guy he didn't like bending over and grabbing stuff off the ground to put it up on the shelf so he's built this entire pallet that has room for big items on the bottom standardized spots for other bins on the top and he doesn't have to bend over everything he's doing his job is easy and again no red tape everyone gets to try anything they want that'll make their job easier here at fastcam so now we're headed over to the graphics department and again you'll see not upstairs in an office no walls everything here is super open and when we get super busy the graphics girls even come out and they help us pick orders and do production everyone's cross-trained to do everything and therefore if we get burned anywhere we can put all of our effort into the area that's burdened and so these girls they do all of our online stuff they put all of our products online get our videos organized they create our labels all of our artwork and then they also help us all with all of our improvements let me tell you if i make an improvement that looks good it's not because i made it look good it's because of these wizards here so that without further ado here's our graphics department jamie hi lucas like i said i'm jamie i'm one of the graphic designers here with my fellow co-worker andreas with just the two of us so one of the problems that we've encountered mostly of me unfortunately is when we get new products it's a huge process that involves a ton of our departments that you've seen so originally it was me running back and forth being like okay so what's this price what's this product how do i do it what do i need to have and it became very what would you say the word loop-de-loo la spaghetti trails that was that's the word right it was a headache for jamie to get all the information she needed to do all this wizarding to make our products look great online is what it was so we created this sheet so this is each department has a requirement for each section of a new product as you can see here and so what we did was this is the final iteration of what we originally started with the first one definitely failed so we had to go back and try different ways so we got to have a trial and error period which is great here we get to try things if it works great if it doesn't then we go back to the drawing board and it takes some time someone who's out of a department to actually fully understand what's happening but besides standardizing the way things look labels and stuff andrea there's something else that we also teach people here that's very important we actually have another kanban system over in our printing area and you guys can see that it's actually color coded to graphics so we are orange in this area and it has all the information that someone from production might need if they come over here and need to print a label an insert anything that might have something to do with packaging so they're gonna come over here super simple process the computer will turn on they're going to take this barcode that's on the bottom of this and they're simply going to scan it and it's going to come up with exactly the job that they need so you can see that this actually matches the kanban card so they're going to click on it it tells them the location of their paper just like our chrome channels everywhere else so they're going to come over to this rack over here with all our label info or with all our labels they're going to pull out to signal that this is the label they're using they're going to grab a stack do not count big stack that they can put it in the printer come back over to this computer over here and they're simply going to hit print and it is going to print the exact quantity that they need it's going to staple or hole punch it whatever they need to be done and everyone is trying to do this we've made it a really simple and standardized process so that jamie and i are not being bugged throughout the day to print everything that needs to be printed so we can focus on more important things another thing that we have our hands on is making our morning meeting temple and whatnot so you guys are gonna actually get to head over with lucas morning meeting area yes i want to ask you one question go back to the printer real quick how did you know which way to put the paper in the printer we have actually standardized so that you don't put the paper any other way but this way but jamie can show you up here some of our labels are a little abnormal so this one does show you the direction because they come with a pre-printed um like label portion on it that we print more on top of so they do have to go a certain way and it tells you everything you need to know about that if you do so i just want to make make it clear to everyone that is how that concept came about wherever you ask the question that's where the answer should be john noticed this frustration 18 years ago that we couldn't figure out how to put the printer paper in and so this printer started that whole generation of thinking that we have populated through the entire company yeah i actually remember being around when that was added to the printer and it was inside the printer drawer so exactly it was inside the printer door you remember i remember like yesterday all right so i don't think we have time to go through you get with you guys our entire morning meeting and what we go through but i'll just leave you with a couple last concepts if you want to see our morning meeting we have youtube videos available showing the entire morning meeting but we're going to end here and this is what we call our sandbox sandbox is where all the kids get together and play right so this is our break area we have a huge break table here big round table so when people take their breaks they can sit around they can collaborate they can get to know each other they can build a team atmosphere and we actually give them 10 minutes more paid break every day than the state requires us to just so that we can get that sense of camaraderie get everybody working together and feeling like a team and our morning meeting this is where we circle up right around here we do the meeting on the screen right there and then everything we do here at fastcap it's all about our employees growing them making them happy so we do things like we put in a gym upstairs that anybody can use whenever they're not on the clock we let people bring their dogs to work and play with dogs we even have people here who buy dog treats regularly even though they don't own a dog just because they work at fast cap and want to give treats to all the dogs at fast cap how many dogs typically are at fast cap what's an average number of dogs that are at basketball on a normal day there's between three and six dogs at fast cap okay cool and notice the kitchen is completely open there's no wall and then yeah no walls anywhere open open concept kitchen open to the break area and then also any tool at fast cap we let our employees borrow them any night take them home and use them and so it encourages people to learn skills they wouldn't otherwise have and learn how to use the tools here get more comfortable building things and it benefits them but also benefits us because then they come back to work and they say yeah i can use a jigsaw i did that all night it's an amazing place to work and it's really it's all about making the people happy making them want to come to work and enjoy their job so with that i think that we can open it up to questions richard that's all yours look okay so lucas uh explain a little bit about uh 3sing because there's been a lot of chat about 5s which we know in the past was workplace organization so fastcappers leaned out 5s and made it 3s so explain a little bit about the morning routine that you have everybody go through okay i'm going to interrupt for one second lucas i'm going to let you do that but i always want to correct the record we didn't lean it out richard we learned it from hawks hawks laid out in japan because they do 3s every day they didn't think self-sustained and disciplined was necessary so they jerked those out we learned it from them go ahead lucas and so yeah that's why it's three it's part of our culture to sustain and keep it doing and we do do it every morning so every morning we start work at 7am sharp most people get here a couple minutes early to start going and so we have morning chores you not everyone has a chore every week there's about eight chores that have to get done bathroom the kitchen sweeping etc and those chores take about 15 minutes if you have one and whether or not you have a chore the rest of the time in the morning from seven o'clock till 7 30 is our improvement time so we actually give people paid time every morning where they're not just allowed but they are encouraged and helped to make improvements to make their job better and then at 7 30 prompt every morning everyone circles up around here we actually have a sound that plays over our radio system we have music playing all the time at 7 28 we have a little beeper that goes off so everyone knows it's time to start gather for the meeting and then everybody in the company leads our morning meeting so we go through an alphabetical order and we have a a simple setup that anyone can kind of change and make their own but it goes through all the same things we have a history segment we go over constitutional rights all sorts of cool stuff and then right after the meeting which is usually between 25 and 35 minutes then we start working excellent fantastic and when you talk about improvements and you talk about the people involvement how have you managed the people that were reluctant at the beginning to get involved and said i just don't know what to improve there's nothing else to improve well first of all there's always something to improve and i have a list about this long on my to-do so if someone really can't come up with something to do i say great now i don't have to do my own improvement here try this and you'll see how much better it makes your job and the more of them you kind of feed them they really start to get the idea and they're like oh well yeah i was working that station yesterday that you're having me improve and yeah i see how that's better and then it really starts to snap and they start to get the idea and come up with their own and so i think feeding people possible improvements when they can't come up with any is a great idea also if they're really struggling just go up to them during the day three or four times when they're doing a build and ask them you know what bugs you about this are you enjoying this are you struggling are you struggling anywhere if they say no stand there watch them and you'll see them struggling and then you can point out like well you really like grabbing that way over there that looks like a pain and though well yeah yeah i guess that is a pain and so then you just work with them help them do the improvement and the more you do it with them the better they get it doing it on their own teaching people not to tolerate struggle that they're traditionally are willing to tolerate yes it's one of my big things if you want to be good at lean get bothered don't just be okay with the norm and the status quo let it bother you excellent unbelievable okay so i'm gonna go to the questions that people have asked now um back to the injection molding you've got the sensors that were explained on the the hoppers what are they actually measuring so the sensor is a shut off level so the hopper is a dryer the material has to be dried before it can be molded and the dryer runs most efficiently at a certain level so you can set that sensor at different levels and that sensor says when i fill up to this level i will stop filling and then as the machine pulls material now that sensor is open then it will fill more material into there and so it's keeping it always at the perfect amount of material in that dryer to be drying it the most efficiently at all times oh perfect absolutely great fantastic uh the qr codes that you've got all around the company how do you read those tablets or cell phones or anything else uh so we have a couple ipads placed strategically around the building that anyone can grab the ipad and they can use it on there but we also let people carry their cell phones in their pockets as long as they're using them for work which is what they do so they can pull out their cell phones scan that qr code and they can take it right with them to the build station when they're doing the task which is really really useful because on a more complicated task it really helps to be able to pause go back make sure you got that step right before you move on so you want that video right there with you live while you're learning to do the build is the most useful we've found so richard the embedded photo app in all iphones and androids will automatically scan that and bring up the the youtube link excellent fantastic so that's a plug for iphones you gotta get an iphone because i've got an android and paul's give me heck over the last my android does it i have a old google pixel xl2 it's like a dinosaur at this point and it does qr codes no problems so yeah just have it okay photo you need to have it in the photo screen not the video screen yep perfect so when when you started rolling around your beautiful clean floor on the scooters there was a lot of chat about safety so how have you ever had any accidents with these scooters going around the facility in in your experience we've had a couple small accidents and most of them are a result of something like a euro door stop rolling across the ground that catches the wheel but we keep it so clean there's not a lot to crash into and we train people that i mean as part of our new employee orientation i say i'm going to blow you guys mind right now but scooters are tools not toys and if you're the one that has a bad accident we have to take the scooters away you're gonna be in infamy the least popular person in the history of fast cap so don't be that person and people seem to really respect them and treat them as tools and use them for what they're meant to be used for and we've never had any bad incidents we also have a safety video that we go over once a month and that is included in our safety training so people are reminded of it frequently so not once a month every week isn't it isn't the safety video everything it used to be it used to be once a week and we've changed it to once a month because it became very repetitive and so we started kind of quizzing people on it and once a month was enough that's because nobody ever leaves in a month right so you don't need to do it okay so the new employees do watch it right away too so if they start mid-month they're started out with the safety video too and and if you haven't seen our safety video it's incredible it's very in-depth it's very fast-moving it's very fun lucas built the whole thing along with the rest of the team it's incredible just one last comment on the scooters do the dogs ever chase you on the scooters [Laughter] yeah my dog loves chasing me on the scooter that's his favorite part of coming to work is he'll go beg for food and then the minute i grab a scooter he's like oh let's go here's a here's a more serious one how many missed scans do you average weekly how are they caught and have you ever proved error proofed this process this is from marianne she says our plant has lto drivers that occasionally miss their scans so when you're entering stuff into the system it's somewhat of a self-healing system because there's only so many empty pallet locations you're always going to the nearest one so if you're putting something in and you miss the scan when you enter it the next time you go to put something in you're going to think that that should be an empty location and it's not you all of a sudden know right away that that palette needs to get added in and those palette tags have the date received on them so when you go to enter it in you can enter it with the proper date and then as far as removal scans since we're doing first in first out it's always pulling up the oldest pallet to pull out if you don't scan it on a removal it's going to send you to that same pallet location next time you go to pull that item and you're going to immediately know oh that one was already removed remove it from the system and go to the next one lucas we put you in charge of dealing with our inventory management because it was an absolute nightmare and you went in and spent literally years perfecting it making it better how much of an influence did your father who's a top executive in a food company have on you because i know you spent a fair amount of time at his facility reviewing how they dealt with things i'm curious i mean so he actually spent most of his life working on the inventory system for his company and he was working on uh he wasn't the programmer he worked with a programmer and kind of told him like i needed to run these algorithms and those algorithms and so he showed me the world's best system i've ever seen but you know they were paying a programmer over a hundred thousand dollars a year for 15 years along with my dad to work with him to do all this and i mean yes it was all union drivers who didn't want to do it right but their system was amazing like you had to talk into the headset and they'd have a 20 number code on each pallet and it would tell you you need to give me letter three eight and seven so that you couldn't even memorize it and get it wrong and so it was very influential to see how perfect it could be um but it almost made my job harder because then i wished i could do something that perfect but without the money and so i had to really dial it back and say what's necessary and what are the best parts of this system that we need to make ours good does that make sense perfect answer thank you so it had a big influence on you but then you you leaned it out in the implementation of it okay so here's here's the next question the posting improvement videos how does it help your lean culture uh so i would say it's yoga10 and so yokotan is sharing of best practices across every different like whether branch or department etc right and it also is inspiring so a if i come up with an improvement that i want to do to say my backpack vacuum right here we have like six of these backpack vacuums and if i build a really cool stand that works better and this vacuum works better then i show a video everyone in the company sees it and another department can say well we have that same vacuum can you come do that to ours that looks awesome and so then those practices get shared across the facility and it's also really helpful for people who are newer and struggling to find improvement they see all the improvements that are going on and they see that improvements can be big they can be small and what kinds of things we're looking for and it really kind of gets the juices flowing in their brain and i'll be honest it puts a little pressure on them if they're not finding improvements they're not making videos and everyone else is they feel a bit left in the dust and they're like i want to make a video i want to be on there too how long are your orientations when you have new people come what so i have a checklist that i go through and i encourage lots of questions so the orientations can vary a lot depending on how much the person knows when they're coming in how much they are already understand you know if i need to explain to them what things are flammable and need to go into a flammable bin and what aren't that takes 10 extra minutes and if they already like yeah these things are flammable that saves time but the orientations vary between 45 minutes and a little over two hours probably sometimes excellent gps tapes you use a lot of them within your facility yeah so um what's the main purpose of your gps tape somebody's asked so the original purpose of it was to make sure that tools never go missing so part of lean is a place for everything and everything in its place and so every morning in our morning meeting we actually go over missing tools if there's a single tool missing out of foam in any drawer anywhere it gets brought up in the meeting i'm like i don't know who took this i don't know where it is and so that gps tape it really helps because if you find a tool in a facility this big with this many different machines and tools you don't even know who's missing it but when it's got that gps tape on it you can go to the leader of the department of that color and you can say hey i've found this micrometer and i don't know where it goes but it's gps to your department do you know where you'd be missing a micrometer and then it ends up back where it is but since we introduced it um for that purpose we found so many uses for it like peter showed you those hoses in injection molding uh he does airlines with them too for the robots so he knows what airline goes to where you saw that we used it for the trash can so that when you put it back it's a clear match like this goes here and we've even used it for our bag sizes because i mean it's not that hard but when you go to grab a 4x7 bag and you walk over to the bag rack by the time you get there you see all the bag sizes you're like how was that 4x6 or 4x7 but when the bags bright yellow bag versus the black bag you're like yeah i needed the yellow bag it's this one there's no thinking so it basically it just simplifies making you not have to think by color coding everything excellent fantastic question about your kanban cards a lot of companies use kanban cards do you ever lose any and do you count the keeper count on them um we have lost them every once in a while and we go over that actually in our morning meeting too that's another of the things on our we call it the dashboard is any missing kanbans and i'd say it's maybe two or three times a year that we run across a missing one and it's a huge deal when one's missing like that is the lifeblood of our company if that's missing like it's basically like we're sitting there bleeding out right what we do to make up for it well basically if a kanban card goes missing we're going to be low on something but we always have a backup check and part of that if it's external ordering is just people being aware and we need that anyway because sometimes sales change so sometimes the kanban gets turned in and the stuff's not coming soon enough so when we start to get low when someone notices there's only 20 of these left there's only 15 left they come and say something like hey are these coming soon and then if that external ordering card was lost we're like no those are on order like let's expedite when you make a new card and then if it's something internal a production kanban something like that if what happens is someone goes to pick the item out of grocery and it's not there there's no kanban card and so it creates a little bit of havoc it slows us down a little bit but we just prioritize that we get a new card made right away and get it back into the flow and we store a lot of the information that goes onto our kanban cards and just a backup sheet so if they're missing we know what was on there last question which is probably on top of people's minds how do you measure productivity throughput quality safety what are your kpis like at fastcap we don't waste time measuring all that to be honest we measure how much quality we can put out and how much our customers want to keep coming back to us and you know we time our builds we know how fast we're building things we know what our sales are like but we don't spend a lot of time on all that charts and all that we don't find it to really benefit us we find that it's all about the culture of constantly improving and you're going to find all those numbers yeah go ahead can you pull up the dashboard and we'll show them exactly what our kpis are you'll understand in a second what's important to bath cap so the answer in my opinion and lucas's answer was correct is that we have a dashboard and these are the things that we care about at fast gap everything else can go to hell in a handbasket as far as i'm concerned and that is whether or not we're two hours backs to truck and at the top here you can see every one of these things let's not move the camera too much so i can read them we want to know whether or not the typing department is on time whether or not the shipping department is on time whether or not we made any shipping mistakes whether or not production is on time whether or not there's any production mistake whether or not core is on time whether or not engineering is on dot whether or not injection moldings on the time whether or not there's a mistake whether or not a kanban's missing whether or not we have back orders and is there a tool missing and if there were any housekeeping items and someone leave a piece of toilet paper on the floor these are kpis they're not traditional kpis and the rest of them can go to hell in a handbasket bass cap is so successful in every possible measurement of a company it is mind-boggling it would it would make your head spin because we have reduced our kpi to something as simple as those things that i just showed you that's incredible absolutely incredible okay we're gonna we're gonna stop it from there lucas fastcap team paul thank you so much it's been an incredible journey and and watching what you guys have done and how you manage your business and how you grow people is an actual awesome thing it's you've done a great job and thank you on behalf of ame and the conference and all the people that put these things together you you've done phenomenal so there was no worry lucas you did a great job say hi to all of your team and say thank you to all of your team and uh you've done a great job you set set the bar so high and everybody's following you it's unbelievable i also want to say if you guys have any questions that you didn't get answered or something you're struggling with feel free to reach out we're always here to help you guys make your business better and answer any questions that you have okay thank you brought to you by paulakers.net where you'll find all paul's books and lean resources for free including the new two second lean play app like audible but free to listen to lean is lean on the two second lean play app at paulakers.net you

Channel: Paul Akers

Views: 3,692

Keywords: 2 Second Lean, Fix what bugs you, Lean FastCap, FastCap, Lean Manufacturing, Paul A. Akers, Lean Business, Lean Thinking, Business Tips, Human Effectiveness, Management, Efficiency, Fast Cap

Id: r-Gb6EGYIJ0

Length: 63min 6sec (3786 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 01 2021