Lean Manufacturing: The Path to Success with Paul Akers (Pt. 2)

fastcap part two we've had so much amazing content with poly acres that we want to continue sharing some of the principles ideas theories that will change your life will change your business it'll blow your mind away [Music] can you really change a business two seconds a day well if you're shaving a couple seconds on 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 if the leader thinks it's all about him and he's always got to come up with a great ideas that's gonna kill everything for sure and when we make it about that team environment that's when you really win the minute you say no it's as we than you've lost you've lost the lean game if you come up with a better way I wanna know about it we're gonna implement it so never stop looking for lean improvements and never never never resist somebody who wants to make an improvement and more importantly you better learn lean quick because if you don't the Chinese are going to eat you alive and spit you out I even know what hit you not awareness of what the competition is mm-hmm and how that competition is potentially gonna affect us is very important and I think that is something that makes us stronger here we've been in business for 21 years you don't we price increases we've had in 21 years how many great we're a huge company doing tens of millions of dollars and 40 countries this company's rockin it man [Music] so I think another really interesting thing is you look at a company that again 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 six people manage this entire company it's hard to even get your head around that there's no marketing department no sales department no HR department no maintenance department there's nothing and we have just a very few people managing the complexity of this company and I mean making six seven hundred products Wow [Music] what is the most common thing that most companies do every year they give a price increase right the cost of fuels going up cost of natural gas is going up everything's going up taxes are going up everything we've been in business for 21 years you know any price increases we've had in 21 years how many three in how many years 21 years that's one increase for seven years that's unbelievable it's I've never heard of any company ever doing that that's amazed cost keep going down because we keep we're more efficient so instead well how loyal are our customers to us I would say super low like incredible could you imagine gonna woods copy and the price never going up they still paying the price of a cup of coffee at 7 years ago you just got go this companies rocking it man so and because of that we have no marketing department we have no sales department we have no HR department we have no financial department we're a huge company doing tens of millions of dollars in 40 countries we should have all that level of bureaucracy and overhead but we look at all that we say that's always why do we need all that so we've eliminated all that nonsense [Music] what are the common pitfalls that accompany a person experiences in implementing lean manufacturing whether in business or in life name two or three the biggest one that comes to mind immediately is ego you know if the leader thinks it's all about him and he's always got to come up with a great ideas that's gonna kill everything for sure if you focus on money it's gonna kill it if you focus on always getting the accolade for yourself you're gonna kill it now the smart leaders don't make it about money they make it about improving the quality of their people's work the smart leaders every time their people come up with a great new idea they're always saying that's amazing I never thought about that that's cool and then immediately the people think well I've got a cool boss I mean he actually is recognizing me he actually feels that I have value mm-hmm so ego is a big deal and if you can check your ego and you can create a culture where one checks your ego where nobody's making it about whether or not it's their idea they make it about whether or not it's a good idea and will benefit the customer and the organization and when we make it about that team environment that's when you really win [Music] well tell us about how long it took you to change the culture of fast gap to a fun lean culture I mean what were the biggest hurdles mm-hmm and then what were the greatest benefits that you've experienced well the took about a year the first year was very painful because we didn't know what we were doing we were just kind of wandering in the woods but after a year we started to see things we're really starting to go well and people started to be very engaged in what we were trying to accomplish because they knew we were serious about it because we didn't just it wasn't the flavor of the month we didn't do it for one or two months then kind of give up and go back to her old ways but we absolutely persisted and then they realize we're serious and this was not the flavor of the month so after one year we started to see the benefits and the benefits were engagement of our people our people were solving the problems that were habitually haunting us prior to that so you know you have problems in an organization and that one year it's the same as the next year that nothing really changes so those habitual problems started to go away and the problems we started encountering were different problems but they weren't nearly as consequential because we were solving problems instead of ignoring them or pushing them or sweeping them out of the carpet so our problems came to the surface we solved them and that made work a lot more enjoyable and obviously it's going to be more fun and people are going to be happier tell us what it's like to work at fastcap it's fun can you elaborate yes it's fun because every day is different and you always get to do something different that involves using your brain so most companies you come into work and your first weeks kind of exciting because you're learning all the new stuff to go with the new company then after that every week gets progressively duller and duller and your brain kind of checks right here every day when you come in you're asked to use your brain and not just do what you were told but think of how to do it better and when you think of how to do it better you actually get to go implement that and you might learn something new too when you're doing it how to build something how to our machine use a tool etc and so every day when you're doing things it's not just do what you were told it's think that makes it fun [Music] so I think that most people don't realize how important it is to develop their people because really the asset of the company is the people we think it's the money in the bank and everything like that but when people are thinking they're driving costs down and quality up and this makes a huge difference in the way an organization works and how effective it is but even more important than that is when an individual goes outside of work because of this notion of growing people and it changes the way they work outside of work and that's really important so don't like take Lyle for instance Lyle yeah so how has what you've learned at fastcap affected what you do outside of ASCAP yeah so the stuff that affects me at fastcap is thinking of processes how I'm doing things I'm always thinking of how I'm training people interacting with people and so when going outside of work it affects my interactions with people of how am i efficiently having a conversation with somebody or in my directing them in the right way so as a youth group leader I'm thinking are all my papers in a row do I have everything in order for my kids and my wasting their time am I actually having processes in my preparation for things so that I'm set up for success so that I can also mentally help my kids grow so to me it sounds like you have a higher respect for people mm-hmm and a higher respect for the resources that have been granted you and you don't just take those lightly you're thinking about that well it starts with the principle of when you're responsible more for more things you get responsible for more people and more things and more things and more people so if you start with the more things that you have in your handle right it affects your relationships with the people so we originally were using this machine to print and cuts all of our custom cruising camcorders well we realized that it was taking a lot of time to do so so we added this new machine so now all we have to do is print on this machine take the rest of the printed material this machine load it up send it over and it cuts beautifully and we just broke this record we have a 502 treat order that would take us about two weeks and we can get it done in about three days [Music] can you really change a business to seconds a day and how give us no real let's take for instance let's take a 60 second process making a cup of coffee okay and if every day you say to the barista you say all I want you to do is not save two seconds save a half a second or a tenth of a second and every day they come in and they evaluate where the cups are where the lids are how much water they used to rinse something out and how many steps they take and every day they just take maybe a second out of every process at the end of 60 days there's not much left right you're doing the whole process much more quickly so and then that's only one process 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 shaving 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 being made non-stop my favorite improvement is this roller system that we added to our shipping table we used to struggle a lot so it would smack go anywhere so we added those little rollers so when I'm done sipping my box I can just give it a push and the big one push the little ones is here in the graphic section where we print all of our labels so when we come up to our printing station we used to have to type in so here's our Kanban for this Oh web type con bon oh well look at that there's a several jobs that Kanban in it so we decided to do a barcode to make it so much easier that you didn't have to search and there it is that's the job that I have to print we went a little bit further so you didn't have to write in all these little labels or information we made a printed version so we just have to type it in and print it and it's ready to go if you guys watch this episode and you don't implement one thing watch it again it'll change your life it'll change your business it's Paul's a living example of that and it's so much fun that's the thing that most people it's like tell us how working for Paul has changed your life when I started at fastcap I was very shy very reserved had really low self esteem and confidence and so after working here and having my own say an opinion value it gave me a lot more confidence to just vocalize my own views and opinions and and feel like they were heard and I can make changes and it's there's a lot of freedom here to make improvements and change things so I've changed a lot in in a lot of really great ways that's pretty cool yeah I guess the number one thing I would have Paul change is that he and it's a good thing so I don't know if I'd change it completely but he's always trying to push what's the newest best way to do something right and a lot of times that results in something where we're kind of stuck with six ways to do it and we don't actually have a standard and it's all in aims of finding the best way to do it like when I communicate with Paul I have to check whatsapp voxer text messages and WeChat okay I have to check them all five times a day because he can't decide which one's the best someday we'll decide and we'll have the very best one but I think we create a lot of confusion trying to get there that's awesome because this is perfect example of figuring out how to avoid waste and yeah I mean so yeah thank you yeah he loves email like most people and I'm kind of prying about of the whole email thing customers not paying they don't want to pay for an executive salary they don't want to pay me to sit at my desk they want to pay for Skylar to make injection molded parts that they can put in the tools that he's making that's what the value is that Skylar is adding value I'm not adding value so I realized that the real value is on the shop floor and so I should spend all my time in the shop floor helping my people do their work more effectively and solving problems with them that's not typical leadership leadership is get a nice big desk in a nice office get a window so people do not disturb sign you're talking on the phone sit in a nice leather chair all the BS right well I don't have any of that you didn't see any that I'm oh wait when you walked in the door today where was I you were with your boys with my boys on the shop floor right engaging and you had to come get me away from them to do the interview right in the only office I saw was your your car yeah I know so that's the whole point so leaders don't realize what leadership really looks like it happens on the gemba and on the shop [Music] couple more questions as far as how lean manufacturing could translate to a lean personal life tell us about that everything's a process how you take care of your your home how you take care of your health how you take care of your car how you take care of your finances everything is subjected to being analyzed and saying could there be a process improvement in the way I do that so the most obvious one for me is I wrote a book called lean health and I was 243 pounds and today I'm 175 and that's a big pretty dramatic shift and basically what I did is I looked at the way I was nourishing myself every day and I valued I identified the value and the non value so it was of no value for me to be any processed food every time I opened up a package and it had more than two ingredients on the back it was probably not good quality so that was a bad process so I said I'm gonna quit opening packages and imma start eating fruits and vegetables and real food and fish and not open packages I quit drinking bad drinks and all the other stuff right motors and it is stuff and lo and behold every every week I kept losing one pound one pound one pound and I made this dramatic decrease to where I'm 59 years old my did to Iron Man which is that's incredible yeah I think most of us are looking forward to get in person a little bit and get to know you on that end are you still climbing 14 hours well I haven't climbed one in a couple years but you know I did Mount Kilimanjaro which is 19,000 and Everest base camp 17700 and I just haven't had time to do that but I'm skiing like crazy so you know I go up and down 12,000 foot mountains ten times in a day and your ski run and you know do all that stuff but no I haven't 1914 lately you're staying pretty busy I'm not afraid to do them that would be easy for me yeah I think you've done a lot more than to be scared by a 14,000 yeah foot mountain tell us about some of the lean philosophy that you've implemented in trekking and summiting some of these mountains well less is more so travel light and be very grateful so number one is I don't want to take a lot of stuff with me you know and most people try to take so much stuff with them they have enough gear for every possible eventualities every possible problem and I don't think that way I think less is more so I try to lean out equipment wise when I travel I drop them all over the world and we take one suitcase in a backpack it doesn't matter where I go that's what I take if I'm going skiing I take one suitcase in a backpack I just reduce everything down to the very minimum carry-on or check-in I'll always carry on second that would be insane because that's just waste I'm sitting there waiting 20 minutes for the luggage to come out but most people don't understand that and I want to have control of my suitcase because if it gets lost that I'm really screwed right so no always always carry that's the challenge I have fall every time we travel like trying to convince my wife how we can do it right I think to have all the nations I just have all the gear to and now I do all my filming everything on my phone I used to take drones with me I should take Sony cameras I used take everything I do everything right here it's just silly you know I got one charging cable and this and I'm set [Music] out of all your outdoor interests what's one that you absolutely can't live without well I love to ski a lot because I love the athleticism involved in it but I also love to ride motorcycles and see a country on the back of a motorcycle because you there's something about experiencing the wind in your face and not having a windshield in front of you so I did 15 countries last year on a motorcycle Lithuania Latvia Sweden Norway Finland Finland Croatia Bosnia Thailand Japan I could just go on and on so every time I go into a country I try to run a motorcycle and just ride that's better that is an amazing experience does that somehow contribute back to your business and I mean they must have more recently it doesn't it doesn't help it doesn't hurt to have an aware CEO it doesn't hurt to have a CEO that has seen and experienced what's going on all over the world I mean that that's gotta be some some benefit to have that global perspective on the world yeah that's another point you mentioned CEOs can either sit in the office yeah well they can travel the world all over the world and I'm bringing them back you know I've been in plants in Guatemala I've been in plants in Australia I've been in plant in Thailand I've been in plants in Bhutan I've been in manufacturing plants everywhere all over the world in Kazakhstan so not awareness of what the competition is and how that competition is potentially gonna affect us is very important and I think that is something that makes us stronger here all right so for this best fence part it has four nuts that go in here it can be kind of cumbersome to have to sit there and press them all in so came up with this thing and you just take these nuts right here and they fit in that little pocket and then you put two up on top as well and you put this piece in and it does all four so well you've traveled all over the world 100 countries 105 what are the what's one place that you travel to that made the biggest impact in your life that might be a tough question without unequivocally China unequivocally I've been there 50 times so it's the number one place that people need to be aware of what's going on so the Chinese are incredibly intelligent and they have a work ethic like none other and they're making us look like we don't know what we're doing the United States they've surpassed us it seems like in almost every regard their manufacturing prowess is over-the-top they've created more high-speed trains than the entire world put together just in the last 10 years they've interconnected over 50 major cities by high-speed trains of over 250 miles an hour they can build a high-rise in a year without something that would take us 10 years their freeway systems their infrastructure systems everything they do is that such a high level it's almost hard to even get your head around yeah and so the reason why that's impacted me as I realize that if Americans don't recognize the competition that's really out there it's over we haven't got much time we got to wake up we got to wake up if you guys want to improve the bottom line of your business and learn something great go to China yeah and more importantly you better learn lean quick because if you don't the Chinese are gonna eat you alive and spit you out and you want you to know it hit you [Music] so you take for instance these are our picking carts we make it all this is all of our product this is called fast bike we make we make everything so just simple carts made out of pipe that are flexible if we decide we don't want it we take it apart we use the fittings we use the pipes we didn't go to rubbermaid and buy carts we made it all right and we made this in our woodshop we made the little boards and our woodshop everything is customized to the needs of our work everything is a part of a process and how we improve it so here's a great big company called Milwaukee they make this fantastic vacuum cleaner right but we made the stand because we had to be efficient we had to be able to walk into it right we may Center it and we make the holder there so look how cool this is when you want to run the backpack you just go like this boom and you're done and you're working in your vacuum right but no Milwaukee doesn't have a stand like that so what do you do a struggle you have a struggler the door thing why wouldn't be struggle so we made this really cool back vacuum stand and now people are buying this thing go wow look at that cool - charger everything's set up everything's a process so you need a new battery boom it goes in everything set I'm just trying to think of how to make this more lean sure this away because it's it's you know twisting what is it well I'm probably 60 seconds 30 seconds to replace I'm sure there is a way and you can't be resistant to that because the minute you say no it says Liat than you've lost you've lost the lean game if you come up with a better way I want to know about it we're gonna implement it so never stop looking for lean improvements and never never and never resist somebody who wants to make an improvement that's an important thing you know the leaders job is to do everything they can to facilitate the concept of continuous improvement and the best way to kill it is to say oh we already tried that it won't work does good us against no we and we say run the experiment try it let's see what happens I've learned a lot okay Paul thank you Paul thank you let me show you absolutely [Music] you guys like what you hear comment below about how this theory of lean manufacturing can change your life change your business we want to hear from you subscribe hit that bell so that you don't miss any videos from uplift thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: UpFlip

Views: 104,720

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, six sigma, factory

Id: UMFNys3Yavo

Length: 24min 28sec (1468 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 19 2020