GA 160 | The Power of Job Methods with Steve Brenneman

You're listening to episode 160 with Steve Brennaman.

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. Welcome 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 Steve Brennaman to the show. Now, we've had Steve on before. In fact, we visited Steve's company, ATC Trailers out in Indiana a few years ago when we did a full blown Gemba Academy live episode. They, they do many really good things over at ATC Trailers, but one thing in particular they're, they're extremely passionate about is practicing TWI or training within industries. Now they're doing all three J programs, job instruction, job relations, and job methods. But in this talk today that you're going to hear, Steve's gonna kind of share their JM or job method story. Now, this was a talk that Steve gave at the, the TWI summit that happened a month or so ago out in San Diego. And I actually sat in the audience and heard this talk live. And I remember sitting there, true story, listening to Steve. And Steve's a really, really good, really good guy and a really good presenter, but he's an even a better leader. And I remember just sitting there thinking to myself, man, if I could just be like half the leader that Steve is here at Gemba Academy, I'll have one big time. Steve is just, he's just like one of these very special leaders out there. He genuinely cares about the folks that work for him. He cares about his business. It doesn't mean that he's all, you know, Kumbaya and everyone sits around and, you know, sings hymns all day long. It's not like that. I mean, he'll get after you if you need to get after you. And he, I think he holds everyone accountable, but he truly walks the talk when it comes to leading a Lean implementation at an organization as a CEO. So again, he's going to talk about JMP in particular. And what we're going to do is we're going to include the slides that Steve is kind of referring to. This is audio only, so you can't obviously see what he's talking about. But we're going to put the slides in. So go over to the show notes, which you'll find@gembapodcast.com and just look for the Steve Brennaman episode 160 episode and maybe open those up and take a look. It's got some really cool trailers and some pictures of their products and things like that. So it just may help kind of tie it all together again. Gembapodcast.com and just look for episode 160. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show.

I am not real rigorous, you know, person. I like to be all over the place and I have to continue to discipline myself. So you're not going to see a JM process that's perfect. This is the JM process that Roger helped teach us, and it works well. So you're going to see some examples and some stories of where I've been able to use it on the front lines and what I use it for as a leader of the organization. I use it to learn. I use it to go to the front lines and really learn what problems folks are dealing with. But also the frontline leaders use it to learn how to do process improvement and really understand the fundamentals of what we're doing. So that's kind of the overview of what I want to share today. So this is the company I lost, Roger was telling you in 2008, I lost the components company. As I was starting ATC Trailers. I bought a little Amish business on his farm that we built doors for the cargo trailer and RV industry, which is huge in Elkhart County. It's about a $12 billion industry. And I grew it into this. I went with that business and let other people run my trailer business. And. And I went with this business and grew it very large. We started our own extrusion mill, aluminum extrusion mill, and got it up and going just before the downturn. And we had a lot of high fixed costs because of some of the things we did. We had three plants, five plants. And so there was a lot to manage. And we didn't have control of the business. We were dabbling with lean on the factory floor. So sort of like everybody's doing, let's fix those idiots out there. I'm the smart CEO. I don't need any of it. Just I'll bless it. I'm supportive. I'm blessing it. Go Save some cost. So that was like every other CEO I've ever met. But I didn't think it had to do with me. I had to understand the lingo enough to know what was going on. But we had a mess. We were not operationally excellent. So I lost that business and through that experience started reading Lean, thinking and realized, oh, my goodness, this has. Lean has everything to do with the CEO. So I was selling off these assets for the bank, saying goodbye to 300 employees. It was extremely painful. So that's why I'm a fanatic today. I'm a fanatic for Lean because I saw all the things it could have saved us from and went through a lot of pain going through it. So I come back in 2009, I come back to my trailer business and engaged with the current CEO who was in place, and I started experimenting. I got to use what I learned, and we had a lot of the same issues at my trailer company that we did at my door company. But I now had a different set of glasses on. I now, I now saw things differently. I saw messes in the corner, and I didn't see it as just, well, you know, that's fine. It's not really getting in anyone's way. I saw everything being done through tribal knowledge, and I didn't think, oh, well, that's. We have, we have a very talented tribe. Why do we need to put things on paper? Why do we need to improve our print quality or anything like that? But now I saw it completely differently. So a little bit about my trailer company, like Roger said, founded in 1999, I was doing purchasing at a cargo trailer company, decided to do it in aluminum. These are some of the products we make. If you want to talk about, you know, everybody says we're high mix, low volume, hey, join the club. I think that's all we're headed toward. The days of the black Model T is they're gone. We make anything and everything that you can put on wheels from a 5x8 little open utility out of aluminum, open trailer, up to a half million dollar command center for the US Government and everything in between. So a couple of the things we make, this is a stacker. We make about a hundred of those a year. It's basically you drive a car in, lift it up on a hydraulic lift and drive another one underneath it. So if you have a prevost or if you have a big diesel pusher, you can carry two cars behind you and you're not taking up, you know, 75ft on the highway, you can do it in a shorter space. So we do a lot of those. And One of the JMs that I did was on the hydraulic lift in this trailer. Just remember that fiber splicing trailers where they bring in the fiber, splice it together and then test the connections. There's a lot of those. We make cool stuff like this. On one side of this trailer and is six flat panel TVs. On the other side are couches. Guess what that trailer is used for? Video games. Yes. This is a, we've done about 65 of these. It's a business that if you buy one of these, you can then rent it for birthday parties, school celebrations, youth groups, anything like that. Where kids, 25 kids want to play video games at the same time time. My kids when they were younger used to like when one of these came off the line at the end of the line, had to stay over for a weekend. They would go in with their friends and test it out. So we make all kinds of stuff. So we started out with True North. Just give you a quick progression. We started out with True North. Our True north is very similar to Toyota's. I mean it just. The more we dug into having this, the more we realized, you know, they really had it figured out. So it's, it's fairly similar respect for people. Two facets of that safety and safety and secure paycheck. And that's not just for the white collar workers that work in the office. The safety of the paycheck is also for the plant workers. That's something we constantly make decisions around. That next downturn is coming and we want to protect everyone. So what are we going to do when that downturn hits? Can we be ready? Can we grow through productivity improvement rather than just adding headcount that we're gonna ax as soon as the next downturn hits so big. 100% on time delivery, probably impossible for us, but something to shoot for. 100% value added. Again, True North. It's somewhere out there. We'll never achieve it, but we're headed that direction. 15% annual productivity improvement. This is a big one. And that is again, almost impossible. We, we hit about 8% last year. That was our productivity gain last year over the year before. And I'll explain why that's so important in a little bit. And then perfect quality in the hands of the customer. Again, impossible, but something that guides us. So this is the one I want to talk about today. This is productivity. This is a three year, and we look at this every single week. How many hours? This is really simple. Anybody can do this math. Our CFO doesn't even have to explain what this means, because we look at it every single week. It's really simple. Here we have dollars of output of trailers, and we track how many hours did our organization work last week. So you take everybody on the line. That one's pretty easy. Then we do an estimate for everybody not on the line that doesn't punch in, and we take all those hours and we add them up. Right now, it's about 9,500 hours a week. We divide that into our sales, and we get how many dollars worth of sales went out the door for the effort that we put in? That includes me. That includes everyone. So are we getting better or are we getting worse? There's the trend line. So every single week, we see this. Now, what does that mean? So one time, Roger was in a meeting, we were doing a JM event, actually, and I was trying to explain what I was talking about. And we were trying to explain to the other employees in this room that were with us, why is productivity so improvement? Why are we working on it? Well, Bill Waddell, if some of you know him, he has a slide that he likes to show. And Toyota. Oh, that's gonna. So Toyota has this 5% growth trajectory. And if you look at this the same way this is, that means if they grew, they had this target. I don't know how official this was, but this is the story that Bill Waddell tells. They have this 5% trajectory. If they can improve at 5% a year, they can grow forever without adding a single person. And how powerful is that? So I engage our workforce into productivity gains, because I say if we all work on this together, we can all share in the proceeds. Imagine the margins seven years from now if you do this, because people, your people, determine all your other costs, all your other controllable costs. If you agree with George Koenigsegur, all your controllable costs, most of them are people costs. So how many computers do we need? How much space do we need? How many pieces of equipment do you need? All that's driven by the number of people that it takes to put out for us about a million dollars worth of trailers a week. So if we can get to 1.2 million and we didn't have to add anyone next year, wow, amazing margins. We can increase pay and everybody wins. So that's kind of the. The background behind why we take this productivity thing so seriously. Now, there's a lot of cultural Implications to that. They have to believe that we're going to share, so we do. So, Jim Lancaster, is it Lancaster or Lancaster? Lancaster just came out with a new book and as I was getting ready to put this, as I was putting this presentation together, I got the Lei email and this quote was right on it. And he says, I've always had a problem convincing CEOs of one simple thing. They need to take the time to go where actual value is actually created. They need to learn to see the work and to see how their management system utterly fails to support the daily work. Few CEOs give a crap about that. My most important advice is to screw up your courage, put aside your daily distractions and walk out into the work to see how value is created at the front line. Now, I know there's a lot of continuous improvement people here, there's a lot of other leaders here, but how many people actually do this? Actually go and engage in the work and actually use these tools? We're teaching people to use them. We're talking on this theoretical level, but do we go and actually do it? So to me, JM is a way that's really simple, that we can engage in that frontline daily work. Because all of us probably, if you're at a conference like this, you're in leadership. So JM four step method, pretty simple. Break down the job to its finite elements, question every detail, develop the new method and work out the idea with others. Really, really simple. And that's one of the things I love about JM is I can teach anybody to do it. You don't have to know what Kaizen is. You don't have to explain all the, you know, what Toyota did. I mean, anybody can do this. It's really simple. So this is the card that I use. You've got step one up there and gives it some details. Step two, step three, step four. And this is not an advertisement for the thing at the bottom there. Don't look at that. So this is what it looks like. I go out with this sheet and I stand there with hopefully a frontline leader. It takes two people to do this because you're writing every detail down. You're just, I mean, they're coming at you as fast as possible. So usually the front line leader and I will go out, we'll stand and observe a job. We'll explain to the operator, this is what we're doing. We're not looking for the things you're doing wrong. We want to break down this job and we want to make it better in the future to make your work easier and higher quality. So by now at our organization, we don't even really have to explain it. They just ignore us. They don't get nervous or anything. We've been doing this for long enough. But anyway, so with the frontline leader, he's calling them out. I'm writing them down. Here's every single job. I can read it a little better here. So this is that lift platform that gets raised up. You put a car on it and it raises up in the stacker. That's this. And so I'll read you the different steps. Set the jig, set the side piece. Walk to cart. Get walk to cart. Set cover braces, Put on helmet. Walk to cart. You get the idea. I mean, it's every single thing. And you especially want to see. You want to raise the awareness of the things that don't add value. See all these walkings down here? I put 15ft, 10ft. 10ft, 8ft, 25ft. That's the part. I'll get to that in a little bit. So you break all the jobs down, or you break the job down into details. This particular one was a long one. This was two hours. My hand was tired at the end of that two hours. So there was, I think, 12 pages like that. It was 14 pages like that at the end of those two hours. But you really understand the job when that thing is done. So over to the side. Then we take the different steps. The step two is question every detail. List your ideas. Don't trust your memory, so challenge yourself. Why is this detail necessary? What is its useful purpose? And then where should it be done? Maybe someone else should do that task. Should it be done here? Should it be done somewhere else? And then there may be a better way. How's the best way to do it? So over here, for each one of these steps that we can eliminate, we put an X and we say B idea. B dedicated lift cart. So we're going to have a lift cart so he doesn't have to walk to get his parts. We're going to dedicate it and we're going to put the parts in order of how he uses it. And we're going to move it right next to the jig so he can just go boom, boom. Like that. Really simple stuff. These aren't ideas that take a Kaizen event. These are things you can do fairly quickly. Most of them. Some of them are a Kaizen event. So. So every time we eliminated a step, we have to put what idea Helped us eliminate that. So B, B, here's a new one D, D down here. Every time we have an X and we eliminated this step, we have to know how we eliminated it. What piece are we going to do? So after that's all done, you know what the way we came up with this new plan was? We sat down with the guy that did it with me, the front line leader and the operator, or two, if there's two operators, we sit down with them, we come together, we put our heads together, and we work through these ideas. So this is a whiteboard. We just basically took the ideas we had, we put it on a whiteboard, and we talked through it with the larger group, the value stream leader, the line manager, whoever has authority in that area. And what, you're not necessarily just trying to sell the idea. You're not necessarily trying to sell your ideas. The magic that we learned, especially the time Roger was with us, we had our ideas that we wanted to present to the group. But when the operators, the users got in that discussion, we got such higher quality ideas. I mean, amazing stuff. So this session here is to take our ideas and give it to the group. But the level of process improvement went way, way up. By the people that are doing the work, they may say, no, I know what you're saying, but that's not really a problem. This is the real problem. Let's tackle it a different way. So in this particular one, we listed out our ideas, and there was some pretty costly ones. And because I was in the room, we had the ability to make decisions to spend money or not. Now, don't think that JM is a way to get new equipment, you know, new things. In this particular one, we needed this $23,000 lift table bad. We needed it bad because they were using a homemade thing that they couldn't. They were shimming all over the place trying to make this big lift platform out of aluminum. And when you weld aluminum, it bends and twists, and it was horrible. And I got to see that firsthand. So we bought this thing almost immediately because it had a huge quality impact. So then we assigned people. This is the group leader. We assigned him to some of the different tasks. One of them was assigned to me. One of them was big enough. It was assigned to the executive team. We need to make a decision on this. So you basically come up with the plan. We're not going to do all of these. We're going to do the ones that make sense. And up here you'll see what we proposed. 442 steps was the number of steps that we tracked on all the sheets. We think if we did all of these, we listed the steps each of these would eliminate. We think we can be down to 257 steps. So we think that time is going to go from two hours to an hour and 15 minutes. That was our hypothesis. So that's what we went and did. And I'll show you the results in a little bit. So these are some of the projects that I tackled. We did the lift. Whoops. We did the lift frame. We did the premium escape door generator installation, welding, a steel bunk hydraulic lift pump, a lot of different things. I even did a couple office processes that were difficult to do. And I sort of chose these with the area leaders said, what are the pieces that really cause problems or what are the things you're doing that are really hard to control quality on? And we tried to do it that way. We tried to take things on that were going to actually be meaningful and make a difference for those frontline people. Because what we were trying to do is not just improve things. We were also trying to make believers out of those frontline workers. Because if you go in there and make their job easier and they can do more and go home on time, they. They'll be believers in lean real quick, and they'll be begging you to come into their area to make their jobs better. It won't be like, oh, here they come again. Here the experts going to tell us what to do? No, if you do this and do it well, they will be calling you over there and saying, I have this horrible process. Could you help us with it? And that's what's starting to happen. So the autolift platform, like I talked about, this is how the parts came in from one of our vendors. They put a kit together of some of the parts, like the hydraulic cylinder, the hydraulic pump. This is four kits. One, two, three, four, right there. And the first thing I noticed was it took the operator 15 minutes to sort through all this stuff and put things in order of the way he was going to use them. And so that's an easy one. Let's do this, let's make a kit. And what we did, I had somebody throw a couple pieces of plywood on a cart with wheels on it really quick, just experiment. And so each of the bins represented parts that were going to be used. So the first thing the operator did, and the idea was this, it would come to us like this from the vendor rather than on a skid wrapped in Wrap it would come like this. The vendor would actually do this on their floor. And then we just had a rotating. We need three of these carts and it would just rotate. When they get an empty one, they fill it and they fill it in order with only what we need, but everything we need. So the yellow bins are used in the back when we're making the lift frame. The red bins and these parts down here are all used in the front when we're actually installing it in the trailer. It was really simple. So in the process of doing this, we were testing this idea out. We had our employee that built this lift in the beginning. He left and we had a new employee. One of the first comments after I went back out there and said, how did this work? He said, it was great because I don't know as much what I'm doing, but I know I can grab the parts out of here and know exactly what to do. Then I grab the next parts, know exactly what to do, then I go to the next one and it kind of guides them through. So we started thinking about this more as standard work. So the kit guides them in doing the right things in the right order, and it was very powerful. So this, this was huge for us. And then it turned into an action plan. The part that I really was glad that we did this is Jesse was the group leader that did this with me and he actually created this action plan on his own. And there's some things on here that weren't part of our jm, but he has goals and targets. Is it red, yellow, green? He did this on his own because I went back there and worked through this process with him and he sort of got it and took it on his own. All these things are done and we're way past this now. So this is a continuous improvement board that he came up with. And we're actually implementing a larger lean management system that is similar to this. But we do daily reflection meetings, we do leader standard work, all of those things as part of an all encompassing lean management system that we use. But this is a variation of it. But he did this on his own with his team. That was fantastic. So some of the things we did are listed over here. So time before, time after was two hours before. We didn't quite hit our 115 goal, but we got it down to an hour and a half. And during our busy season, we do three of these a week. So we saved an hour and a half worth of their time. And during our busy season, they work overtime every day, so. So that's an hour and a half less overtime that they're involved in. So since then, we have completely developed a new hydraulic lift, all new car lift. So we're now using product management to build a better product. So we don't build this one anymore. But for two years it really had a big impact. So this was a generator install. This generator gets touched tucked down in the tongue of the trailer. This is for an RV product that we make. And it was painful. As I was doing the JM with the front line leader, it was painful to watch two operators try to wrestle this generator into place and tuck down into that frame. And then imagine right in here are the inlets for the fuel lines and the electrical. And he's trying to feed that down through there. It was a nightmare. And so very quickly we were able to take this and use these improvements to make it much, much better. So some of the things we did, we staged the generator in the market. So that meant we did a lot of these hookups back on a bench where it's a lot easier to do. So they have their own parts kit prep person that then took a lot of that work back there. So this thing now comes up front, everything's hooked up. They're just dropping it in and hooking it to the trailer. There's no working with in this area where it's really, really tight. So those are some of the things that came out of this tool and material kit. I got tired of watching the operator. He's underneath the trailer on a creeper and he's trying to do all this hookup down there and up. I forgot this wrench. So he gets up off the creeper, he walks over there, gets, gets his correct size wrench and back. And it was back and forth, you know, probably 10 times. All of that's gone now. It's all in a little kit he's got right next to him. He's underneath on the creeper. Everything he needs is right there. Now we're getting. We're in the process of going back through this one again because we could do a lot of improvement to that kit because it's hard to find parts when you're on your back underneath the trailer. So the idea is we come back and we do it again. So on this one, 140 steps. And we wanted to get it down to 79. It was 43 minutes. We haven't quite hit the 15 minute goal yet. But I think the last time we did it, it was about 28 minutes. So almost in half. Not quite. And our step improvement is getting close to that. 79. Not quite there yet. We did add five minutes worth of work back on the prep table though. So you got to, you got to factor that in as well. Other changes, I went through some of those. Okay, so after the one I did the other day, we were 32 minutes, but much safer installation process. He doesn't have to call somebody over to help him get that thing wrestled into place. He does it all by himself. One person, much better ergonomic working conditions as well. Hydraulic lift pump, that's another one that I did. Time before was 20 minutes. And all 20 of those minutes was in the trailer, getting out of the trailer, going back in the trailer, getting out of the trailer, going back into the trailer. 40% of his time was spent walking. Afterward, 10 minutes was out on the bench. So we established a kidding bench. 10 minutes was out there, but only 5 minutes was in the trailer. And this is a point in the line where there's a lot going on in that trailer. And you can only fit so many people in the front of that trailer. And, you know, one person's hooking up the electrical system, he's hooking up the hydraulic system, all those kinds of things. So it's really nice to be in and out in five minutes. I'm not jumping down, getting something coming back in. The goal that we had after this JM was you go in the trailer and you don't leave until it's done. No getting back out, doing this. Simple things, these are not. This is not complex at all. Anybody can see this. So this is the biggest one that I did. And this was. We had a project. We needed to free somebody up on Value Stream three, which for us is the really big complex custom stuff. Everybody says, I never do anything the same way twice because it's all custom, so why do it the same way? But I was going to train the continuous improvement leader on that line. We needed to take someone from the line who was talented and pull them off and make them a continuous improvement leader. So what I did is I made job breakdowns for all of his work so we could train his replacement. And we did a couple of JMs. So this is one of the main ones that we did. And the job was to prep the breaker box and the transfer switch. And Sometimes there's a 110/ volt breaker box all tied into one. So there's a lot of work that goes into prepping these parts before they even get to the Left line. So this is what we worked on. One of the things that we realized. Here's a trailer. You can see the side that the tongue is here and the door is over here. So one of the things I noticed when I was doing a jm, watching him do this work, is that the door is almost always on the curb side of the trailer. Almost always. Sometimes we'll have doors over here, but almost always it's on the curb side of the trailer. And most of the materials were over here in our two bin carts on the other side of the trailer. And the tongue's in the way, so you got to walk all the way around. Over on the curbside was our extrusion saw where we cut trim pieces. And that didn't matter where it was. It could be on roadside curbside. It's the same amount of trim on each side. So his idea was okay, because what I did is I noticed how much he was walking for this job in doing the JM, we added it up. It was about 60 to 65% walking of the job. Now, there's something about walking, at least in our factory, that doesn't feel like waste to the operator. If you're doing. Have you ever done spaghetti diagrams? Everybody done spaghetti diagrams? Yeah. You're drawing these lines back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And you ask them, you know, is it pretty wasteful? What is it? No, I don't have any waste. No. And they're walking all over the place. It doesn't feel like waste. And so, you know, you're here, you've got this, and you're thinking of the next thing. You walk over, you grab the wrench, and you walk back like this, and you come and it just doesn't feel wasteful. Now, there's other things that feel wasteful, but walking just doesn't feel wasteful. So when you do a JM and you actually track the number of feet that they're walking, you figure up 60% is walking. If we just eliminated that, it's 60% less time that it's going to take if we just do that. So his idea was, let's switch these, let's take these, and let's put them where we actually use them on the curbside. And let's take this and let's put it over on the roadside, since that doesn't matter. So that's what he did. But he didn't stop there. He decided to make a nice little station there. And instead of having our two bin carts that are filled by the supermarket, you're all familiar with that. We put the bins for everything he needed to prep those parts and get them ready. He put it right into, right beneath the bench where he was working. Made the bench a little higher, lots of light. Because a lot of times he'd be working in the trailer where there's no light because the electrical system wasn't hooked up yet. So made this whole big station, everything he needed at his feet. Guess what? No more walking, because he's got all the parts at his feet. Sometimes he'd have to go around to the two bin cart and make three trips because there's all these breakers and the breaker box. And plus, he's got all of his test instruments right here. Again, this is not rocket science for Lean. This is just doing the basics, eliminating waste. So here they're cleaning out that wall, they're putting this in place, place, getting it ready for the switch. So this is probably. And he dedicated. You know, we pulled him off the line, made him continuous improvement so he had time to make these changes. But in about two weeks, he made all these changes to the line, and his replacement is now doing it much better. So the steps for him to prep all these parts and get them ready to go in the trailer, install it in the trailer, was 140 steps after improvement, we went to 79. The time before was 43 minutes, and we got it down to 18 minutes. And really all we did is just eliminate the walking. That was 90% of what we did. Now we do six trailers a week, seven trailers a week on this line. So it's not high volume, but every single trailer gets some version of this. Every single trailer, we cut an incredible amount of time, cut it to less than half. The other issue, if you understand bottlenecks, theory of constraints, this station is by far our biggest bottleneck. This is where a lot of the electrical systems and plumbing systems and slide outs and hydraulics all come together at once. And so this typically, this would be probably the most likely to be our bottleneck. And we just eliminated 25 minutes from our bottleneck station. So, you know, again, we didn't go into it thinking that, but looking back afterward, we realized we made a pretty big change. The work is also easier, less tiring, because you're working at this level rather than walking back and forth and getting up and down out of the trailer. Better quality, too, definitely. So what did we learn? Why did we not see walking as waste? That's one I've been pondering over, and I've talked To our group leaders about just there's something about it, at least for what we do. Because we do a lot of walking. Our trailers are big, some of them are 53ft long. And so, you know, you do a lot of walking, you go get your stuff, you go get your tools, you do all this stuff and it just doesn't feel like waste. So why is that? We have a lot of conversations around that. And I never would have seen it had we not broken down the job to that level of detail. The line work hasn't changed much since we started our lean journey almost eight years ago. And I ruffled some feathers when I said that our COO is, you know, let me know that our frontline leaders weren't super happy when they heard that. But I would say it's changed more than I thought. But we have done a lot to present parts to the line. We've done a lot for rather than the line workers keeping their own supplies, we supply them in small quantities. We've done a lot surrounding prints and information and all that stuff. But the actual work, the hands on work on the line has not changed that much. That's an ongoing argument. Kidding and prepping parts is first on the list of improvement almost every time for us. Every time I do a jam, the first thing we talk about is what do you need when you do this job? How can you have everything with you when you go in to do that job in order of how you're going to do the work. So we've started taking the thinking behind kitting and we're actually establishing a kidding person on every main group group of our line. There's three on every value stream and we've got five value streams. So there's going to be 15 dedicated kidding people. Because if a welder is welding, the longer their hand is pulling the trigger for welding, the better off we are. And rather than making him walk over and get supplies, if he turns around, everything's right there. So we have done a lot on kitting and we're continuing to do that. But it is huge for us. So walking is 30 to 50% of our enclosed trailer line work. How can we recognize walking as waste Kaizen event to introduce kidding parts? We did that. Everyone can learn to do JM if the leaders can teach them. And it's pretty simple. This is another one. I'm just going to go through this fairly quickly. You can't see it very well, but this is a tough job. He's got the control panel upside down on his lap he's got all his tools around him and he's trying to hook up all these wires and you watch this and you question every detail and it's just like, oh my goodness, you have to be a genius to do this job. If you tried to train me to do that job, there's no way I could do it. So we created this little table with a kit underneath and where we set our wire wires that come in. It's just basic stuff. These are the guys ideas. So the kit over again, we could have done a lot better than this kit. But that's what they came up with and it was a lot better than they had before. Now we have a work standard. This got kind of messed up but now we have a work standard around the control panel. This is one of the things we realized we needed to make it clear. And this is what the back looks like. Still got a lot of improvements to go, but better than we were. So standard work for us has been kind of our final frontier to me. From my perspective, everybody talks about standard work. Very few people do it. But we started on our most basic trailer line and we have seen amazing results from using this. So I just wanted to give you a quick visual on what we've learned through standard work. And JM is really a. We've learned that if you do a jm, you've got a great starting point. It's not standard work, but we've got a great starting point towards standard work. So this is a spaghetti diagram of our most basic trailer line. This is probably one we made when you were with us. This is the weld table where we put all the pieces together. This is just a utility trailer, just an open deck. So we had two stations really small. This is the, the weld table and then this is the assembly. So this is where all the lights get put on and the decals get put on, the railings get put on everything that's not the basic frame. This isn't a big product line for us. So we did. We only do like. Well I think we're up to about 50 a week on this line for those. But dollar volume wise it's not very big for us. But you can see, you can see where, where he's going. Walking over to get parts, walking over to this cart. We've got everything close by, but there's still a lot of walking shared work back and forth. This person probably got done and came over and helped, which is good except it makes a lot of spaghetti. So cycle time was 181 minutes for two operators. That was the labor time for two operators to do this job was 181 minutes. So next we went to kitting. We said, how can we get these parts closer to here so we don't see some of these lines? And how can we balance the work so they don't have to go back and forth? So the next one looked like that. And I love pictures because you don't have to be a lean guru. You don't even have to know anything about lean to tell me which one's better. Is that one better or is that one better? This one's a lot better. So you see, the labor time went from 181 minutes to 134 minutes by the work that we did here. And most of what we did has to do with moving these kits and making some semblance of standard work of doing the same job at the same time every single cycle. And then the last one, we went to very, very, very specific standard work, following down to the. Down to the few seconds at every part. So again, this is. And then we've been able to get it down to 84 minutes labor time. So again, from here to here to here. And the most important thing from this point to this point all happened within the team leader and the operators. No upper management or middle management was involved in that improvement work. Because of the way true standard work works and auditing it and coming up with ideas and going back in and changing it. This was. This is where we're headed. So we're now. Now it gets more complicated because we're now starting to do this work. What does standard work look like on a custom line? What does standard work look like on our semi custom line? There's a lot of it. So that's what we're working on now. So this is what our standard work looks like. This is actually the value stream leader doing the job so that we can see is it simple enough that even our value stream leader can do it. And so that's just an example of where there's a few iterations from this. So how do we take this spaghetti diagram and make it better? So this is a JM that we were doing to try to take some of those lines out. Again, back to the reason, the problem we're trying to solve. We are continuing to try to achieve 15% productivity year over year. We haven't yet hit it. We hit 11% one year. We hit 8% last year. So we continue to try to move forward and get better and better. This is our sales history. So as you can see, we're pretty lucky. We don't have to lay people off. We've got plenty of work and we can just ride that increase in sales activity. We can just ride that all the way up. So I just got an email from the gentleman from the value stream leader that you just saw in the standard work. He just told me. Last year, the first five weeks of the year, we produced 930,000 out of that plant. $930,000 out of that plant with 36 people. This year we produced 1.350 out of that same plant with 5 extra people. So 47% increase in output, 14% increase in headcount. That's what we're trying to do. Just a couple more things. Great way for leaders to get involved. Great way for frontline workers to see waste and increase improvement ideas. Great way for other groups to come into a different department and engage, improve safety, quality and cost all at the same time. 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. 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