Incremental: The Continuous Improvement Podcast

Discover how to enhance production in small teams by applying the Theory of Constraints. Explore the importance of production leveling and managing labor as a constraint. The hosts delve into cross-training to cover workstations effectively and highlight the pitfalls of local improvements that can become obsolete. Learn about Shigeo Shingo's block production method to optimize workflows and how improving product development can significantly boost capacity and efficiency. Tune in for insights that could transform your shop's operations!

Please follow us on Instagram and share your improvements and tag us.www.instagram.com/incrementalci In this podcast we discuss concepts from Lean Manufacturing, the Toyota Production System, and general business management to improve our businesses. Thanks for listening! Please drop us a note with any and all feedback! If you have parts you need machined, reach out to Devin@lichenprecision.com and follow on Instagram www.instagram.com/lichen_mfg If you need CNCed Buckles, check out www.austeremfg.com and follow at on Instagram www.instagram.com/austere_manufacturing

Discover the nuances of push, pull, and flow manufacturing, key elements of the Toyota Production System. Learn why overproduction can be wasteful and the financial impacts of excess inventory. Explore innovative tool management strategies using Kanban for timely replenishment. Uriel and Devin share lessons on improving internal communication and workplace safety, emphasizing the importance of respect for employees. Plus, insights on minimizing batch sizes and optimizing shop processes for continuous improvement are revealed.

This week Devin and Uriel discuss some improvements from around the shop with some discussion of what issues came up that led to the improvements as well as some of the thinking behind the improvements implemented.    Please follow us on Instagram and share your improvements and tag us.www.instagram.com/incrementalci    In this podcast we discuss concepts from Lean Manufacturing, the Toyota Production System, and general business management to improve our businesses.   Thanks for listening! Please drop us a note with any and all feedback!   If you have parts you need machined, reach out to Devin@lichenprecision.com and follow on Instagram www.instagram.com/lichen_mfg    If you need CNCed Buckles, check out www.austeremfg.com and follow at on Instagram www.instagram.com/austere_manufacturing

Please follow us on Instagram and share your improvements and tag us. www.instagram.com/incrementalci  This week Devin and Uriel have a wide ranging discussion about a range of topics that relate to lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System, and continuous improvement. Some of the topics include:  - Balancing equipment utilization vs operator utilization vs overall shop throughput.  - Profit sharing and exploring other ways of putting money where your mouth is to share success with employees.  - How to think about revenue goals. Is it based on equipment, or is it better to think about employees as a profit center that gets multiplied based on the equipment or process they're utilizing.  - Information flow in a company as it relates to production leveling and scheduling.  - Safety stock and how to evaluate if it's needed. Fixing problems / making improvements vs actually getting work done. How do we keep work moving while still capturing issues to be resolved later.  - Part orientation as they move through production. We spend a lot of time orienting parts.  - Prototyping aimed at learning.  Thanks for listening! Please drop us a note with any and all feedback!  If you have parts you need machined, reach out to Devin@lichenprecision.com and follow on Instagram www.instagram.com/ lichen_mfg  If you need CNC'ed Buckles, check out www.austeremfg.com and follow at on Instagram www.instagram.com/austere_manufacturing]

This week we talk about:   - Listener question - we discuss how we've been improving the podcast process inline with Lean concepts  - Single loop vs Double loop learning and building a learning organization  - How to think through standardizing setups and workholding to account for a wide variety of work scenarios.  - An update on approaching an assembly station redesign and shifting the focus from designing the station to designing experiments for quick and cheap learning.  - Devin and Uriel then go over some of their improvements from the past week.

This week Devin and Uriel talk through some listener questions, talk production leveling, how to prioritize tasks, and what happens when linked processes fail. Standardized tooling and redundant tooling can be an essential part of gaining efficiency. It is interesting to think about what can be standardized but also how to standardize deviation from standard... Is that possible? Kanban can be a very useful tool for making sure that tools stay in stock. As buffers get reduced, downtime becomes more immediately problematic so it needs to be addressed.   What's the best way to get started in lean and what are some favorite cheap and quick improvements.   Developing in house vs buying off the shelf or hiring out custom machines. Toyota talks about building in house costing 1/3-1/5 the cost of buying. What are they talking about?   Figuring out what to do next minute by minute in the shop is very tricky. It is hard to build systems that surface what should be done in what order but if we just write out a schedule ahead of time, than it will be rigid and will not respond to fluctuations in the market.   What happens when things fail in a system of linked processes with minimal buffers, it becomes immediately apparent that there was a problem. Adding inventory buffers between processes can alleviates this issue, but bakes in a lot of waste.    Devin and Uriel discuss some improvements that they made during the week with some interesting conversations around what issues were noticed that led to the improvements.

Delve into the intriguing world of production leveling, where uneven demand leads to waste. Discover the 'Three M's' of the Toyota Production System: muda, mura, and muri, and learn practical strategies like staggered schedules and pricing adjustments to manage demand. Hear about Toyota's approach, including inventory management and the balance between equipment and human constraints. Gain insights on optimizing processes through effective communication, checklists, and SOPs while tackling bottlenecks and improving efficiency in small businesses.

This week we cover: Rationalizing production, TPS Engineering, Cognitive load research, Single piece flow. Our weekly improvements,  and a discussion of developing software vs buying off the shelf.   Continuous improvement is not unique to lean. It is something we all do, but lean and TPS do bring a systemized and scientific approach to improvements that is very helpful. TPS is not about reducing waste. It is about solving your problems in a rational and scientific manner. So what is meant by rationalizing your production? Don't seek local optimum but instead rationalize your entire process to and make sure your decisions are inline with your goals.  Ask why 5 times to get to the root cause and solve the problem at the source.  Toyota seems to focus on the human element.   "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." - Aristotle   "Practice does not make perfect, practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect."   TPS Engineering achieves better results with half the engineering hours in half the time. Their teams, unlike most companies, are large at first then get smaller over time. The savings they seem to be leveraging is reducing rework. 90% planning, and 10% execution. This is hard because it shows slow progress at the beginning but has very little rework. Devin relates this to his process of designing fixtures. How do we think about this approach when compared with the concept of "fail-fast, fail cheap"?  Do we fail fast and cheap on a whole project or can we break things down to de-risk a crux of a process, it can avoid a lot of rework.   Mental work load is something that is barely talked about in an explicit way in a lot of writing on TPS. There is some very interesting research on this topic. Uriel spoke with Kenneth Kotovski who spoke about some of his research on the impact of "problem isomorphs". They saw a 15x increase in time of solving a structurally identical problem. There are many examples of difficult mental tasks that could be eliminated or greatly simplified. There are so many examples of us overusing our brains which pulls them off of much more useful tasks.   Single piece flow. What is it? Devin and Uriel give an overview of single piece flow. The idea is that a single piece of the thing you're producing moves from one process to the next with no waiting between and not in batches. It's very hard to achieve. Eliyahu Goldratt mentioned that Ford used a spatial constraint, Toyota uses inventory constraint, to achieve flow. He then proposed using the release of stock to limit overproduction.  How do dishwashers impact the kitchen. This is a good example how batches have far reaching effects. More storage space for more dishes means traveling further to move around the kitchen because you need so many dishes because of the batch size of a dishwasher.  Single piece flow as a north star to move toward. It has far reaching impacts from quality, space, and highlighting new issues to solve.  Devin and Uriel go over some of their small improvements.  Devin shares some of the challenges he's having with quoting new jobs and the software available. There are some very expensive solutions that MAY do what he needs, but there are also some cheaper options including just building tools in house. The question is which direction to go.

Please share ideas for a hashtag for folks following this podcast. We'd love to get a community going around this so we can all share these ideas.    The idea behind this podcast is to let people follow along as we wrestle with the ideas of TPS, Lean manufacturing, and Continuous improvement.   We talk about how to think through automation. Is it truly automation vs. people? Probably not. So far, we've focused on keeping automation fairly inexpensive, but also we try to keep our automation very flexible even at the expense of speed. Flexibility seems to win every time.  The Toyota Way is a great book  https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-toyota-way_jeffrey-k-liker/248851/item/3846812/?gclid=Cj0KCQiA8t2eBhDeARIsAAVEga1NtXj1opypqk1dldXkbghA4YpThZr2p5FjaqDyT3CU4H2FxNfEGPcaAklDEALw_wcB#idiq=3846812&edition=3503878  How do we compete on a global scale and how do we find automation opportunities that are inexpensive, flexible and easy to implement. Automation does not need to be all robotic arms. We discuss some other place to implement automation that are cheep and very effective. Some software is a great place to start implementing automation. Unfortunately much of what we see on the internet are very fancy and complex movements but really where we should start is automating simple tasks and do so in a universal manner.  The shift in mindset that allows us to leverage the tool set of lean and TPS is to stop thinking about just the cutting of your parts as the process of production but rather thinking about all the steps end to end of finding work, engaging the customer, to making and shipping their product. This includes paperwork, email workflows, etc. Look for the 8 lean wastes in every step.   We touch on Zero Quality Control and how to approach zero defects. Poka yoke fixtures and source inspection are foundational to achievement of zero quality defects. It is interesting to explore how we might apply that to some of the things we do in our shops. We also discuss some basics of SMED. Both concepts from Shigeo Shingo.    We go over how the vibratory tumbler is maybe delaying the process of getting new buckle components ready for paint. Devin questions how this issue can be solved without just throwing money at it. This is where production rationalization is critical. How do we make rational choices when looking at the complete production process. Do we spend money on upgrading the tumbler or are there cheaper ways of improving flow and speeding up end-to-end production time. Some interesting ideas come out of the discussion. Good food for thoughts. How do we reduce batch size and speed up the process as much as possible per dollar spend.   We talk through mental load and its effects on work in the shop. How do we quantify the effects of this. The gains of getting things out of your head seem very substantial, but it’s hard to figure out what the extent of this is on our ability to work effectively. We’ll dig into this further, but many of the improvements we’ve made in the shop save time directly, but also deliver a huge reduction in mental load. This might be the missing piece that makes lean and continuous improvement a runaway success…TBD   Devin goes over some improvements to his job management board and how they improve the availability and clarity of information at a glance.   Uriel shares some improvements from this week. Some fun with barcodes and general organization. Great video on QR codes and Barcodes from Fastcap!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftRVAjGIEwQ   Don't waste your human potential folks!  Revenue is vanity and profits are sanity!  It can be hard to grow a business with only improvements. But by far the worst improvements are improvements that are incomplete. All the time and costs, with no benefits!