This is what Real World Problem Solving looks like (aka Lean)

When I was still in college, I worked for a garage door manufacturer who had created a new type of garage door that featured plastic thermal panels. There was immense interest in the product and we received thousands of pre-orders.

The problem was that we had issues with just about every aspect of the production process of the doors, from poor quality of door panels, and the need to manually build the door frame manually to difficulty in packing the doors for shipment.

With this backdrop, the VP of Engineering asked me to step in and ‘figure’ out how to get shipments out the door. At the time I took over, we were able to produce 25 doors a day and with a backlog of over 15,000 doors, we were in serious jeopardy of orders canceling and having this promising new product fail before it even had a chance to succeed.

At this time, I had no experience in process improvement, just the mindset I learned how to play drums, take one thing, master it, and move on.

So the first thing we needed to address was the quality of the thermal door panels. After talking with our third-party vendor who could not commit to higher quality or higher production numbers, I suggested that we buy our own plastic molding equipment, buy the templates from the vendor and do it ourselves. This entire process change took just over 4 months, from the time we evaluate systems to the installation and production of door panels for the production line. The first problem solved.

Once we were able to start developing door panels in sufficient quantity, the next problem was that the molding machine was at the entire end of the large warehouse, which caused delays as we had just a single pallet that we could put enough panels to build 3–4 doors. The production line started having to wait for the next replenishment, so I needed to solve the next problem, how to transport more raw goods to the production line.

Working with the maintenance team, they build stackable metal frames that would hold 4 doors of panels and we could stack them 3 high and transport them via forklift. Now the production line had a steady stream of door panels to build doors. The second problem solved.

Now that we had sufficient raw goods waiting for the production line, I saw that the production line was limited in production throughput because they were still hand-cranking bolts into the frame which was time-consuming. Going back to my maintenance team, they worked to drop pneumatic lines to the production line so the assemblers could use power drills, this vastly reduced the time to build a complete door (typically 4 individual panel frames). The third problem solved.

Now that we had addressed the overall production delays, we then started to see a backup on the packing line, which then caused slow-downs in how quickly we could build the doors. So back to my maintenance team. We discussed various solutions but went with the simplest, they extended the length of the assembly table to accommodate up to 4 door panels, over just one, this allowed the assemblers some slack on their side. This however didn’t really solve the flow problem so we decided to extend the length of the packing line to accommodate up to 10 unpacked doors. This improved flow however it really exposed the biggest impediment, which was context switching.

We sold multiple widths of doors from 12ft to 18ft and each door had it’s own box material for packing. Every time the door size changed, the packers would have to manually move 4 different rolling carts to bring the correct packing box to the line. To address this challenge, I asked our cardboard vendor to come in for a visit. As we talked through the problem the vendor suggested that we do away with the four different cardboard types and instead use one master board, with four different creases that could be used for the four different door sizes. This eliminated the time-consuming swapping out of cardboard carts and removed the remaining impediments to smooth-flowing products out the door. The fourth problem solved.

What was truly unique about this was that I was only 19 years old and had zero experience other than working on another production line and driving a forklift, yet the VP of Engineering empowered me to solve the problem, asking me only to check in with him to know when we had to spend money.

The takeaway? This is how change happens. It doesn’t happen by someone telling you about an approach or framework that will solve the problem. The ideas and concepts can help, but there is no substitution for rolling up your sleeves and actively engaging in solving a complex set of problems.

As a leader of an organization, who may have spent millions on an agile transformation, it is unlikely you have materially changed your organization because based on my experience, you have been missing in action. The challenges faced in attempting to develop operational agility are not small and cannot be accomplished by your people, especially as they are not typically empowered to solve their challenges, instead, they are asked to learn a framework, which to have any success requires making operational changes to your business processes.

The changes that I helped initiate over the course of 7 months, allowed us to increase our daily garage door production from 25 to almost 300, which allowed us to reduce our order backlog quickly.

As an Agile coach, this is my approach to helping organizations adapt agile frameworks to how they work.

To work with me contact me at michael@soundagile.com