The Automation Trap: One Shop’s Hard Lesson in Lean Thinking, Ep #19

[0:00] Eric Nekich: You’ve got to take time to look at like the status quo, right? How else do you know what’s improving? How much it’s improving, right? Where the true bottlenecks are, the root causes. Without that lens, you’re just gonna continue to, like you said, whack-a-mole.

[0:30] Mike Payne: All right. Shop owners, listen up here. I think all of us know we are in one of the most in capital intensive businesses. There is, and margins are tight and we’re, we’re always fighting issues. And then when we make money, what do we do with it? Stock market’s up and down all over the place. Well, I get asked a lot about where can I invest my money?

[0:40] I. I’m a firm believer as business owners, you’ve gotta invest in yourself first. You need to reinvest capital into yourself. So the number one thing that I’ve done in this industry investing was ProShop, ERP. We’ve been using ProShop since 2018, and my payback literally was within weeks with their per user based pricing.

[1:10] I knew when I made the decision I only needed to save my workers roughly one hour per month. We saw within the first week we were saving multiple hours per day. That type of ROI just doesn’t come along very often. Outside of that, the real value has been able to quickly implement best practices across my entire shop from the time we get an order to the time we ship it.

[1:30] Scaling my business with confidence, being able to go out and know that I can deliver on my promise to deliver quality parts to my customer, and then gaining insights into every job, employee machine, and every process in our business to really drive efficiency and look for opportunities for improvement.

[1:50] That’s where the real value in your business drives. So visit ProShop erp.com, book a demo, and start realizing ROI today. That’s ProShop erp.com.

[2:00] Narrator: Talent is scarce experience. Even more so. Driving a cost in sleepless nights. You may even think to yourself, can I do this? But this new era brings new technology and a different perspective on your operations.

[2:20] What you will hear will turn on a light bulb in your mind, so you can turn out the lights in your shop, get ready to. Sleep soundly while your shop never stops. Get ready for making chips. Lights out with your hosts, Nick Goner, Caleb Merck and David Buick.

[2:50] Nick Goellner: What’s up everybody? How you doing?

Speaker 5: Hey Nick. Hello. Hello.

[3:00] Nick Goellner: Hey, so Eric, I know you’re new to podcast hosting, but you don’t just wave when somebody talks to you because it’s audio. Oh. So if you just, okay. Welcome back. Noted. Hey, we got another guy back

Dave Vuyk: here too. What’s up, Dave? Hey, not too much. Thanks for, uh, did you move?

[3:10] Welcome me back. We’re in process right now. Moving is always a lot more work than you want it to be, especially this one, but we’re getting close to the end.

[3:20] Nick Goellner: Yeah, I got some flack from Mike and Paul, the making chips guys, about like how I talked about moving for four months and how hard it was, and then.

[3:30] Mike just goes, Hey, do you notice how Paul moved? And we didn’t even know about it. And then they were like, why didn’t you hire movers? I’m like, Hey guys, I did hire movers. You know, the problem is my wife and I didn’t have anything in boxes, so they just moved the big stuff. And then they looked at me, these two guys, and they were like, what do we do now?

You want us to move all your miscellaneous items? And I ended up doing way too much.

[3:50] Dave Vuyk: So the hopefully takeaway here is, the takeaway here is be more like Paul.

[4:00] Nick Goellner: Yeah, be more like Paul and hopefully more like Klaus and less like Gary because I don’t know. I mean, we got some good feedback on the first episode, but there’s a lot of people who are heartbroken over Gary’s struggles and I think it might get worse today.

Dave Vuyk: Yeah.

Nick Goellner: Gary’s

Dave Vuyk: in a tough spot. Poor Gary.

[4:10] Nick Goellner: What did you guys think of Dave? You were just a listener. You weren’t on the episode, so as the listener, what did you think

[4:20] Dave Vuyk: as your man on the outside? You know what? I think it’s super relatable, right? Because we’ve all been in those seasons of working in a business where things are incredibly busy.

[4:30] And you’re just trying to throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks. But the reality is when there’s no underlying strategy, especially in this case, some kind of an automation strategy, that journey can just be fraught with peril, which is exactly what we’re seeing here. So probably a lot of the sadness for Gary is due to the fact that I bet you a lot of people can relate to what he’s going through.

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[4:50] Nick Goellner: lot of Gary’s out there. What’s your takeaway, Eric?

[5:00] Eric Nekich: No, I’m gonna agree with Dave, right? I think that in any part of that story, probably most shop owners, production managers, everybody can probably find some symmetry for either what’s going on in their shop now, or maybe even a manufacturing challenge.

They’ve already been fortunate enough to address.

[5:10] Nick Goellner: Speaking of challenges, to address today’s episode, I wish I could tell you that everything gets better for Gary, but. I’ll get to reading here. I don’t wanna ruin the story. It probably doesn’t. Okay. Gary wasn’t exactly set up for success, but before we go into it today, like the whole reason we’re doing this narrative is we truly wanna equip and inspire people to think about lights out the right way and.

[5:40] I think it’s essential to have some sort of background understanding of lean concepts, if you’re gonna be involved in anything related to improving processes or automating things, or just throughput in general. So I wanna talk about the eight wastes of lean. And we will pick them out of the story as I read today.

[6:00] But in no particular order, one of the waste is defects. So that would be waste from a product or service that fails to meet customer expectations. In this case, parts outta spec, parts outta tolerance. Another one, and this one can be a little bit counterintuitive for people, but like. Overproduction. This one’s probably the most obvious in the story after the robot gets applied.

[6:20] Yep. He starts producing a lot, but it’s more than the customer’s demand. And a concept we use a lot at Goldner Inc. Is the customer isn’t just the person who buys the products from us, the company that buys the products that we ship the finished product to, it’s whoever’s ne next in line. And so you wanna have a lean, what’s the name of Closest Shop?

[6:40] Lean Stream. It’s. A constant flow. It’s not these spikes, these peaks and valleys where everyone’s like super stressed or they don’t have anything to do. And so when you’re overburdening the bottleneck by overproduction, that’s obviously one of the forms of waste that we’re witnessing the story. Another is waiting.

[7:00] So anytime you’re waiting in queue, we call this white space a lot at the business, but just something just sitting there. No one can touch it. We’re waiting on Eric. Remember when you were telling me your swear words in sales? Yes, I could. What? What are they again?

[7:10] Eric Nekich: Following up. Checking in. Those are the worst ones.

Following. Yeah. And for me, uh, do you remember what I said? You’ll have to remind me. I apologize. Uh,

[7:20] Nick Goellner: hey, I’m just waiting on

Eric Nekich: Oh, yeah. Waiting on it. Yeah. Uhhuh. Absolutely. It’s

[7:30] Nick Goellner: like, well then. Figure out what the next step is. Don’t just have this be like, oh, someday they’ll get back to me. I’m always like, all right, let’s work with whoever’s next and be like, can we commit to a date?

[7:40] Yeah, absolutely. For a certain date, this is probably my favorite one. We’re putting it right in the middle here. I wish I would’ve bookended it, but I’m reading from a list, unused talent or. Unused employee creativity. A lot of times when you see like a list of the waste in lean, it’s seven of ’em, and sometimes it doesn’t include this one, which I think is insane.

[8:00] ’cause this I think is maybe the most important form of waste. You’ve got a team that you’re treating humans like robots, and so you’re not letting them use their God-given gifts and their creativity. We were put on this earth to create things and to create solutions to problems and. What happens, and you’ll see in the story today, like people get locked into a certain thing and then they just become, I say this a lot, right?

[8:20] The humans are taking their robot jobs. It’s not the other way around.

Eric Nekich: Correct. Yeah. No, that’s a great way of putting it.

[8:30] Nick Goellner: Yeah, because it’s always like, oh, if we had automation, people will lose their jobs. And I’m like, that’s the jobs nobody wants to do anyway. So next is transportation or motion.

[8:40] Sometimes it’s called, but it’s just. Wasted time and resources and costs when unnecessarily moving products and materials. So we’ll be able to point some of this out in the story today. Then there’s inventory when you have waste resulting from excess products and materials that aren’t processed, carrying too much inventory any finance person knows that could be a killer.

[9:00] Eric Nekich: Sure. Operation to Operation wip. Uh, you? Yeah.

[9:10] Nick Goellner: I said transportation is sometimes motion. Those are actually two different things. Motion is wasted time and effort related to unnecessary movements by people. Sometimes people when they first do like value stream mapping, they realize like, why is this here?

[9:20] And that on the other side of the shop, like that little travel time might take 30 seconds or two minutes or whatever it is to get from one corner to the other. But you add that up and. Huge waste over the course of a year.

[9:30] Eric Nekich: So when, so I understand this correctly, Nick, then when we’re talking about motion, like this would be why people might build a manufacturing cell or focus on one piece workflow or something like that.

Okay.

[9:40] Dave Vuyk: Yeah. Think of all the, all the reasons someone might leave a machine to go get something, whether that’s tooling materials, maybe instructions from either from a document or from a superior.

Speaker 5: Yeah,

[9:50] Nick Goellner: exactly. Transportation though I had these kind of blended together ’cause they’re so similar. That’s wasted time, resources and costs on unnecessarily moving products and materials.

[10:00] Whereas motions as people unnecessarily moving around and when I think about. Motion. I always think about like when they break down quarterbacks in the NFL or when they’re like assessing rookie quarterbacks and they’re like, man, there’s so much wasted motion in there. Or a golfer, someone with a bad swing has wasted motion in their swing and it’s less efficient and there’s more opportunities.

[10:20] You can use my name in that case if you want, Nick.

Eric Nekich: Yes, you can say the eight wants

[10:30] Nick Goellner: F or Charles Barkley swing a golf course. And then the final, the eight is extra processing. So this is waste related to more work or higher or work that’s higher quality than is required. So this is where the Klaus of the world and the Germans are like, oh, they over-engineered it.

[10:40] Or you know, we had it exactly where it needed to be and then we took it one step further. So it’s, that’s an interesting one though, when you’ve already got the commitment and they keep selling it to you, it’s just Shut up.

Dave Vuyk: Go ahead Dave.

Nick Goellner: Yeah,

Dave Vuyk: I was just gonna say on the extra processing, sometimes prints are over tolerance, sometimes they’re under tolerance.

[11:00] But you know that the product you want going out of your machine shop is gonna be. Fantastic quality and give a great impression. So I always find that’s a bit of a two-edged sword. Even if it’s not calling out for all machines, all sides to be machine on a part, a lot of people might choose to do it anyways just so that the parts that are going out the door look really, really nice.

[11:20] Yeah, exactly. There’s a fine

[11:30] Nick Goellner: line there, right between like providing this incredible unparalleled experience and then just like overprocessing things just and being wasteful. It’s funny because it’s really easy to be on different sides of the line, depending on kind of your generation, your personality, how you think about things.

[11:40] But we would talk, and I know this is not the same thing, but we would talk with my grandfather who invented a sawing machine about how the enclosure’s gonna look and the aesthetics of the machine. And he’s just, that doesn’t help production at all. Nobody cares about it. And then my thought was like, someone’s gonna spend over a million dollars on a piece of capital equipment.

[12:00] They’re gonna wanna like show it off and have it look cool and. There’s like a within reason caveat there. It doesn’t need to look like a Lamborghini with all these bends and glossy paint and things like that. At the same time, if it just looks like a, something that came from iron clunk, machining and is very clunky and ugly.

Yeah. Alright, get you guys ready to dive in.

Eric Nekich: Yeah. I can’t wait for part two of this story. Episode two two.

[12:20] Dave Vuyk: Cue the scene. Should we reiterate where we left off last time? A little bit just to, yeah, yeah. Actually, because

[12:30] Nick Goellner: people may not have, so first off, if you haven’t listened to any of this. Story yet, we’ve got the first episode in the bag.

You can find it, one episode behind this one, and it’s probably gonna be four, maybe five total episodes. But yeah, we’re telling a narrative of Klaus and Gary and how did it end for us, Dave?

[12:40] Dave Vuyk: Yeah, so towards the end of the previous episode, Gary was awarded a big job from shrewd tech enterprises and true tech.

[13:00] Even indicated that they thought they were taking a bit of a chance on Gary. This was his opportunity to show them what he had to offer. So he had a bit of anxiety going into this job, and now we need to see if he’s able to deliver on it or not.

[13:10] Eric Nekich: He’s got that shiny new cobot ready to rip and make tons of money on this shrewd tech deal.

Right?

[13:20] Nick Goellner: Yeah. And. He thinks he’s gonna make tons of money. He thinks he’s gonna be just like Klaus. ’cause he wants to maximize the spindle utilization also, please, no

Eric Nekich: spoilers. Yeah,

[13:30] Nick Goellner: he also only got the job because he underbid Klaus. Klaus was too busy. He bid it super low, so there’s no tons of money when you do that.

And yeah, he’s just trying to improve the wrong metric without spoiling it too much. So let’s let dive.

[13:40] Dave Vuyk: I wonder if that cobots gonna solve all his problems or not. I’m so eager to find out.

[13:50] Nick Goellner: We are really bad at Splash. I didn’t say exactly what I bought you for Christmas. I just described everything about it.

[14:00] That’s what I do with my wife. Okay. So the shrewd tech contract was supposed to save iron clunk machining, but Gary’s cobalt, a used relic from an online auction, turns his shop into a pressure cooker. The robot turns out parts overnight loading and unloading and auto clamping single station, but still dinosaur ice on one of the three axis mills.

[14:20] But the cobot is blind to quality parts, pile up half out of tolerance, amplifying the bottleneck at Earl’s quality department. Bill and Bob, the veteran machinists fumble with the cobot setup, cursing. Its crypto controls, no manual, no support, because remember they got it from an auction and it’s just Gary watching YouTube videos until dawn.

[14:40] And so to make it work, he sinks more cash into replacing the automatic vice. It’s clamp. UNC clamp cycle was a complete mystery that he deciphers through trial and error. All of that tied up his mill for several days after getting it to work. Without human intervention, the shop’s chaos deepens because piles of raw material clog the floor.

[15:00] Job travelers vanish and the cobot relentless output only feeds the mess, which is of course, guys a textbook case of overproduction waste burying iron clock in inventory that it cannot process. Man. It sounds like Gary’s trying to fight fire with fire over here. That’s a great way to put it.

[15:20] Eric Nekich: Yeah. I think we even mentioned that in last week’s episode, but this is like the classic case of throwing good money on top of bad.

[15:30] Nick Goellner: Mm-hmm. So we use the term dinosaur vice a lot ’cause we don’t wanna name names. And there’s some brands out there that make a particular kind of vice. And also those same brands make more modern vice too. But what is a. Dinosaur vice. Eric, what does that mean? You’re the work holding expert.

Eric Nekich: Sure. I mean, it’s, you know, I always like to look at it like it’s almost, the vice is almost agnostic, right?

[15:50] It’s a very just archaic way of looking at clamping a work piece, right? So in this scenario, congratulations, the vice opens and closes by itself, but it’s big. It’s bulky. It requires a lot of material For a rigid clamp, it requires a ton of lateral force for that rigid vibration free clamp. So what you run into really is a work holding a clamping device that has cut off accessibility, right?

[16:20] So now you’ve got a robot loading an operation, but that part’s gotta be flipped. 4, 5, 6 times before you get a finished part. And every time we flip it, you open up the door for scrap rework, pick any of the eight wastes.

[16:30] Nick Goellner: Well, it’s kinda like, maybe it would be transportation or motion, but unnecessary to, to have totally flips.

[16:40] Eric Nekich: Yeah. And then you’re limiting the amount of material you can clamp because of all that lateral force. I always referred to it as a, the gentleman who comes over with the pipe and the mallet as Johnny Cheater bar. Right Now, you might not have that in an automatic vice, but you’re still cutting off accessibility.

[17:00] You’re still really putting a lot of limitations on an automated process’s, not Johnny Kebar.

[17:10] Nick Goellner: He needs to be in the story. Eric, where were you when me and Chad GPT were writing this? Johnny Cheater Bar and Flippy Long stocking, running the machining department. Flippy Long stocking. I think he just named the cobot.

[17:20] One thing I think about though, too, is like when I try to describe a dinosaur vice to somebody, I’m like, look at the stock that you’re clamping. And then if the vice is five times the size and weight, that’s a dinosaur vice.

Eric Nekich: Yeah, it really is.

[17:30] Nick Goellner: And if you’re clamping one at a time, that’s another challenge.

But. Anyway, not to make this all about the work holding. There’s some other things that we notice here in scene one. Anything else that you guys are picking up on?

[17:40] Eric Nekich: I think that I’ll just point out quickly that you can see the foundation being laid here for what happens when you don’t leverage an expert.

[17:50] Bring in someone who’s. Successfully automated processes before there’s a saying, right? A blind hog will find an acorn every once in a while, right? And so it

[18:00] Nick Goellner: was a blind squirrel, finds a nut, okay. I’ve never heard the hog acorn thing, but that must be Wisconsin. It makes for a better visual.

Eric Nekich: Nick, thank you.

[18:10] Thank you Dave. All the, you know, not having a manual, no support ’cause he bought it. Second, I’m looking at the money that Gary thinks he saved buying this thing on eBay. And the amount of time and energy he’s got trying to integrate it. I’m doing the math in my head in a paragraph and a half, and I can tell you with certainty that he’s in the red zone right now.

Yes, yes,

Nick Goellner: exactly. Not the good kind,

Eric Nekich: not the

[18:30] Dave Vuyk: good kind are always it. Like them trying to be their own support team, but it’s also the lost opportunity of that mill being tied up for several days, right? So if that’s your best producing piece of equipment and it’s down, not only is there issues with this job with the amount of inventory piling up and poor, you know, the scrap rate might be high, but it’s also all your other jobs are piling up as well With that mill being outta commission for several days.

[19:00] Eric Nekich: Caleb alluded to that last week, right? Spindle up time’s amazing with the new robot, but you’re not taking into a consideration the four days it was down. Overall productivity is,

[19:10] Nick Goellner: yeah, that’s a really good point. That’s what jumped out to me too, the whatever he thinks he saved by getting this used cobot at an option he.

[19:20] Just lost it all in trying to figure it out with YouTube videos and not having any support and having to rebuy another automatic vice ’cause the first one wasn’t working. Repeatably and Yeah, reliably. Yeah.

Eric Nekich: Frustrating. Bill and Bob,

[19:30] Dave Vuyk: you can appreciate where his mind is at, right? He knows that the margins are super tight on this job.

[19:40] There’s a lot hinging on this process working, so he’s just doing whatever he can to make it work.

[19:50] Nick Goellner: You root for Gary ’cause he is got grit and he really has the effort and I don’t think anyone could say he’s got an attitude problem. He’s just got a knowledge problem.

Mike Payne: Manufacturers, what is your biggest headache?

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[20:40] Nick Goellner: So let’s get to the next part here. So, okay. Bill and Bob see their pride bruised first, they weren’t consulted about the cobalt, and now it’s reducing them to deburring parts. While it sluggishly loads the vice, it was slower than they ever were.

[20:50] I. The robot grippers limit the mill to one specific job. The job they lowered all the margins on which slashes, versatility and it doesn’t. Deeper parts, leaving them to clean up its mess. We’re janitors now. Bob Mutters tossing a scrap part into a growing reject bin. And Bill sarcastically disagrees.

[21:10] Don’t flatter us. It’s our job to babysit. Gary’s pet robot. Earl, the quality guy hates it the most before he could catch drifting tolerances by talking to Bill and Bob and getting them corrected. The cobot is running unchecked, overnight and it produces a mountain of parts each morning. Many in that mountain are defective because no one is there to adjust offsets.

[21:30] The scrap rates soar and Earl is stuck helping to deeper. His inspections are falling further behind. The shop spindle utilization rises when everything works as planned, but it’s inconsistent and unreliable. Availability of the machine is unpredictable from setup delays and troubleshooting issues like missed clamps and chips stuck in the auto vice.

[22:00] Machining performance lags as the speeds and feeds are slow to coddle the delicate unattended process and quality craters under defective parts as Earl begins each day with a pile of parts to check, eventually catching up, but never in sync with the machinist to help catch, scrap, and course correct before it’s too late.

[22:20] One Monday morning after the cobalt had an unusually productive weekend. Earl looks upon a mountain, not a pile. He hasn’t checked anything yet, but he already knows that mountain is full of hidden scrap. Gary walks in with a big, ignorant smile, proud of himself. He’s achieved a weakened full of unattended production, and he pats himself on the back.

[22:40] Hey, Errol. Hope you got a good night’s sleep. You’re gonna have to break records to keep up. That struck a nerve. Earl Snaps. If we read what he said aloud, this podcast would be slapped with the EAG seconds after we published it. But I could just tell you, Earl throws his badge on the bench. He quits in a fury, leaving Gary staring speechless at a quality void.

Oof. Goodness gracious.

[23:00] Eric Nekich: Bill, Bob Earl. They’re all really mad. And to use a scary movie reference, this call’s coming from inside the house, right?

Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly.

[23:10] Nick Goellner: No, exactly. And he’s like, Hey, you’re gonna have to break records if there’s one flaw in Gary’s like attitude, or him as a person is kinda showing a big lack of empathy for his team.

[23:30] Starting with, Hey, I’m going to like bid really low on a job and we’re gonna automate it because I have this weird jealousy of Klaus and I’m not gonna include any of my team in the process. And if he did that, he’d probably have a team that figures out how they can all be more valuable than just babysitting a cobot and deeper reports.

Yeah.

[23:50] Dave Vuyk: Yeah. Interesting. Hey, because the automation should be lifting the team up in this case, it’s actually demoted them. Why the heck is that debu process not happening in the machine? I. And my goodness, Earl, what happened to in-process checks? Does that just go by the wayside? ’cause you started automating the process.

Two things that I was thinking of as well.

Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly. Mm-hmm.

Dave Vuyk: They clearly didn’t consider this when they were designing the process.

[24:10] Eric Nekich: It’s clearly a case of unused talent. You have veteran machinists doing that stuff. Earl seems to be, from what I’ve read, a pretty solid QC guy. But I think the lesson here is maybe a bit of a leadership lesson too, right?

[24:30] As manufacturing leaders, it’s easy to get really excited about your plans and what you want to do and accomplish, but there’s something called buy-in and really think he would’ve been a good spot to maybe meet with the team. Before we bought Flipse, what was it? Flippy, Longstocking. Flip Longstocking.

[24:40] Nick Goellner: Exactly. I think what it really says to your team when you don’t include them on any ’cause, this isn’t just like purchasing more cutting tools to do the process the same way or whatever. You maybe don’t need to consult everyone on your team to do that. This is a radical shift in how they’re gonna process parts and what it really says when you don’t include your team on that is, I don’t think you have anything to add to this decision.

[25:00] I’m going to make it without you.

[25:10] Eric Nekich: And automation, you know, especially tending automation. You know, depending on the facility can be a sensitive topic. People still kind of that view that these yellow arms are coming in to replace us. And I think both of you guys touched on it at the beginning of the episode.

That’s rarely the case.

[25:20] Nick Goellner: Exactly. I like what Dave said about deburring in the machine. And putting quality nearby, right? Like quality checking out the machine. The argument against deburring in the machine would be like, I’m making my cycle time longer and maybe I could run more parts with and keep that deburring externally and whatever.

[25:40] But again, no understanding of where the bottleneck is. The bottleneck is actually in quality. That’s why Earl is so frustrated, and let’s say there wasn’t that case. Let’s say there was no quality bottleneck. You want a deeper in the machine when you’re running lights out because you’re either getting no machining done or you’re getting a complete job done, ready to get checked.

[26:10] It’s not about the speed of the cycle when you’re running through the night, you’re just trying to get that many hours of free unattended machining without interruptions. Yeah. Alright. Ready for the next scene? Let’s go. Let’s hit it. Okay. So Gary’s home life. Oh no, no. Linda, its taking a personal turn now.

[26:30] Yeah. Gary’s home life crumbles under the strain. Linda’s fed up with his late night chips to check the cobot. Her voice sharp. If you leave again, I won’t be here when you get back and desperate to stay home. Gary buys a machine monitoring system. It’s sleek dashboard, mocking him with data he barely understands.

[26:50] Hey, spindle utilization is up, but the numbers lie because parts are scrapped and the shop is drowning. Sleepless. He checks his phone obsessively, wondering if the automation’s happening or hastening iron clunks collapse with Earl. Gone. Bill and Bob try manual checks, but they can’t program the CMM and the quality grinds to a halt.

[27:10] The shop’s value stream is a nightmare waiting waste from idle mills. Inventory, waste from stacked parts and motion waste as workers scramble through the clutter. Gary’s dream of rivaling Klaus’s lean stream feels like a cruel joke. Yeah, the story just listed the waste for us. We don’t even need to break it.

[27:30] Yeah. Good job, Chad G. Pt. Yeah. Let’s move on to the next scene. Recruiting a new quality manager becomes Gary’s obsession, but he’s out of his depth. He burns cash on a LinkedIn recruiter premium account, and he is wincing at the cost. He fumbles through job posts painting. Iron clunk is a dynamic workplace while chaos rains after weeks.

[27:50] He finds Sarah A. Sharp candidate ready to start, but her salary, demand and arrival signing bonus offered by Klaus’s Lean Stream. Put her out of reach. Gary’s broke his cash flow is gutted by the cobot, the vice, the monitoring system, and everything else. And Sarah joins Lean Stream as a quality and continuous improvement manager.

[28:10] A gut punch that leaves Gary Reeling. He’s copied Klaus’s tools, his automation, his monitoring, but without lean principles. He’s built a house of cards. This shops a mess. His marriage hangs by a thread and iron clunk is bleeding out.

Eric Nekich: I’m glad Linda made it back into the story. I’m a little upset that there’s still having marital woes.

[28:30] But what I love is the clue that got dropped into this scene of the story, right? And Gary is obsessed with finding a quality manager, but Lean Stream hired a quality and continuous improvement manager.

[28:50] Nick Goellner: I love it, Eric. You can’t disconnect quality from continuous improvement like Lean Six Sigma. Six Sigma is like a quality reference to like how many standard deviations away from the norm things are and right.

[29:10] Like why is it so often not about metrology or checking parts when you talk about Lean or Six Sigma or things like that. It’s because like in order to achieve that quality, you really need to have a more well-rounded, lean background and foundation. Klaus understands that Sarah’s probably thrilled to have an opportunity that if you take a job in continuous improvement, the sky’s the limit.

[29:30] Yeah, absolutely. Like any career in any industry, if you have a continuous improvement mindset, you’re gonna be successful. Sometimes it’s like little nuances like that, like how you position a role to a candidate that’ll.

[29:40] Eric Nekich: I think it speaks to another problem, right? Gary seems to be plugin holes in the Hoover Dam with bubble gum.

[29:50] He stops one and then another one shoots water in his face and he stops that one and he’s whack where? Yeah, exactly. Where it’s like really needs to be looking at the entire workflow. Right.

Nick Goellner: Yeah.

Eric Nekich: Yeah, completely.

Nick Goellner: Alright, you guys ready to get into the fifth scene?

[30:00] Eric Nekich: Yes, I am absolutely on the edge of my seat again this week.

Let’s hope Linda doesn’t leave here.

Dave Vuyk: Yeah. In fairness, Linda deserves better. So hopefully things get resolved.

[30:10] Nick Goellner: Get it together, get it together, Gary. The final blow comes when Mr. Green from Shrewd Tech calls. The first shipment arrived late. It’s incomplete. It’s riddled with defects. Gary, lemme talk to you young man.

[30:30] We trusted you. This is unacceptable. Gary’s vision blurs. His chest gets tight. He doesn’t know what to do, so he dials Klaus. His voice is raw with desperation. I needed that higher. Klaus I. My business, my marriage, everything’s falling apart. You’re the villain here. You’re stealing my shot while iron clunk dies.

[30:50] You win. Okay, you’ve buried me. And then he slams the phone down. Tears stinging his eyes. Minutes later the phone rings. Klaus calls back. His voice is calm. It’s empathetic Lunch tomorrow, Gary, let’s talk over sandwiches. Klaus doesn’t gloat. He offers a lifeline, a partnership, buying an equity stake in iron clunk, and consulting with Gary to help him turn it around.

But you’ve gotta commit. Klaus says, actually, it would move on like this, but you got the commit. I was waiting for you. I was hoping to come in with that.

[31:20] Eric Nekich: Next time would come back. I knew that’s even,

Nick Goellner: it’s even worse than before. I should be good at a German accent. My company is full of German people.

Eric Nekich: Your family is full of German people.

[31:30] I mean your company.

[31:40] Nick Goellner: My company, my family. There’s some blur together. You’ve got to commit. He says, and he slides out one copy of the book, the goal across the table. Start here, get to the choppa map your shops flow. So basically Klaus is Arnold Schwarzenegger. That’s awesome. Okay.

[31:50] Speaker 5: And he’s here to be. He’s here to be the action that’s even better visual.

[32:00] Now maybe catch EPT can use, that’s actually an image, but just have, get grab my hand. I be alright, isn’t it? Now I’m just picturing

[32:10] Nick Goellner: twins like Danny DeVito and I know Schwartzenegger, but they run shot. All right. Let’s stop jacking around here. Dave, you were about to make a thoughtful point. Go ahead.

Dave Vuyk: I don’t know about thoughtful.

[32:20] It sounds like Gary’s going into cardiac arrest after that call with Mr. Green from Shreek. By the way, Mr. Green really sounds like a good villain name. Yeah, just the way you read that. It’s good.

[32:30] Nick Goellner: You know what it’s named after. The opposite of the villain. I’m the nicest guy you’ll ever meet. He’s the quality and continuous improvement guy at Henna.

His name’s Josh Green.

Speaker 5: Oh,

Nick Goellner: that’s so good. Nice. The quality guy from Sured Tech or

[32:40] Dave Vuyk: whatever. Mr. Green. Shout out to Josh. But then Gary takes it like, like it’s been this kind of personal competition against Klaus and he can see like you win almost as if cloud’s success was intentionally spiteful against Gary.

[33:00] And then Klaus is kinda like. Dude, tell you what, I’ll come over and help. And he just responds in a nice way. But yeah, I think that’s pretty cool actually. ’cause have you

Nick Goellner: ever had that kind, like, have you ever had someone like lash out at you in life and you’re like, whoa, like this is like a way deeper problem than I realized.

[33:10] You’ve had this weird rivalry thing, Gary. Yeah. What’s cooking behind the scenes for a while?

Eric Nekich: Yeah. Yeah.

[33:20] Nick Goellner: So Klaus could have been like, screw this guy. He is a weirdo, but instead he responded very Christlike. I really like it. Absolutely. And I think what’s cool about this is like he knows the real problem here.

[33:30] There’s something in it for Klaus here, right? He wants to buy an equity stake in iron clunks. So like Gary, he sees the potential. You wouldn’t do that if you thought this was a sinking ship with no future. Absolutely. He’s like, Hey, look, you have tons of problems that you’ve created for yourself by trying to copy me in the wrong way, and you’re outta cash and the few people you still have working for you.

[34:00] Are probably this close to quitting. So instead of just like giving you a book and being like, Hey, do your best dude, when it’s, that would be too little, too late. He’s actually gonna come in, make an investment in the business, and now he’s got skin in the game beyond just like being a kind guy. He’s here to help.

[34:10] I think that’s a great part of the story.

Eric Nekich: Absolutely.

[34:20] Nick Goellner: Okay. When we got lost in the whole Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nick sucks. At German accents thing, what he said after get to the choppa was like, start here and map your shops flow. And that’s a really important part of any process, whether you’re automating or not.

[34:30] If you want to be good at manufacturing, you should know how to do that. Be very competent in basically value stream mapping or process mapping or whatever you want to call it. Mapping the flow of work, of the flow of material from start to finish through the shop.

Eric Nekich: Let’s get to the end here, boys. Yeah.

[34:50] You’ve got to take time to look at like the status quo, right? How else do you know what’s improving? How much it’s improving, right? Where the true bottlenecks are, the root causes. Without that lens, you’re just gonna continue to, like you said, whack-a-mole, right?

Nick Goellner: Yeah. I’m so glad you made that point before we moved on.

[35:10] What we’ve experienced in our business is like when we start to lay out a process and any sort of continuous improvement initiative, you always need to start with a really good understanding of the current state and not like some anecdotal like, yeah, things suck and we’re running outta money and we’re disorganized, but like in mapping that flow really nailing down the objective current state.

[35:30] Putting some data to it, putting some understanding to it. So often people wanna jump to the solution, we gotta do this, we gotta do that, we gotta do this, we gotta do that. When before they’ve done a good enough job, like making sure they understand the score on the scoreboard as it sits right now.

Dave Vuyk: And it can be hard to like do that super objectively when you’re so close to the problem yourself.

[35:50] Don’t discount the value that like an outside expert can bring to the table by helping you walk through that process. In this case. Klau bought inequity stakes. So he’s a business partner, and that might make good sense for a lot of people, but it doesn’t have to be a business partner. It can be an outside expert that you’re bringing in just to have that outside set of eyes on your situation to see the things that you might not see for yourself.

[36:20] Eric Nekich: I’ll add that, like that impartial view. Also, you know, it opens up a new set of eyes, but it also doesn’t care about why you have these little processes in the places you do, right? You, you might have put a process in to protect a certain call out because something else was going on in that process where it’s like, again, it’s that having that fresh set of eyes is just so invaluable.

[36:50] Nick Goellner: Yeah, I completely agree. Like you said, in this case, obviously Klaus has a more of a reason, more skin in the game to be involved as this third party. She’s not anymore once he makes this investment, but let’s talk about the MEPS for a second that are very at risk of being defunded right now. I, many of them have already been defunded.

[37:10] There’s these. In most states, there’s access to these incredible programs that will help you do just this, right? And they’ll come in and there’s more than just that. But that’s just a great resource and I wish the powers that be would really understand like how much of an impact these meps make. Shout out to Mike Payne, who’s leading the charge on that?

[37:30] All right, let’s conclude here, boys. The final scene of the day, scene six. Scene six. Yeah. Gary returns to iron clunk, humbled the book’s weight heavy in his hands, by the way, it’s not that heavy. It’s pretty quick read. Really wanted to add impact to the story. He opens the book. It’s Paige’s dog eared from Klaus’s Own Journey.

[37:50] Words like constraints, flow, and value. Hit him like lightning for the first time. He sees the shop’s. Chaos, waste bottlenecks, broken streams, not as fate, but as problems. He can fight. Klaus stands beside him, pointing to a whiteboard. Gary grabs a marker. His hand’s trembling and they start sketching out iron clunks value stream.

[38:20] Raw material piles. Idle mills. Earl’s absent. Checks. The cobots. Overproduction. It’s all a mess, but it’s his mess. And with Klaus’s guidance, a flicker of hope ignites. Can Gary turn iron clunk around? That’s a story for another day.

Eric Nekich: Oh, nice. Let’s

Nick Goellner: go.

Eric Nekich: Yeah. What a great, clearly having a bit of a eureka moment here, right?

[38:40] Yeah. Eureka moment,

Nick Goellner: Reka. I’m just picturing, I can’t tell if that was German or Jamaica somewhere in the, I’m not sure what’s, yeah, I’m with

[38:50] Eric Nekich: you Dave. I know what’s going on,

[39:00] Nick Goellner: but what I’m picturing in my head is Arnold Schwarzenegger with one of those big like Eureka trumpet things from those cough drop commercials.

That’s, that’s

Speaker 5: a Rico, that’s

Eric Nekich: Cola. That’s Eureka.

Speaker 5: It’s a lot like Eureka.

[39:10] Eric Nekich: It is. I’ll give you that. Yes. Phonetically we’re there. Yeah.

[39:20] Nick Goellner: Well, gentlemen, thank you for joining me and our audience as we try to help Gary survive, keep his marriage together, save iron clunk, and we learned a little bit about Klaus’s character.

[39:30] Cool. Klaus’s character too. What I love about him is. He’s like so many other shop owners, we talk about this all the time. We talked about it on the last episode. People who you think are your competitors in this industry, maybe they are. Maybe you compete for the same jobs, Gary and Klaus, but more often than not, they want to help you.

[39:50] They are like really, truly part of this community. Everyone who listens to this podcast, you would be part of the community. You guys. Thank you for being part of my community and being able to tell this story with me. It’s been a lot of fun. It will continue to be a lot of fun.

[40:00] Eric Nekich: I can’t wait to see the arrow start moving in the other direction.

[40:10] And Klaus is an amazing character. And that’s where Caleb is this week, right? He’s in Germany. Putting together Klaus’s backstory for the prequel. The Automation Trap won the Phantom Menace.

[40:20] Nick Goellner: I, I gotta say like you’re assuming the arrow’s gonna go back up. I’m writing like, alright. Alright. Dark comedy. It just keeps going down on the, an Optimist

Eric Nekich: podcast just ends.

Klaus is gonna liquidate iron clunk

[40:30] Speaker 5: lin a light. There’s a machine auction coming up for Iron K. Yeah. Yeah. Geez. Oh no,

[40:40] Nick Goellner: no. Let’s hope it doesn’t get to that end up together. Gary ends up coming some sort of psycho. I think you’re right Eric. Not to spoil the future, but the arrow’s gonna start moving up.

[40:50] We’re gonna learn a little bit about value stream mapping. We’re gonna continue to teach lean automation concepts with the next episode of Lights Out. Guys, thank you for joining me. Let’s clap twice and turn the lights out on this episode.

[41:00] Speaker 5: Good thing we were all in sync for that. It’s perfect. Yeah, that was great. Awesome guys. See you next week.

[41:10] Nick Goellner: Hey guys, it’s Nick and I’m so excited about Machine Shop Mastery being part of making chips. So my good friend Paul Van Mader, he’s been a partner. He’s been a sponsor, he’s been a friend and he’s been involved with making chips for a long time.

[41:20] And now his podcast that I love is part of our group. Here’s why he should listen to it, Paul. I just run a software ERP company for machine shop leaders. Paul was a machine shop leader. He loves machine shop leaders. He’s the one leading the charge to thank all the machinists out there for all the incredible work they do and the.

[41:50] Best thing about him is he actually knows how to make their incredible work turn into an incredible business. So when you listen to Machine Shop Mastery, you’re gonna hear Paul and his guests talk about exactly what they’ve done to overcome their challenges and make their business successful. You’re gonna get those kinda like heart wrenching stories that tell you what people have been through, things that you can empathize with because you’re a manufacturing leader too.

[42:10] So check out Machine Shop Mastery and learn how to master your machine shop. Hosted by my good friend Paul Van Mader, under the Making Chips Network. Thanks.