GA 132 | How to Apply Lean to Puzzle Manufacturing with Don Scott

You're listening to episode 132 with Don Scott.

Welcome to the Gemba Academy Podcast, the show that's focused on helping individuals and companies achieve breakthrough results using the same continuous improvement principles leveraged by companies such as Toyota Del Monte and the U.S. department of Defense. And now, here's your host, Ron Pereira.

Hey, there. This is Ron Pereira with Gemba Academy, and I'd like to welcome you to another edition of the Gemba Academy Podcast. As always, this is. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day and your week to listen to the show and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over at Gembaacademy.com, we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now, today, I'm excited to welcome Don Scott to the show. Now, Don works for a company called Buffalo Games, which primarily produces jigsaw puzzles. So it's a very cool industry. And obviously, many of us have done a jigsaw puzzle or two or at least attempted to do a jigsaw puzzle or two. And so Don really kind of walks us through how Lean works in that type of environment, including the challenges that they face because they are very seasonal. They have a lot of their business happens right around Christmas time, and so they're constantly battling inventory and having to possibly overproduce a bit in the beginning to deal with that huge volume there at the end of the year. So Don kind of walks through that and tells us a some of the best training that he had, and then he also explains how he's rolling it out. They're still relatively new with their journey there at Buffalo games, but he's doing a great job understanding that Lean really, in the end, is all about people, and he really gets that. So I did enjoy talking with Don. So if you want to get to the show notes for this episode, just go to GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 132. Again, GembaPodcast.com and Look for episode 132. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Don, well, thanks so much for taking time to visit with us. Where are you calling in from?

I am at Buffalo Games. I'm in Buffalo, New York. And it's great to be with you, Ron.

Buffalo, New York. All right, so Yankees fan, Mets fan, how does that work?

Well, we have a little team here. We have a Bison's Triple A kind of thing, and that's our. That's about as far as we get with baseball.

Oh, yeah.

Obviously, we're Bills and Sabres fans here, so.

Exactly.

You know, it's not easy, but we do it anyway.

Yeah, right. All right. I'm a Texas Rangers fan, so I got sports pain, too. Trust me, I know. All right, well, thanks for coming on, Don. I'm really excited for the show. We were talking offline about your industry. It's pretty unique, and I can't wait to learn more about what you guys are up to. So let's just kind of get things going with you telling us a little bit about your background, maybe how you first came to learn about continuous improvement, and then give us an overview of what your company's all about.

Okay, well, actually, I sort of came by Lean pretty honestly, really. I started working actually as a press operator here at Buffalo Games. And some of the things that I did, I just started noticing that there was a tremendous amount of extra steps and extra build ups of things that were getting in my way. And I started to wonder, what is there that I could do about that? And really, that just led me to do some research into Lean. And I found resources like your site, like Gemba Academy, that had a lot of really good explanations of what could be done and how it was formalized. And I was just hooked on it. And I just kept putting things on a little board that I had behind a workstation down at. Down on the press on the factory floor, and, you know, I put them up there for people to see. And eventually it just sort of somebody noticed and I said, you know, what I really wanted to be here is the change agent who brings some of this waste reduction to our company.

Now, when was this? How long you been been on the journey?

Well, I mean, this was some years ago. And so, I mean, I started studying, you know, just getting books and just eating up anything I could find to read and learn from. But it was a couple of years before, you know, before I had that opportunity to make this leap. And so I've been doing this for a little over a year now.

Okay, cool, cool, cool. All right, well, tell us a little bit about Buffalo Games. What do you guys make?

Buffalo Games is the largest manufacturer of jigsaw puzzles in North America. And we also make a pretty decent range of board games. And so we're toy makers, basically, and we respond to all those Christmas sales and things like that. So a lot of the stuff you'll see on store shelves, in terms of jigsaw puzzles, some of them are ours, a good percentage of them are ours.

How many jigsaw puzzles do you guys make? I don't know, a year, month, day kind of thing.

Let's see, we make about 100,000 a week and that puts us around 5 million a year. Wow. And so that's a lot of jigsaw puzzles, man. And we're looking at maybe next year putting out close to a million board games and party games as well.

Wow. Now, how many different skus or different types of jigsaw puzzles do you guys make?

Well, we have about six or seven lines, basically based on by piece count. You know, a 300 piece, a 500 piece, 1,000 piece, that kind of thing. We probably have roughly 200 active titles at any one time. I mean, the artwork, you know, really kind of drives. It has to stay refreshed. But I mean, the actual piece count itself doesn't really change. I mean, the cut doesn't change. Yeah, so that's, you know, that's constantly being changed and cycled through and, you know, just to keep the line fresh and current.

All right, well, very good. I want to dig even deeper here as we go through the show, but as you know, Don, we like to start with our guests providing a quote or two that possibly inspires him. So do you have one?

Yeah, I do. Let's see. I don't really know the source of it exactly. I'm just going to put it out there. It's reducing costs is reducing quality, and increasing quality is reducing costs. There's a couple of reasons. I really like that quote. Number one, it seems to be very much true. It's like this nugget of truth. Whenever you try to save money on materials, with that being your goal, you end up costing money downstream. So it really sort of is like the difference between goals and results. When you start off with the right goals, you can achieve amazing results. And if you start off with sort of a singular focus on just cost reduction, your results won't be as good. And so I really like the idea the way that it sort of is not just that it's mostly true, but it's also sort of a template for goals and results.

Can you say it one more time? Say the quote one more time?

Sure. Reducing costs is reducing quality. Increasing quality is reducing costs. And I don't know where I came to that. I don't know where I found it. I think I just ran across it and it just stuck with me. And I've used it a number of times to sort of make points around here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, very good, very good. That's a good one, Don. Alright, so let's talk a little bit about training and maybe kind of how you first got started. I know you mentioned you read some books and so forth, but what would you say is kind of the best training that you've received?

Like you said, I read a lot of books on lean and I'm taking a lean course right now. But I would say by far the best training I ever had was actually working as a press operator and experiencing manufacturing from the frontline perspective. That lets you see things from that real, like that day to day perspective and realize what the real challenges are from as dynamic as the factory floor is. It lets you see it right there and where your priorities change by the hour, problems come up and you get to see how they get solved or not solved. And it lets you see that sort of that amazing creativity and that little sort of community that those frontline people have. And I think that that really just with respect to the people and their capabilities and what they can do, I think that was an amazing thing. I think I learned a lot about manufacturing, but more about people than I knew there was to even know and their potential. So I think that was like a paid education.

Yeah, you know, it's kind of like, you know, you hear the stories of people, oh, go work in an area for a week or whatever, which is good. It's better than nothing. But nothing beats truly being engaged. Right. With that team and entrenched with them in the battle.

Right, absolutely. And, you know, taking breaks with them and like seeing how they solve their problems and what they do on their personal time and some of the amazing things that they do and the things that you'd never know about, you know, through layers of bureaucracy or if you don't really engage them, I mean, if you're just looking at a production report, you don't realize all of the training and capabilities that people might actually have.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So you have a very unique industry. So I'm curious, what is the biggest challenge that you've experienced as you've been implementing Lean?

My biggest challenge really is seasonality. A tremendous percentage of our sales here at Buffalo Games happens only in the fourth quarter. And it's all based around Christmas sales. And so if we were to try to simply match demand with our capacity, even if we could do that, we wouldn't want to because we would have to double our labor force or our capacity basically in the fourth quarter and then the rest of the year. What would we do with those people in that capacity? So while you really want to reduce your finished goods inventory Levels and things like that. There is a buildup of inventory here that I don't currently have an answer to. I've got probably a million puzzles in the warehouse right now and I don't have that answer. I mean you definitely want to reduce it as much as you can, but that's a challenge.

Yeah. You know, our friends over at Zingerman's Mail Order there in Ann Arbor, Michigan, they make. It's a, you know, Zingerman's is a famous kind of deli in Ann Arbor right by the University of Michigan there. And they have a mail order business and they're a big part of our upcoming visual management course that we're putting together. And Tom explains they have a very similar situation to you in that is it 50% of their. Of their year happens in December as far as revenue and 50% of that happens in the last two weeks of December.

Yeah.

So yeah, it's a very, it's a, you know, we talk about he junka and level loading and all the rest of it and it's all great until you have to have you know, half of your year in one month in a matter of a couple weeks. So that's right. Definitely, definitely a huge challenge. But you know, I think, hey, junk. It doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have any inventory. Right? I mean, and no, no, it means.

You have appropriate inventory and, and there's so many other things you can work on too. You can work on your, your, your scrap and your supplies and, and all of your raw goods and things like that. Those, those can be tightened up too. And you, you can just have to be pragmatic about it Now.

I don't know. I mean the risk obviously of overproduction is, you know, oh, we've got a whole batch that are defective or they go obsolete. But can a puzzle go obsolete?

It can. And primarily what happens here is that assortments of puzzles go obsolete and there you have to do. It's not really the actual quality of the puzzle itself, but it might be something that you've packed up in a brown box to be shipped. And if the assortment changes and the customer doesn't want that particular. You might have to take some of those out and repack those. And that is a terribly labor intensive thing. So one of the things I do want to do is tighten up the assorting so that it's done a lot closer to shipment.

Yeah, yeah. So talk a little bit about how you've introduced lean to your co workers. What's been Your approach?

Well, I had a couple of little classes because really, I was a little surprised that, you know, even with the little things that I had put down on the factory floor, down by the presses and things like that, that nobody had really, no one here on the front line had any idea what lean was. Someone said that it involved reducing waste, and that was about as far as they got. And I sort of had expected that there would be, just because of the term lean, that people would be sort of more sort of fearful or have approached it with some trepidation. But so I, you know, I didn't really know what to expect, but there was none of that. But I still wanted to give people a perspective of lean where it was something that they could actually do something with on their, you know, in their daily work. So I struggled with that because, you know, you tell them to reduce inventory levels. Well, the press operator doesn't have any control over that. Right. You know, so I don't really want. I didn't want to get into that kind of granularity with them. So what I said was that I gave them a definition of lean, and here it is. Lean is changing work to make it easier for three people. And I have to define those three people, but those people are yourself, the next person, and the previous person. And that really spoke to them because everyone understood that the next person was essentially a customer, so a customer of their work. And so everyone understands that the customer is king. The customer is most important. And so in that context, they were able to see, like, if. If we had a more flowing value stream, that that next operation, they wanted to send something good to it, and they had. And they wanted to be conscious of those things and focus on those things. And they also wanted to focus on the previous person and say, you know, like, you're delivering too much stuff to me. Can you not give me so much? You know, and there were some things that I gave them that, you know, just. Basically just ask.

Yeah.

You know, without a formalized program or solution in place, they could still affect the quality of their work and the quality of their work day, really, by changing it slightly and, you know, even if it wasn't a rigid schedule.

Yeah, no, I love that. I mean, what I really like is the focus on the previous person. You don't hear that a lot. You know, we always talk about the next person or the downstream customer. But you're right. I mean, you do need to kind of have that responsibility, respect, and that, you know, that attention to the previous person because they may not even know that what they are doing isn't optimal. Right. Because no one's ever told them.

Right. And the material handler in for, for instance, might say, oh, well, you know, this guy has to run all these boxes. He must want them all all at once.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, but really, they're just in his way.

Yeah.

So, I mean, there are little things that you can do just on a. You know, and it was pretty small footprint as an operator. I mean, and, you know, it depends on, you know, you might make the next operation, the next process. You might make it easier just by the way you stack something.

Yeah.

I mean, something really simple. So I just asked them to think about what the next operation was, think about what the previous operation was and look at what was between them and try to reduce that stuff that got in their way.

Love it. I love it. What are you most proud of, or maybe what's been most satisfying about seeing Lean kind of develop at Buffalo Games?

I would say that it is really satisfying when you'll put something out there. I mean, when you first start a Lean program, I mean, not everyone is involved, so you have to just sort of put some things out there and put some Kanban boards up and just change a few things. But when you do that, nobody really sees the actual value of what you're doing. They don't really fully understand it. And you can talk to them and you can train them and you can tell them all of these concepts in the abstract, but a few months down the road, when they've actually used it for a while, even if they don't 100% buy into the absolute value of it, it's wonderful when they take ownership of that and they bring it to you and you realize that they understand it.

Yeah.

And that's. That's just amazing to me, because, you know, Lean is something you take home. You know, it's something that affects the way you do chores and home projects and everything. I mean, so if you. If you get that to somebody, you can really. You can really make a difference in. Not just in your company, but. But people's lives in general.

Yeah, no, I agree. Totally agree. All right, last question. Let's say there's someone listening to this right now, Don, that's just starting their journey with Lean. What advice do you have for them?

Well, it sort of relates really to what I said before and what we were talking about before in terms of introducing Lean to coworkers. Make the customer really visible. When you know who you're working for and you Know that that person is depending on your work. Basically, the next process almost is its own management. And so I would say whatever you do before you try to reduce inventory levels or 5s, everything, make that customer really clear, make your value stream really clear, and make the supplier process clear, make the customer really clear. Because on a, you know, on an individual basis, that that's where you get your real gains in terms of efficiency and production.

Yeah. Well, also, something that's very obvious that you focused on is in the end, Lean is about people, right?

Absolutely.

You have to. Have to. Have to know that it's not about 5s or 7 ways while those things are important and you need them. But if you don't have the people side, it doesn't really matter how good you are with the tools, for sure. So. All right. Very good. All right, Don, well, let's go ahead and transition into the reflection section and this first question. You know, we spent a lot of time in Lean talking about those two pillars, continuous improvement, which is the tools, the things that we do. But there's the other pillar, respect for people, that can be a little bit harder to define. So I'm curious, what does respect for people mean to you?

Oh, boy. Respect for people. I'll tell you. One of the things that I learned as a press operator was the difference between a good day and a bad day. And a good day was a day in which you worked really hard and everything went right and you made a ton of product, and it didn't matter that you worked hard because you felt great, because you'd produced a lot. A bad day was where you put in maybe the same amount of effort and didn't get a thing done. And no one gives you an award for a bad day. And so those bad days are just thankless. But I believe that, you know, everyone experiences those good and bad days in much the same way, and no matter what level they're at in a company. So to show respect for people, I really try to make it possible for every day to be one of those good days, first of all, because that benefits everyone. But, you know, those bad days do come around. And so I try to make a point of being aware when. When they happen and going around and thanking those people for that effort, because it's maybe the only thanks they'll get for it.

Wow, that's pretty profound. I don't think we've ever had that. It gave me chills, man. That's really powerful. I mean, I mean it. I mean, because in the end, it's you know, that's humanity. Right. It's just respecting humanity.

Yeah, it is. I mean, and, you know, people deserve that respect.

Yeah. Awesome. What's the best advice you've ever received?

You know, I knew this was coming up and I thought about it, and I really struggled to find that I had gotten a lot of advice from anyone. You know, people say things, but I do remember one thing, that oddly enough, a carpenter that was working for me, and his name was Alan Brown, I believe, and I was working with him on a home project, and I was a little frustrated that it was taking as long as it did. And so I was sort of complaining about it a little bit. And he turned around, he stopped what he was doing, and he said, you know, I've been doing this a long time, and I know one thing, they'll forgive you if it takes longer than you said, but they'll never forgive you if it's wrong. And that always stuck with me because the amount of patience that it took for him to say that, you have to be patient, but you have to be committed to making things right. Yes.

Do you have a personal productivity habit that others might benefit from?

I do. I do. When I go on a sort of a value stream type walk or a Gemba walk, I go down to the floor and I talk to people. There is one thing that I never ask, and I never ask, how's it going? Because how's it going is this ambiguous phrase. It means either how are you? Or how's your machine running? And every single operator, machine, operator takes that and gets defensive about it. So if you ask, how's it going? He might say, it's fine, but he really thinks that you're asking how his machine is going, and so his defenses are up. And so if you want to know how a machine is running, don't ask, how's it going? Because you'll hear every single excuse in the book, everything that's ever gone wrong with that machine in response. If you want to know how a machine's running, ask how are you? And have a conversation with him about it. And he'll probably tell you because you're.

Making it about them.

Yes. Yep.

Interesting.

You're really getting to like that sort of personal thing. And you. And you're very clear about what you're asking. Yeah.

How are you? Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah. Yeah. You never know. They may open up and say, I'm horrible. I had a. My baby was up all night and I slept, you know, one hour. And, you know, they might.

But you Know the time that you'll spend getting through that store that maybe, you know, you. You know, you're probably okay to hear, but it's not what you asked for. It'll be worthwhile because he'll tell you how the machine's running. Because if he's having a. You know, if he's not doing well, it's probably because the machine is running. He'll probably be a lot more clear about what's wrong with it, and it'll probably be the truth rather than this defensive excuse thing.

Love it. I love it. So has there been anything over this past year or so as you guys have been practicing lean, that surprised you?

Yes. It always surprises me when I take someone through the factory and I show them. I'll show them, of course, some of the lean projects that we have going on, but I'll show them how a puzzle is made. And it's pretty cool. You watch big presses cutting cardboard into pieces and having them get all broken up. But then we're sort of done with the general factory tour, and then I take them into the warehouse, which is just crammed full of puzzles, really. And they're all on order, so it's okay. But that's what they really love, is that warehouse full of puzzles. And it's so funny, because that's what I really hate.

Yeah.

That's what I want to get rid of, and that's what they're blown away by. So that always surprises me.

Well, it's just that human nature of mass batch production. Right. We're just batch thinkers for whatever reason.

You know, it's definitely impressive when you see all those colorful boxes on a warehouse shelf.

Yeah, I love it. All right, so let's say that you're going about your week and just things aren't going well, and you need to recharge and refocus. Do you have a routine or ritual that you follow to make that happen?

Yeah, when I sort of, you know, first of all, I do a lot of just sort of walking around, and I'll go outside and I'll find someplace else to work. But one of the things when it's really, really just sort of like I don't feel like I'm making any ground, I will go back and I've saved that board that I made when I was a press operator, and I look at those things and the distances that I calculated, and I'll say, hey, we don't do that anymore. And I'll look at that, and I'll say, I'll look at the calculation that I made of how much walking I could save an operator or something like that, and what I did to. To make that happen or what I help to do to make that happen. And I'll look at that and I'll say, these guys are walking 25% less than they used to, you know, so the work that I'm doing here is important, and it affects a lot of people. So that. That gives me a little boost.

Yeah. Love it. Last question. So I know you, obviously, you have the inventory thing that you want to challenge and conquer one day, and I'm sure you will, but is there another knowledge or skill area that you want to get better at in order to become a better lean thinker?

Sure. And it's maybe. I mean, I think my lean thinking is pretty solid, but my expression of that and the way I sell it sort of internally here at Buffalo Games definitely could use some work. It really boils down to quantifying things, savings. Things like when you save a certain amount of miles on a fork truck. I mean, how does that translate into actual dollars and cost benefit? And, you know, you have to talk in those terms. You can't just avoid it just because some of the improvements you might want to make may carry a cost, and you have to decide whether it's worth it. So I do struggle with quantifying labor savings into actual dollars and time savings, and particularly when I talk about flow improvements and translating distance traveled and making that into a dollar, that's difficult for me.

Yeah. Well, the other elephant in the room, I don't know how you guys do your accounting, but all those puzzles sitting in there are what a traditional accountant would call an asset. And that looks good. You start reducing that, they're going to be, hey, man, what's going on here? You know, and so that's a whole. A whole nother challenge with. With lean accounting versus traditional cost accounting. So.

Yeah, I certainly don't. I mean, you know, because we are so seasonal. I mean, the. The cash flow issue, that's a pretty easy case to make.

Yeah.

You know, so. So that doesn't bother me so much. But putting an actual dollar value on it and not just wildly ballparking it.

Yeah.

That I could be better at.

Got it. All right, well, very good, Don. I really enjoyed talking with you. Are you a conference guy? You're going to be at AME this year?

Well, I hadn't really thought about it, Ron, but, you know, you need.

You should think about it. It's coming up here next month. But it's a. I'll send you some more information. People can go to gembacademy.com ame to learn more about it, but it's. It's the biggest Lean Conference in the world, and we'll be there. It's in Dallas. Emmett Smith's going to be talking keynoting, and it's going to be pretty. Pretty spectacular.

So it sounds cool. I'll try to make it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very good. How can people connect with you, Don?

You can certainly just sort of connect with me on LinkedIn. Let's see. It's a dwscottjr. I'm not sure of the exact, you know, hyperlink there, but put in Don Scott, Buffalo.

Buffalo Games. Right. And you'll find it. Yeah, got it, got it. All right, well, very good, Don. I appreciate you coming onto the show. And I'm gonna go check out all the puzzles that we have. We have a million in our house, I think, ourselves, so we'll see. Does it say Buffalo Games? Will it say it like, on there?

If it's been purchased anytime in the last 20 years, yes, it will say Buffalo Games on it.

Okay.

Probably say at least Buffalo right on the front of it.

Okay, well, I'm gonna go check them out because we got a bunch of puzzles. My wife and kids love them, and I try my best at them, but I was like, just. They're both pieces are missing.

There are no missing pieces in our puzzles.

Start on the edge, right, and then work in or something. I don't know. Good stuff. All right, well, thanks again, Don, and you take care.

You, too, Ron. I really appreciate it. Thanks.

Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast. Now it's time to take a free, no strings attached, fully functional test drive of Gemba Academy's School of Lean and Six Sigma. Over at GembaCademy.com gain immediate access to more than 500 Lean and Six Sigma training videos free ofcharge@gembaacademy.com.