Paul Akers walks us through a typical day at FastCap (a company on a lean journey). For more information on FastCap, visit our website.

Jon Miller, of Kaizen Institute, let us know that FastCap will be included in his next book titled Creating a Kaizen Culture: Align the Organization, Achieve Breakthrough Results, and Sustain the Gains. Cool!

Below is a draft excerpt:

Growing People Every Day at FastCap

FastCap is a product development company based in Bellingham, Washington, USA. Established in 1997 by Paul Akers, a veteran woodworker and inventor, FastCap engages its entire workforce of thirty people in the maintenance and improvement of standards every day. There are several notable features to the kaizen culture at FastCap. The company culture would not be what it is without the unique passion, urgency and energy of Paul Akers as a leader. As an inventor, Akers is never satisfied, always finding something in the world that does not work and inventing a solution. This makes Akers a demanding leader, a tireless teacher and for the unprepared, an exhausting source of ideas. When Akers found kaizen, he found a way to help everyone in his organization see the processes in his company in the same way that he saw the word: always something to improve. In order to make it as simple as possible for people to understand and immediately take action, Akers demanded that everyone make a 2 second improvement every day. He wanted to engage every person’s mind at FastCap in finding something that could be improved, no matter how small. Akers even wrote a 100-page book about this approach titled 2 Second Lean: How to Grow People and Build a Fun Lean Culture to share the story. Akers commitment to developing his people into problem solvers who are aligned with his vision and who understand the process takes the form of the daily morning meeting. Every day, for thirty minutes, every FastCap employee stands in large circle in the middle of their facility. They review the mistakes that were made on the previous day, the reason why and what can be done to prevent similar mistakes in the future. They engage in peer-to-peer teaching, rotating a different employee as the teacher each day. They watch a video to learn about history and discuss its lessons. They start their day as one team.

A simplistic cost calculation would show that the daily 30 minutes of non-productive time for 30 people at $30 per hour on average time 220 days equals $100,000 per year. How can a small company possibly afford this? Paul Akers would say, “How can you possibly afford not to?” FastCap ships a high volume of orders and we have no doubt that the two seconds of savings per person per day easily adds up to far more than the cost of the morning meeting. Although kaizen is an improvement to the standard, and thus a self-funding activity, this is not the right way to calculate the cost and benefit of daily kaizen. There are many indirect benefits of their kaizen culture which lower costs and accelerate growth at FastCap, but are much harder to calculate, such as:

· A positive, fun, engaged workforce in a family atmosphere

· Prevention of errors, avoidance of repeating errors, a quality mindset

· Ease of gaining top talent by becoming an employer of choice in the region

· Development of future leaders with deep knowledge of the company

· Increasing international exposure FastCap and its products through excellence in kaizen

No doubt many readers will remain in shock and dismiss out of hand the possibility of having the entire production team, much less the entire company including its President, meet every day for 30 minutes for learning and improvement. Yet how many hours each day do people in your organization spend in meetings in which zero learning and zero improvement happens? How far away from the actual workplace do these meetings take place? How fresh or accurate is the information being discussed at these meetings? How many times was the information transferred from point of occurrence to the reporting point at the meeting? What causes such meetings to be necessary? If we view the daily kaizen activity at FastCap as a countermeasure to certain management challenges, and reflect on the situation within our organizations, we can find the answer. In the broadest sense, we can view the daily morning meeting at FastCap as the ultimate act of maintenance of standards. Each morning they confirm their commitment to the company, to each other through the history lessons and peer-to-peer teaching, to the customers through quality reviews, and to their many shared cultural values. The cost of trying to manage and repair broken processes that would result from stopping the daily maintenance would be far greater than thirty minutes times thirty people.

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!”

Paul Akers, of The American Innovator broadcast, shares the presentation he made to the Lean Construction Institute. This is an excellent opportunity to get the kick start you need on your lean journey.

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

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

For more information on FastCap, visit our website. http://www.fastcap.com/ To sign up to receive news regarding The American Innovator show, go to this link.

Isaac shares yet another ingenious tip for making quick work of sanding a second time. For more information on Lean, visit 2 Second Lean.

The FastCap team did a Lean Series on videos for Gemba Live!. Below is the first video in the series. You can find the rest at the Gemba Academy.

Dave West says, “I had to find a way to hold together my shop vac cord so it didn’t drag on the ground. Using a simple magnet and PowerHead Screw from FastCap I found my solution.”

For more information on lean, visit 2 Second Lean.

The guys at Xylem Design sent up this video showing off their lean skills!

Paul Akers, of The American Innovator broadcast, shares a video update from Ashley Bailey at Klime-Ezee. Klime-Ezee has been on the lean journey for about 6 months now and Ashley provides insights into what is working. There is also a bonus appearance from Katie Bailey (from Kindergarten Lean). For more information on Klime-Ezee, visit their website. For more information on The American Innovator, visit our website.

Daniel sent us this video showing off his lean improvements at home. Daniel is just beginning his lean journey, so I’m sure we will see more videos in the future!

For more information on lean, visit 2 Second Lean.