Check out this New York Times article by Donald G. McNeil, Jr., about how an Argentine car mechanic adapted a method to retrieve a cork from a wine bottle to develop a device that could be used to save a baby stuck in the birth canal.

We reviewed this in our morning meeting.

A couple of pictures of Paul Akers speaking at the 2nd Annual Washington State Government Lean Transformation Conference in Tacoma last week!

Paul, the “renaissance man”! Check out this article in Forbes

Paul – GREAT meeting this morning, thank you for letting me be a part of your team for a bit. Most enjoyable items for me were:

• Cleaning!
• Openness in looking for problems, asking why 5 times and getting to the root problem, and how to improve.
• Going through the 8 wastes using real life scenarios.
• Being aware of your surroundings (zebras and crocs – what a brutal, but motivating video).

A fun saying that goes with survival:

“Each day, a gazelle wakes up knowing he must outrun the fastest lion to survive. Each day the lion wakes up and knows he must outrun the slowest gazelle to survive. For us, that means every day, when the sun comes up, we better be running!”

You have an awesome culture there, open, honest, hardworking, not afraid, humble, and ready to work. Simply, put, you have an AWESOME team there!

The best is yet to come!

Fred Kennedy
General Manager
Pioneer Post Frame Inc

Paul,

Just letting you know that I appreciate the email updates and links to the American Innovator. Also, I have no problem helping out people in our region that may reach out to you looking for some words of encouragement or knowledge / experience sharing.

Things are going well here. We just graduated our 3rd class of Viking Academy. These folks received some more targeted training in 2 second lean and cultural change to augment what is shared at our drumbeats. It’s a rewarding process. Lots of hard work, but rewarding. The group that recently graduated includes operators, material handlers, mold setup, customer service, program management, and our operations manager. It was a diverse group and allowed us to break down barriers between departments and through levels within the organization.

Have a great weekend. Travel safely.
Shawn
Viking Plastics

We watched this in FastCap’s morning meeting. Great innovative company!

Dave West of Meadowview Construction, shows us yet another creative use for FastCap products: Holey FastWrap;
Fastcaps; Long Nose Marker.

We watched this during our morning meeting. So cool!

Check out this Tools of the Trade blog post about Brian Way’s Tricked Out Truck.  You might remember we featured this truck on The American Innovator.  So cool!

Martin shows how FastCap’s Kaizen Korners improve the shipping process at Toolovaton.

For more information on FastCap’s Kaizen Korners, visit our website.