Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Daily 5S Walk: Weeding the Garden

the daily 5S walk is a lot like weeding a garden.

There is no expectation that suddenly one day you'll go out and there will be nothing to do. Weeds always grow and your studio will tend towards disarray.

Keeping up with it every day is easier than letting things get out of control.

It can be a soothing moment in the day when you check in with your studio and take care of your space.

You can consider the items you find to be just like weeds. "a weed is a plant out of place" - you're looking for items that are in the wrong place.


Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Daily 5S Walk: Kill Your Darlings

Sorting and Setting in Order doesn't always happen easily the first time. During the daily 5S walk today I noticed that our "red and white sides of clothespins" flag system wasn't working the way I had imagined, even though I'm a [sarcasm font] complete genius and it's almost inconceivable that one of my ideas didn't immediately cause the whole production team to jump for joy.

It's okay to try something you think MIGHT work. Around here we are used to "this might work, and if not, we'll change it" as the default for making improvements. It's an everyday part of our operations and lets us try things, which sometimes work out really well!

This clothespin system wasn't useful, so rather than leaving it up and working around it, we're scrapping it. The clothespins are currently sitting in the Zone of Disarray awaiting my next genius idea for how to use them somewhere else, or perhaps another use entirely. They weren't useful on the production floor, so they had to go.

Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Daily 5S Walk: Set in Order: Label it!!

On your regular walk, one of the easiest things to spot is under-labeled items. Today I walked right past this set of jugs.

The one on the left was labeled properly before going out onto the studio floor. The other two were rushed into service one day and need to be labeled to match.


A few minutes later, done!


Wednesday, August 7, 2019

Daily 5S Walk: Sort: Look In the Corners!

Corners are infamous crud-collection areas in your studio. Here, we have 'intentional' storage of a canopy tent for outdoor events (the black bag), and then a stack of buckets right in front. These buckets haven't been touched in months. They should be moved to the red tag area (aka the Zone of Disarray)

Monday, August 5, 2019

Ohaus scale review

In our shop we recently started using an Ohaus dual-display portion scale and I'm in love!

This scale can be bought online, including at Amazon here:  https://amzn.to/2SbGxgy

Here are my favorite features, compared to the discontinued KG-20 from AWS, which we use already and which I originally intended to buy for this purpose.

1. Dual display. Two people standing on opposite sides of a table can both read the scale's output - this makes it much easier to spot-check employee's portioning without peering over their shoulder. Even better, whenever we have two employees working, they can both see the scale, putting an extra set of eyeballs on the task to make it more likely we catch simple mistakes.

2. Small and light. The footprint is smaller and the scale can be moved more easily that others.

3. Check-weight feature. This can light up and beep when you get either in range or out of range. This is really helpful when weighing many of the same items - saves worker fatigue and attention for other tasks.

The scale's capacity is slightly lower than our previous model, at 33 pounds instead of 40, but it was also about 1/3 the cost. The resolution is 0.01 lb (metric capacity: 15000g with readability 2g). this is slightly lower readability than the more expensive scale, but still suits our everyday needs within a very small (less than 1%) tolerance.







this blog post contains affiliate links. When purchasing using affiliate links, there is no additional fee, the destination website pays me a small commission on any sales, which helps keep the blog running.