Day 40: first day of Florida lean tour in Jacksonville

We finished up day one of our lean tour in Jacksonville with a pool-side hansei - what did everyone take away from our visits today? Was there any one thing that stood out, perhaps as something to try at their work? 

We had visited Dr. Bahri, an area dentist who spent many years learning about lean before trying it in his practice.  After 13 years of reading and learning about lean processes, he starts with....

SMED

Yes, SMED - or single minute exchange of die - where one tries to minimize the changeover time between jobs - or in the case of our dentist friend, the setup and changeover time between patients and even multiple operations on a single patient. Not an easy place to start.

We are used to lean n00bies starting with 5S, maybe basic value stream mapping, heck even heijunka or load levelling. But SMED? Not a typical starting point on the lean journey.... But it was very interesting to see what he and his staff had done to make significant improvements in a dental practice. Customers were happier; less chairs had to be filled; the waiting room was empty - real wasted space it was. But the good doctor had real passion for continuous improvements, particularly those that made his customers happier.

For the second half of the day, we visited Saft Batteries, who were in a relatively new plant (2011).

The building - awesome. The people - fantastic. The processes - errr.... You know what? We couldn't see everything so it's important to keep that in mind, but there seemed to be an unbalanced load across the lines, such that if they had to double capacity, they could run into trouble. We saw robots on break, machines on the main line with OEEs of under 15%, and a whole new business line of large systems that was kinda crammed into a small corner of the floor. However, this is still a pretty new facility and the team has made huge improvements since 2011. They know what they need to work on, so we were all pretty confident that they will get there.

My takeaways from today? Sometimes simpler is better - it is always about the customer - and it is most definitely about the worker and respect for people. 

AMac