GA 139 | How to Use Job Breakdowns with Kyle House

You're listening to episode 139 with Kyle House. 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, thank you so much for taking time out of your day and your week to listen to the show and for watching our Lean In Six Sigma training videos over at GembaCademy.com we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now today I'm excited to welcome Kyle House to the show now. Had a great time, meeting and kind of just networking with Kyle at the the AME conference that happened a few weeks ago here in Dallas and got to chatting with Kyle and came to find out he had interesting background and has done a lot of practicing of TWI training within industries. And so I asked him if he wanted to come onto the show and he, he agreed. And so today what we're going to spend some time talking about is the, the job breakdown aspect of job instruction now within TWI as we've had several guests on. But I'll just kind of run through some history lesson here. There's, there's really three primary J programs, job instruction, job relations and job methods. And within job instruction there's a kind of four steps that we, that we follow. First step, prepare the learner. Second step, present the operation. Third step, try out the performance and four step follow up. So pretty basic stuff. But in the second step there's a really critical aspect and that is to identify what we would call important steps and key points. And we do this when we create a job breakdown. And job breakdowns are not difficult to do per se, but they take a lot of practice. And so what we did today was just, I just really grilled Kyle on some practical tips and how they go about it at his company and had a great time chatting with them. And I think there's a lot of wisdom in here. And even if you aren't practicing twi, which you should be if you aren't, but if you aren't, I still think there's a lot of value that could be taken from this on how to just better instruct your associates. So show notes for this particular episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 139 again, gembapodcast.com, look for episode 139. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Kyle, well, thanks so much for coming onto the show. Where are you calling in from?

I am calling in from Olathe, Kansas.

All right, very nice. So today we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about an aspect of TWI that's. Well, it's all important, but this is particularly important as it relates to the job instruction aspect of TWI and it's job breakdowns. But before we get into that, Kyle, tell us a little bit about your background, maybe how you first came to learn about continuous improvement and TWI and maybe what you're up to these days.

All right. I took a basic lean course, Lean Fundamentals back in, I don't know, 2008 or something like that. I wasn't an early adopter or the early majority necessarily, but it was interesting. We used it and had some no results from that. And I left that company that I got that training from and went to an larger corporation. They were doing a lot more training and hands on. And so I started to see some of the tools, learn the tools and just got really excited about it. So I've been chasing the lean journey pretty hard for the past five years and my first exposure to TWI was through Skill Point with Lean Frontiers and the TWI Institute. They team up and do a program and so we went out there and did one of their trainings and they do it through a lean simulation and use the TWI methodology at the same time. So it's actually a really cool way to learn it. And so that was my first exposure to that. And so I am currently the continuous improvement leader here at Tortel Products and we are just moving along.

How long you guys been on the journey?

We've been on the journey for quite a while. I mean on and off. I mean you got the, you know, some leadership comes in and is really focused and some goes out. So we are dealing with some of that. But we've been in the last couple years been starting to get some momentum going, especially within the last year going as support from upper management and everybody. So it's been good.

Yeah, very good, man, Very good. So, well, as you know, we like to start all of our shows, Kyle, with our guest sharing a quote or two of something that possibly inspires them. So do you have one?

Yeah, I do. I'm always kind of inspired by the dimming. A bad system will be the good person every time. It's the process, not the person. Type of, you know, mindset, I think that kind of frames it. If you go into it lean or any type of training or any of those things, focus on the system and the process, not the person. And also, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that we use when we created them. That Einstein thing where you just kind of have to challenge your own thoughts, your own thinking, your own way, and be humble that you might not have all the answers.

Yeah, Very, very easy quotes to say, but very hard to follow both of them.

Exactly, exactly.

All right, well, very good. All right, Kyle. Well, you know, we've had several TWI folks on in the past, and we'll link to all those episodes in the show. Notes for this, for this episode. But where we kind of talked about, you know, what TWI is, some of the history we've had some good folks on from Australia talking about Oscar, talking about Junior and Patrick Graup and, you know, lots of folks coming on. But a topic that is obviously extremely important within the job instruction, let's say suite of TWI is a job breakdown. And so I thought we would spend a little bit of time kind of just talking about that aspect of ji. Now there's obviously, you know, there's four other steps, right, to how to instruct, prepare the learner, present the operation. This is what we're going to kind of spend some time on. Presenting operation, but try out performance and then follow up. So all four are very important. Right, but. But I would say a lot of the meat is in the job breakdown. So let's just start just a level set in case some folks aren't familiar with what a job breakdown is. Give us a little overview of what it's all about.

Okay, well, a job breakdown is. Well, the way I was trained. It was a way to get a person to quickly remember to do a job correctly, safely, and conscious conscientiously. So it's a way of breaking down a job, analyzing it, understanding the operation so that it can be taught in small chunks, small pieces that you kind of build off of. So it's a way to look at an operation from an overview and break it down into small, smaller pieces that are easier to train to operators. And it's basically just a reminder to the trainer on what to train. And kind of like a checklist that you make sure that the trainee has received all the material that he needs to know. And it also gives you opportunity to plan training. Because when you have job breakdowns of all your jobs, you can easier to put a training schedule together, understanding of who needs to know what and when and who's going to train them. So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, I know a lot of kind of, let's say, lean thinkers, for lack of a better word, who may not be totally trained up, or maybe they're just learning about twi. Something that I've seen is. Or struggle that I've seen is how folks can sometimes get a little bit sideways or a little bit conflicted on the differences between, let's say, a job breakdown, a TWI job or JI job breakdown, and maybe more detailed work instructions or standard operating procedures, something like that. Talk a little bit about, let's say, the differences between those two tools.

Well, the biggest difference, I think, is that usually the people that are writing work instructions are your engineers. They're your, you know, your. Your people that are really digging into, you know, the nuts and bolts of how things go together. And they're written from a perspective that is written for engineers. You know, it's not necessarily written for somebody on the line to, you know, be a trainer trying to learn an operation at somebody at the floor level. So what you'll find in work instruction is just very wordy, very. You know, every engineer has their own writing technique and style. And so when you're on the line and you're trying to learn these things, you have to learn the differences and how people write and what do they really mean and what do they really say? There was one day I was walking by, and a lady stops me and says, you know, Kyle, we really want to learn this stuff. But these workers, they're just too confusing, you know, and they make us feel like we don't understand what's going on. And you got a, you know, a paragraph to describe on how to, you know, put four bolts in or whatever. And so they're really. They were really, you know, frustrated. And then one of the ladies says, well, yeah, if so, and so writes it. They write it like this, and they mean that. So I was sitting there and like, yeah, that would be really frustrating. And that's how we train people a lot of the time. We hand them a work instruction. We say, okay, we'll follow these steps, but we don't capture the tricks and the knacks and how you hold parts. And there's a lot there than just tighten four bolts.

Yeah, the feel, right? You know the feel of that feel. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, well, so how do you guys go about creating job breakdowns maybe I don't know if you have any, some examples or maybe some tips of a good job breakdown.

Right. The hardest part of writing breakdowns I found was because I've written a lot of work instructions myself. And you kind of get in the habit of trying to detail everything to a fine detail in your job breakdown. And it's because you kind of lose the focus that this is really just a reminder for yourself, you know, all those things you don't need to train somebody because they'll get over, there's too many words and they get confused. And so one of the big things I would say to focus on is just to remind yourself that this is for me to train with. This is not something I'm going to hand the operator and say, okay, well train yourself. And what we've done is we have some operations that could take, I don't know, 30 seconds. We have some that could take three hours to train. And so what we try to do is just try to analyze the underlying skill sets because there's a lot of things that something that people may do in the three hour that they do in the two minute job. And so if you can train them, break it down and train them how to solder a wire and solder crimps and do those things, then when you get up, build off of that and get a little bit more and a little bit more. When you get up to the big three hour job, it's really not as complicated to train them because they already understand a lot of the basic skills. And so now we're just, we're training them on this, this larger job breakdown. But it itself isn't very big because they've already built up on top of that.

So, you know, in the kind of the TWI literature, they will talk about, you know, important steps and getting key points or two, two main things, if reasons as well, you know, for the key points. But with the important steps being something that, as they say, advances the work.

Right.

So how do you guys go about. Because when you're first learning this stuff, it's really hard. Like you said, you've got these big long work instructions. It's like, well, which part of those work instructions actually advance the work? So like, how do you guys do that?

Well, a good question to ask yourself when you're looking at important step is, you know, if I don't do this, can I finish the job? You know, that's a big, that's a big factor. You know, if I don't put this terminal crimp on the wire, can I finish this job? And the answer will be, well, no, if you don't put the terminal crimp on the wire, you can't crimp the job with the wire. Right. And so that's, you know, that's how that's a good way we approach it and think about it is, you know, if I don't do this, can I advance the job? Now, if I say put the terminal crimp on the wire, that's advancing the job because I'm putting it on there. But there may be some key points to that that I need to understand, like the wire.

How far down to put it.

How far down to put it on. Yeah. How, you know, how hard do you crimp the wire? You know, those types of things are more key points.

But contrarily, an important step wouldn't be pick up the crimp in your right hand. Right. Or something like that, where the work instruction may say that.

Right? Yeah, yeah. The work instruction will point out a lot of these things, and it's really not needed. You know, there's a lot of steps that we think that we need to tell, but there's also a lot of steps in the operations that the operator is just going to see you do, and they're just going to do it. Pick up the cramp. I don't need to tell you to pick up the cramp. You're seeing me pick it up. Now, what you do with the work instruction is that's where you refer back to which crimp tool do I need? Well, let's look at the work construction, because if you're in as 9100 or ISO or any of these things, you have to have traceability. You have to have calibrated parts. You have. You have all these different things. So now you need to go to the work instruction to figure out which crimper do I use or which material do I use. But that's not what we use to train the skill of actually crimping terminal.

Right, right, right. Now, do you guys have a general rule of how many, say, important steps you'd like to see on any particular breakdown?

From my experience, four to five is important steps is five is starting to stretch it. And it just depends on how many key points there are. And key points are make or break the job, injure the worker, and make it easier to do. So. Those are just three things we're looking at as key points. And so if an important step has some more key points, you kind of Have a balancing act. There's. It almost becomes. It almost becomes like an art form of writing poetry. It's so simple when you look at them. But it's very hard to do effectively. Well.

Because it takes some practice.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, we just want to overcomplicate the world. Right. And life in general.

Right.

Yeah. But when you come. You said it earlier that, you know, really these job breakdowns are notes to yourself.

Right.

And when you think of that, that really change. It's not notes for me to hand you and for you to. Because, in fact, when you're training them, the. The learner is not even seeing the breakdown. Right. I mean, it's really for the. The trainer versus standard work where they may look at it and they may, you know, whatever. So, yeah, it's a different. It's a different mindset, really.

Yeah. And, you know, just. Just recently, this last week, we had, you know, this stuff takes time, and you got to go narrow and deep, and you hear that a lot. You know, other, you know, lean things. If you just. If you don't have the resources for it to dedicate to the training, you just pick what makes the most business sense and you go there. So we had just been working some way. Our way around some of the other areas, and I was going into. We started writing breakdowns in one of our areas and one of our flow lines. And there was a lady there that was new, and I said, you know, how were you trained? And she said, well, this person sat me down. You know, this is traditional training. It's the work instruction. Let me show you how to do it. Oh, you got it. Okay, I'll see you later. You know, I'll come back and check on you. And so we. We wrote some breakdowns and broke down the job that she was doing into three other actual elementary steps that we could train her on.

Pretty easy.

And when you break it down that way, it was very easy for her to learn how to solder the wire correctly because she wasn't using the right technique, we found out, and there was an easier technique. So when we just did that and she just repeated that process of soldering that wire, she got really good at it. Yeah. And then crimping the wire, she got really good at it. And so we did all that and broke that down. And now we combine all of those trainings into the bigger jib on how you. How do we do this other part? And all you have to do is say solder the wire. I don't have to reteach her what that means and it doesn't overcomplicate it. So now I just say solder the wire. Have you been trained to solder the wire? Yes. Okay, I don't need to train you on how to solder the wire. So she just did that. And she went from two and a half hours to three and a half hours to build one of these, this particular part to an hour. And just recently she's gone under an hour. So, I mean, we took something that was just training. That's it. Just training how she was trained and took an hour and a half to two hours off of her build time by just breaking down the training segments into small chunks that she could understand at that time and get good at.

You know, it's funny, today I was talking with my colleague Steve Cain, you know, we're working on this TWI course, in fact, for Gimba Academy and ji. We're starting with JI and talking about how, you know, we go through the, the, the explanation of how telling alone is a bad way to instruct and how showing alone is a bad way to instruct. And we were talking about showing alone. It's like, well, who really ever does that? You know, we're trying to almost be contrarians. And then he says, well, I tell you who does it? Ever been told to shadow someone, you know, watch someone work and then as if that's going to teach you how to do the work. I mean, everyone's done it. I've done it, you know, heck, I've had people here, give them back. I'll sit with Greg and watch him.

Work for a day.

You know, I mean, it's a hor way to, to train, yet we all do it, right? And, but when you, like, you take that lady and say, watch him solder or watch her solder. You know, she's never going to learn until she touches it and feels it and gets those key points and you know the knack right, to do it. So.

Yeah, yeah. And I think too, we've had other times where we've had operators that, that one can do it in three minutes and one took 15 minutes, right. And they, they've been building the same part and so they're arguing. You know, I, she's, she's a phenomenal, you know, she's a phenom. There's no way I'll ever do that. There's no way I can ever do that.

Yeah.

So we sat down and broke down the job and, and said, okay, well, you know, there's some technique here. There's some feel here, there's some how the part is sitting in the fixture. It makes a difference when you get flux all over and it takes you an extra five minutes to clean the part off. And just little things like that that we trained. Then sure enough, we got it. We got her from 15 minutes to three minutes. Yeah. Just. Just through training. Skills.

Yeah.

You know.

Yeah. Yeah. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. So can you. I mean, you've already shared a few examples, but can you. Any other. Any other stories of how breakdowns have helped help you guys?

I think they've helped us. And this, this is a little bit of a future state thought here, but they've helped us develop. Now that we have all these breakdowns, we can develop pathways for new. For new people. You know, so having. Having somebody come on. Sometimes when you get a new person and you're trying to figure out where to. Where to train them, you know, we do. We're. We're high mix, low volume. I mean, we could do over 2,000 different parts in, you know, in a year that are completely different. So where do you start in training somebody? But we have these jibs and we found these underlying skill sets that apply across the board. So they allow us to bring somebody in and have a pathway for them, or they understand that we can build these skills up. And by the time that they're done with that, they're a highly valued person on your line because they've learned so many different things. And then also the reduction of scrap in the particular area that we started at, we had a high, pretty high scrap dollars. And when we scrap something out on that line, it's very expensive. And we've been under $100, which is crazy, for the past five months. And that's huge for us when it comes to. Because the parts are so expensive.

Sure.

And that's just from training.

Yeah, yeah. Now, one question I have for you guys. So let's say you, I don't know, you create a breakdown to teach that young lady how to solder or whatever it might be. What do you do with that breakdown once you're done with it? Do you file it somewhere? Is it just for you? Do you put it in a library of other breakdowns? How do you handle that?

Yeah, we have a shared drive in our company that we just organize it through there. We give it a number so that we can track goes into our training matrix, which is similar to the training timetable. Kind of looks the same if you're familiar with it. And it's just an adaptation of that in Excel. And so it goes on there. So we document the number so that when we need to refer back to it. When you go to train somebody and you ask them, well, part of preparing the workers, figuring out what they already know, right? So if you're asking them, hey, have you ever crimped and soldered wires? And they say, no, you go train on crimping soldering wires. And so now you have this database that you can go back to this jib. I know that's JIB102. And so I just pull that out, print it out, and as the trainer, go over it, make sure I'm prepared, and then train them.

So make sure you're prepared. What if you were to, I don't know, ask someone if they know how to do such and such? And they're like, no. And you're like, okay, well, we need to do that first. But you don't even know, so what would you do?

Right?

Because you can't. You can't really do the key points, right, because you don't have the knack or the feel yourself. So what would you do in that situation?

Right. I think the important part is, is, well, one of the big point parts of it is getting your. Your supervisors of the area and your line leaders in the area developed. And you also need to find those key people those go to people that everyone goes to. And those are the people you invest in and you teach them the skills. Like, we have a gentleman that's at that line, I said, with the lady and the crimping and the soldering. And he knows every job on the line and he has the right attitude and he likes to train. So we invest in that person. I sat down and wrote the jib, but I went over it with him because he's the expert, and then developed him as a trainer. And he was the one that actually delivered the training. And it wasn't me, because I couldn't have. I wasn't gonna do that, not having all the necessary skills set that he did. So we developed him, and now he was the one that was training him, and we've been developing him to deliver the training. Because you want to team up with your highly skilled people, because they're the experts, they know what to do.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. One other question I want to ask you. You've talked a little bit about prepare the learner, which is the first step. You know that first one put the learner at ease. You know, it's always like, you see the cheesy videos, and it's like, oh, Kyle, how are you today? You know, it's like, so what do you. What's your trick? You know, to put the person at ease.

You know, when you. When you read back through some of the other bulletins, you read back through, and you'll see that just because they're the best mechanic doesn't mean they're the best trainer. Right, exactly right. So you have to have people that have some personal. Personal communication skills that can do that. So, you know, with new people, new people is a little easier sometimes just because you can ask those generic questions, you know, where you from? Where you been? How you doing? What kind of work have you done? And that's cool, you know, like that. And it builds a relational side when you've already worked with the person because you kind of get into more personal questions like, how are your kids doing? How's your life?

Right.

You know, what's. What's going on? What's. What's going on? And you just do something completely off topic, has nothing to do with the training. And. But the more you do it, the more they know that the methodology. Yeah, but it's still. It's still important.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. All right, very good. Well, I could fire questions at you all day. I love this stuff. But. So let's go ahead and transition into the reflection section and just kind of run through. I got a couple new questions in here. I don't know if you've heard them all or not, so I might throw you a few curveballs here. So first one's not a curveball. It's an oldie but goodie. So it's the whole respect for people side of lean, and, you know, it's sometimes harder to define and put your arms around versus, you know, continuous improvement. So I'm curious, Kyle, what does respect for people mean to you?

One big thing is, you know, I think I've had management roles and leadership roles is respect for people, to me is it's never giving them the answers directly. A lot of the times, you know, and trying to develop them to have the skill set and the tools to solve their own problems. And that, to me, that's respectful, you know, to me, it's disrespectful to let somebody just continue to build bad parts. And you haven't trained them to, you know, you haven't trained them correctly. Yeah, you know, that's not respect for people, you know, and if I answer the question for him, every Single time. And what I'm kind of saying to him is, you can't solve these problems. You need me to do this. And so just, you know, developing people and giving them the skills that the. I always say, you know, problem finders to problem solvers at a one to one ratio.

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

I think in CI or lean, it's just an old mentor of mine. He said, you know, if you lead an event, you lead something of change. And at the end of it, the team really gets all the credit and they feel like they've done it all, then you've been successful. And he told me just to be humble. Be humble, because, you know, a lot of people are out for the glory of, oh, look at what I did. But, you know, there's nothing more rewarding than getting done with something. And some. And your name is barely even mentioned. You know, you have to be a humble because you understand that you've played a part in it, in teaching and developed respect and trust from people. But I'm not out for the glory. I want to see them. It goes back to respect for people. I want to see them succeed.

Yeah. You know, I recently interviewed Roger Bylas, and he said something very similar. He said that something that brings him the greatest joy is just kind of sitting in the back of the room during that report out and just seeing, you know, those folks that are fired up and the glow on their face and how proud and happy they are. That's what it's all about, right?

Yep. Absolutely.

All right, Very good. So, speaking of humility, can you think of a time, maybe an experiment or a project or an event that you were perhaps leading or you were just a part of, and, well, it flopped or it failed. It just didn't work out like you planned. Can you think of a time that that happened? And if so, what did you learn from it?

Oh, man. You know, I think if you're. If you're. If you're living, if you're really in lean and. Or you're. If you practice. Let me just put it this way. If you practice pdca, you do this a lot.

Yeah.

So I've just kind of come become numb to the fact that what we're going to try probably isn't going to work. And, you know, we. That kata approach you have, that experiment, you're gonna try it, and it's. It's not gonna work. If it works the first time, great. But that has very rarely ever happened for Me, you know, when get into these things and you just kind of build up a numbness to understand, you know, like when I started trying to do a 3s and I'd send in my problem statements, you know, to my sensei and he just would keep sending them back to me and sending them back to me because I wasn't. Try again, try again, try again, try again. I'm like, I'm, you know, I'm calling them and sending them stuff at 10 o' clock at night and you know, because that's just the reality of it. It's something you have to do and then learn from and it's just a continual cycle. So I could pinpoint about a thousand times that that's happening. And what I learned from it is it's just that, you know, you just got to keep going, moving forward.

Yeah, exactly. What are you most proud of as it relates to your, your journey with continuous improvement?

I'm almost proud of the things I've left some companies and the thing I'm most proud of is that some of the things, some of the bigger things that we implemented are still there today and they didn't fall away because I moved on and I had a big part in, in the change. But to the day just hearing that they're still improving and they're still growing in that department and, you know, they just kept moving forward. I'm most proud of that.

Yeah, that's awesome. What's the best book you've read over this last year?

Best book I read was Everybody Matters.

What's that one about? I haven't read that.

That one's. It's just about respect for people. Like Love. Just kind of a Barry Wehmiller book and just a really interesting way to look at people and the respect for people. So it's, it was pretty eye opening and I've seen that common theme, if you look at, you know, I was just at the Amy conference in Dallas and you know, there's a lot about people and there's a lot about investing in people and respect for people and love for people, which is kind of cool to see that coming around.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right, last question. You've been at this for a while, Kyle, and you obviously know your stuff, but I'm curious, is there a knowledge or skill area that you feel you need to improve in order to become a better lean thinker?

Yeah, it's kind of the same thing. I mean, I think one of the biggest things is still developing my listening skills and what happens a Lot of times, and don't jump to conclusions is I'll be on the floor and there's a problem and I'll be listening to somebody, and I already start trying to jump to what the problem is in my head. I'm already jumping there. And it's just one of those things that's. I don't know if you ever get over it.

Yeah.

But, you know, it's just one of those things that I continue to work on and continue to try to. Okay, let me listen to what this person's truly saying, because there's been plenty of times that I've failed because I thought that I knew what the answer was implemented and found out. Yeah, you didn't listen to what they were saying. So that's. That's one of the biggest things for me. Right, Right. Very good.

All right, Kyle. Well, man, it was great to hang out with you at ame and are you going to be in Boston next year?

Yep, we are planning on.

Awesome. Awesome. Are you gonna come to our party again, man? Yeah, that was a good time. Good time. So. Well, hey, how can people connect with you, Kyle?

Just through LinkedIn. I don't know. Huge on the. The intro webs, but.

Twitter guy, eight hours.

No, I'm not a big tweeter or Snapchat.

This is the one. Oh, my gosh. My dog.

I don't.

Yeah, my kids are on the Snapchat. I was talking to my colleagues at lunch. I'm like, what the hell is Snapchat? It's like putting a little bunny ear on. And you're like, oh, my gosh, what's wrong with this country of ours?

I don't. I don't need to look like a bee, you know, I don't know.

We're just too old, man. That's what it is. All right, so Kyle House. K Y L E. Right.

Yes.

How is on LinkedIn. Look him up. Look him up. All right, well, Kyle, it's great chatting with you, and maybe we'll do another episode. We'll talk about JR or something like that. How's that?

Sure. Sounds good.

All right, brother, be good.

All right.

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