The POD - Part 2

Back at my office I thought about what had happened and what I had learned. Obviously I needed to come up with a different approach. I thought about the handful of individuals who had come up to me afterward and thought about how I could get some traction for my vision. I knew I could never hope to start at the beginning or end of our process. Those steps were dominated by the most senior toolmakers in the company. And they were arguably the most complex and difficult tasks to do and do properly. Creating the part forming process requires years of experience. The “forming process” ultimately determines the success of the tool. This was not an area I wanted to tinker with.

Likewise the “Tool Tryout” process at the very end also required the highest level of skill and experience. It was here that the most experienced toolmakers worked their magic to ultimately tune the tool to make a quality part. It was also here that all the previous sins had to be corrected. The root causes of issues at this stage were scattered all throughout the previous process.

Instead I decided to start with the milling and drilling of the blocks. These operations were very repetitive and repeatable. I knew this mostly because they were performed by the most junior employees. And because of that one would get too upset if we made changes there.

Not being a toolmaker myself I needed to put together a team to help me create a LEAN prototype. I first chose one of the die makers who had approached me after my meeting. He was very experienced and well respected. He also happened to be the chief union steward. But most importantly for me was the fact that he was also lazy.  "Lazy" in that he prided himself on getting his tools to work with the least amount of effort.

I knew I would also need help from the Design department so I next approached the most senior designer, a union steward as well who was also originally trained as a toolmaker. Like the first person this individual was very knowledgeable and had often made suggestions to me in the past on how things could be improved.

Knowing that I would need to move and set up equipment I added my maintenance man to the team who also happened to be a union steward. Like the first two he was also well respected by employees on the shop floor.

I sat them down and told them that I wanted to try out some new ideas using a small prototype in the Milling and Drilling areas. I explained my reasoning and they agreed. They were somewhat skeptical when I told them I wanted to set the prototype up in the middle of the die tryout area. But I told them we needed this to be highly visible and I wanted people to understand that we were trying something different.

To get them going I laid out the following concepts or guidelines for the design and set-up of the prototype which would soon come to be known simply as The POD.

1. Flow: The new process had to focus on flowing the product as smoothly as possibly from one operation to the next.
2. Visibility: As opposed to the large areas filled with mills and drills I wanted the POD to be laid out so that you could easily see the entire process as you would draw it on paper.
3. Pull Scheduling: It was important that the POD would only mill and drill components that were needed by the next operation.
4. Cost: There was no budget for this project. With the exception of minor maintenance items there would be no major capital expenditures.