Video Transcript
Speakers:
- Lisa Rawcliffe - Engage Forward, Lean / 5S Consultant
- George Sobota - Engage Forward, Lean / 5S Consultant
- Carrie Jo Linville - OEM Materials & Supplies, Account Manager
- Jake Shaw - OEM Materials & Supplies, Account Support / Fixture Designer
- Kevin Pawlowski - Moderator
Kevin:
Thanks for joining us and welcome to our webinar on bottleneck Analysis and Lean Manufacturing. This is put out by OEM Materials and Supplies and Engage Forward. Today, we're going to cover the best way forward if you're looking at taking out bottleneck in your organization into streamline your operation, save money, reduce lead times, what have you, basically to please your customers. So we've got two companies that are presenting today, Engage Forward. Engage Forward is a consultant that goes into organizations, often lean manufacturers and maps out their process, looks for bottlenecks, looks for inefficiencies, works with coaching the team members. So they work well together. The communication goes well and the process flows smoothly. Okay. So oftentimes they will map out your facility, come up with the best way forward in terms of the design. They'll take it to someone like OEM, materials and supplies that way in material supplies.
They are a distributor and integrator for Flex Pipe. Flex Pipe creates custom fixtures for organizations specifically for Lean, but can be for any organization which can be customized to anything you could possibly need. They're also an authorized distributor for trust in Workbenches. Okay. Quantum Storage Systems and much more. So with us, we have Carrie. Carrie's an account specialist, account manager, and she'd be the one to talk to find the right fixtures for your needs. And then Jake Shaw, he's actually a CAD designer. He's the one that would actually design any custom fixture that you need from Flex Pipe. So he will be the one to talk to for that. He's going to be actually showing us how from start to finish, he creates a flow rack in a lean project. So that's going to be really interesting. So let's move forward. George, if you could take it from here.
George:
Absolutely. I'm so excited to be talking about bottlenecks today. It is such an important part of evaluating your processes, especially and manufacturing. This bottlenecks happen not only on the production floor, but also in the office, and it has a large impact to your business. So everyone feels the effects of a bottleneck. Sometimes you may feel that by having a specific workstation being always overwhelmed while other people are standing around, you might have, let's say a machine breaks down and you have to have people start sweeping or people are sent home for the day. Those are some of your bottlenecks that are so critical to your operation that are important to try to address. Sometimes you might not even be able to continue on a critical project or an order unless you have somebody sign off. There's some simple bottlenecks that happen just throughout your organization.
So there's many reasons for bottlenecks could be missing people, parts, lack of skills, variability and process or order. But the goal is to identify those bottlenecks and minimize their impact. Some of that is just simply seeing how can you find where those bottlenecks are and there's certain metrics you can use. Some of it is using tact time or cycle time, how many back orders you have, what is your throughput? These metrics will help to make your bottlenecks visible. So we've seen in multiple organizations where sometimes just throwing money or people or new equipment at the problem just doesn't help, and a root cause of that is needing to very clearly understand what a bottleneck is. So I like this word it was for them is if you don't know what your bottleneck is and you're not addressing it, it's like pouring water into a clogged pipe.
You're really not helping the situation. One of my favorite tools of doing that is value stream mapping. So this is just a quick visual of what a value stream map would look like, and it's divided into three sections. The top, it's an information flow. Think about your systems like ERP, your spreadsheets. This is how information moves from different departments to your customer, to your supplier. Your material flow is the actual products and goods coming in and out. And then the lead time ladder, this is the meaty part, this is the fun part, and it's the most important insight that you get from value stream mapping. So you really start seeing how much of your time is idle time and even better, it's a way to clearly understand what you can address to improve the process and improve it in very tangible ways. And you think about, well, why is having a lower lead time important?
This means happier customers, you have less inventory carrying costs, and ideally you have more sales and more cash is the important one. So we'll dive into just really quickly some smaller tools that you can use to help identify and then address bottlenecks. And starting with simple time studies, just understanding how long something takes to complete and observing those processes directly. So every step in the process when you're looking at it, I don't need to read through all of them, but they need to be evaluated if they're valuable, if they're capable, if they're adequate, flexible, these are all things that are important for each step of the process. This is another way to be able to look at a more specific process. It's called process mapping. Sometimes people call them swim lanes. So on the left side you see different departments and you start understanding, well, what are the handoffs of taking, let's say an item or an order and what has to happen for a product to be completed. So it starts for purchasing, goes into production for example, and let's say at the very end, of course can then get sent out from your logistics or your warehouse.
Kevin:
So George, if you don't mind if I interrupt. So looking at this diagram, you've got arrows going up and down different directions, and then you've got a dotted line going back to the start. Is that an indication of some kind of problem?
George:
Not necessarily. Sometimes it could be a problem, it could be a quality issue. It has to go back to be, let's say a work order has to be edited, but sometimes it's just inherent to the process. And as you go through and start using these tools, this helps you understand, well, there is a lot of back and forth happening. There's a lot of movement between departments. Can we improve on that? Can we provide better information upfront? So that way there is less of that delayed time and time where let's say an order is stuck in an inbox or stuck before and stuck at a machine cell and not being able to be started.
Yeah, and this is just another example. Another example. So it doesn't have to be fancy. We love diving in and just sometimes using sticky notes and paper and whiteboard or you can be advanced and map the process digitally through commonly used tools. Vizio is one that has been around, but there's other tools available now that are really effective.
Kevin:
And just to put this in perspective, something like this generally wouldn't fit on an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper, would it? I've seen something like this with the post-it notes, fill a room, fill a large conference room wall of just arrows and post-it notes. Is that common or is that just a sign of something's off the hook and it should be this simple?
George:
No, it all depends on your scope. So if you want to start small and address a specific part of your business, then you might be able to fit it into eight and a half by 11. But absolutely it can explode into a full room. Four walls, post-it notes everywhere. And in some ways I would advise that you do do that because you can bring people in from multiple departments in your facility and really get a clear understanding of what's happening and more importantly than how you can improve. So absolutely post-it notes are great because anybody has access to them. You don't have to go digital. Digital is nice because it's editable and you can adjust it quickly, but the tangible feeling of that, there's a lot of value to that.
Lisa:
And sometimes we'll use a combination. We may start with a very tactile post-it notes on the board, but then we may ultimately become digital with it so that it is a piece that can be a living document that they can bring up and adjust and update throughout the year because this should give insight to the entire team as to what their current condition really is. And it helps to really identify where can you focus for improvement. We all have only so many hours a day that we can attribute to work. Hopefully we do go home and we do go attend to our families and our communities. So given the number of hours a day that we've allocated for work and we still have to make and produce products or goods and services for our customers, there's only a finite amount of time that we can attribute towards making improvements.
And if we can have to be selective in what time we're using to invest in that purpose, value stream mapping can be hugely powerful in identifying what improvement activities are going to yield you the greatest return for that effort so that the more improvement you can gain from a single effort or collective effort, then that in turn begins to snowball towards giving more capacity back to the operation on activities that previously may have been wasteful in some way or overproduction. And we're going to talk a little bit later about the eight forms of waste, but value stream mapping is such a valuable tool in helping the whole team see where we are today and to then be able to prioritize and see the impact. If improvement is made in this particular area, what will that translate to as a business in being able to better serve our customers and better serve our own teams with improved profitability, reduced frustration and losses that can come from some of the inefficiencies of having these constraints or bottlenecks in our process.
Kevin:
So it sounds like this is a process that could stretch over days, right? Involving cross-functional teams, so people from different areas of the organization piling into a room and going through this.
Lisa:
It's a pretty intensive activity. We recommend that companies look at doing this once a year. It's not something you're going to have this concentrated focus on all the time, but it's worth the effort of really hunkering down for a week and going through this process in depth. And what we have found repeatedly with our clients is that for many companies, including the ownership or the founders of some of these companies as well as the rest of the team, when the cross-functional team is in the room and they see the business in this way, it's really sometimes the first time that they've seen their own business broken out into this kind of a visibility. And it's very empowering and it drives a lot of understanding across the different departments of the company to better understand the cause and effect of what we do here and how it impacts the next operation or some operation, three or four layers, excuse me, layers down.
George:
Spaghetti diagrams are fun because you really get to do layout a 2D representation of your shop floor and literally track how your parts and people are moving around your floor. So where the spaghetti comes in is when there's a lot of overlap. So you could have a part coming back to the same machine multiple times or being stored somewhere for a while and you really track it from when it first starts to all the way when it's completed. The big benefits of this is it's meant to gather insights on how you can minimize travel time and it can help as you implement and put in new pieces of equipment or let's say you consider an expansion. This is a way where you can understand, well, how is the combination of people and products moving and how can I improve on that to minimize that travel time?
Kevin:
So each of these lines are a person, right? So this is a bird's eye view of a facility and that could be a person walking that could be with a lift truck or a fork truck moving product around, but they're basically people walking from parts of the facility to another. Is that right?
George:
Absolutely, yes. Five Ys is another, seems simple, but a very powerful tool. It is a great example because it reminds you of, let's say if you have a toddler at home and they're in their why phase, they keep asking why, why, why, why, why? Well there's some benefit to that. You can get pretty deep and I have a great example of that, of really discovering the insights of that and asking the multiple why's. Imagine you're a new park ranger for the Jefferson Memorial in Washington dc. You're in charge of keeping this memorial in pristine condition. The problem is birds are leaving droppings all over the memorial and it's causing you to use expensive cleaners that's degrading the monument. So normally people would think, okay, well let's just use more cleaner or let's just hire a cleaning staff and we'll have the problem go away, but it's not really asking and understanding what the root cause is.
So let's go through it using the power of five Ys start to investigate, well why are there droppings on the monument? Because the birds, they're feasting on spiders that live in or around the monument. Why? Well, there happens to be a swarm of mid flies that are attracted to the monument at dusk, why lights are programmed to turn on an hour before dusk and they're attracting those mid flies. So now we're getting into the root cause and the root cause is those lights are on an hour before dusk. So now we can have a solution that addresses this root cause and in this case let's delay the lights at that delay, turning on the lights at the Jefferson Memorial for one hour later than it currently is. And I think this is a great example because it eliminates implementing weaker solutions.
You could try to bring in hawks and test different cleaners and just put in a lot of extra time and effort of addressing different problems but not necessarily the root costs. Another version of this is to split it out by using a fishbone diagram. This one's fun because of not only the graphic, but it really splits out by different categories and makes you think of the problem in a different way. Sometimes people call this six m's. So machines, materials, manpower, measurement, mother nature, there's all different potential reasons to be able to for that you can dive in to really get to a root cause of a problem. Gemba walks just in general are important and you might think, well, what's a gemba walk? Gemba walks is just physically going to where the work is, being completing, being completed, and observing what that process is that you want to improve, you want to go and see. So that's in a nutshell what a gibo walk is. And some of the core tenets that we want to share is you go see if you have questions, you ask why, and you show respect. You show respect to the operator or the individuals that are using and doing that process and that shows you, that really teaches you a lot about how you could potentially improve that part of the business.
Kevin:
So is this a high level like director, VP type of person or is this somebody more managerial level or a line manager, someone like that doing the gemba walk?
George:
Yeah, I'd say ideally both as the higher up in an organization you are realistically you might have less time for that. So then there's a tiered approach that you can do and there's a terminology of leader standard work for that. But what's exciting is the more time you spend out there, the more people are comfortable with those various levels of leadership and to be able to bring up issues as they come up. So a way it's just a positive feedback loop to be able to go see, understand, and improve and get the resources you need to improve those parts of the business.
Lisa:
When we talk about gemba walks, there's some core principles we like to reinforce that first of all, you need to define a purpose for the walk. Don't just walk randomly and it's not intended to be a walk where you're going to find trouble and berate people for why they're not meeting production targets or why are they generating defects in a punitive finger shaking way. The purpose of the walk. You could have one that's focused on safety, looking for potential causes of danger that could result in incidents or accidents. You could have a gemba walk that has its focus entirely on defect reduction. You could have a gemba walk that's focused entirely on getting flow and pulled to be happening fluidly so that all the materials and processes are running one to another without disruption or delay. But walk with a purpose is one of the core foundations.
Showing respect is another, that when we are at someone's workplace and we're observing that, we're showing respect to them, that we're inquiring with a desire to understand. It's really about seeking to understand, not to assign blame or to any other purpose. So walk with a purpose, show respect, and never walk alone. There's such a powerful opportunity that gemba walks can give us when we're developing the capabilities of other people to think like an owner ideally in an organization, the more people that are working there that think as if they're the owner of the company, then the more engaged, the more purpose-driven people will be in the work in serving customers and serving the betterment of the organization. So when we bring someone with us on these walks, it can be a great way for a manager to bring one of their direct reports or other people from departments with them to help them see the business from the perspective that they're looking at it. And it's a great way to develop their ways of seeing and thinking and acting.
George:
As your organization develops and continues to mature along its lean journey production metrics and more and better data is always helpful. There's tools that are coming out daily that help from a dashboard perspective. You can get notifications on your phone. There's so much that is coming out that can help you manage your organization in real time. And this graphic is a perfect example of just something that is either power BI as you gather information and you can start utilizing that information to help you in your journey. And one example, just a short one is we did a project at an electronics assembly manufacturer. They were working on a high profit item. Their typical lead time was three or more weeks and their challenge was they only had one person that knew how to assemble this item and it was a complex item and there was a risk of losing customers to competitors.
So some of the things we did was we identified the bottlenecks in the process, we established a cellular flow, so we made the flow of the product work in a much smoother fashion and just using some of these concepts that were covered, we decreased our lead time from three weeks to two days. So that's an 87% improvement and that's without hiring additional people. And these are some of the low cost, high value wins that you can get by looking at processes in a different way, by understanding where your bottleneck is and how it is affecting your operation from changing your lead time from three weeks to two days, you have an opportunity to gain business. You at a minimum don't prevent business from leaving. So there's a lot of opportunity of being basically delighting your customer and providing what they need as fast as they needed.
Lisa:
I will say that the work that George did there with putting that work condition into a cellular flow, it used a lot of excellent principles of lean thinking with five s, workplace organization point of view storage, placing materials close at reach for the operators so that they don't have to spend time moving even a couple steps a day or a couple steps with each assembly can add up over the course of the day of other losses that can contribute towards creating a constraint in the process. So many of the efforts of creating a cellular flow bring in all kinds of elements of lean thinking with which workplace, organization and point of view storage are very foundational to the rest of it.
George:
Great. So some ways to minimize bottlenecks, you can rebalance work. Cellular flow is one of those examples. Cross-training employees is helpful. Applying pull systems and automation is a tool as well. So there's a lot of different ways to attack bottlenecks, but there are many options.
Carrie:
Okay, so we're now going to move on to looking through the A deadly lean waste as a way for us to show how flex pipe resin and OEM materials can add value by helping you solve these types of waste. So the waste, the eight deadly waste is easily remembered by using downtime and downtime. The D is rework, scrap, and failures from defects, then overproduction more product than is needed before it's needed waiting someone is waiting for something or someone non utilized talent under utilizing a person's skill and talent knowledge. The emphasis more is more on involving everybody in a lean process because they're the most experienced, the people on the front line and then transportation is unnecessary movement of products, machines or material inventory is inadequate or excessive material motion is unnecessary movement of people within a process. Then extra handling is adding more to the process than is needed. So these eight waste will drain 90% of your processing potential. Being able to see waste in a process is key to the continuous improvement process. Once we learn how to identify waste, we can see it everywhere in our workplace, in our homes at the stores we frequent. And the one waste we see across every organization is waiting.
Kevin:
And if I can add, as I look down this list, every one of those I see a dollar sign. So what that means is every one of these is taking a great deal of money from your profit margin and as you justify let's say setting up a lean organization, lean process, working with a consultant, bringing in new racking, new fixtures, okay, this is where you can identify to your financial people, to your executive team where the advantage is going to come from from all this effort and cost of implementing the lean improvements.
Carrie:
This next slide really emphasizes the importance of a physical layout. Ideally a factor, a factory floor would be laid out strategically with the equipment, the workstations, the conveyors and other elements to improve efficiency, productivity, and safety. And as you know in this diagram, as you can see is receiving starts in the top left-hand corner, which is close to the stockroom, which is closely to the kiting. The kiting is next to the SMT line. Then you move over to rework, final assembly, final inspection and to packaging and shipping. So there's a continuous flow and that flow minimizes material handling. It reduces inventory because you have everything where you need it, when you need it, and it reduces motion and it maximizes the workflow and the space. And almost always the workspace is either in a U, an S or a T layout. So the next thing that we'll examine is actually machine time is the biggest downtime element in the improvement process or on the eight ways.
And your machine, you can eliminate machine downtime by either upgrading to a more stable platform. Some of the, let's say the SMT platforms out there are 30 years old, so they are plagued with downtime. The other thing is to improve your maintenance schedule to make sure that if you have older machine, you do more to make sure it keeps running. Then the number two waste is excessive motion. And we address that by creating a very effective work cell. And this works cell will evolve the workstation. It will involve flow racks and probably visual cues for the tools that are needed. And that's why we address the shadow box early on to make sure everything is in its place when it's needed and you won't have motion because the operator will have everything he or she needs at that time. Part of the removing unnecessary product is the sorting from the works cell area and then we set everything in order and find out exactly what they need to do this particular task.
Kevin:
The picture to the right is an example of a fully customized workstation. So this would be made of flex pipe where you can cut and configure anything you need. And so here's a workstation that can go around the corner and can meet the needs of the operation. Exactly. So minimizing the motion that carrie's, talking about
Lisa:
Seeing those same activities and use cases not only in electronics but also in heavy industry in machining environments in food production. So the application of tools and resources that you have available to you can be infinitely applied in a variety of manufacturing settings in addition to electronics.
Carrie:
This diagram shows two different work areas. The work area on your left actually has a built-in conveyor with a return conveyor underneath the top surface. The second workstation has the flow rack built into it above the works surface. And the reason we really like working with Flex Pipe is because flex Pipe is so versatile and like you said, it could be used in food, electronics, heavy equipment. It's 100% customizable, it's easily modified. There's no waste because you can disassemble a bench and reassemble it. And this is really helpful for the continuous improvement because you might get a bench, you might deploy it, you might use it, and they say, oh, if I just had this, I can add that. And so really we've enjoyed working with it, working with flex pipe. So this one is on non utilized talent and the call here is automation, specialized equipment, robotics and conveyors.
We know that one of the largest waste is not having the right people in the factory. There is a lack of skilled people. So for the people you do have to remove them from mundane routines and let them work on a more complex problems. You can automate simple functions like the picture on the left is a taping machine. The picture on the right is robotic arm and they're lifting up lithium batteries, which are really heavy and fragile and it is workflow constraints. Again, we're talking about the work cell, the waiting, the motion in the inventory. The work cell is designed for a particular process and you want to centralize all the resources in that place. You start with the works station and you provide all the tools with the shadow boxes or PEG boards, you optimize that workstation. One of the problems we've seen is that if the workstation is larger than the work being done, it starts to collect things like water bottles and purses and phones, phones, things that don't belong on the work surface.
So we want to limit the space of the work surface to just what is needed in that area. Some of the ESD, you can't have anything within 12 inches that causes static. So the smaller the work service, the better. So you don't collect unnecessary products on a station. The next would be the flow racks. Here we want to collect all the necessary resources, the parts, the packaging for the ban systems and the flow racks will help with FIFO, keeping the order of the work in process. And then the carts are for WIP or storage or resupply or just for your finished goods. And here you're looking at two different flow racks. The flow rack on your left is for multiple items. They call it the supermarket flow rack. The rack on your right is a carton, a carton flow rack usually for boxes. So these can help locate all the necessary equipment near the workstation where it's being used.
And it's also a visual to the picker on when it needs to be refilled. The rack on your right has a return return area where someone can visually see that all the bins are full. It's now time to replenish back to carts. Again. Carts are used for moving products or material. They're designed according to size, weight, shape, and quality of the products needed to be moved or stored. The carts can be reinforced with additional pipes to support up to 4,000 pounds. The cart to the left is for moving or storage goods. And the rack, the cart to your right is work in process. So the carts keep the work flowing from one work cell to another. And the one about this particular image here is that maybe the cart, it reflects that day's work. So you would be a queue that it's almost four o'clock and I still have one whole rack empty. So it's easy to gauge the flow of material by the size of the rack and how it's being used.
Kevin:
An interesting feature of this system is the pipes come in different colors. So you can coordinate, let's say red for rework and repair items in blue for production items. And so it can be coordinated with how you want to run your facility.
Carrie:
And this is the last of these slide of my set of slides and this is material handling. And the waste here is stockouts and overruns and that is all part of the supply chain optimization. You can manually with our bins and racks, you can manually create a Kanban system. If you want something a little bit more sophisticated, you can go into Barcode or RFID. But something that's near and dear to our heart at OEM materials is a vendor managed inventory where you simply outsource that to us. And we work very closely with you with a customer to determine what they need when they need it. And we always have some on hand in inventory so there's never stockouts and we watch your supply and your reordering so they're never overruns. So that's really one of our main line of business and we've been doing this for 20 years.
Lisa:
To add to that, we've helped organizations align with that same concept of vendor advantage inventory and that opportunity presents additional benefits to the organization, not only preventing stockouts or lack of inventory, but also really helps the cash cycle because your investment, you're not buying a truckload of hardware all at the same time because you got a good deal, right? But now you have all this stuff to handle and manage under these VMI types of programs, you bring a lot of stability to your process of being able to keep production moving without running out of material, but also your cash cycle is greatly impacted in a very positive way.
Kevin:
Now let's hand this off to Jake who's going to take us through an actual project from start to finish. So how does a flow rack go together from concept to final execution?
Jake:
Today we will be very briefly reviewing a flow rack together. Flow racks are also known as gravity racks. Now the reason you would want to implement a flow rack or really any modular pipe and joint system into your lean operations, whether that be manufacturing or warehousing or what have you, is because you're constantly and continuously striving to reduce wastes from your processes. This specific flow rack that you see before you is currently being used by a manufacturer here in Southern California. Now before this rack, the workers at this facility had up to two full bins of materials on their workstation tables. And when they were done with bins of materials, they would put those empty bins on the manufacturing facilities have parts pickers or also known as water spiders. But the parts pickers would have to leave the aisle ways, come around to the workstations, put bins of materials on there, and then bend down to the floor and grab those empty bins and take them back to be refilled in the stock room. Now as you can see from this rack we designed for this company, the rack has one way in and this is where bins would go down full of materials to the worker and then they would come out at the workers' table right here. When the workers are done, they'll be able to put their empty bins that don't have any more materials in this out rack. Which slides back down to the parts picker right here down the aisleway.
Let's see. So the wastes that this rack helped this company reduce, there's a couple of 'em. The first one is motion. So the workers at this facility can now continuously produce without leaving their workstations or without having to do any unnecessary bending or walking to receive their new materials and to get empty bins out of their workstations. Same goes for the parts runner. The parts runner does not have to leave the aisle way between workstations to refill workers with materials or to collect the empty bins. They can just stay right in their aisle right here, put new bins full of materials to the workers here and receive old bins down this out rack. The second waste that this flow rack helped this company would reduce is the weighting. The workers at this facility now have multiple bins of materials waiting for them at a time instead of only up to two at a time as would fit on their table before the racks were there.
With this, they should never run out of materials to continue producing due to any space availability issue like they had been encountering before. Now even though it's not a waste, it's worth noting that this rack helps these workers with the ergonomic aspect of their job. Well now the workers can discard their empty bins without bending down to the floor and the parts runners can collect those empty bins without having to bend down to the floor or walk around to the different workstations. The workers receive their full bins of materials. If you look at the design, they'll receive the full bin of materials right here. And that point is going to be within the workers' economic zone as it's called. And I think it's worth being said that now the workstation tables are clearer since full bins of materials are not needed to be placed on the desk as the holding point for those bins.
So if you look a little more detailed at the rack, there is a nice about 30 degree angle down here where materials will slide down this rack and deliver to the worker and the worker can just put empty bins right here, which slide back down to the aisle way. And a lot of our clients, like everything on wheels put everything on wheels in case we have to move it or in case production needs change or workstations move. So a lot of times we like to recommend people get these modular systems on wheels. If you're working with an OEM sales rep or someone from Engage Forward and you're planning out how to implement these specific items into your lean operation, it can be as simple as having us go there and look at your space and do measurements for you or do the quick little drawing for you before I jump in a design program and actually get it down on a design.
Another way would be as simple as just a quick little sketch on a napkin with some dimensions. And that gives us a really good jumping point to go off of. So it doesn't have to be anything formal. There's no deposit required to get this kind of process started. And I think it's worth noting that when you come to us with an idea, as long as we have the stuff we need to get mostly complete design like dimensions, what it looks like, things like that, what it would hold or any weight capacity it has to adhere to, you'll receive your design within 48 hours. So it's a quick process to get the design. And from there we just do revisions together until it meets exactly what your needs are, which is our goal.
Kevin:
So let's recap George and Lisa from Engage Forward, took you through how to go through a facility, map out the current process and find those bottlenecks, and then design a system that works for the organization to streamline that as much as possible. And then of course, Carrie and Jake took us through the actual fixtures, the actual tools that are available to you to get the job done. Okay, so you've got the right tools, the right equipment, you're going to reduce the bottlenecks and you're going to get greater efficiency.
Lisa:
If people are curious as to how they could begin the process of really looking at how do identify their bottlenecks and their root causes and to find a pathway to a solution, they can reach out to OEM or to engage forward. And we can come in and do a very brief short assessment with you to understand that and take the steps from there. I would say continuous improvement is a journey. It's not an overnight process, but you can make improvements and find the benefits paying you back immediately. And as you uncover those and you address those quickly, you'll find more. You're lowering the waterline and more rocks appear. But that's the journey of continuous improvement. It is continuous, but you can begin today and you can make those improvements right away and benefit from it immediately, and it just continues to grow.
