GA 405 | Elevating Constraints with Max Krug and Pavel Kuviarzin

So when we work with companies, you know, we set rules. And so we only have one rule. If you talk to any of our customers and ask them what's the one rule? The one rule is we follow the rules. Period.

Today I'm excited to welcome Max Krug and Pavel Kuvierzen to the show. Now, Max and Pavel are with an organization called Future State Engineering. And today, today on the show, we dive pretty deep into the harmony between what is traditionally called theory of constraints and Lean and just how to. How to make a process better by elevating constraints. That's really probably what we spend the most time on. And it was a really, really fun conversation we dove into. Actually we're working through here at Gemba Academy. Our own processes of making videos and podcasts and, you know, we have our own process, we have our own manufacturing process, if you will, we're manufacturing videos. And so we're knee deep into many of the things that we talk about today. So I was even pinging the guys and asking them questions on this is what we're doing. What do you think? And so we had a really fun conversation going back and forth, very lively. And Max and Pavel really, really know their stuff. And what I appreciated about them, and I mentioned this towards the end of the podcast, is sometimes when you get a certain group of folks on who might be passionate about one type of continuous improvement, whether it's TOC or Lean or Sigma or something like that, they kind of get a little entrenched in their little camp. And anybody that's outside of their camp, they don't really like well. And as you'll hear, Pavel and Max definitely passionate about toc, but, but they're also passionate really about making things better and using whatever tool is needed. And that's what I think I like about these guys the best. So really, really good episode. I want you to listen to all this one because it's. There's lots to learn no matter what kind of industry you're in. Okay, so show notes for this one are going to be over@gembapodcast.com, look for episode 4. 05. Also, if you are liking the show, please go give us a five star review. On if you're listening to the Apple podcast, just scroll down. You got to scroll down a little bit. It's sort of weird how it works, but then you'll see the little reviews thing at the bottom. Or if you're on Stitcher or Spotify, whatever it is, give us five stars and leave a little comment. I Read them. And they really do help this show grow. The more stars it gets, the higher it goes in the search ranking. And we don't monetize this podcast. What we're trying to do is reach as many people with this whole idea of making things better. Right. That's really what we're all about. So appreciate that. Enough from me. Let's get to the show. Pavel and Max, welcome to the show. How are you guys?

Great. Ron, thanks for having us on the show. It's a great opportunity for us to speak about what we do and show our expertise and appreciate the opportunity.

Yeah, for sure.

Hi, Ron. Thanks for having me on the show. And Max.

Yeah, yeah. Well, so let's talk. Where are you guys calling in from? Obviously you guys aren't in the same place. So Pavel, where are you calling in from?

So I'm actually right now it's one of our clients in Pennsylvania.

Okay. And I'm calling in from my home office. I'm just south of Buffalo, New York and Jamestown.

Got it, got it. All right, well, good stuff, man. I appreciate you guys coming on. So I know you guys have listened to the show a little bit and you know, we do like to begin with our guest sharing a quote. So do you guys have one that you want to share?

Yeah, I have one. So I've been doing a lot of work lately with creating the right mindset with companies. So I like Henry Ford's quote, whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.

Oh yeah, that's a classic. I use that one with my kids all the time. So good. So good. All right, well, hey, let's maybe talk a little bit about you guys background. So Max, do you want to go first, tell us a little bit about how you got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff and then a little bit about what you guys are up to these days.

Okay. So my education's in industrial engineering. So I started out as an industrial engineer back in the 80s when just in Time was real popular. So I really got introduced to it Then I was with a small company that was growing like crazy. So we went from 25 million to 225 million in 10 years. So I really started to apply a lot of the just in Time concepts. Then I went to work for MEP center as a project engineer and I got trained in lean theory constraints, total quality management, and then I really started to blend those three together to really help companies improve their performance significantly. Went off on my own in 2005. I struggled a little bit doing implementations and then rebranded ourselves two years ago as Future State Engineering. We really focused on putting a methodology together to get breakthrough performance with companies.

Got it, Got it. All right, Pavel, what about you?

Yes, so all my career I've been in operations. I started working as a supervisor in distribution center and quickly I went up the ranks. I've been holding different positions as operations manager, continuous improvement manager and helped the company to achieve significant results. Like Max said, this company also was growing really fast and from 50 million, it grew to over 500 million within about 10 years. My education comes, so I have the business management education. I also have a certification of project manager from PMI as well as certified in inventory and production manager management from Apex. It's one of the largest supply chain organizations in the world. I also worked with manufacturers, help them to improve their performance and inventory turns. And so I was always working in applying continuous improvement methods and things like Lean and all five S's in areas. But then I met with Max and I started to really understand all the concepts of TOC and everything kind of start clicking together. Like all my experience and how when I'm applying TOC at the right time, how can we can use the right tools at the right time and how it can really achieve significant improvements in different companies. So I really see TOC as it has all the methodologies within TOC framework. The trick is to be able to use the right tool at the right time and when you really apply TOC correctly, that's what helps you to do it. So I've been working with Max for the past two years and we were helping companies, mostly manufacturers, improve their performance significantly.

Nice, Nice. Okay, so TOC stands for Theory of Constraints. If folks aren't familiar with it. But I think most of the our audience is primarily, you know, lean thinking practitioners. So many of us are familiar. We've all grown up. I think Reading the Goal was probably one of the first books everybody reads. You know, when you first get introduced to continues Improvement and Alex Rogo. Right. And what are you doing Alex, with your wife, man? You know, my wife actually read the book. She loved it. You know, it's a great book.

So.

So Max, you want to tell him the joke about one of. Ellie Goldridge is the like the, the founder of the ttoc and remember the joke you told me about in one of his sessions when one guy said the book is not right, you are wrong. And then everybody's asking like, what do you mean? What do you mean I'm wrong? Yes. What the concepts didn't work for you? He said, no, the concept worked, I improved the company, everything worked. But she didn't come back.

Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. Well, let's talk a little bit about theory of constraints and talk.

Just.

Maybe. Just how would you guys describe toc?

Yeah, so I would describe it as a business management philosophy that really looks at a system view of the organization. It's really about system thinking. And with any system, there's very few limiting factors that control the system. So if we can find those limiting factors and we can apply a little bit of effort to improve those areas, we can get big performance gains for the company. So it's looking for where are the leverage points? And if we can find those leverage points and improve them, we can improve the whole system performance. That's sort of the basis of theory constraints.

Yeah.

I just wanted to also say one word that you can describe to series is focus is the ability to focus your attention in what needs to be done. So focusing is very important at many times, especially management. It's hard to focus when you have so much stuff going on. And if you ask anybody in organization what we should improve, usually they're going to bring you the ideas that going to improve specifically their area of responsibility. But then many times we find that people are not really thinking of how it's going to improve the entire system or the entire company. So you can call an organization as a system, system created of different processes. So a process can be a department. So that's one. If you improve this one process, it's not necessarily going to improve the system. Now, TOC is helping you to focus in the right place at the right times that you need to improve so that you're going to improve the system.

Right? Yeah. I mean, I think one of the beautiful examples in the, in the goal is of the young boy, you know, Herbie, right. You know, and he's carrying this heavy backpack and he's the, he's the constraint, right. He's the bottleneck. If you of, of the, of the boys marching in the. Was it Boy Scouts or whatever, right. They're. They're hiking and. And so we need to elevate this constraint. Right. So you take the stuff out of the backpack and distribute it and so forth and, and then eventually put him at the front so he kind of sets the pace and keeps everybody together. How would you, how would you talk about that, that sort of a situation in a, in a business context? Maybe? Do you have like an example of, of, of how you've Used TOC to so identify constraints and then elevate them and improve the whole system.

Yep. So you're exactly right about Herbie. And the whole goal is to get flow and get everybody flowing at the pace of the weakest link or the bottleneck or the capacity constraint, resource, whatever you want to call it. And if we have people operating at a pace faster than that, then they're just doing overproduction and creating inventory and waste. So what we want to do is understand from the system perspective where is the flow disruptions and then if we can isolate that, then we can have everybody work to that pace. When we go into companies, we actually use value stream mapping as a technique to get the information flow and the product flow from a high level. We're not putting a lot of detail on the map, we're getting a high level map of the flow and then we make assumptions about what we see. So if there's a lot of width on the floor, one thing that we know is probably the first operation in each value stream is not a constraint. If it was, there wouldn't be WIP buildup on the floor.

Yeah.

So we know based on the inventory profile that we can eliminate the first step is the constraint or the bottleneck. And then we start looking downstream. And a lot of times we see there's policies in place that prevent companies from really seeing where their true bottlenecks are. So I have tons of stories about where they had perceived bottlenecks and when we went in and looked at it, there was things that they were doing that was causing disruptions in the flow. And when I asked, why are you doing that? It's like, well, we've been doing it that way for 50 years. Yeah. So a lot of times these policies and these old habits are causing what we call artificial bottlenecks. And when we change the policy or change the habits, it's no longer a bottleneck.

Yeah. You know, it's so interesting also I know Pavel, you, you, you have a, you mentioned, I think, some project management training and experience and, and you know, I, I, it's funny, as we record this, we're here at Gemba Academy, we're constantly working on improving our own processes. Right. As far as making videos and new courses and how long does it take and how can we streamline that process and we leverage multiple tools to accomplish that. We're really big into agile Kanban boards, but we've more recently really kind of gone back to the basics, I would say basics of say, project management and, and put everything into, well, we mapped it with a value stream map, but then we also then put it into a. And into a Gantt chart where we, you know, identifying your critical path and, and figuring out, you know, how things are flowing. So I'm wondering, have you guys experimented with, with things like, you know, traditional Gantt charts coupled with value stream maps coupled with other tools? What have you done anything like that?

Yeah, so we've actually done two projects with construction companies, which is really interesting because when you go talk with them, they're like, well, we're different. Lean theory constraints doesn't apply to us. And so having that mindset that it doesn't apply to them, but when we start introducing some of the concepts and tools, we actually value stream map their process. And then we took and started putting some of their projects into a simple Gantt chart and train them about. We use critical chain, which is pretty much the same thing as critical path, but you're looking at resource contention, not just task dependencies. And then they start to see, oh, we're not so different. So we've had some great gains. And just simple philosophies that we use with the construction companies that, because we don't like to call it lean or theory constraints, because people get turned off by that sometimes. And it's about flow of the project. So when we start talking flow of the projects with them, it starts to make sense. And so we have a concept that's really big that we use is called full kit. And so full kit means we have everything in order to complete the task. So we don't start the task until we have everything to complete it. So it's not about starting as soon as possible, it's about finishing on time. So just putting the full kit concept in place, they get huge benefit from that. Yes.

And also. So this is the same company we work with, the construction company. Another example would be, is, so they had a huge issue. We have a process, we call it a design sprint. That's when we start kind of getting all their negative effects and understanding. So the first step of the process is to get the interviews and the feedback from the people. So the subcontractors on the job site are saying yes. So they're bringing all the material that we don't need yet. They're bringing all the concrete, the asphalt, the steel, the wood. They're bringing all the material at the very beginning of the job. And now I'm spending most of my time rearranging all the material just to start the job. And the idea was why do we need to bring all the material in the beginning? And then you said, oh, just to make sure we're going to have the material. So what we did, like Mike said, we start bringing the material at the right time when they need it.

Yeah, like, okay, coming back to Gemba Academy, I can't help but think about our own process this season, what we're learning. And so in our value stream, if you will, we have some, you know, like here's how a course is created at Gemba Academy. So we have this idea for some new topic, let's call it ABC is the topic of the course. And oh, we imagine there's going to be 10 videos. And so what happens is we write the scripts and then once that's happening, then we do something called storyboarding where we say, here's what we think the video might look like. And then graphics are created and all the rest of it in the end we have like our final assembly, if you will, would be one of our editors who's going to take the video that we shoot and then all the graphics that are created and all the other images that we're going to use and then they sort of assemble it all together at the end and on obvious for us, the constraint, the bottleneck, if you will, is indeed that final, that final step. And so what we've learned, like you guys are mentioning with your kits, is that if the final editor has everything they need, their kit, they can really accelerate through. But what happens so often, even for us, and we've been at this for a while, they'll get in there and we'll realize something's not quite right. And then, oh boy, you know. And then in Agile we have a so called blocker, you know, on the, on the Kanban car, right. Because they had to go back and maybe rework as a, you know, in a lean terms or something. So it's, it's very interesting how these concepts apply no matter if you're in construction, you're manufacturing or you're making videos, right? Yeah, these things are universal.

So, so interesting to a point of that. So when we work with companies, you know, we set rules and so our, we only have one rule. If you talk to any of our customers and ask them what's the one rule? The one rule is we follow the rules, period. So I work with one company, we put the full kit process in place. They're a manufacturer and so they're constantly get a job started and then missing something. So we said, okay, full kit is we have the material available, the prints are correct. All the programs are written for the CNC machines. The tooling's there. Everything's there ready to go. And we don't release it unless we have full kit. So the rule is, don't start the job unless you have full kit. So, of course, the first job we go to release, after we put the rule in place, they're missing the programs. They're like, well, what do we do? I said, what's our rule? We don't release unless we have full kit. Do we have full kit? No, we're not releasing it. And people start freaking out. What's the CNC department going to do? So I don't know. We'll find something for them to do. They can do some preventive maintenance or some organization, but then they come back, say, well, you don't understand. The CNC program's not needed to the fourth or fifth operation. So by the time the job gets there, the program will be done. I said, yeah, but I've seen too many cases where we start it and then the guy that's programming gets delayed, and then he's under the gun, and then when he goes to program, he looks at the print, says, oh, I'm missing dimensions. I can't program this. I don't have the dimensions. So now we got to call the customer to get the dimensions, and three weeks later, the customer gets back to us, and now what do we do with that job? Yeah, it's just clogging up all the other jobs.

Yeah.

So that discipline of following the rules is extremely difficult.

Well, and I think what's even harder probably, is coming up with the rules, like, what are the rules? And then getting everybody to agree, hey, this is the ideal state. This is how it should run. Right. You know, and then. And then don't deviate from that. It's.

It's.

It's very difficult. Yeah.

Yes.

And the big thing, we also see that kind of. When they see a resource standing idle, management starts freaking out. Oh, this is not being efficient. So it kind of brings me to another. Another quote, because you said a quote in the beginning. So from Eli Goldrad, He. He said something like striving. Striving to ensure that no resource be idle is the biggest generator of waste, which is a big paradigm change. Big paradigm shift for a lot of companies where we're saying that we don't care if some resources are standing idle. What's important is that the constraint is not idle.

Right.

And that's what's happening when you have everybody's busy and not being productive and just producing stuff. That's when you. Creating a lot of work in process inventory on the floor.

That's right.

And that's what exactly. That's what exactly we see with a lot of companies when it comes there is mountains and mountains of inventory. But we, when we start implementation, when we're starting to get the buy in, because we have a special buying process, how to change the culture. Because that's the biggest thing that usually that's the biggest change. The hardest thing to change is the culture.

Yeah.

But once we get there, that's when we explains and the methodology we're going to use and you'll see how the working process just goes down right away because all we focusing is to produce the stuff that we need to produce at the rate of the demand so that we're producing to the customer needs and we're not just producing parts just to have mountains of inventory.

Right now the one thing that I'm curious to get your guys take on, so I'm getting like free consulting from you guys here on Gemba Academy's processes on our podcast. So like the way that we operate is, you know, our constraint again is our final editing stations, if you will. There's multiple people who do it. But, but that's that if one of our final editors is. Doesn't have work to do, that's devastating for us. Right. I mean like that's for sure the constraint. So but for in order for that we do have, we maybe some, what we would call in lean terms, some standard whip, you know, right before that station. So a bit of a buffer, right. A little bit of a cushion, not much, but a little bit. Right. So they are never without work. Okay. Now so, but for that to happen, we do have to begin, let's say course the new course. You know, the script writers got to get going, you know, because the talent is going to come in to shoot the video a week later or something like that. Right. And so, so for us we have one assembly line, if you will. And for us to make sure that it never, the constraint is never left without work, we do have to sort of begin before let's say the, the, the full kit is created. Do you know what I'm saying? Like what do you think about that situation?

Yeah, so the way we look at it is. You're exactly right. So the final editing is the constraint. We want to make sure that we have all the full kit ready to go for that editor. And of course not Too much and not too little. So there's a right amount of width that you want to have there. And again, we do the same thing, standard width. And then the upstream resources need to be monitored on how well they're keeping that standard width at a constant level. So if it get. If it starts to drain. So we're monitoring that work in process in front of that resource. If that starts to drain, we got to start expediting upstream to get the work flowing. If we don't, we're going to starve that resource. So we have a. What was called buffer management, where we're monitoring the upstream resources to see how well they're supporting the constraint. And if there's delays, we got to take immediate action to overcome those delays so it doesn't disrupt the flow at the constraint. Yeah, so it's the monitoring of the resources upstream to the. What we call the buffer or buffer can be multiple things time. It can be inventory. It could be extra capacity. We're monitoring that to make sure that we get consistent flow.

Now, in TOC terms, we're gonna. We hear a lot about drum buffer rope. So I think this is maybe all playing together. Do you guys. Are you guys practic this drum buffer rope concept with your clients? If so, talk about it.

That's the primary tool that we use. So when we start implementation, that's usually the first thing that we implement to get flow going. So the drum is the pace, it's the rate that we want it. So it's almost like tact. It's the rate that we want to produce at. And a lot of companies don't know where their constraint is. So we usually choose shipping the customer order, the demand rate as the drum. So we start, okay, here's where our demand rate is. That's our drum. And then for each order, we calculate the lead time, what we call the reliable lead time for that order to flow through the operation from start to finish. And we have. I call it the 15% rule. So what we do is we take the touch time of the job and we divide by 15%, and that gives us the lead time. So I learned that by doing projects with Dr. Goldratt, what his rules were. And then I did some calculations every time I did a project. And so what I came up with, this 15% rule is good enough to get stability and to create flow, and that cause disruptions and delays. So what we do is we say, okay, shipping's the pay setter. Every order. Let's calculate what the reliable lead time is. Using the 15% rule. And that's our release how many days. We're going to allow that to flow through production. We call it the reliable production lead time. And then back off from the shipping date, the reliable production lead time that gives us the release date. So the buffer is that time, reliable production lead time for that order to flow through the system, given all the problems that they still have. Because we know people aren't going to show up, we know machines are going to break down. We know we're going to have quality issues. We know vendors are going to deliver late. That 15% is enough buffer to absorb that variability. Then the rope is don't release jobs early. So that's hard. That's one of the rules that's very difficult to. So don't release jobs before the release date. So the first operation doesn't have anything to do. What they want to do is they want to pull orders in and keep that resource busy. No, we wait until the release date to release that job. Now we can get standard wip. So that creates standard WIP in the system. And then we put the buffer management in place to monitor the disruptions and are the jobs that are most in danger get highest priority. So we use that buffer. It's a simple color code system to give everyone indicator of what jobs should be worked on in their department, first, second, third, and so forth.

Got it. Very good. Very good. I wonder if I want to kind of change gears. We've been all about flow and constraints and all the rest of it. But, you know, obviously when we're going in and we're working on to improve a system, you know, in the end it comes down to being able to not just identify constraints, but identify, you know, and root causes to just problems in general. Right. Whether it's a machine breaking down or defects or something like that. So talk a little bit about how you guys go about root cause analysis, trying to identify the root cause of a problem.

Okay. So when we talked about, you know, the rules and following the rules, so what I learned from Dr. Deming was he said, do a process consistently, even if it's wrong. And so I follow that philosophy because I want people to follow the rules. And then if there's a disruption, a special cause of variation, we can assign the reason. So if they follow the rules and we don't like the example I gave. Oh, we don't release a job because the program isn't done. Well, let's. Let's take that and parade. Take that. Reasons why we couldn't release or why we couldn't follow the rule and let's Pareto that. So then we take that Pareto analysis and we say, okay, here's the number one reason that was causing us to miss the release of. And we didn't have full kit. So we take that, we use that as a tool to start doing root cause analysis. And so we find that companies are not very good at problem solving. That's probably the number one thing I see that companies aren't good at. So we take that data, we define what is the problem, we get the team together, we start going through. We usually use like a cause and effect diagram to understand all the reasons why that problem is there. And then we use five why analysis to get to the root cause.

Yeah.

And it's five why is probably the most difficult tool I've ever used. Yeah. Simple in concept, but until you try to apply it, it's extremely difficult. If you don't get started off in the right direction, you'll get so far off on a tangent, you won't even be close to solving the problem.

Yeah, you're so right. I mean, you know, 5Y is one of those deals where you can have two different teams and say, and send them into different rooms with the same problem and their, their, their, their five why analysis might be radically different. But I guess my, my, my take on that is that even when we're doing five why, we're still guessing. Right. We don't know. Right. And so if anything, it's setting up an experiment to go run. Right. And that's. So we're really passionate about scientific thinking and toyota kata and whatnot, whatever you want to call it. But experiment your way forward because nobody really knows, you know, a fishbone or whatever it is. It's still opinions being drawn up on a, on a board. Right. So, yeah, being able to go out and drive your experimentation so we can learn. Right. That's, that's, that's what I feel like the true power is in these tools.

Yes. And we do a lot with what we call predicted effect. So we have assumptions about, like you're saying we really don't know their guesses. We have assumptions about what we think the problem is and then say, okay, if this is our assumptions, what's our conclusion? Yeah, well, this and this and this are happening and this needs to be the effect. Okay, so let's go out and make assumptions and change some things and say, okay, this is the predicted effect we expect to see. We do the changes. Did we get that predicted effect if no one of our assumptions was incorrect.

That's right, that's right. That's right. You know what I appreciate about your approach, Pavel and Max, is that, I mean, sometimes you'll get. One of the things that drives me nuts about our continuous improvement movement is all the camps. You'll have your hardcore lean camp, you know, and I suppose I probably live mostly in that camp myself. However, you know, there's a Six Sigma camp, you know, these folks over here that are really into traditional dmaic Six Sigma. Then, then you'll have the TOC camp over here. Maybe you have a project management camp over here. And sometimes we get into our little camps and we want to say, hey, Dr. Goldratt said this and that's all that matters, you know, or hey, John Shook said this. I remember reading a, there was an article, article. John Shook and some TOC guy were like fighting about who was right and I'm like, oh my gosh, guys, stop. Like how about we just learn everything we can about how to make the world a better place and then apply it, you know?

Yes. So I call it common sense. But that's so common. So you know, let's look at the situation, let's understand the situation. Let's apply the right thinking and the right tools to solve the problem. So I'm not a lean purist, I'm not a TOC purist, I'm not a Six Sigma purist. It's like all these concepts are great, but if you misapply them, you're not going to get the results.

Yeah, that's exactly right. It's about using the right tool at the right time.

Yeah.

Yes. And it's like the quote from Ono that I like, he said it takes great effort to follow the rules of a pull system. Thus a half hearted introduction of a pull system brings hundreds of harms and not a single gain. So his point is if you, if you don't follow the rules and you misapply it, you're not going to get the results. And I see so many of these, you know, experts and you know, purists misapplying. They're supposed to be the experts, but they misapply the concepts.

Yeah, yeah. Well, there's so much pride also. I mean, you know, the pride before the fall.

Right.

And you know, just some, some, some people out there who are proud of their background or whatever it might be. And that's fine to be proud of your background and what you've done, but then using that as their LinkedIn like profile and they want to make sure you know about their background. You know, I'm like, what's, what are you, what's missing in your heart, man, that you got to be like that, you know, so. Yeah.

But anyhow, we just did a design Sprint with a company that's a part of a big corporation. So they're one of 53 plants across the world. And so the solution, so the design Sprint actually looks at their current situation. We value stream map, we understand what their issues are. We come up with a game plan. It's really part of the first step of the plan, do check, act process of how we're going to transition the company.

Yeah.

And so my fear is that corporate's going to take that and say, oh, we're just going to cookie cutter that and all the other plants. No, you can't do that because every plant situation is different. So it's not a cookie cutter solution. And I think a lot of times these purists are like, oh, it's a cookie cutter solution. You just do it in this sequence. No, it's not.

Yeah.

And that's exactly the mistakes I made before because something worked in the plant in a different, I think it was even a different country, not just a different state. And some machine they got it was for mass production and they put it in their plant because the top management said it's a cookie cutter. This machine works in the, in that country and that's in that plant in that environment. But it's an environment for mass production. There were this plant in this different country was only producing like a handful of different items. When these guys are more of a boutique shop and they have numerous different items.

Yeah, they have 7,500 different SKUs that are different configurations. So it's a job shop environment.

Yeah.

So they invested millions in this machine and now they're suffering for it for how many years? Because now the processes much takes much longer because they have to readjust it for every different specification. And through our design Sprint, all the people on the floor, the manufacturers, engineers are complaining about it. But that's exactly it. When you do a cookie cutter solution and you think it's going to apply for different environments, that's not true.

Yeah.

So I'm going to go ahead and make the ask now. I want to have you guys back on in a future episode because there's a few topics that I wanted to get to, but we're just not going to have time. So we're going to do a part two down the road, if you guys are available, I want to talk down maybe a teaser for the next episode where I have you guys back on. I want to hear your take on things like visual management and then perhaps how to we, how do we, how do the gains that we achieve, how do we keep them from backsliding? I'd love to hear your take on that. But, but, but for the sake of time, let's wrap this one up for now and we'll, we'll promise to bring you back on if you guys are open to it. But how can folks connect with, with you guys with your company and then with you guys individually?

Yeah, so our company website is future stateengineering.com and Pawel and I are both on LinkedIn. So Max, Krug and Pavel, you can say your name. I can't pronounce it correctly.

Yeah, that's Pavel Kuviarzin. But it's pretty easy to find us over on LinkedIn.

Yeah, and I post regularly on LinkedIn so I do three posts a week. So I do a video on Monday on a different concept. I do a quote of my own on Wednesday and then we do a famous quote on Friday.

Nice.

Cool.

All right, well so we'll put all the links in the show notes. So GembaPodcast.com this is episode 405. So GembaPodcast.Com episode 405 and or you just scroll down on your little app there and you'll see all the links in there. But, but yeah, Pavel and Max, thanks for coming on. This has been been really fun and, and, and I appreciate the free consulting that you guys offered me. Or you're going to send me an invoice, right? Like that, right?

Information's free, right?

No, it was good. I really enjoyed it. All right, well hey, thanks guys and let's do it again sometime soon, okay?

Absolutely.

Great.

All right, thank you Ron. Take care. Thanks for listening. Whether you've been on the continuous improvement journey for many years or perhaps you're just getting started, Gemba Academy is here to support you. And while we're best known for our more than 15 lean and six Sigma teaching and virtual tour videos, we also have a team of experienced Lean and Six Sigma practitioners available for one on one coaching as well as a variety of Lean and Six Sigma certification options. To learn more and to schedule a demo, head on over to gembaacademy.com.