Walters & Wolf’s Youtube site just passed 700 improvement videos! One of the suggestions that Paul Akers made when he visited our shop was that before we make any improvements, we should document them with a “before and after” video. This makes the improvement easier to see and share with the rest of the company. Our management team started our “learn by doing” process by agreeing to make one improvement video each week. We would then watch them in our Monday management meetings.
That process worked out so well that we began to expand it to all the people in our lean groups. While we are still in the process of getting all the people from all our offices into a lean class, the number of improvements has been growing steadily. This is the real power of a lean company. Yes, you can adopt the continuous flow concepts and yes you can hold Kaizen events on different processes and you can have improvements all over the company. But if you don’t engage the people who are doing the work, you are going to miss out on the best ideas and you will also find it very difficult to sustain your changes.
You can see our videos on line here: Walt Wolf
What types of things are we improving? In addition to some great videos of people making improvements at their homes, we have people doing 5S in their offices, updating the cover sheet for our shop drawings, updating the way we do our shop releases, defining and documenting our standard file locations, studying and implementing how to make all our documents available via the cloud to all our team members and easily keep them in sync, how to keep all the machines at all the offices coordinated so the tooling and the files will work across all the locations, etc…
It is a fascinating time at our company. The pace of change and innovation is accelerating and we are just at the beginning of this journey.
