FastCap’s Lean Video Library can be found under the video tab on all our websites, or by going to this link.

Paul Akers, of The American Innovator, visits Greg Glebe of Xylem Design, a Lean Manufacturer, and takes a tour of his display/pedestal facility. They are doing amazing things! You gotta see this!

For more information on Xylem Design, visit their website.

For more information on The American Innovator, visit our website or Facebook.

For more information on lean, go to 2 Second Lean or Facebook.

For more information on FastCap, visit our website or Facebook.

To sign up to receive news regarding The American Innovator show, go to this link.

Are you interested in Lean Manufacturing? Well take a trip to the shop floor and see a lean factory tour at FastCap in Ferndale, Washington. Paul Akers is the founder and president of FastCap, based in Bellingham, WA. FastCap is an international product development company founded in 1997 with over 2000 distributors worldwide. A prolific inventor, Paul holds US and international patents. FastCap, launches approximately 20 new innovative products per year and has won business of the year multiple times. Paul and his wife, Leanne, have built FastCap from their garage into a multi-million dollar company. At its core, FastCap is a Lean company, determined to continuously improve everything, everyday. Our products reflect the idea that things can be improved and the best ideas come from the shop floor.

Viking Plastics shared with video with us where they discuss their journey into Lean Manufacturing using the 2 Second Lean principle. What’s stopping you?

Leanne Akers demonstrates how cleaning up one cupboard a weekend is a great way to do the 3 s’ing (sort, straighten, standardize). This weekend…the spice cupboard.

For more information on lean, visit 2 Second Lean.

Paul Akers gives an example of how to do a lean video resume.

For more information on lean, visit 2 Second Lean.

Video Resume for Graham Johnson (Lean All-Star) with introduction from Paul Akers. [Note: Graham is no longer looking for a job.]

Scott Daily, General Manager at Maxwell Counters, Inc., sent us their first lean video. Congratulation to getting started on the journey!

Then Paul challenged them to take it one step further. Check out this video by Walters and Wolf (who have been doing lean for several years now).

For more information on lean, visit 2 Second Lean.

Paul Akers, of The American Innovator, leads a global round table at MAPP’s Benchmarking & Best Practices Conference in Indianapolis on October 17, 2013.

Round Table Participants
Ashley Bailey from Klime-Ezee
Kelly Goodsel of Viking Plastics
Nick Kocelj of Walters & Wolf
Michael Althoff of Yellotools
Greg Glebe of Xylem Design
Paul Akers of FastCap

For more information on MAPP’s Benchmarking & Best Practices Conference, visit their website.

For more information on The American Innovator, visit our website or Facebook.

For more information on lean, go to 2 Second Lean or Facebook.

For more information on FastCap, visit our website or Facebook.

To sign up to receive news regarding The American Innovator show, go to this link.

Daniel sent us this Review of Paul’s book, 2 Second Lean. Great thoughts!

“I just finished reading the last six chapters last night…

The final big take-away I got from the book were your comments about Kaizen events (p. 110) and how they really are an uneven approach to Lean that can be disruptive or even burdensome and thus hard to get buy-in for. I also think they are maybe a bit disempowering because they send the message that change is something we can only do occasionally with big projects, and outside of that it is business as usual. Unfortunately this is how almost all Lean initiatives start, in part I think because it is a model that works well for consultants. But governments and politicians like big projects for other reasons as well.

Contrast that to my 2 second improvement this morning. There was a hole punch that wasted about five minutes of my time yesterday because it seized up on the 24-sheet document I tried to hole-punch yesterday. Today literally 15 seconds with some shredder oil I brought from home fixed that problem for anyone else who uses that hole punch in the coming months, saving probably hours of waste all told. One beauty of this is that I didn’t need any executive sign-off or stakeholder consultations to do this. While it is small, the return is probably measurable in 1,000s of percents! If you do that every day, with everyone in an organization, how can you not have amazing results?

For myself, it also caused me to realize that hole-punching is overprocessing to begin with, I can just keep a document in a folder and it is actually easier for me to work with that way.

Even better (now that I am actually using my brain on this problem which I would have thought beneath me), I can read and annotate a document electronically and avoid even the step of printing it (Overprocessing), going to the printer (Motion), _Waiting_ for my job to come out, and bringing it back to my desk (Transportation), filing it away (Motion / Inventory), and then, all too often, realizing I actually needed a different report (Defect), or just a few pages of it (Overproduction), and while I am dealing with all that Waste I am being Underutilized by my department and wasting the customer’s (taxpayer’s) dollar. There we go, all the 8 wastes just in the act of printing a document!”