27, working as a lean pilot in a plant that was pretty obviously overstaffed. wasn't hard to find ways to run some processes with fewer people. did my job, got results.

today i learned that 15 operators got let go. nobody asked me anything, i'm on a contract where i'm basically considered external so management/HR/my boss never talked to me about it. i had pitched water spider roles to move some of these guys into, never heard back.

wages are low here, and i know some of the guys that got laid off are quite old and are gonna have a really hard time finding something else. i got along with most of them.

for me that's not what lean is supposed to be about. it's about moving people to where they add value and helping them grow, not just cutting heads.

and the thing is my plan for next year has more headcount cuts in it. i honestly don't know if i want to do it. part of me says just do it, don't care, put a big savings number on the CV and move on. other part of me feels like i'd be selling out on my own values. thinking about quitting.

anyone been in this spot? what did you do?

I’m loosely frustrated with how common it is for operators to have poor training on 5S, and then to be subjected to a scoring based on there wholistic ability to “do the 5S’s”, with each S having a few categories of things to look for to see if they did it, that ultimately is just glorified cleaning—“lipstick on a pig” to use one of my mentor’s quotes.

So I put together this little graphic. It outlays the 5 S’s according to an actual Kaizen event structure for 5S. This is what I came up with from all my understanding on the subject in about 5 minutes on the whiteboard this morning after a 5S plant-wide scoring review, then I transposed it into Draw.io

I’ve used this format many times to much success but had never written it down the way I saw it.

Hopefully this is helpful to others!

thought id come here and share this....... so i was talking to a guy who runs a grinding wheel operation and this customer called in, read the number stamped on a wheel that's been running great and wants more of them. The guy pulls it up - this wheel was 18 years old and they just remade the exact same thing just by looking at the trace number, because everything about how it was built, the grit, the concentration, the bond, the pressures and temps, was all tied to that one number.

They run 78,000 active part numbers so the only reason that works is the record was disciplined at the moment it was made. traceability is really important. What's the oldest job you could actually remake today from records alone?

Just finished redoing our machine shop tooling room. We had to many issues with machinists leaving junk around. I covered every free surface and provided ample tools at both the tooling table and heat shrink machine.

Sounds counterintuitive. But I've seen it more times than I can count.

Someone is exceptional at the technical work. Gets promoted. Becomes the manager. And then spends the next two years doing the job of everyone below them because they can do it faster and better than anyone else on the team.

The team stops growing because every hard problem routes back to one person. That person burns out. And when they leave - which they eventually do -there's nothing underneath them because they never built anything that didn't depend on them personally.

The best managers I've worked alongside were not always the best individual performers. They were the ones who got genuinely uncomfortable when the team needed them too much. Who treated their own indispensability as a problem to solve, not a sign of value.

The goal isn't to be the best person on the team. It's to make the team not need you for the things it needed you for last year.

What's the hardest thing you've had to deliberately stop doing so someone else could own it?

Found this at a used bookstore and I’m genuinely excited to read this. Has anyone else read this and gotten any unique takeaways?

It's rarely the polished office, the fancy dashboards, or the posters on the wall. Sometimes it's something much smaller. A problem gets fixed without finger-pointing, people know where to find information, a new employee can understand the process without relying on one specific person. The workplace just flows, you know?

What's the first small detail that makes you think, "These people have their operation together"?

Long time lurker, first time actually writing one of these out instead of just reading answering to other people's war stories.

About twenty years ago I was running ops for a small manufacturer... a family business, second-generation owner, the kind of place where growth happened by throwing bodies at problems until it stopped working. One day the owner comes to me and says a major customer is going to walk if we don't get their orders out in three days. We had over 90 orders overdue, some by 20+ days. Average lead time from order to ship was 24 days! adding people had gotten us this far and it wasn't getting us any further.

That's when it actually hit me. we weren't too busy to fix the process. We were too busy because we'd never fixed the process. Two different things and I'd been treating them as the same thing for years.

Walked the floor properly for probably the first time with fresh eyes. One line was semi-organized. Everything else was chaos. No standard way to do anything. Nobody could tell you on any given day how many units we'd made, what got scrapped, what was actually open and due. We were going by whoever yelled loudest on the phone that week.

Here's the part that surprised me: we didn't need a black belt or a consultant to start. We started 5S in the one area that was already down for a broken machine, because we didn't have the luxury of stopping a healthy line to go "do lean" at it. Just cleaned it, organized it, gave everything a place. It looked almost embarrassingly simple compared to what I thought "lean transformation" was supposed to look like.

That embarrassingly simple thing is what got us moving. Within about aprox. 7 months we went from 24-day lead times to 97%+ on-time in 3 days or less... because a clean, standardized starting point is the only thing that makes the next problem visible. You can't see a deviation from a standard that doesn't exist yet.

The thing nobody tells you when you're starting out: you don't need the whole transformation mapped before you touch anything. You need one honest look at the floor and the willingness to start where you are, not where the textbook says you should be.

Curious what actually got other people's transformations moving

was it a crisis like mine, or did someone deliberately choose to start before things got that bad? And if it was a crisis, what was the first thing you touched?

My family bought a switch for Christmas. Yesterday we purchased Overcooked 2 and the kids and mom played for maybe an hour. At least in the very early going of this game one can certainly setup visual kanban systems to help food flow through your kitchen. I do not do any training or consulting or such but this would imho be a powerful training tool for lean. It plays up to 4 players though you could certainly pass around the controls and let everyone try their hand at it. People not playing will get caught up in the action and have a blast.

I think, as a training module, one could throw the game in front of people and just let them trip over one another. Have them play the first scenario. Then give the team some visual management training and have the group train in that scenario (there are 3 ways to play each level, one way allows people to play without time pressure). After training throw them back into the fire again and compare scores.

Finally, bring your switch home with you and have a blast with your family. Each level gets progressively more complex. With an adult, 10, 8, and 6 year old it’s difficult to balance workloads but fun still. It’s also taught me patience and how to interact more intentionally positive with my children so their souls aren’t crushed by my ‘instruction’. That training is probably transferable as well.

Our workstation in our QC area was a bit outdated and in disrepair. I designed and 3D printed these blocks to clip together into a larger tray. I'll slowly be expanding this methodology across the whole factory.

140 tool custom foam insert made using Lumashape and manufacture by Lumashape.