Lean Manufacturing: The Path to Success with Paul Akers (Pt. 1)

do you want to decrease you inventory costs and increase your profit margins how about decreasing waste and improving the quality of your products lean manufacturing is the key to achieving all those things and Paul Akers well he's the expert in all things lean in this interview Paul Akers shares principles concepts and routines for a lean business culture and lifestyle and it will change your life an author innovator TEDx talker international speaker award-winning business owner the list goes on and on for Fall acres in his life in business is lean yours can be too so stay tuned for this amazing episode it cost us 2.2 million dollars to build it it would cost anybody else a 5 million dollars to build it but because we applied rethinking to the way we did it we did it for a fraction of the cost the bank president he comes in and says Paul I've never seen a business so well-run in my entire life particularly like that guy just one business of the year I was making a ton of money and things were rocking and everybody wanted to work for me everything was going right that's why 3se is the most important activity anyone will ever do to learn lean manufacturing become a leading thinker lean thinkers can see waste and systematically eliminate it in every process in everything they do every day my favorite improvement the year it's got to be this magic magnet dispenser that Lucas made and look how fast this is eliminate a bunch of motion that's looming tax rate that's Lean Thinking [Music] so first of all this is fastcap welcome to bass gap and the interesting thing about this company is there's no walls so this is the office and there is the shipping and receiving and manufacturing everything which is very unusual I don't know of a company in the world that it's like that so we deliberately did that because we want to connect everybody together we want to connect all the work together so they process an invoice and boom it goes right to the shipping department right there they don't have to walk through a door or tap on a glass or anything like that everybody's in direct communication so it's very unusual the next thing you'll notice is it's a beautiful building very open tons of Windows 140 windows here which lets lots of natural light in so it's a really pleasant place to work the floors are immaculate it's all polished concrete we don't have any custom floor coverings anywhere everything's just very simple very lean and this building is a miracle to be honestly because it's 50,000 square feet and it cost us 2.2 million dollars to build it it would cost anybody else five million dollars to build this but because we applied Lean Thinking to the way we did it we did it for a fraction of the cost most people can't get their head around a building this size building for that much [Music] tell us about what lean manufacturing is what are the basic principles the most basic one is the ability for these two eyeballs to be able to see waste if you can identify all the things that are going on in your life both at home and at work that are not changing anything that aren't adding any value and then you do something about it by eliminating that that's mean I'll give you another example when you make this coffee let's just we'll take this coffee right here okay so the woods had to make this coffee and the first thing you had to do was get a cup so they had to walk two steps and grab a cup then they put the cup underneath there then they took the puck thing out and then they slammed it down and got all the coffee out of it and then they had to walk over one step and wash it out maybe and then walk back well guess what no coffee has been made yet that's waste that's non-value-added activity it isn't until that they push that button and the copy is actually coming out that value is being added it's only at that moment only for the 30 seconds or 15 seconds of that copy came out was value being at the rest of it was always so the main principle is to get to the value taking that value added activity and to be able to identify all the things that are really not changing anything you're not paying for someone to walk and take one step or two steps to get a cup to get a lid you're not paying for that that's not what you came there for you came there to drink coffee to nourish your body with coffee to get a caffeine but you know this whole idea the Japanese word it's called mu de mu da Buddha means waste it's this little tiny word with four letters and it is so powerful but most people in their lifetime will never understand it that's me manufacturing that's lean thinking now in the front of all of our inventory racks are build so we have about 700 product and there's about 50 build cells where we actually build the products and we've done really in just a 4x8 section that's very flexible we can change it for whatever product we need to build we have a little station set up with jigs and it just really works well we have the inventory down below we build the product up above just the great system allows for a lot of flexibility now we have an automatic shrink wrapper which allows our people to build power loads because we ship a couple semis a day and what happens is they just drive that on to their push a bus on the floor clip and then it automatically starts to spin around now the operator can go away do something else when it's done it automatically cuts itself and then the operator comes back and retrieves the pallet puts the label on it and it's off into the truck it's a very efficient system and again relieves the burden off our people but we don't want our people that work hard to learn them to work smart the bank comes in a week before the Japanese come into my company the bank president he comes in and says Paul I've never seen a business so well-run in my entire life the best-run company I've ever seen best well-organized managing everything cuz I'm OCD everything looks perfect and he said he was willing to give me any amount of money I want to know no you don't give money to small startup companies I didn't have an MBA so they don't really like to give money to people like me but he said any amount of money you wanted because this place was so dialed in a week later the Japanese walked into my plant and they delivered the message you're clueless you don't know what you're doing I asked him can you help me said well I don't know you're clueless you don't know how to manufacture so the bank sees what I'm doing says it's unbelievable right but the Japanese who can see waste and understand value versus non value say you're out of you maybe I don't know what I'm doing and so what an interesting contrast very interesting Congress particularly when in fact I just went business of the year right that was the same year I was making a ton of money right and things were rocking and everybody wanted to work for me I had this young hip crew everybody wanted to work for me everything was going right but I had a couple inventory problems that's why I hired the Japanese and demands a couple inventory problems so then they came in in and one week they took processes that were taking me 45 minutes on those machines right over there 45 minutes - five minutes so every time we did an operation it took us 45 minutes and they in one week through small little improvements got it - five minutes and at that point I said I don't know what I'm doing so I started listening I actually got in a plane and immediately went to Japan to Lexus and Toyota to see what they were doing and then when I saw the contrast of what Lexus and Toyota compared to all the other American manufactures I go oh my gosh I'm not even on the right planet I don't even have a clue and that's when I became crazy about leaving but all these cells are all the different products that we make so as we get an order so these are called Kanban cards so if there's a Kanban someone grabs the Kanban card goes into a production cell and then builds the product and that's what all these cells are they're all they're all work cells right here these are all the different con bonds the whole company's run on a paper card just like this so they would bring their Kanban and they would drop it into here and then they would start building the product right here so everything's set up in Nice manufacturing cells so they can work really really effectively and efficiently so it's really the whole everything we do here is very simple yeah but most people don't realize the importance of great processes I see all these red lights on every island no they because we have this massive forklift which is down there being charged which is called a turret forklift that the man up the man goes way up in the in the unit and we don't want anybody down that aisle when that forklifts in there cuz it's massive so the red light goes on and it tells everybody visually don't go down an aisle exactly yeah you've got kind of been a merchandise going all the way to that when we moved through a lot of it we ship two or three containers sometimes every day could you imagine that that's that's a lot of stuff down here I'm trying to quantify it either in dollars or in between 100 and 200 thousand dollars a day Wow [Music] what tools can be implemented to have lean manufacturing there's just a few simple tools and here they are the most important one is something called 3fc it means to sweep to clean everything so the first thing you do when you start your work the first thing they do when they walk into their studio the first thing you do when you sit down to your office and you don't open up your phone look at your email you don't turn on your computer right you look at your office you say what can be cleaned here and you start to clean you clean the dust you'll clean the windowsill you realize the cables are all bunched up in the back of your computer and you you sweet that means to clean you sort you take all the papers around your desks like if you go down to my desk right now you'll see there's hardly anything on it right and I'm a busy guy there's nothing on because I've sorted I've taken all the crap that's piled up on most people's deaths and work area and I got rid of it so you sweep your sort get rid of the things you don't need and you standardize you create standards on how you do works we tell people to do that for 10-15 minutes a day max no longer that we do it for a half hour here the reason why you three us is to find problems so it isn't to keep a neat clean place we don't clean this places it's incredible right as a factory yeah so you can eat off the floor we don't do it for that reason we do it to find problems interesting because when we clean we go oh why is that dirt accumulating there where is that dirt coming from that dirts coming from the seal in the door that's that's faulty so then we go and fix the seal on the prop in the door and then we don't have the dirt there anymore so we saw the problem then we create a standard that alleviated the problem we call it a countermeasure that's why you three us that's why three se is the most important activity anyone will ever do to learn lean manufacturing become a leading thinker so what you're watching is a process that was taking us three days to make all these custom parts for a customer so I went down to the shop because I love being in the shop and came up with some ideas on how to eliminate wasted motion and transfer tation and we have to drill these little aluminum parts we have to drill them twice so number one as I was noticing I was reaching up to this handle all the time and taking my hands away from the work and then it was having more set-up time so I said how can I change that so I simply took a bungee cord and then put a bungee cord to act as a spring and then put a piece of webbing on there and I hit it with my hands and away you go and then as we were doing the improvement with our team somebody noticed hey if we make the stop on the outside parameters of both sides we don't even have to pick the part up and flip it around so you can see I drill one side push it over the other side then we have an air nozzle on there blowing all the debris away which we learned from Walters and wolf which is really cool we took a process that was taking us even as long as three days to make these parts and now we cut them and drill them in eight hours gigantic improvement I show up in the morning my first task is to make an improvement help other people make improvements and make sure that we're cleaning and looking for things that are out of place and I spend half an hour doing that I go to the morning meeting after the morning meeting first thing I jump into is making sure everybody's trained on what they're doing so I'll flit around for the first hour from person to person just watching them making sure they got all the processes down making sure they remember everything making sure they're doing it right answering any questions once I'm sure everybody's got everything going then I'll jump into it and I'll start working on stuff and finding improvements coming up with improvements jumping out to check on people again and then I do a lot of running around figuring out where everybody should be at certain times kind of balancing the workload around the facility so I talked with Alisha the production leader and Lauren the shipping leader and kind of judged their burden where they're at and move people around between them a little bit and that's due day yeah awesome big circle of all that and it's fun I get to make a lot of things build a lot of jigs help a lot of people learn to run a lot of tools and make a lot of things and we kind of call it the school of fastcap and I really like how much I get to teach everybody all day nice yeah there's always changed man it's cool to see that yeah [Music] what do you call people that are just overly obsessive about little details OCD OCD but this is this is different this is a different principle concept wall whoa I don't think I've ever had anybody ever in my life ever interview me and get what you just said ever people think because they're OCD they leave right where we're going again thinking here you nobody's ever said that congratulations man good job it is not being OCD and everybody thinks oh I'm OCD I'm already super organized I'm already leave you haven't got a freaking clue about yeah what let's because I'm the most OCD person in the world and when the Japanese came into my company this company they said you're clueless I was the neatest cleanest guy you've ever seen everything had to be put away and he said you're clueless interesting because OCD is not lean being organized is not lean lean thinkers can see waste and systematically eliminate it in every process in everything they do everyday but then there's one step further the real great lean thinkers and the lean leaders get everyone to do it mm-hmm total participation in an organism where everyone is working together towards the same target of eliminating waste out of every process they do I can now live more peacefully thinking yeah that OCD has nothing to do it has nothing to do with it and that's it for anything because that's what lean does it does make you peaceful because you're not struggling with things you're enjoying the fact that you're effortlessly going through the day and the minute it's not effortless you stop and you fix [Music] so what top three problems can a lean culture solve for business owners well the biggest one is hair on fire your hair sound Empire I mean most most business owners walk in and there's just they're just the master firefighter they're just walking around putting out fires I'm the savior I'm the smart one well where's the next problem let me solve it I don't have that with clean yeah because you don't have that would leave everybody solving problem so the fires are like like little tiny oh and look we can let's tweak that instead of these big problems and chaos that's going on all the time so the number one thing is hair on fire right maybe number two is happy employees people don't want to work people don't want to stay people don't want to invest their life in an organization that it's functioning at a high level so just those two things right there do I need to say anymore no I mean and these dogs here are just everyone's just an incredible little addition to this business everywhere what do you what do you think about lean yeah it's a family and we want people to feel good about work and you don't mind if they stop and pet the dogs and everything because if they're happy and they feel good at work they're gonna they're gonna work absolutely [Music] if you ask anyone here at fastcap i was the quietest and the shyest kid here you're the second person let's say do not talk to anybody now I'm talking to sales reps I'm talking on the phone with other people I'm talking to customers I'm talking to sorts to all different types of drivers that come in here deliver who receive everyone just a it's wonderful and I mean I could customer could walk in through here and I know okay I could take him there I could show them this I could show him that and it just my communication skill has gotten a whole lot better that's cool and I think one of the biggest things that help that is the morning meeting we do morning meeting every single day and every day and everyone takes turns doing it so every not month month and a half or so no option gonna do it no return well it's fun right it's fun it's it's part of the lean culture so I love doing it it brings out the brings me out of the nine and comfortable zone like you know it's really uncomfortable and me I hate it you know stand out there but I love it at the same time because it pushes me to be a better person to focus on things that I'm not good at and and lately I've noticed it from when I first did it - now it's improved a lot but there's still tons and tons of room for improvement that's great [Music] over here all the all the paper for every day of the orders is color-coded Monday Tuesday so today's Monday all the orders were put on pink paper today now the entire company is managed through this one little board here that's made out of OSB and painted with brown paint so if you look up here you can see the burden of the company is there any burden on this company right now there's nothing everything ship everything ships two hours backs of trucks at the time we get the order to the time we make it package it and ship it two hours so the end of every day we go home completely finished you can sleep that night and we sleep at night and so the next day everything's gonna be printed on this color and if this whole board is filled with tons of colors we know there's a burden on the company so we can allocate the resources get more people over the shipping department to ship so wherever the burden is that's where everyone moves very flexible environment and it's based on all these simple visual controls so look at me visually this is incredible clipboards so these are clipboards for next day or second day air UPS FEDEX all the different ones so a customer calls and says I need something next there we're not just going to put it in the queue we're gonna put it on a clipboard nice because it needs to get special care right as if we missed that and they don't get the job done right so at four o'clock before the cutoff for next day err if all the clipboards are not back in here what does that tell us Oh something didn't get done go find that clipboard get that job done but as soon as all those are back in wanna we know everything got shipped so this is hair on fire no one's hair is on fire right because we have a process to make sure there's nobody running around but oh crap we didn't get it out I don't I don't see how businesses operate any other way the other way I know that's we still make it well that's why I laugh that people don't get this when people don't get this is just like what you don't get this yeah it's so simple it's unbelievable and all these ideas came from our people just making these improvements all the time so all the waste is just falling down there and the real product is coming out right here that is very cool Maitland my favorite improvement of the year has got to be a new magic magnet dispenser that Lucas made and so before we had one like this where you have to manually just pull it every time slow it's a lot of movement the magnets are inserted the magnets are inserted now we have this pneumatic device which down here we have our petal on it and what's the pokey okay Sonia makes us remember that we have something down there so nothing gets run over it nothing yeah so it's in with the Kanban so when you put the Kanban back with the finished product it the pokey okay says hey don't forget the foot pedal yeah and put it back well that's a great improvement right there Mac strips here and this nice little holder that attaches under the table look at that look how clever that is okay so that just plugs it so it's a quick change build station so as you need to build it you go and then we load it up follow mad scripts when we're ready to go place it in here and that magnetizes right to the front and keep going keep building them keep going when we keep building them so this tells you how many you have to build through the red and look how fast this is eliminating a bunch of motion right Wow and look at this is all stacking up right here very cool [Music] how did you first discover the idea of being lean and what prompted you did incorporate it into your own business in a nutshell well it's a great it's a great story how I first discovered the concept although I didn't get it I was in San Diego and this would be this was about three years before the Japanese came to my company and I some a friend of mine said you got to come see this business it's incredible and so I went and saw this business and it was a cabinet making company with about maybe 20 employees and when I went in there there was no activity there was they weren't building any cabinets and there was no inventory there was no lumber racks there was nothing and lo what the heck is going on here and I'm a cabinet maker I run this is a craziest thing I've ever seen in my life somebody's tender folia yeah somebody's trying to pull me and I said what's going on goes well we have a slow day today so I don't have anybody building cabinets they're all doing maintenance they're all doing 3s seen on all the equipment so nobody was making a cabbage but everyone was going around polishing and cleaning you know making everything perfect the machines doing all that stuff and he was not there was no stress and I walked out I said that is the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my entire life because I'm used to inventory all activity people building stuff loading trucks getting everything up so at that time you didn't get the lesson oh I didn't get the lesson at all no I walked out thought it was the stupidest guy in the whole world it was unbelievable because what he realized is there was no demand the customer was not asking for anything so why should you make something because if you make something then you got to store it then you got to build an inventory rack then you got to manage it you got to count the inventory and then if you ding it with a forklift then you got to rebuild it so he understood waste so he only turned his machines on when there was a demand from the customer but it was also foreign to me I didn't get it at all and it wasn't three years late it wasn't till three years later that the Japanese came in and started explaining me the concept of just-in-time only making what the customer wants when the customer wants it that the light came I go that's that company I saw in San Diego that I thought was crazy and I'm the crazy one and he's the smart one [Music] this is a task Piper this is where we we make this is called a fast pipe cart so we make everything every we make the work benches we make everything but then people see this and they all want it so they want to buy it so this is where we process the orders for a fast bike so check this out so there's no orders for fast pipe right now why do we know that because of this right here see this thing when the order gets there the light goes on so if the office brings back an order puts it on the clipboard the light lights up and and Saeed who's over in a whole other department can see oh that's an order and it'll come over and he'll build it just in time but we don't build anything unless there's a man and now look at javis another important principle this is called respect for people so I can diffuse that piece of paper and I got a bear I'll just put it back in there and they'll figure to cram no no no no it's kind of go back I need to make sure I put it back exactly in the right place lean office desk in exactly the right direction because that's called respect for people just because I'm the boss that doesn't get me right to come in and destroy someone's work area right right and this is the way everyone operates here everybody operates with this high level of respect for people and for resources you would just save 20 seconds for somebody trying to figure out how to get that paper better or worse put the wrong paper send it to the customer the customer cut make the bungle I got the wrong instruction we're talking hours by the time it's all done just cuz Paul misbehave Paul didn't respect the core issue was respect okay that's important is respect lack of respect for people and for resources I wasn't respecting the worker mmm-hmm I wasn't respecting my customer I wasn't respecting the resource of the diesel truck to ship the item all the way there and then have to reship it again so lean thinkers have a deep respect with people to fit the time of my customer the time of my worker and for the resources that are required to make everything happen so I'm gonna stop I'm gonna pause I'm gonna make sure everything's bad and then I'm gonna move on once you implement it lean manufacturing how much does your inventory cost decrease how much did your profit margin increase okay loaded question I'm not gonna be able to figure out and calculate all the numbers to what you just asked me but I'm gonna tell your listeners and you numbers that will do nothing but astound you okay all right so number one the first thing with lean is if you do it for money you're gonna completely blow the thing out it has nothing to do with money it has to do with improving the quality of people's lives your process-oriented so work is easier more enjoyable so you can deliver more value to your customer greater quality or customer nothing to do with profit if you make it about profit you lose guaranteed a hundred percent you will lose that's number one let me just repeat that if you make it about profit you lose think about that first 100 percent you'll lose it will never work it never has work I've never seen it work once [Music] yeah this is another really cool thing so all the products are made down there at the end that the machine's down there at the end and then this is the inventory and people just walk into these cells and package it just in time and then ship it and so if they're out of something they're communicating with the operator right there at the end of the end of the aisle and then the fast caps are all over here in these bays so these are all the different paths that we make every size shape you could possibly imagine and again the operators are all there at the end making it and you're in direct communication with it so it's really really nice got screws on the cabinet to cover this is like a birch or a maple right here a white maple and you know notice everything we make even the countertops everything's made out of particle board just painted and everything is customized we made these bins these cardboard bins are called our Kai's Ian Binns we developed them to design them so they're flexible and we can move the partitions anywhere we want I say this again why I say what I say we make everything baby we make everything we don't if we were to buy things off the shelf it wouldn't be detailed enough or specific enough for our processes so we just find ourselves making everything whether it be the work benches the way we store our products the way we manage our our work cells everything we just make everything amazing [Music] when I went into business I had a problem in front of me it was to cover a school I wanted to make my work easier so I made a fast cap and it made my working it was too late lighten the load of my work and then when I presented it to my customers my goal was to solve a problem for my customers and if I effectively solved the problem of my customer they exchanged their hard work in time with dollars if I just said to my customers I want your money do you think they would come to me I doubt it no but if I said I have something that can solve your problems I have something that can make your life better make your work more enjoyable make your work higher raise the quality of your work when they come to me money's never even talked about mm-hmm so you first go into business for the purpose of serving or providing something to a customer and when you do that in a high level they exchange they give you their time and money in exchange for it you'll never have a problem of a profit at that point it's impossible it's against the laws of nature if you're adding value you're giving something to someone that they need they're more than happy to exchange your money for a nice cup of coffee right but if they gave you a crappy cup of coffee would you give them the money and has what if I said I just want money I want to open up a coffee shop and I want money are you gonna give up too much coffee no they're providing something to value and it's the value that you're that you're in business for yeah to deliver that quality product that service and the profit is a byproduct have you guys heard of lean manufacturing we'd love to hear your comments comment below once you've seen this episode come back and tell us how you've implemented lean manufacturing in your business in your life we'd love to hear at you guys so that we can share that with others you guys we've had so much awesome content with Paul acres that we want to make this part 2 so stay tuned we're in 40 countries tens of millions of dollars with a business all over the world three or four thousand distributors worldwide and the entire brainchild the entire brain of the company is in this little office with only six people we've been in business for 21 years you know a price increases we've had in 29 years how many 3 in how many years 21 years can you really change a business two seconds a day so a lean thinker understands that all these processes that we do every day are just terrible processes and they are not satisfied and they say how can I just shave a couple second well if you're shaming a couple seconds I have a 50 or 60 processes a day you've got one hell of a company going on right and that's what we got going on here millions of improvements we make non-stop [Music] you

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Keywords: lean manufacturing, lean management, lean production, lean manufacturing principals, lean manufacturing tools, lean six sigma, manufacturing, lean principles, lean manufacturing training, paul akers, paul akers 2 second lean, toyota lean manufacturing, fastcap, lean factory tour, kaizen, production, six sigma

Id: oarLDeAFSj4

Length: 32min 39sec (1959 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 12 2020