GA 262 | The Next Generation of Lean with Tyler Athey

Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection. And I like that quote just because it's something that early on in my lean journey that I struggle with, trying to boil the ocean, as people will say from time to time. So I keep that one kind of posted up on my wall in my office just to remember that old adage, better, not perfect.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Tyler Athey to the show. Now, Tyler and I exchanged a few emails before we came onto the show and kind of brainstorming some ideas for what to talk, and he kept coming back to. He had more questions for me than he wanted me to ask him. You see, Tyler's been practicing lean for just a few years, and he's in his 20s and kind of out of school recently and just kind of learning his way. But as you'll hear, he knows a lot more than he was letting on. He has done quite a lot in just a few years of being out of college. So really, the first part of this episode is just hearing more about his journey. He's had some interesting experiences with different industries, and we actually kind of geeked out a little bit on some of the Kanban systems that he was working in and at his previous company. And then, yeah, then we kind of transitioned into a more of a. He was interviewing me. He was asking me quite a few questions, you know, on various things that he was wondering about and struggling with. And I did my best to provide some answers, and a lot of it, as you probably guessed, resulted in me really preaching about the power and effectiveness of scientific thinking. And so, yeah, so it'll be interesting to follow Tyler's career over the coming years. Really nice guy, and I enjoyed talking to him. So show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 262. Again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 262. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. All right, Tyler, welcome to the show. How's it going?

I'm good. Thanks for having me. Ron, how are you?

I'm doing well. Doing well, thank you. All right, well, so I think today will be an interesting, interesting podcast. I got some questions for you that I definitely want to explore, but sounds like you might have a few questions for me, so maybe we can. We'll turn the tables and let you take over towards the end. How's that sound?

That sounds excellent.

Okay, good. So, as you know, Tyler, I know you listen to the show. We like to begin with our guest sharing a Quote. Do you have one?

I actually have a couple for you.

Okay.

So my first one, an old and simple quote from Mark Twain. Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection. And I like that quote just because it's something that early on in my lean journey that I struggle with trying to boil the ocean, as people will say from time to time. So I keep that one posted up on my wall in my office just to remember that the old adage, better not perfect. We just have to keep making continual little strides and not try to become perfect overnight.

Love it.

The second one is not necessarily related to lean, but something that's been a great quote in my life. I know. Another question you used to ask towards the end of your shows was, what's something that inspired you? And I think maybe this is a quote that inspired me. It's from Richard Branson, and it's, if someone offers you an amazing opportunity but you aren't sure if you can do it, say yes, and then learn how to do it later. So there's been a few times in my life that I kind of took that advice and took a couple leaps, and it led to some pretty cool things.

Very good, Very good. I like that one. All right, well, Tyler, let's kind of jump in and hear a little bit more about yourself. I'm curious how you first got started with lean and. And just really kind of catch us up to speed to where you're at at present day.

Sure, yeah. So it all started, actually, back in. Would have been 2014. I was a junior in college, and I was looking for an internship, as many juniors are. And I came across this one internship which was called an industrial engineer. And my background's actually in mechanical engineering. So I wasn't really sure exactly what an industrial engineer did, but I read through the job descript, and a lot of the job description had this talk of continuous improvement on it and being a mechanical engineer. I had no idea what lean was or what continuous improvement was, but this was probably the first Richard Branson quote in my life where I said, oh, yeah, you know what? I can do this. And I went and I had the interview, and I ended up being offered the role. And within that role, then I started to learn about continuous improvement. And half of my role was more like 3D machine design. The other half was out on the floor working with the people, trying to help them solve their problems, implemented a water spider, just trying to reduce waste for that company. And coming out of that role, I really realized that I didn't really like sitting behind my desk that much doing CAD drawings. I really enjoyed that role of, of being out and helping the people and interacting with the people. And it quickly became something that really clicked with me and something that I really understood. So coming out of that role then and graduating college, I decided to try to explore roles more on this continuous improvement side which my first role then out of college was a Lean project manager role with a pharmaceutical or biopharmaceutical product testing lab actually. So they were just beginning their Lean journey. So I was with them for about three years trying to help them build their Lean culture. Spent some time implementing Kanban systems for them, trying to make sure we had material at point of use. One of their biggest opportunities was just they spent about a quarter of their time just walking around looking for things, trying to find glassware, trying to find different consumable. So bringing their material to point of use and setting up these Kanban systems to make sure they always had what they had, where they needed it, when they needed it was huge for them. And also just trying to help build up that culture. Started teaching some classes as well. So I actually took a five day Lean training class that was offered by our parent company's corporate Lean office. And I came back from that. The president of our company said, how would you like to maybe scale that down to a two or three day class and teach everybody in the lab? Here comes my second Richard Branson moment as a shy mechanical engineer. I say oh sure, I can do this. And then I walked out of that. Being like what did I just sign myself up for? Getting in front of people and talking was definitely, still definitely isn't my strongest attribute. But that actually turned out really well. I think that is teaching those classes. It was just an introductory course to Lean, just teaching value stream mapping, 5s, what the wastes are, things like that. I think teaching those things really helped solidify some of my knowledge of some of those basic concepts. And I think that was definitely a tool and that training was something that really went a long way for us helping to start build that culture at the lab. And then I was there for three years and then now I am at a company that manufactures industrial automation and industrial networking products. And I've been with this company for about nine months now.

Very good.

Yeah. So that's where I am today.

Nice, nice. So I'm curious to jump back in that first job, I know in communicating with you before we started the episode. You have done a lot with Kanban, it sounds like. So talk us a little geek Out a little bit, you know, for maybe take it in two approaches. One, like more technical talk a little bit about maybe the type of Kanban that you use. Was it like a. Like a two bin system or what? You know, the mechanics of it, but then also implementing it, because sometimes implementing those can be, you know, if a company's not used to it, it could be a big change. Right. So curious if you've met any resistance or anything like that.

Yeah. So the actual implementation of it, a mix of different things really. Whatever kind of visual signal was best for that application is what we used. Two bin system we used a lot. But in certain scenarios, whether we were setting up a kanban in a drawer or whatever it might be, maybe the two bins wasn't really the best application or best visual actual reorder signal. So we did different things, just different visual markers, visual indicators. And sometimes it was just simply a card hanging on a shelf and people kind of familiarize themselves with what the actual numerical reorder point was. But how we set it up was we had basically two stages of the kanban inside the lab where they worked. They had their kind of what we called their restocking kanban, which might have been a two bin system inside the lab. And when they obviously depleted one bin, it was their signal that they needed to give the signal for someone else to restock that bin so that they weren't going to run out of the material that they needed in the lab. And then back on the second level, there was an external store, you might want to call it, that had maybe a week's worth of material that might have been shared by a different lab within the company. And we had that. It was called our restocking kanban. So we had a similar system where we got to a certain point and then they would have to pull that trigger to or see that trigger and pull the card to reorder the materials from our external vendors in order to make sure we didn't run out on that level as far as meeting resistance. I think like I said, building, starting with these trainings and definitely having that expectation set from the top down, that lean is kind of plan A and there's no plan B. And this is what we're doing and we're going to send people through these training classes and became part of their jobs. Not a whole lot of necessarily resistance, maybe definitely a lot of skepticism. People being burned in the past by delays in the customer or their suppliers getting them the materials and having the mindset that we need to Keep a whole lot of extra material on hand just in case for these scenarios. Definitely some skepticism there. But I think people quickly came to realize that it was a good thing. And they were certainly happy not to have to walk around and look for stuff all the time and constantly running out of materials and having to shift around their priorities. And a couple one or two complaints about people not getting in their steps for the day because they weren't running around as much. But otherwise, I think people really started to realize it was a good thing and came on board with it.

It's so funny you said that. I remember back in the day when I worked at a company called Flowserve, we. We did this. It was kind of a material handling Kaizen event sort of thing where we mapped out this poor gal. She had to walk like, I don't know how many miles, you know, it was like, per day to this horribly inefficient, you know, warehouse or, you know, part of their factory. And it wasn't rocket science, Right. It was like, all right, these parts always grab together. How about we put them together, you know, real hard. Right? But we did that. And it like, I don't know, reduced her walking by like 80%. And. And that, that comment did actually come up about like, hey, man, you know, like people could, you know, are they gonna be lazy or what? You know, so I get to get. Fight, fight. Other things to do with all that time you used to walk. Right.

Right.

Hopefully you do other value added stuff. So. Yeah. Interesting. Good stuff. Good stuff. Did you. Did you ever get your reorder points or your bin sizes wrong and run out of parts due to your.

We had very variable demands in that business because it was basically a service industry where customers were ordering us to do analysis on a sample. And things had spikes and peaks and valleys and things had to be adjusted and changed all the time. But I kind of had to tell the people that we can only really look at what the averages are. No matter what system you put in place to plan for your reordering, nothing's going to capture the 100%. And having months and months of material on hand that's costing money for the company isn't the right way to go about fixing that problem. But as things changed, we adjusted them. And with their training, it was really great. It was a company of about 1500 employees. We had, I believe, 15 different departments and just thousands and thousands of different consumables. So going through these trainings and giving people the tools and knowledge to do this stuff after we was, after it was rolled out, they really did a pretty good job maintaining that themselves. And when they had to change their reorder quantities and their points, they did that pretty autonomously. So it was a pretty cool thing.

So if you could go back to that position that you had there at that first company and that time machine question that you've probably heard me ask, and you could go back and give yourself some advice before you began that journey because obviously you were brand new to lean really at that point. Was there anything that you would do different if you could?

That's a great question. Maybe not try to make it so perfect from the beginning. I definitely spent a lot of time and a lot of people's time trying to collect long periods of data because we didn't really have an ERP system or anything that we could really go back and look historical demand and how much of materials we use. So a lot of it was just manual collection. Okay. We're going to set up Kanban system for these parts right now and we have a sheet and just kind of have people manually fill out how many they use in a day. And just a lot of manual data collection and manually putting it into Excel to figure out what the right levels were. I think maybe if I go back I would try not to make it so perfect from the start and just maybe try to use their knowledge to get a good starting point and then, you know, adjust from there. Even though it probably won't be 100% correct to start. Probably save a lot of time just, just getting somewhere and then, and then adjusting then and trying to figure it out perfectly the first time and you see.

In other words, stop being such an engineer, right?

Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much, yeah.

No, I'm the same thing. You know, I mean, it's, it's hard, you know, you want to be, you don't want to make mistakes, you know, and I think that's why we, we tend to over plan sometimes because we're scared to make mistakes. But therein lies a problem like when you have fear of making mistakes, then that leads to bad behavior. Right.

So I'm certainly pretty high up on the, in the green section of the disc or personality training. So I'm a thinker for sure. So I can get pretty, pretty detailed and deep into my thought from time to time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, let's, let's pivot towards that then because I know you were, you were peppering me with some really interesting ideas and questions over email and stuff, which kind of brings us to your current company and where you guys are at right now in your journey. So let's talk about that. And if you have any questions for me along the way, that's cool too see what I can do and we can open it up to the podcast world listeners and if they have ideas, they can chime in as well.

Sure. I have one specific question that we can get into then about something that I'm dealing with right now. I think just, just in general with the company I'm working with right now. I think really what we're trying to do is build that culture. Right now we're just running Kaizen events just to really get people introduced to what Lean is and we're trying to roll out kind of a Kaizen wall of fame kind of thing to just get people's ideas and inputs and build the culture. But from a continuous improvement journey aspect, I kind of see two sides of what people have done. And the one side is they make this really, really big, monumental change and then they run Kaizen after Kaizen events after that to try to make it better, make it perfect. And then there's the other event where they kind of have this or there's other kind of journey where it seems like people have this kind of direction that they're going into or they have this large project where they, and they try to break that into smaller projects, smaller Kaiser events to get where they're going. And really how do you know what the right balance of that is? Kind of something that I'm struggling with right now. And at what point in your Lean journey is correct? Because there's huge large scale opportunities that we have as far as, you know, everything's batching queue, so getting to one piece flow. But in our industry, it definitely seems to be a little bit of challenge. So when's the right time to just really dive into some of those things?

Yeah, well, it's, you know, what you're describing is what, you know, those of us who've been practicing for a while, we've all been there, you know, not all, but most of the people listening to this that have been practicing for, you know, 10, 15, 20 years can all probably talk about a time where they did a lot of, lot of events or, you know, that's my business partner, John Miller. If you listen to the episode a few, few weeks ago or whenever it was, all these podcasts kind of run together on me. But he, you know, you know, back in the day that was the consulting model and to some extent still is for Some consultants, you know, they would just say, hey, hire us for three, four days. We'll come in and we'll, we'll make an area better and you pay us a boatload of money, you know, and.

Right.

And then if you want to, you know, better again, bring us back in, you know, and we'll run more events. And, and so Lean really became largely a, an event driven environment for, for many, many years. And then I would say kind of when the value stream mapping kind of movement started, you know, and led by Mr. Mike Rother and these guys with Learning to See and all those, you know, Eliyahu workbooks that came out back in the day, you know, I think that also it helped a little bit in breaking from just running around doing a Kaizen events for the sake of doing Kaizen events. But it also led to even more Kaizen events because you would create your current state map, right? And then you immediately turn around and create your future state map. And then what did we do? We drew Kaizen burst or these little, you know, these little lightning bolt things or whatever, you know, all over the feature state map and saying, oh, we got to do a smed changeover event there and oh, we got to do a 5s event here and we got to do, we got standard work here and so forth. And so it also led to more Kaizen events. But what was a little bit better about that approach is that, you know, we might call that more of a, we had a system level Kaizen approach, right. Like with this feature state map, it's kind of like where we hope this value stream that we're mapping will be in maybe six months or a year or whatever it was. And so those then smaller Kaisen events, what we would call the point Kaizen, you know, those would hopefully bring us towards that, that so called ideal state.

Right.

And so, so I think. But. But then what also transformed, you know, keep going another five, 10 years when Mike Rother wrote Toyota Kata and you've obviously probably heard us talk a lot about scientific thinking here on the podcast because we're huge believers in it. Is this is, this is where the game changed really when? Because Mike himself, Mike Rather himself stood back and said, listen, we've taught all the tools and we even have this amazing value stream map in this, but we're still missing something because we've all copied Toyota's tools, but yet we still don't have their management system. What are we missing? And then that's when they went back to seek, seek out those unwritten or those hard to see, you know, non artifacts, if you will. And that's where scientific thinking comes in. And so I think the answer to your problem, in my opinion is to, it's not that you need to stop doing Kaizen events, you know, because it's, you know, making things better is, is always good. My friend Paul Akers, you know, says fix what bugs you, you know, and, and that does work, you know, to, for, for many organizations. But you get into, you know, large organizations, sometimes we can fix what bugs us and it'll make us, it'll make us better. But at the end of the day, sometimes we still need to have this long term vision or this challenge as we call it in scientific thinking, right? Toyota Kata this challenge, where do we want to be? And then, then we break it back down. And so like things like value stream mapping can work in perfect harmony with scientific thinking, right? We can still have the current state map where we're at. We have that future state map. That's where we want to be. And then that gap instead of, instead of creating this Kaizen newspaper with a list of things to do, which is what we typically used to do, we just say what's one thing that we can do? Or what's, where can we be in two weeks? Right? And say the so called target condition, right? And then okay, well let's see if we can be there in two weeks. That sounds good. Well, what, what, what's in our way? Well, these four things are in our way to that two week goal. Which one of those do we work on? Let's work on that. Well, what are, what ideas do you have? You know, what's your next step? And it might be I need to run a Kaizen event or it might be I gotta go talk to Cindy and see what I can figure out about that one thing, you know. And then so we just start. This is the beauty of it, right? It removes all of the pressure and the anxiety from continuous improvement. When we break things down this way and, and we try to overcomplicate it with big checklists and big long Kaizen newspapers with all these actions and who's responsible and who's going to come back and report out on those things. This is not as effective in my opinion as simply breaking things down into like setting a goal, a challenge, Having a long term challenge. Where you want to be in a year, where are you now? Your current condition, where can we be in two weeks? What are the things in our way between where we are now and where we want to be in two weeks and then start chipping away at those small obstacles.

Yeah, sure. So as far as setting that true north of that goal, and maybe that looks like complete one piece or small batch flow all the way throughout the entire value stream of one product, is there ever a time where maybe you need to, you just run Kaizen events, do some training, spend a couple years building your culture before companies really ready to even start trying to chip away at that, at that true north, the kind of that perfect, the vision that we're trying to strive for, trying to achieve?

Yeah, I don't think so. In fact, I kind of have this kind of crazy idea here. I am running this company, genba Academy, and we teach a lot of people about how to solve problems. But now I'm almost of the mind where I tell people, you know why, you know why you're struggling is because you try to solve so many problems. Quit trying to solve so many problems. Instead figure out how you can learn faster. And the more you learn, the faster you can learn, the problems are going to go away. Okay, but it's kind of like we, we've talked a lot about here on the podcast, you know, the so called the process, you know, like Nick Saban and Bill Belichick and these guys, you know, they practice the process. They don't worry, they don't worry about winning the super bowl or winning the SEC championship or the national championship. They know that's their all, their end goal, their challenge, right? But what they really are passionate about is are focusing on each day, each moment of that day. That's the process, right? Doing the best. And so in essence, it's about the process. It's not about the results. The results happen. Those guys win more championships than anybody. But why? Because they focus on the process. And so I would come back to what's the process of continuous improvement? And I would dare say it's scientific thinking. And so what you want to start, perhaps an approach to take would be quit trying to jam, lean down everybody's throat, you know, and just start learning, learning the improvement kata, learn the coaching kata, practice it and then, and then take it in small steps. And then the other way I explain it. Can't remember if I've said it on the podcast or not, but I explain in my mind it helped me understand it. Like Toyota Kata or scientific thinking is like the horse, right? It's this big horse and the horse is pulling this huge cart and the cart is full of all these things, whether they're lean, Six Sigma Mechanical engineering, you know, industrial engineering, all the tools that we might ever need. Right. Or the principles or whatever it might be, Respect for people, all the things that we talk about, those are all in that cart. So the horse sets off on this journey, and we say, hey, Mr. Mrs. Horse, bring us to that point. See that point way out there in the distance, the horse locks their eyes on it. Yeah, I got it. Go. Well, the horse is walking, everybody's good, and all of a sudden, a horse stops. You're like, what's going on, horse? Horse. Like, hey, bad. You got this obstacle in front of me. Can't get around it without some help. Oh, good. No worries. Jump off, grab out the thing that you need out of the cart. Right. Work on the obstacle, clear the obstacle, say, we're clear, horse. You see that? You got your eyes back on the prize over there with that vision. Yep. Keep going. And so in this way, you can. You can introduce these lean tools kind of as they're needed, you know, it doesn't. Because that's the other problem is you start teaching everybody about all these various tools, and that's cool. And it's always good to know what these tools are, but, you know, teach someone what a hammer is, then everything looks like a nail, you know?

Sure.

So. So I, you know, I've. I've talked to a lot of really experienced lean folks who have come to the conclusion that scientific thinking, in and of itself, used properly, is the best enabler to lean success that. That. That ever existed, you know, because it. It's not about the tools. It's not about the things that we want to do. It's about where do we want to be, what's in our way, and when we need to clear out that obstacle that's in our way, that's when the tools come in. Right? And so, like, here at Gemba Academy, that's Our whole thing is like, yeah, we got a thousand videos. But it's not about the videos. It's about. It's about the things that you need to learn to get where you want to be. So where do you want to be? And a lot of people don't know where they want to be. And that therein lies, really, the root cause of many problems is they don't have a challenge. They don't really know where they want to be. And then if they do, sometimes they don't even know where they're at, which sounds kind of crazy, but, you know, if I went out to your factory or your. Your. Your Gemba, and I walked up to anybody and I said, hey, how's it going? Good. I'm Ron. Hey, how's it going? Hey, how's it going today? It's going pretty good. So, like, I don't know, if you were talking about your work as like a game, you know, like a sports game, like a football game, basketball game, what would you say? Are you winning? Are you losing right now? And you stop and look at them and now, like, all of a sudden, many of them will have, like a panic look on their face and be like, I really have no idea, you know, if I'm winning or losing right now. Right. And so this is real basic things like, you know, visual management, you know, like, let's start kind of popping up. It's a natural, natural countermeasure to not knowing if you're winning or losing. Right. But. But again, we're always moving with a purpose. So, yeah, that's really. My best advice is really dive in. Have you done anything with Toyota Kata or scientific thinking?

I actually have. Not yet. It's just being so new in my journey. I've been really just trying to grasp and understand all the different tools and concepts within Lean. I actually do have the book Toyota Kata. It's on my reading list, but maybe I'll bump that more closer to the top of the list.

Yeah, no, I would say that. You know, I've been practicing lean for over 20 years, and when I finally opened my mind and my heart to it, you know, a few years ago, it changed. It fundamentally changed the way that I approach my work. You know, it changed really, not just my work, but just like my life, you know, because it, you know, it helps even with my. With my children and whatnot, you know, like, daughter stressed out about the act, you know. Okay, well, that's a challenge. Where are you now? Well, I took the pre ACT and I got xyz. Okay. You know, and then we start breaking that down, you know, and then it just. It just removes anxiety. Right. And you start taking things in chunks and. Yeah, it's a. I would. I would encourage you. The Toyota Kata book is good, the original one, the red book. But if Mike rather the author, were talking to you, and there's only one of the books that he's written that he would encourage you to read. It's the Toyota Kata action guide. I would encourage you to pick that one up if you're going to read just one of them. It's. That would be the one Mike would want you to read. I've heard him say it. So that's how I know. And he told me the same thing. So. Yeah, the Toyota Kata practice guide, our action guide, I always call it Practice Guide. Mr. Action Guide. I think that would be the best one to serve you and awesome.

Yeah, definitely do that.

Yeah. But I don't mean to discourage you about learning the tools because you know, we all, we all have to know the tools. Right. The tools are important, but tools in and of themselves aren't the, you know, they're not the answer. You got to know how to think, you got to know how to kind of navigate through the journey and then, then you bring out the tools when they're needed, as they're needed.

Sure. So I have a couple of more specific questions for you here. I'm not sure how much experience you might have. I'm sure you do from time to time in your career with the electronics industry.

I worked at Motorola, Nokia, built a lot of cell phones, man.

Awesome. Oh perfect.

Yeah.

Did you guys build the actual.

Oh yeah, man, I saw your email smt. I was a Fuji and guy and oh my gosh. Yeah, I built a lot. I did a lot of screen printing design of experiments and man could talk to you all day. Reflow oven profiles. Oh man, that's awesome.

Yeah. So it seems like so we build the board. So we build these industrial automation, industrial networking products and they all have all these boards inside of them and we manufacture the circuit boards. And it just seems like in service mount we always had the mindset or in the past we bought these machines that are the most expensive, the fastest, that can do things in the biggest batch size as possible with super long changeover times. And it's exactly opposite of where we want to go with maybe buying more machines that are not as expensive, that maybe are more flexible. But with your experience with surplus mount is what is the ideal state? You know, is it is a one piece flow or small batch size is something that's, that's achievable or is it require maybe new thinking on, on the equipment we purchase or. Yeah, where, where have you gone with that?

Well, I mean, I mean I can only speak for like kind of like how we approach things back in the day and it's been many, many years since I built cell phones. But you know, we had an assembly line, right. So we might have two sides of the, of the circuit board and you know, started with a, you know, screen flow machine, screen printing machine and you know, put the paste solder paste down and then it would go to two or three, you know, chip shooters or whatever it might be to, you know, put on the small parts and then maybe a larger pick and place type machine for some of the bigger parts and then it goes through a reflow oven. So you could argue that in a way that's kind of. It is, it is flow, you know, I mean, it is flowing, you know, and you know, we had goals, you know, 300 an hour or whatever it might be, but we were, we were making the same thing. Right. You know, for days on end. So in that way it was, it was easier. Right. Now we did have to balance and you know, obviously, as, you know, like, balancing the time of each machine is really important and optimizing how the machine picks and places and that's an art in and of itself. Right, sure. But, you know, where, where, where you can get in trouble is, you know, machines stop or run out of parts or whatever. Well then flow has stopped. Right? And, and now you're, you know, you're, you're no longer at your, your, your cadence, so that, you know, minimizing those stoppages when you're running kind of in a mass production mindset like that. So I, I don't know if that's your environment or not, but yeah, we.

Manufacture thousands of different types of boards, so there is a changeover aspect to it and it is very lengthy. And we just, like I said, we have these machines that make things fast in very large batches. So the mindset is how can we build the biggest batch possible, which might be fine with the way things are set up now, where everything's batch and queue and there's a large amount of inventory in between each process step. But if we wanted to move towards maybe this ideal state where we are building to a customer order and not to the sales forecast and a customer order comes in for 30 and we 30 go through our service mount and, and then those same 30 go through our PTH and the same 30 get assembled and cased into their final product and shipped out the door all in one flow without stopping, without batching and queuing in between. And with all the, with the just thousands of different products and boards that we built, that would be the challenge.

Yeah, well, and it's obviously really big question, but you know, you also, and this is where the leadership of your company comes in and decision making, like, do you really want to produce thousand different products or, you know what I mean? Or do you want to, do you want to build five products and you know, corner the market on those five Products, you know, which is more, which is more advantageous. Right. From, from a business perspective. But obviously that's a, that's a leadership and strategic question more than it is a tactical question.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So my last question is something that I've done already and struggle a little bit with, is maybe trying to get the one piece flow all the way, all the way through is boiling the ocean right now. But let's start with just our final assembly cells where we have our board and we have all the products or all the parts that need to go into the final assembly. How do we make that flow one piece at a time? And it's more like really a value stream mapping question and breaking it down. Because even within one of our final product assembly might make 1,000 different variations of final products. And when you have this just one final assembly cell that has hundreds of different products with slight variations and maybe slight variations in assembly steps as well. Like this one might get this and this one might get that, and most of them are about the same, but there's just slight variations here and there. And all of them obviously have different customer demands. And even products that are in the same product family, step for step follow the same thing, might have different cycle times based on how big it is. If you're making an HMI display, a small display might take a small 4 inch display might take 4 minutes to assemble, where a large display might take 15 minutes to assemble. So when you're trying to take this whole cell and transform it into a lean production cell with one piece flow and you have all these different variations, how do you map that out? How do you, how do you even get to the current state? Do you need to.

Yeah, it's, it's obviously a daunting challenge, especially with such a high mix, you know, but I think I would encourage you to start with one, you know, start with one product and don't overthink it. You know, start with one product that, you know, maybe it's a more common product that, you know, if there's something that you, you know, maybe you assemble more than, than other things, start with that one. And then like literally like just what are the steps to assembling this pot, this product? Write them out on a flip chart, you know, and time them a few times, you know, pull out your industrial engineering, you know, skills, you know, and just start understanding the manual cycle time, if there's any automatic cycle time. Just start to really understand the steps and how much time they take. And then, you know, obviously we would like to be able to calculate like attack time, you know, based on, on the demand of whatever product that you're faced with and how much time we have available. If we, if we know those two things, then we can calculate attack time, right? And then if we know that, let's say, oh, that product there takes on average four minutes to assemble. Well, there we know our cycle time, right? So if you know your attack time and you know your manual cycle time, from there you can create, calculate your crew size. Well, today we need two people. And if we have two people, here's a little playbook we used to call them, mixed model Playbooks, you know, and it's a matrix, you know, and it's standard work, right? It's like, here's the steps for assembling this particular widget. And if you have two people, person one does this and person two does this. If the demand is such, that requires a crew size of four people. Now here's how that work is broken up, right? So, but it all begins with, you know, just beginning to understand, you know, what's it take to, to a, you know, in a, in a perfect world to assemble this particular product and you can't get intimidated by the fact that you got thousands of them deal with it. You know, eventually, you know, you can, you can, you can figure out maybe there's, there's similarities. You know, I know we got a thousand of them, but when we really look at it, maybe there's 20 different main types of things that we do, right? And then you can start to kind of categorize and you can still fine tune them and you know, accordingly, because they are going to have some differences, I'm sure. But you know, there's a lot of high mix producers out there who still practice Lean, right? And so you can too. But I would encourage you to start with one, you know, and just see what you can learn, right? Once you read the Toyota Kata practice or action guide, then you'll, you'll be able to figure out, you know, let's start running some experiments and see what we learn, right? And because that's what, that's what true Lean is. It's just learning journey. And the better you get at learning and not being afraid of, of technically I only want to use the word failing, but like something, experiment didn't work out like you thought it would, right? Great. We learned, you know, even if something does work out like you thought it would, great. You learn, you confirm what you thought. So that's what it's all about, right? It's about kind of setting a setting, setting our eyes on something. We often make predictions, you know, like, what's your next step, Tyler? I'm going to do this. What do you think is going to happen? This. Come back. Hey, Tyler, what was your last step? This. What did you think was going to happen? This. What actually happened? This. What did you learn? You know, that's that cycle, right? That's, that's this routine, this dance that we want to constantly get in, whether it's one piece flow or setting up the chip shooter or the reflow oven, you know. You know, you would experiment with a different profile. What do you think is going to happen? This. What actually happened? This. What did you learn? You know, so you'll find yourself. It's the same questions you just kind of repeat ad nauseam, but it's constant learning.

So would you potentially just even set up a separate future state value stream within that one final assembly cell and then just start with that and then let that run separately whenever that product comes in and then try to incorporate other products into it as time goes on?

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of what you're describing sounds similar to what we would call like a, like a, like a model cell, you know. You know, this is very typical. You know, you build a temporary area over where you're experimenting, right. And you're, you're trying things out. And it can be rough and dirty, it could be pieces of plywood, you know, kind of propped up on saw horses. And we're just trying to figure, figure things out, you know, whether the cell flows counterclockwise, all this kind of fancy stuff. It, you know, these are, these are lean, technical things that we can get into at that point.

Right.

But, yeah, I mean, but, but you know, running experiments, you know, and see what you can learn. Don't. And like you said, don't try to be perfect earlier on the episode. Right. Don't, don't. Don't let perfect get in the way of better, you know, and yeah, just, just iterate and experiment and learn. That's my. The best advice I can give you.

Sure. No, that's good advice. Thanks, Ron.

Yeah. Awesome. All right. Well, gosh, We've talked for 40 minutes. That was fun.

Wow. Wow, 40 minutes already, huh?

Yeah. Yeah. So last question I have for you. You know, obviously you're. You're think it's safe to say a little bit younger than many of the guests that I have on, so kind of in the. Would you consider yourself a millennial?

I guess yeah, I'm 25, so definitely in the millennial. In the millennial area.

So what do you think of this whole lead movement, like, within, you know, your demographic there of folks, you know, around your age? Is there other folks interested in this type of thing or what? What do you think?

That's a great question. As far as, you know, other folks, I haven't. I haven't met too many people in my age group that are, you know, that I can necessarily. My peers in lean, I'm sure they're out there, but I'd like to think of that. My age group would certainly embrace this kind of journey, and I think we're definitely open to change. So, yeah, I think with my generation, I think there's good things to come with leaning. Continuous improvement, for sure.

Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, hey, man, it's been fun chatting with you. Last piece of advice I would give you is to get. Definitely get out to some conferences, you know, over the next few years, if you can. Ame is a big. The big monster. But, like, Katakan is a. Is a great one. And, you know, we talk about them quite a bit here on the podcast. But the more you can get out and network and meet other practitioners and just connect with folks, you know, LinkedIn and I don't know if there's any Snapchat, you know, lean things for you. I don't know that kind of stuff, but LinkedIn is where we all live. You know, there's some Twitter people out there too, you know, but in fact, Mike Rollers on Twitter now.

Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. I try to have connected with a few people who are on the show just to start making some connections with those who are fellow lean thinkers.

That's great. Well, so if you're a millennial and you're listening, you need to reach out to Tyler and let him know he's not alone.

Absolutely.

All right. Hey, what's the best way, speaking of reaching out to you, for folks to connect with you, Tyler?

Yeah, probably LinkedIn would be the best way to connect with me.

And spell your. Your full name and last name.

First name is Tyler. T Y L E R. Last name is Athy A T H E Y.

Okay, cool. And we'll put in the. The show notes. This will be episode 262. So GembaPodcast.com look for 262 and we'll link to Tyler. Are you on Snapchat? Tell the truth, man.

I am on Snapchat.

I do it, I do it, I do it. I can't figure it out, man. My kids are on it, and I'm like, what is that? Like, what do you do with that? It's all good. All right, man. Well, hey, have a great day. Thanks for coming on. And keep learning, man. Keep learning. Okay.

Thanks for having me, Ron.

All right, take care.

You, too. Bye.

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