Latest / The Manufacturing Blueprint / 10. How Productive Shops Get More Done With Less Chaos
Transcript
- speaker-0: You're not gonna fix busy with more effort. You fix busy with better systems, right? And giving yourself the opportunity to make yourself better, your organization better, your team better. At the end of the day, it's not about being busy or not busy. It's about whether your operation is actually moving forward. Do you have the ability to scale and knowing that profit doesn't come from effort, that profit comes from the flow. Welcome to the Manufacturing Blueprint. This is the show where manufacturing leaders, shop owners, and operators come to sharpen their thinking, strengthen their teams, and improve the way work gets done. From leadership and culture to systems, strategy, and execution, we break down the blueprint used to build high-performing manufacturing organizations. No fluff, just straight talk and real conversations, real lessons and real results. Here's your host. Jason Davis. Hello again and welcome to the Manufacturing Blueprint. I'm Jason Davis, the CEO of DD Enterprises, here with my co-host Paul Barnes, who has almost 20 years experience working globally with a large airspace organization. On this show, we're going to be talking about leadership, operational discipline, and what it actually takes to build strong manufacturing organizations. If you're getting value from this show, make sure to follow or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. And a quick rating or review helps us reach more people in the manufacturing community. Today, we're going to be breaking down something we see all the time operations that are constantly busy, but still falling behind. Paul, I know this is one that a lot of people are dealing with. Growing up in the manufacturing industry, I think we've been conditioned to value motion. It's something, you know, as leaders we equate busy is being productive or having overtime or needing overtime equals a commitment, especially from our employees, or having a full schedule. Yeah, well, that makes us successful. I don't know that that all those things are accurate, you know. speaker-1: Yeah, being being busy is something that becomes of second nature to us and sometimes we would feel uncomfortable, right, if we weren't so busy. Being busy, as you said, it doesn't necessarily mean we're being profitable. It doesn't necessarily mean that business is really succeeding or doing well. We can just get wrapped up in doing things. But sometimes being busy is more of a liability than an asset. Might look impressive, but that constant activity on the factory floor frequently masks inefficiencies. And those inefficiencies can drain the business's profitability and resources. speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I I think one of the other things is when you when you look at managers or leaders or really kind of anybody, how often are we trained in a chaotic situation? Most businesses don't have the opportunity to bring somebody on board and spend six months with them, you know, helping to develop them before they're prepared. It's like You get drafted in and you're going right to the front lines. It's like, you know, it kinda sink or swim for a lot of people. I know. I know from my personal experience I've had situations where I'm like, okay, let's really take our time. And that lasted two days. And just because you you know, you you've got things that need to be done and you have to start assign them responsibilities. And so it it become it it has the real likelihood of becoming chaotic from the very beginning. And I think that's just what we all get accustomed to. speaker-1: think I've known my work any other way. I guess. Right. I guess whenever I got hired, whatever it is, eighteen, nineteen years ago, I mean you get hired because there's a need, right? There's a gap. There's something struggling. They need someone to fix it to help. So they put you in there, but all of a sudden there's just craziness going on, right? And sometimes being untangle all that and get back to some kind of normality. And sometimes we don't know it any other way. The business just seems tactic all the time. But sometimes that's a safe place for us, right? Sometimes that would that's what we've become used to, that's what we're accustomed to. And for many of us, that's our psychological shield, right? We feel safe there because that's how we've been owned the business, that's how it feels like it's supposed to be. And it provides us with a certain amount of certainty, right? The certainty that it's always gonna feel like that. Sometimes it protects us from that fear of failure. Or even scrutiny of others. Because when we're really, really busy, we're needed, right? As managers, as leaders, we're needed because business needs us, because it's struggling, there's so much going on. And if that work wasn't didn't feel so busy, then we'll become a little bit insecure about what are what we're doing, what should we be doing, what's the direction. Is the business succeeding? Sometimes when we're really, really busy, we feel like we're winning and the business must must be booming. speaker-0: Right. Yeah. speaker-1: But whenever people aren't rushing around so much, does that mean that we're not being profitable or are we being more profitable than we were? And how do we weigh up that firefighting from real productivity? That's the question. speaker-0: Yeah, you really have to take a step back and ask yourself, hey, are we really moving forward? Are we really being productive and and kind of look at that overall picture? You know, one of the things I've I've heard before and and and maybe this is something we can discuss later, but you know, it's a situation where, hey, if you have a leader and you take that leader out of the situation they're in and that organization starts to collapse, you're right, there's the this thought that, well, the leader didn't do their a good job because they didn't prepare the other people for that moment. And I I think there is totally some some truth to that. But there also comes a point where we have to find that balance between if y you're not needed there because everybody else is doing what they need to do, like where is your place? Right? Like, okay. So I think there's there's a real balance there. It's not always just black or white one way or the other. You know, so it's really finding a place stepping back and looking at the whole organization. speaker-1: I always try and teach my leaders that they should be able to take time off out of the business, right? Mm-hmm. If they can't take a week's leave from the business, if the business falls apart without them, then we're not good leaders. We're not building stable production systems and we've got a team capable of run three days it might fall apart without you. But it's true, right? Sometimes we like the fact that we're needed. speaker-0: No, you're right. speaker-1: But at the same time, are we coaching? Are we growing the teams? Are they evolving or growing? Or does the business become dependent on us? Yeah. Some people like that. Some people like the control and the fact that they need to be needed. But if that's the case, then we're limited to how successful and how far we can grow the business because we can't spend our day-to-day time just in the day-to-day, right? As leaders, we should be visionaries. Where are we going? speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: What's our six month plan? What's our three year plan? And so on, five year plan. So we need to be spending our time doing that stuff, not looking at the day to day. But sometimes we find it right that we enjoy being busy so much. It's like a badge of honor, right? You tell people we're so busy, I'm swamped and you're trying to talk to people and there's people phoning you and you have to reply to emails when you're talking. And sometimes we can see that as like an ego thing, right? Because we're in big business, we have be swamp, we have to be busy. But actually if we're running our business well, it should run without us and we should be able to take time away to do other things and know that the business will succeed without us. speaker-0: Well, I think that one of the challenges to that is it's not as simple as just saying, ⁓ okay, well, I'm going to make it this way. It's really important the people that you put around you. It's easy enough to say, okay, well, I'm gonna to go take this time. I'm gonna go step away from the business, in the business to work on the business, because those are that is definitely a critical situation. But having others in the business that are trained to do that work and to take over for you, that's not always easy to come by. Right. I mean, that's somebody that's gotta have experience and you know, you have to spend the time to train them. And as a leader, you have to have trust that you can hand it over to them. Sometimes, you know, we get caught in this like, I wanna just keep everything to myself moment. But it is really, really critical that you give away some of those responsibilities. But at the same time, you don't you I I think one of the things we fight is they don't do it as good as I would do it, so I'm not gonna give it away. But I will also say sometimes not as good as you would do it is still adequate. Right? Let's say you you know, if you performed it at a nine out of ten and they perform it at an eight out of ten, it's not as good as you would do, but it's good enough to let you step away and do something else. So you know, make you know, working with with the people around you, working with your coworkers to have them take on some of the responsibilities to to take on some of the other things, I think's ⁓ very critical. speaker-1: Sometimes it's it's a little bit easier though, being able to get those people to do the daily firefighting, right? Sometimes the firefighting is the bit that takes up our time as leaders and as managers. But generally it's easier to coach someone that can do that firefighting for you. But if you get drawn into the firefighting and everyone's doing the firefighting, then it's who is doing the strategic planning and the organizing. Manufacturing needs more than technology. It needs people who are inspired, connected, and ready to lead what comes next. That's why you should check out Elevate, powered by AMT and Women in Manufacturing during IMTS 2026. On Wednesday, September 16th, from 1 to 4 30, Elevate takes place in the West Building. This dynamic program is designed to inspire, empower, and connect manufacturing professionals through powerful speakers, meaningful conversations, and community building opportunities. And after the program, there's a reception where you can keep the conversations going, meet new people, and build real connections across the industry. If you're heading to IMTS and you want to invest in your leadership, your network, and your place in the future of manufacturing, make time for Elevate. Learn more at the link in the show notes or head over to IMTS.com. speaker-0: So if that's why it happens, let's talk about what this actually looks like ⁓ on the real operational side. I think you've got things that we see are maybe your your schedule reshuffles, ⁓ your your expediting material, your jobs are jumping around on the floor, maybe you're pulling one forward or pushing one out. You got people moving around the shop looking for tools or for travelers or prints or answers to questions. And you've got groups that are always telling you, ⁓ we're we're almost done with it. We're almost done with it and then you know, it's not very definitive. But Paul, tell me from your side, like what are some signs that you immediately notice when things are busy but not productive? speaker-1: You can normally see it in your numbers, whether that's with your overtime being high, guys working long hours, maybe working over the weekends, but you're not shipping more product, right? Your revenue's not growing and generally that's not a good sign. ⁓ we have a recent example where just due to part or material availability, we're not able to complete our product. So what we're doing is everyone's working really hard, right? We're still building all the product we normally would, but we're not finishing anything. Then we end up trucking it for to storage, which is maybe an hour down the road. And then a couple of weeks later we're gonna ship it or truck it back in again. Again, a huge expense. And then we're running overtime to try and finish those products and complete them. So there we can see that we're we're really, really busy. We're really busy, but we're not actually producing more seats. Sometimes we're we're accumulating hours. Everyone's busy. But not in the right way. We're not measuring the right things. Mm-hmm. Sometimes it's better just to stop the production right and do something that's profitable. Do something completing it rather than just keeping people occupied. It creates a bad culture. speaker-0: And when you mention that a lot of a lot of times, you know, especially on your side, you're in a larger facility, you've got a lot of systems in place. I want to think about somebody that's in a smaller shop that maybe doesn't have all the systems in place, doesn't have all the metric boards that are easily available to help help you spot some of those things. ⁓ it could be very simple. It could be a very simple analysis at the end of the month. You can look at your hours work versus your completed product and look at that trend. Obviously we can you know, what are the easiest metrics. If if you're a shop and you don't or you're a facility and you don't have any metrics to really go on yet, I mean, obviously that's something we're gonna suggest that you start to build to. But if you don't, the first thing you can do, the easiest thing you can get is what are your sales, right? I mean, I think we all can easily see, okay, what was our sales this month? And you can then should be able to kind of backfigure what your hours worked and look at that as a comparison. And see how that trend looks. So those are things that your system's going to have almost no matter what. If you don't have those two things, well then you shouldn't be in business. If you if you if you don't know how many hours you work and you don't know what you build, well let's just ⁓ unfortunately you just need to pack it in. But I would say most everybody has that. Obviously you may not have the more advanced systems, but that's a that's definitely a goal to work to. So it doesn't have to be some complicated formula. It can be very simple that you could just something you can track, put that on paper every single month so you can see that trend over the course of time. speaker-1: Right. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it, right? speaker-0: That's true. Yeah, we've said that a hundred times already. speaker-1: There's ⁓ also if you're talking about being busy but not necessarily productive, think about like firefighting, right? So you're continually reworking, right, the same things, or maybe you're fixing the same errors, or maybe your machines are breaking down in the same way. And what you do is you go through these cycles of things without really solving the root cause. We're continually sticking plasters over it all the time. And what happens is our teams become busy but actually not more profitable, there's no more productivity and we need to fix the root cause of some of those issues so whether we can reduce that level of noise and then ramp up stability and be more productive. speaker-0: Yeah. One example I know of like where ⁓ our shop in the past we've looked really busy ⁓ is on new products. New products can be very challenging. Sometimes they can go right through the shop no problem, especially if you've got families of parts, ⁓ you've done previous items that are really close. But sometimes new products can give you challenges that you didn't see before. And you know, you've got you've got busyness in engineering, you've got busyness in the quality lab, you've got busyness on the production floor and y but you're not getting those results, right? And so, ⁓ I think that that's another area that you're you're you're constantly moving, you're d you're having a meeting, you're going over things, you're making changes, you're being very busy, but you're again not being productive and that's what it comes back to. And so there's definitely some things that we can look at as far as what what can we do to help alleviate those things. But Yeah, I think you you kinda nailed it there that dealing with the same issues on the same shi on multiple shifts, shift after shift, you've got to be able to identify those things and know what effort looks like and then know what efficiency looks like. speaker-1: Sometimes in the shop floor it's just even flutter, right? It's large piles of whip. There's just materials building up. There's bottlenecks. And we can be working really hard trying to process them. But if you're not getting stuff out the back door, then you're not making money, right? You're burning lots of overtime, you're holding loads of inventory. Everyone is super busy, but the end of the day we have to be productive, which is to ship parts to our customers. I see it and I don't know what it's like in your business, but this doesn't even just apply to those in the shop floor. I see this right through the office. I see ⁓ admin staff sometimes entering the same information in the spreadsheet, right? They want to track a metric and they need something to track it to. So they populate all these fields and then you go to another department and they're using the same information and tracking a different metric. And sometimes everybody is is working hard producing all this stuff, which helps them in some way. Yet if we spoke more and worked more cross-functionally, we could actually remove more of that hard work, save time for people, but actually get the same result. For me, it's it's in my meetings every day, right? My calendar is maybe 80% full every day. And that's not a good thing, but that's where it's at. But what I end up with is maybe 30 minutes here between meetings, 30 minutes there between meetings. And that's no good because by the time I get back to the office, I got twenty minutes left and you can't find your place. Right. Right. You can't concentrate and get back dialed into what you were working on. And you just lose that twenty percent of your day, right? My suggestion if you if you have got a lot of office staff or you spend time in your office, try and have a window, right, that you consolidate your meetings in the morning. Or try and set up meetings more cross functionally where you can try and do a lot of meetings at the one time, maybe with a wider group of people to save yourself time. And again, it's not about working harder, it's about streamlining that to allow yourself more time to enable you to be productive. speaker-0: Yeah. ⁓ similar to that, but a little bit different. I find that, you know, I think it's important to have an open door policy, right? I mean, I've got the situation where anybody can ask any question at any time, which is great. But what that can creep into is, okay, well I've got a two hour window and I and I've got certain things that are scheduled to get done. And fifteen minutes in I get interrupted for a question and then it's like, Well, I really need to look at that and that's got to ship today. Let's go solve it and then I come back forty five minutes later. now I've got an hour left and takes fifteen minutes to get back to where I figure it back out where I was and then one more interruption that's just something simple. That's right. And now I've just got a compl two hours that are just completely gone. And and so I think that's a challenge that's that people are gonna have with growth. Like as you grow, you're going to experience those challenges. speaker-1: It I sometimes I I I I sympathize with you 'cause I suffer the same. I feel sometimes that the expectation of the managers or the boss is that you're responsive to everything and we feel like we're responsible for that. It's like a hyper responsiveness. Feel that you have to reply to every email, every message. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: Has to be responded to immediately, regardless of the importance or the time of the day. When in fact, if we actually looked at the necessity of that reply, well, could it wait? And sometimes we are our own worst enemy on that, right? We should be able to say, unless there's something stopping production, right? And in which someone's gonna phone me, any emails can wait, any messages can wait, right? And there should be no interruptions. And sometimes that's our own self, self-discipline. But unless we've Unless we mentally think about it and take a step back, you don't make that conscious decision. But what it does is it rotate your time. You feel really, really busy, but you're not being productive. And sometimes we just need to trust and delegate that responsibility to some of our team to make those other decisions. And yes, they may make a mistake, but with every mistake they're gonna learn. speaker-0: Yeah, that's critical. But we're supposed to get to mailbox zero, right? That's that's what we're told. You gotta have no messages there. And so ⁓ we gotta get busy to do it and that's why we gotta stay up at night and we gotta do it from you know, from home and in the bed and on the weekends and you know, so that's what we've been told we're supposed to do, but I think you're right. I mean, maybe we're on to something here. speaker-1: ⁓ I I don't know. I'm I'm gonna start keeping quiet 'cause I don't think that I am any person to give advice on this because I love getting through my emails, right? 'Cause I'm I like to be in control, I like to feel control and I like to know what's going on. speaker-0: I agree. And that's a battle. I mean, I think that's an innate battle for somebody that's a leader, somebody that's just some that you're just gonna be a go getter. That's what you wanna do. You wanna have everything done and tidied up and ⁓ I but I think that's th the thing, you know, you can delegate or you can just choose to allow some of these things to not go, you know, to to to wait. They c that that's okay. Like there there are gonna be things that can wait for sure. speaker-1: think with my emails, I sometimes ask people to take me off it because I get copied into so much. And it's just Sir, I'm copying you in for your awareness, sir. And it's like, don't copy me in for awareness, right? I know what you're doing. If you need support, if there's an escalation, then I want you to send it to me, right? Don't just C C me in anything or just add me to the email trail. Because then you're just filling up with emails, right? Which then you have to start filtering through. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: And it's just empowering, making sure the team feels that they're trusted enough to go in action and knowing that if they need support you're there, right? But not just death by emails. It is horrible. speaker-0: I'll well I'll give you a though on the opposite side in a smaller organization, I have found though I would rather be copied in on a on many of the emails because I may be in a situation where I'm asked by someone, right, having a smaller team. ⁓ I may get a phone call by somebody that knows me, right? I've been I've been here twenty seven years. I may it may get escalated to them and they may pick up the phone and just ring me straight out and then I've got I need to kind of know the answer. Now, it's certainly okay for me to be to tell them, look, I'm not a hundred percent sure. Let me call you back and make sure that happens. But for me, having email the email loop where I am C C'd and I kind of know what's going on, I don't have to respond, I don't have to action it. And we've kind of worked out a system internally where there are certain emails that come in and we've had this discussion that there are maybe two or three other people that are involved in these different things. And if it's these emails, they get it. They know it's their responsibility. I see it and just ⁓ instantly just file it away. And so we've worked out a good system, right? But we but we've got longevity here. I know, they know, ⁓ and so it's just a good mix. But I see where you're coming from from the larger scale because you're like, Okay, somebody will tell me when I need to w when when something's needed, but there can be a mix on that and some of that might be based on your size. I will say one of the things that I liked that ⁓ you know, in our text messages now, I think the old days you used to feel the need to respond to the text message even with a okay or God or whatever. And so then they came up with the little thumbs up emojis that you can just, you know, I don't even know. I'm so old, I don't even know what that's called. Like where you can just is there's gotta be a term for it that I just don't know. But ⁓ anyway, ⁓ so I don't know about you, but like Yeah, it does, it saves time. And then so now th have you noticed that it's on Outlook as well? Like I don't know if you use Outlook, but we use Outlook here. Yep. And so it's on the it's on Outlook, right? But the funny thing is, speaker-1: You don't even have to apply. You can just acknowledge speaker-0: That's right. But and so I started doing that. This was a little while back. And the funny thing was, ⁓ I can't remember what it says on the opposite side, but the but there was somebody in the office that's like, what does this mean? What do I need to do with this? And I'm like, no, wait, wait. I'm just saying to you. Like they were went into this whole point where like now they thought they had to have some kind of they had to do something. They couldn't figure it out. I was like, no, no, this is just me saying, Okay, I've got it. You know, I've I've read it, we're good to go, and I didn't have to send you another email. So so that's that's a good part of it. So another speaker-1: Issue that I have at the moment is we are running a lot of business improvement projects, right? Because I push the team to try and find improvements, add it to their goals for the year, what efficiency improvements and plans they can get. Right now, an issue I have is that we have so many projects open, but none of them are closed. And we are really, really busy trying to change things, but actually we're not getting time to actually complete any of them. None of them's finished. Mm-hmm. And sometimes I think we just need to take a step back, prioritize what we should be working on and try and deliver some of them because I have a team and they're wonderful for good ideas, right? They've loads of good ideas. You know, they'll say no idea is a bad idea. I know a lot of exceptions to that rule, but there's also a lot of good projects we're trying to do. ⁓ but not getting them done, not getting them finished. And what it's doing is it's eating up the team's time. speaker-0: Right. Yeah. speaker-1: to the point where they can't do their day job but they also can't finish these projects. And we need to just group them or pause some of them and put them on the back burner to try and just to try and get them over the line. But anyway, that's just examples, right? Some examples how we can become really super busy, how our time can be consumed, but actually not being as productive as we need to be. speaker-0: And that's where it really starts to hurt, right? Because on the surface it looks like things are moving. It looks like things are progressing, but underneath it's costing you, right? It's costing the organization money. It's costing the organization time. ⁓ it's costing the organization just across the board. And you've got operational costs, which might be your your high whip, your long lead times, you got bottlenecks throughout the floor, you've got constant switching with products on the floor. And I know that's something that that we've had to battle in the past that when we allow products to miss a scheduled delivery, now we're eroding that customer relationship. We're causing our guys on the floor to reschedule things, taking time, moving this, moving that. I mean, those are all all things that are costing your business. Now you don't see it. It's not a bill that you is you know, it's not an invoice that you get in and you have to pay, but you're still certainly having to pay. speaker-1: Yeah. Sometimes th whenever everyone looks so busy, it's impossible to see actually where the actual constraint is. Right. Sometimes when the whole floor's running at a hundred percent busyness, you might think you need to buy more machines, you might need to hire people, but in reality that's not true. Reality fixing maybe a fifteen minute issue or a bottleneck, and sometimes it's hiding the data you actually need to improve your business just because you're being busy. Yeah. And then also one thing we maybe didn't mention there was even the health, right? The persistent fatigue. Sometimes we're so busy, we get burnt out, right? Morale can get low, turnover can go high. And it's just because you're busy and sometimes it's easier to get frustrated whenever you're busy but not being productive because you know you're struggling to get things out right. And that can be really bad for morale. speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you've got the there's there's the frustrations that come with that. You've got the blame culture, you know, because production's blaming quality and quality's blaming engineering and engineering's blaming pr ⁓ purchasing. I mean, you've got all of these things that that can creep into it. I would say, you know, one of the things that probably impact us the most are external issues. And by that it's the sub suppliers. Like a and we really work to try to develop our sub suppliers, but there's only so much. I mean, obviously we're a smaller organization, right? 50 people, but there's only so much pool we have in somebody else's business, right? And our suppliers, ⁓ let's think about like whether it's anodizing or plating or heat treating. And we have some great suppliers. I don't want to take that away, but we have some that are not so great. And there are there are certain products that have to go to certain groups. Some of that's even assigned from our customers and they say this is where it has to go. Well, we have the communication. They need, you know, five to seven day lead time and it takes them four weeks. Right. And that just totally destroys our schedule. Now we're communicating with the customer and the customer's like, well, when are we going to have it? And we will say, Well, we think it's going to be on Tuesday, but in the end, you know, it's out of our control. So What we then try to do is the next time around, you know, we'll we'll we'll start pulling their product in, that product that we know that might take longer. You know, we're swapping our schedule around, we're spending time pulling it forward, pushing something else out, making that one kind of risky to get it to the vendor earlier, and then that time they do it in three days. So and then now you've got products sitting here sitting on the shelf for a week. I mean, this it's just a constant juggle. So working with your vendors, I mean, that can be You know, making sure that your vendors are supporting you and doing everything you can to to help develop those vendors can be really critical too. speaker-1: Right. And then what you're saying is there and you've got longer lead times, right? You're quoting longer lead times to your customers. And then that's that's at the bottom line of that is it's going to lose your business, right? Because you can't be agile enough to react to rapid response to new orders from new customers, and it's going to cost you business, even though that you feel you're already busy. I think it probably can also include some complexity creep, if you want to call it that. Sometimes because speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: We encounter issues, we tend to overreact or over manage or we over process or we over inspect, right? And we start becoming more and more busy but less and less profitable. That's a big issue that I see in our industry at the moment as well. We make it more busy than we need to, whether that's just an inspection point, whether it's additional rework, right? How many dimensions do you have to check? Well, because we're so conscientious, we're gonna check extra dimensions, right? Well speaker-0: That can also happen if if you have a rejection, then obviously, you know, maybe you had to go through a corrective action process and then and and then put in some type of added inspection, a quality alert. So these things are now just yeah, these things are now just adding more inspection where if you would have spent the time to do it right up front, you wouldn't be dealing with that, you know. speaker-1: Yeah. That's it. And when do we ever pause and we take those inspection points out again, right? Because I find in my business we're very quick to put them in because we have to protect the customer, we have to protect the next next part of the processes. But when we actually fix the root cause of that, sometimes we just leave those inspection points in and we become very, very over processing. It's not a real 'cause speaker-0: But like you said, speaker-1: Right. But at what but at what point whenever we we know we've got good product do we take that inspection step out again, right? We become we reduce our processes, reduce our you know, our our lead times and then reduce that busyness and become more productive, right? That's what we're talking about. speaker-0: No, you're right. I think it it has the ability. This is one of those things where it has the ability to constantly add product to it or parts to it or time to it, but you never take that away. It's almost like, right? It's it just continues to funnel in and maybe it is just like that funnel because you're constantly putting all this in and you only get the small amount out. So, you know, you you definitely can fight that. So I think that's a really key point to to make sure that we're aware of. speaker-1: Then even if you if we're talking about when we're talking about inspection, sometimes I see the over inspection, right? We talk about customers' eyes. Would the customer expect it or would it not? And sometimes we overinspect it, right? Really is it is it a is it a visual surface, right? Is it is it a surface that the customer cares about or is it not? And sometimes I've seen us rejecting lots of product that the customer would have no issue with, but it's calibrating our inspection. speaker-0: Right. Yeah, that's speaker-1: busy, that could cause us to to create more and more product, right? You could be paying for material twice, you could pay for labor twice, you're paying for your energy twice, but you're only selling the product once. And you can be so busy, but you're not being productive. And again, it's how do we control those processes to ensure that we're making the right business decision. speaker-0: One time. Yeah. speaker-1: Hey, it's Paul from Making Chips. If you've been burned by recruiters who don't understand manufacturing, you are not alone. That's exactly why we created Hire MFG Leaders. We're not just recruiters, we're current and former shop owners, and we know what it takes to lead in this industry. Whether you're hiring your next operations leader, sales manager, or production supervisor, we'll help you find someone who actually fits. Learn more at making chips.com/slash hire. speaker-0: don't wanna say that overtime is always bad because there are times that I think it's valuable, more valuable to me at times than adding another individual, right? Because from a financial standpoint it may cost you more to onboard someone new, to pay for the benefits and the package and everything that goes along with adding a new employee when you may not need that for the long term. Or maybe you even need some for the short term, but it's just not enough to it's enough that an overtime employee can, some overtime hours can cover what you need. But if that overtime becomes required, you know, then that's something where I think we you want to start looking at what that financial impact is. And and obviously you've got expedited freight cost that that everyone potentially deals with. ⁓ you've got the inventory build up and I and I know we've talked about this before, but I think this is something that gets lost a lot of times that ⁓ how critical inventory is and the cost of inventory, right? So often we think of inventory as like a little bit of a safety stock or you've there there's a what's the difference? I mean, it's is is safety stock and inventory, I mean they're Is that just another way that you can convince somebody that inventory is okay is just changing the name and calling it safety stock? Right. speaker-1: I'm not I'm not sold on it, but I mean there there there's a place for it, but sometimes we d we don't truly understand it and we don't truly apply the logic correctly, right? speaker-0: Correct, yeah. And so ⁓ again, those things take money because you had to buy material, you had to pay for outside services, you had to pay for labor. So obviously there are some strategic areas where you want to do that. Maybe you've got a difficult setup on a on a machine and I know that I can run a thousand pieces and I'm gonna sell five hundred this month and five hundred next month. I can batch them together at an outside processes and save money. I can save money on the setup, I can save money on the quality inspection, and I can run them all together. That That's fine. I'm not saying that, but when we have a lot of excess inventory just to try to protect ourselves because of other things we're messing up, we need to just fix those other things. And all of that goes together to just having your cash tied up. And as smaller businesses, you know, that cash flow is so critical. Like it can just really just make or break a company. I don't know the financial numbers or I don't know the statistics on it, but I would have to say obviously the percentage of new businesses that fail is extremely high. And in the end they all have to deal with the cash flow because if you don't have cash flow, then you're not gonna stay in business. And so that's something that, you know, we all gotta be aware and it's I don't think for most businesses it's probably like one thing that that does it, but it's all these little bitty items that collectively make that cash flow problem. It's a little bit here, a little bit there, a little bit there, and then that's what it brings it all together. So yeah, absolutely beam busy, it hides our problems, it doesn't solve ⁓ although we want to be busy, but ⁓ movement without flow just becomes expenses. And so that brings us to another question. Where does all of this actually come from? And I think a lot of times it can come back to leadership. Now, I might be talking to myself, I might be talking to you because we certainly I well, I don't know about you, Paul, but I know me certainly. I have made decisions that have been wrong and cost our organization money. I've made we've put in processes that were not the right thing. I mean, we've all had those experiences, but some of those shifts, some of those things that the ownership or leadership can do is when we are changing priorities midday. And some of that might be because of, you know, decisions that we're making. It's sometimes it's sales overpromising, right? And, you know, it's so hard in our industries to say no, right? We're all fighting for more sales. And there are times that we just need to say no. We can't take that on. But when the customer is standing there wanting to hand you a PO and they're like, Well, I know you quoted fourteen weeks, but we really need it in four, which happens. And then, you know, now it's like, if you can get it in four, we'll give you this purchase order. So then, you know, those dollar signs start coming through, you know, okay, well, I've this machine has been ⁓ had some open capacity for the last month. I really could handle putting this on there, but I know my engineering team are they're tied up and Quality's really busy in this other project, but yeah, we'll make that happen, right? So over commitment there that makes a big difference. speaker-1: It's a really good point. And sometimes it's good to if we're talking about what we can do as leadership, we need to standardize some of that decision making. Sometimes work can come in, right? And you're gonna maybe get send it to engineering, get engineering to look at that, what would be involved, how long would it take it, what would we need? And you get some of those numbers. But at least if we could create a quick way of looking at it, so without driving them to do four, five hours work? Is there something that they can do up front or have we got a decision matrix that allows us to make quicker decisions? Because the quicker we can come to a conclusion of whether we're actually going to do it or we're not going to do it saves time from the rest of those teams, right? speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. This segment can be really difficult, you know, for me personally. And and I don't know about you, but I mean, as we talk through these things, these are these are things that I know that I've not done properly because I I the next thing I'm thinking about is enforcing standard work, right? How often do we fall into the trap of, you know, well let's just get this one done. We just gotta get it out the door because you know, we're trying to meet a deadline or whatever. I'm not suggesting that we're s sending out subpar work, but our way of getting to that finished product can be better streamlined, better standardized to make sure that, you know, that we are operating in a situation where we are more profitable. ⁓ and I and I think that's one area that that our organization needs to do a better job is standardizing work, standardizing our setup, standardizing our process and And a lot of that comes back to just the discipline that it takes every single day for every single person to be responsible for their actions, right? And and I'm not suggesting that we don't do a great job, but we could do better. speaker-1: Even ownership of tasks. Sometimes I see people going and doing something and then maybe twenty minutes later someone will come along either to do it or to check it. And what we're doing is people's being really busy, people's being diligent, but we're not being have the correct ownership or responsibilities over certain tasks, right? Maybe it's even from a maintenance team, right? Someone's doing routine maintenance and someone does something. And then another guy from the maintenance department, he's gonna come along and say, speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. ⁓ speaker-1: ⁓ I was gonna do that, right? And he's maybe all the tools in his hand. So, or he's setting up a machine, right? I'm gonna go and set up that machine, and then he goes to a different one and there's someone already working on that machine. How well are we organized and how well do we follow standard process? And it can be very, very simple things. It's like at the end of shift, what do we do at the end of shift? Confirming all our tools are there, sweeping the floors, right? And and what happens is we get to the end of shift and everybody wants to sweep the floors into clean up and you go around and there's only there's only one brush and then the guy's well I can't sweep up because he's doing he's sweeping up right and you're like just get a second brush right that's not hard but sometimes these are the are the the silly little things and I know this is only small examples but it's all these examples together that can drive a lot of efficiency improvements into your facility right how we do it how we standardize those things speaker-0: Right. speaker-1: Even start a shift, end a shift. And whenever they become second nature and you do them in a standardized manner, you become more efficient. You you have less gaps in your processes because you're regimented in how you do it. And all of those things work together to reduce that level of noise, right? speaker-0: Yeah. Well, and the other part from a leadership standpoint is if you allow it to go undone or not done, then that's what's going to become the standard, right? And so that that is the difficult part because all of us as leaders, we have different personalities. You know, it can it can run the gamut. You're gonna have some people that are gonna be standing on top, micromanaging every single employee. breathing down their neck, screaming at ⁓ telling ⁓ to sweep the floor. Get this floor sweep. I don't there's three chips over here. I can't, you know, we're we're not gonna allow that here in our shop. ⁓ and then you've got the opposite end where it's like the the the leader is never involved. The leader just is completely absent. There's you know, re reclused into their ⁓ office. I don't know if that's even a word, but let's just imagine that it is. We all know what I'm trying to say. you've got the opposite end of that. And they just the everybody just gets free reign to do what they want to do. And if they want to sweep, they sweep. And if they don't want to sweep, they don't sweep. There's no accountability. So I think for me it's finding that balance. Right. I'm not a real confrontational person. I'm not going to be somebody that's going to be standing and screaming at at at employees. ⁓ but I also want to make sure that they're taking ownership in what they're doing. They're being professional and how they're how they're handling themselves and their areas, making sure that we are staying, keeping our area our work areas clean and safe, keeping our tools organized and reducing reducing time, you know, between jobs because we've got the tools that we need there and together. And, you know, get away from like an old school shop is like you keep everything just stacked around and there's three people in the entire shop that knows where this one thing lives and it's behind the third pile of junk over under the two pieces of scrap, you know, but they know where it's at. So I think it's really developing that culture that is giving accountability to the employees. They have something to take ownership in, but it has to be driven from the leadership so that way your team knows what winning looks like and they know what they've got to do to accomplish that. That's a very challenging thing to do. speaker-1: America is reindustrializing with unprecedented growth in aerospace and defense manufacturing. If you're a manufacturer trying to scale growth, you need ground control. Ground control automates specific workflows like FAI generation and PO review. They help over 200 manufacturers break OTD records and collect revenue faster with easy-to-use software tools. The best part? They are FedRAMP compliant and can handle ITAR and CUI data. And if you're a ProShop customer, Reach out for an exclusive integration to seamlessly create inspection plans without any manual data entry. Check them out at rungroundcontrol.com. Here's an interesting thought for you. We like to be busy, right? We like to make sure people's utilised, everyone's really productive, right? Productive. We're not talking about being real super busy. We're trying to be productive. But how how productive do we try to make people? And the tendency from us is that we want people to be busy every second of every day because we need to make as much product as we can 'cause we want to make as much money as possible. problem is sometimes we can overload people. And I have to be very careful because I'm a big driver for like lean improvement, optimization, right? Efficiency improvements. How much can we do? I'm a driver for that. But there's all there's a fine line in that that you can become too busy, right? Because whenever you become too busy trying to create product all the time. You're sacrificing other things within your business, right? You need time to rest, right, right? You have to get time for rest. You have to give time for improvements. How do you create your standard operating procedures? How do you do your Kaizen? How do you make your small improvements every day to make your business better if you're just one hundred percent focused on being productive all the time? When do we do maintenance, right, on our machines if they're running around the clock? speaker-0: Yeah, that's really good. speaker-1: When do we do training? How do we cross-train people on new machines if we're just loaded to capacity all the time? Are we getting new ideas? Is there thinking time? Do we get together as a team or are we just busy, busy, busy, busy? Our processes degrade, right? We don't improve the business because we're super busy. We're super busy. Even if we're being productive, we can be too busy and it can then hamper our future growth. And that puts us in a risk then in the next phase of your business, right? So I don't know what your thoughts are around that, but if we load our people to a hundred percent capacity, it it's still a risk, right? And you're probably setting yourself up to feel because can you ask your team or your machine or your business to run at 100% capacity all the time? Or how much slack, if you want to call it that, do we build into our business? How much do we plan? Do we do we load to ninety percent? Or do we load till a hundred percent, right? And then if you fall behind, you're already running then overtime to recover. Or do you plan for ninety percent, knowing that you're gonna have failures, knowing you're gonna have downtime, and that's gonna take up the rest of the ten percent anyway, or or how do you give your team opportunity to work on business improvements? Mm-hmm. speaker-0: Well, I think that takes us into what productivity actually looks like. What does a truly productive operation feel like? There are things that we're gonna, you know, is that a unicorn? You know, it's like I I mean, I really think at the end of the day, it's like this we all know what what it should be, but then when you get there, it probably doesn't even feel right. ⁓ because I think, you know, once you've once you've done that, that product speaker-1: It's like speaker-0: Activity, being extremely productive can again feel boring compared to that chaos, but it scales. It allows you to scale from a smaller operation to a larger operation because you're putting those things in there. But, you know, that that clear priorities, right? I think you really hit the nail on the head with we want to work, work, work, parts, parts, parts, ship, ship, ship. Those are so critical. But if I know as an individual, one of the things I love to do is when I travel, I like to travel by myself. Like from a business standpoint, I like to travel by myself and I get in an airport. I enjoy I enjoy a layover. I enjoy a long flight because I put in headphones and I just focus uninterrupted. I don't know anybody. I'm not answering questions. And I'm able to just focus on the business and I can take that time to clear my head of the day to day and really look on strategic things, the vision aspect. What are we what are things that we can do to help us improve? And I have this great list of things. And then I get back into the office and it's like so hard to accomplish those things because it's like, well, we need guys to do these parts and we need you guys to do those parts and we got to move that. And you can get drawn into that. So stopping and making sure that you have some time every day or some time every week to focus on building the business, not just with yourself. We've talked about it before and I've heard it a hundred times. It's work on the business, not in the business. That's part of it. But we gotta one thing I think I've missed a lot and ⁓ probably a lot of people is that's not just true for you as a leader, as an owner, as a manager, but that needs to be true for everybody across the organization. You need to take because if you don't take the time to allow the people across the entire organization in engineering, in production, every machine operator, ⁓ across the board, if you don't allow them time to improve the business, you know, you're talking about big structural things. Well, you need to improve the small things too, because if you're building that house, that bottom, that foundation has to be very, very sturdy and you can't scale that unless you built that foundation. And you need everybody to take time To build that business. speaker-1: to grow your business, it needs to be predictable, it needs to be repeatable, it needs to be not a one-off. You need to do it every week, every month, it needs to be reliable. You need to know what you're gonna get. And sometimes we run it the busy way, right? Constant overtime. There's hot orders, jump in the queue. We scream about our deadlines. But we can do it the productive way, right? Where the shift ends exactly on time because the machines ran at the planned rate, the materials were where they should be at the right time. And the team followed the standardized process. Right. And if we do that, we'll actually then lower the whip. Right. So it's about shipping your five orders. It's not about putting five orders into your processes. It's about getting them out the other side. Taking away that busyness and actually being productive. So we said earlier, right, if we if we're loading our business to 100% capacity, you're planning on your setup times being optimal, the machines running exactly on time. every part being exactly where you need it at the right time. And we drive that because we want to be as productive as possible. But what we're doing is we're setting up the business to fail by putting too much pressure in our systems. Whereas if you can set it up to be repeatable and reliable, you can then gradually turn that up, right? As you grow and scale your business. So yeah, the busy way, right? The busy way, parts moved across the factory maybe three times. They're stored in a warehouse that I stuck speaker-0: Right. speaker-1: you know, at the start, then you bring it back to try and finish your product. You're being super busy, but you're not being super productive. Or you can do it the productive way, wait till you have the materials, you build it right first time, you complete it and you ship it in the most cost effective manner. And what you're doing is you're taking all that hard work, unnecessary work away and doing the value added work that your customer wants to pay for. Removing the business and being productive. speaker-0: And this is a a really hard part for organizations, I think, to make that step because if you're already struggling about your schedules, if you're already in this chaos, how do you take the extra time to to improve it so that way that job becomes more calm, you know, you bring more calm to the business. Like that's that's a that's a hard, hard thing to do. But I don't even want to pretend I have answers for for that for that one. speaker-1: It takes you to be brave though, right? speaker-0: Yeah. It does because, you know, you're just fighting, fighting, fighting just to make your deliveries and then you now have to like, ⁓ well, wait a minute. I was already like struggling to make my deliveries. Now I've got to slow down and, you know, but but again, it comes back to the tortoise and the hare. It comes back to the, you know, steady equals consistency equals profitability. I mean, all those things. In the long run, they're worth it to take that extra time. I mean, is it gonna be challenging for three months or six months? Absolutely. ⁓ but once you've spent that time to develop those processes, those systems to get that ⁓ there, you're gonna help create more of a calm factory. And remember that's not lazy, that's discipline, right? There's a difference in that. speaker-1: discipline. The steady hand holds a full cup, right? You've heard that one before. speaker-0: Yeah. No, not in not in America. No, I'm kidding. No. speaker-1: Maybe that's an old tea joke. Is that is that a T joke? It might be. It's true, right? If you're holding a steady hand, you can hold the full cup. But if you're there and you're under pressure and the business is shaking and everyone's running around panicking, you just create more chaos. You create more spills, there's more waste, and you're not maximizing the profitability of your business. speaker-0: It might be, yeah. Right. So at this point we've talked about ⁓ a number of things. We talked about why busy feels safe. ⁓ you know, being busy makes you feel like that you're accomplishing tasks, that you're doing something. We've talked about what busy looks like, and that's the you know, whether it's the reshuffling of your schedule, your expediting material, your your jump through hoops. You got people moving about the business that are ⁓ just constant constant movement. We talked about the hidden cost and how the high whip or long lead times can stretch out. Those are from your operational side. You've got your your people side is the burnout or the blame culture, frustrations. You've got financial side where you've got overtime piling up, expedited freight, those types of things. We cover the leadership responsibility, which is, you know, it's important for your leaders to make sure they're taking responsibility and taking ownership and that they're not creating that culture ⁓ by Allowing sales to overpromise or changing your priorities midday, making sure that you enforce a standard work. ⁓ what does productivity actually look like, right? Setting those clear priorities, creating a stables stable schedule, ⁓ having clean handoffs, using standard work, those are really critical. And now let's let's maybe take a look at like a practical putting these things in practice, giving some action to this is, you know. Defining what a daily win looks like. Right. I think one of the things that we don't do the best job in in our business is d giving somebody the details on what a daily win looks like. What is your number one priority for the day? And at the end of the day, if this is accomplished then you've won. It's easy for us to say, ⁓ well, get as many parts as you can, right? And while I think that's great if, you know, they should get a hundred parts and they need to run a hundred parts, but if they run a hundred and twenty and they kill themselves, then was that a productive day? Was that a good day? I don't know. I mean getting to a hundred parts would have been a win. And so make sure that's clearly defined for your team. speaker-1: You're right. It's what we've talked about, right? Predictable schedule. It's about it's about knowing what you're putting in and knowing shipping. What's your plan to ship, is that what you achieved? We said at the start. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. And you need to figure out how you manage and measure your business. speaker-0: Yeah. To me there's there's four things. I want to limit the whip. I want to make sure that we that we start things and we finish things, right? That's exactly what you spoke about earlier. Because if we're starting multiple jobs and then we're pulling off, I mean we're moving things around, it's causing problems. So some of that can be ⁓ attributed to many factors. It can be outside services, it could be materials, it could be tools not there, gauges, but working on the process so that you you can limit your whip. The third thing is looking at your overtime, looking at your firefighting, those kind of two things to me go together a little bit because, you know, set your schedule and work to your schedule, not shifting it around so often if you can. And also not having to pull in the overtime just to cover up those problems, right? So getting those things fixed up front and then Tracking repeat issues, right? If it happens weekly, fix it. If there's something you deal with every single week, fix it now because it's going to save you time in the long run. If it happens monthly, yeah, you probably need to fix that too. But definitely if it's something that you're dealing with every single week, make a change and go fix that problem. speaker-1: Sometimes we talk about five S and we apply it really only to items, right? We sort the necessary from the unnecessary. But when do we apply that to our time? Right. Our calendars, our meetings, even our processes. Take a step back, make note of actually what we do in our week or in our day and go along and say necessary or unnecessary. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: What's the frequency that we're doing these things? And how do we strip out some of that busyness so that we can be more productive? How do we stop ourselves running at a hundred percent capacity or a hundred and ten percent capacity? How do we strip that down to ninety percent, eighty percent capacity, and then actually start working proactively on the parts of the business that we need to? So yeah. Sort your necessary from your unnecessary time. speaker-0: Yeah, because you're not gonna fix busy with more effort. You fix busy with better systems, right? And giving yourself the opportunity to make yourself better, your organization better, your team better. At the end of the day, it's not about being busy or not busy. It's about whether your operation is actually moving forward. Do you have the ability to scale and and knowing that profit doesn't come from effort, that profit comes from the flow, right? It comes from the operation that's able to flow products. Point A, point B and not having or maybe that's point A to point D and not having to stop at B and C, go back to B, go back to A, back to C, B and then D. Getting those flowed straight through all the way from start to finish. So thanks for joining us today on the manufacturing blueprint. If you got value from this episode, make sure to follow or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. And if you'd leave a quick rating and review, it really helps us to grow the show to others in the manufacturing community. And if you know about another manufacturing leader who's dealing with this, share this episode with them. And remember, we're not just talking shop. We're giving you the blueprint to build it. We'll see you on the next episode.