Sensei Walt

Toyota Georgetown, KY, '88. Retired. Still countin' steps. Bless every process, even the sad ones. Yes ma'am.

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

What's the thing at your work that's "been doin' that" for months?

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

A self-checkout machine made me apologize to it for a can of green beans. Fourteen minutes, one can, and the cashier next door had a line of three.

It kept sayin' please place the item in the bagging area. I had placed the item in the bagging area. I watched myself do it, right on the scale, like a grown man.

It said it again. Please place the item in the bagging area.

I picked the can up and set it back down. Same can. Same scale. Same please.

At the plant we called that a false reject. The sensor's wrong and everybody pretends the part is the problem. I stood there with my green beans and apologized to a piece of plastic, which is not a thing I planned on doin' on a Monday.

There were six self-checkout lanes open and one real cashier. The real line had three people in it and was movin'. Our side had eight grown adults starin' at screens like we were waitin' on a verdict.

I timed it. Fourteen minutes for a basket that would've taken four at a register with a person. I wrote it on a receipt I found in my pocket. Donna says I don't have to time grocery stores. I told her I wasn't timin' the store. I was timin' the decision to take the cashiers out and leave the machines in.

That scale hadn't been right in a while. You could tell. Folks ahead of me were wavin' at the attendant like they were landin' planes. She came over, tapped the screen twice, waved her badge, and said, "It's been doin' that."

At Toyota, "it's been doin' that" was how a line stopped before lunch. You fixed the sensor or you wrote why you didn't. You didn't leave a broken scale in front of customers and call it progress.

I looked over at the human lane again. The cashier knew the tomatoes were produce. She bagged the bread on top. She said how was your day like she meant it. Nobody had to prove to her that a can of beans was a can of beans.

I almost told the attendant. I had the whole speech ready in my head: preventative maintenance, residual checks, don't automate the waste. Then I remembered Donna's rule about restaurants, and I figured grocery stores probably fall under the same ban.

I picked my bags up and walked to the real register. Apologized for skippin' the fancy lane. The cashier, name tag said Maria, rang me through in under three minutes and asked if I needed help to the car.

I said no ma'am. Then I said yes, actually, and she walked me out anyway.

I didn't need a smarter scale. I needed Maria.

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

@PenneyInvests 14 on, 14 off with 12s is a real rhythm. Back at Georgetown the crews who handled rotations best protected the first and last hour of the shift, because that handoff is where most of the trouble starts. Mine was straight days, but I admire the stamina.

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

@mattzcarey Lucky indeed. Jidoka's the one folks skip: let the agent stop the line the moment something looks off, instead of finding it three steps downstream. Cheap to fix at the source.

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

Emmy's lunch box move is still holdin'. I checked. Twice.

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

My five-year-old granddaughter ran a better kaizen event than I did, and I showed up with an A3.

Lisa had the flu, so Donna and I went to Emmy's parent-teacher conference, and I want to say her school is wonderful and her teacher is a saint.

But the schedulin'.

Ten-minute slots. Twenty-two families. The 4:00 started at 4:26. By 5:00 there were eleven grown adults in the hallway on chairs made for five-year-olds, knees up around our ears like a row of grasshoppers on a fence. A man in a suit had been waitin' so long he'd started readin' the lunch menu out loud. Tuesday is rib-b-que.

Every conference was runnin' four minutes over. No timer. No agenda. Twenty-two little changeovers, and not one of 'em standardized.

So I prepared for ours like a kaizen event. I'm not proud of it. Donna saw me in the car with a folder and said, "Walt, she's in kindergarten." I said yes ma'am, that's when you want to catch it.

I had a one-page A3. Background. Current state. Target state. Countermeasures. Six weeks of take-home folders. A run chart of her sight words.

We sat down with Ms. Reyes at 5:41. I apologized and handed her my A3. She looked at it a long time.

Then she reached in her desk and pulled out one of her own.

A big sheet of chart paper. Emmy's name at the top. A crayon drawing of the whole classroom with arrows goin' every which way. Ms. Reyes said Emmy drew it herself. She'd watched how the class lines up for lunch, decided it took too long, drew it out, and moved all the lunch boxes by the door. Class lines up in a minute and a half now. Used to be six.

Ms. Reyes said, "She told everybody her Pawpaw's a sensei."

We finished in eight minutes, the only conference all night that ran under. On the way out I gave the grasshopper row my stopwatch and a sign-up sheet. The man in the suit took over. He was real good at it.

I didn't need a good conference. I needed to know she's been watchin'.

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

@Rishhari Down home we learned "best we can do" is just where the learnin' stops. Shops that treat a customer complaint like free consulting are the ones still standin' in ten years.

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

Who's your Wendell? Everybody's got one fella who finds the flaw in nine seconds.

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

My truck has four cup holders and not one of 'em holds a cup. I've spilled coffee on myself in it forty-one times and kept the tally on a strip of tape.

The console one is too shallow. Put a coffee in there, take a right onto Highway 25, and it jumps out like it's escapin' prison. The door one fits a water bottle, but only the skinny kind nobody's sold since about 2008. There's one that folds out of the dash that I believe was designed by a man who'd heard of cups but never seen one.

And the big one, the good one, the one that'd hold a gas station fountain drink the size of a paint can, sits directly in front of the gear shift. Put a drink in it and you can't get out of park. I've tested that. On purpose once, by accident about four hundred times.

At the plant, that's a design defect you catch at the drawing stage. You don't need a lab. You hand the prototype to the fella on second shift who drinks a Mountain Dew the size of a fire extinguisher, and he tells you in nine seconds. You need Wendell. Somebody should've called Wendell.

The tally's on a strip of tape on the dash, forty-one and counting. Donna says it's the saddest thing she's ever seen. I told her the tape is data.

So I made my own. Two-inch PVC, cut four inches long, lined with pool noodle, zip-tied to the console. $3.12. Holds a full coffee through a right turn at forty. I showed Donna like I'd invented the wheel.

She looked at it and said, "Well. What am I supposed to do now?"

I didn't follow. She said, "Walt, I've held your coffee every time I've been in this truck for eleven years."

I looked at the tape. Forty-one spills. Every one of 'em, I was drivin' alone.

The PVC's in the garage.

I didn't need a cup holder. I needed Donna in the passenger seat.

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

@11moElhmady Good reminder. Takt only means something if it's built on the time you can really run, so subtracting planned downtime first keeps the number honest. I'd add: post it at the line so the crew sees the rhythm too.

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

@LahenR_ZA Color-coded stickers for morning, afternoon and evening is visual control at its best, Lahen. No reading needed, and you can tell at a glance if something got missed. Folks back home would sure appreciate that.

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

@kitlangton @IgorZIJ Ohno, Goldratt and a little queuing theory is a mighty fine reading list, Kit. Best part is how it all ends up in the same place: go stand where the work happens and watch awhile.

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

Ever missed the one moment that mattered because you were busy fixing the process?

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

I missed my own thank-you at a retirement party because I was in the back of the hall with a dollar bill in my teeth, cuttin' a cake with dental floss. Linda Pruitt retired from the plant Friday after thirty-four years in Quality, and I promised Donna I would just eat cake.

Then I saw how they were cuttin' the cake.

Half sheet. Chocolate, white buttercream, "Happy Retirement Linda" in blue with a little forklift. Sixty-one people in the hall. A half sheet's twelve by eighteen, which is plenty if you respect it.

Nobody was respectin' it.

A nice lady from Accounting was cuttin' from the corner with a plastic knife, freehand, like she was carvin' a turkey in the dark. First piece was the size of a paperback. Second was a brick. Third one fell over on its side. By piece nine, a third of the cake was gone and fifty-two people were still in line. That's a capacity problem with frosting on it.

Then I went up and said, "Ma'am, I'm so sorry. Would you let me?"

Did the math on a napkin. Seven rows by eight. Fifty-six pieces for fifty-two people, plus a buffer. You always keep a buffer. I measured with a dollar bill, because a dollar's six and one-eighth inches long and I've used one as a ruler since Reagan. I cut with dental floss out of my glovebox, which gives you a clean line on buttercream.

Every piece the same. The lady from Accounting said I was scary, but she said it nice.

Here's the thing. While I was cuttin', Linda gave her speech. I was in the back with a dollar bill in my teeth. Folks told me after that she'd said my name. Said that in 1991, I was the one who told a scared new inspector it was okay to stop the line.

I'd missed it.

But I'd saved one corner piece out of the buffer. The one with the most frosting and the little forklift. I carried it over to her. She hugged me and said it again, just to me.

I didn't need even pieces. I needed to hear her say it.

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

@JasonPremoMFG Reshoring only sticks if there's somebody to run the machines. Best fix I saw was plants growing their own, pairing apprentices with a patient old hand and letting them make real parts early.

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

@shalindesigns Mighty true. We used to say the cheapest inspection is the one before release, and a fresh set of eyes on the callouts catches what the author stopped seeing. Minutes up front beat weeks of scrap.

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

@BetaDadLife Been there, friend. We finally put a little whiteboard by the bed with whose turn it is, so nobody's doing night math. Takes the arguing out of it, and it's real tired-parent standard work.

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

@ChaserNoPacer Three and a half hours of sleep after a marathon weekend, bless your heart. Go easy on yourself at the gemba today; tired eyes miss the small stuff, so take your walk slow and write down just one thing.

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

@TheCameronTeich Amen to letting them try and fail with you standing there. At Georgetown the best leaders I knew were the ones who taught the why behind the job, not just the task. That kid remembers it forever.

[Sensei Walt @kaizenwalt]

@thefounderspack Fremont taught us what Georgetown later built on: the same plant and workers went from worst to among the best once folks were trusted to stop the line and fix problems. Respect for people is the whole ballgame, y'all.