Lean Manufacturing - Lean Factory Tour - FastCap

[Music] well hello everyone it's time to take a tour of fastap fastap is located in Bellingham Washington just about 2 hours north of Seattle up in a little tiny town called Ferndale right on I5 it's a beautiful place we have about a 50,000 sqt facility it's just really really cool place to work about 110 Windows lots of natural light everywhere coming in we're going to take you inside now remember it's simple it's not fancy so when you get inside just a big overview we got three big gas fans keeping everything cool and lots of natural

light everywhere when you walk in the front door it's all standup we made all the desks out of our fast pipe system everything's simple now people always say well do people like to stand up we wouldn't have it any other way is it difficult to stand up sure it takes a little time to get used to it but we love it everything's on Wheels everything's flexible including the filing cabinets now this is looking from the office back into the shipping area and from the shipping area back in towards the office you notice notice there's no

walls this is our order desk and it's all on Wheels and it's all color coded based on the day of the week so whatever day of the week is the invoices are that color so we can quickly tell whether or not we're behind or ahead whether or not we have flow when you look up on the wall all the boxes that we ship in are all colorcoded so it's easy to identify what size box is the perfect size to ship in and then when you need to find it it's colorcoded down below as well all

LED light lights all radiant heat it's just an incredible place to work so this is our grocery aisle and right here is our shipping terminal so 90% of all of our finished products are right here we build the con bonds every day and everything's clearly done through Visual controls and the last five digits of the UPC code so if you want to know what's there there's a picture of it right here and all these labels have been made by us and it just allows us to manage our daily picking as you can see Thomas is

down here picking an order right now on a cart that we made and it's just very simple this one main aisle all the way down to the shipping terminal and it's out the door our showroom our conference room very simple stand up no chairs the meetings don't last very long our graphic design area again everything stand up everything's on Wheels everything's flexible we want to be flexible because our needs are always changing all our tools are carefully shadowed we never search for anything we never struggle cuz the minute you struggle you have waste hi I'm

Graham and welcome to Graphics this is the most magical cell in the whole building we produce all our labels and inserts for over 700 products right here in this tiny cell that's this big back here we've got all our paper racks of the different labels we use over here we've got our computer where we developed a a six-step process where anyone can come off the street follow the very basic steps and get the job done in 2 to 3 minutes and then over here if ever anybody runs out of paper we've developed a very simple

combon card system where anyone can understand exactly what they need to do for any of the process all right so at the end of the day we've got a great Frost that's that allows anyone to come in on their first day and run a $150,000 printer for a giant company producing all the labels and inserts just out of the first day our bathrooms are beautiful fresh flowers granite countertops polished concrete floors bade toilet seats I mean it's really a great place to work because we want work to be fun and enjoyable we keep it sparkling

clean every day C cleans the floors with automatic floor cleaners we have two of them and everything just stays at a very high standard this is our sandbox where we meet every morning for our morning meeting and a new person leads it every day our kitchen open to the entire facility no walls we even have a lean dishwasher it does a load in Just 2 minutes no batch work our main production line everything flowing towards the shipping terminals you'll see how that works here in just a minute it's very cool see that's an aisle where

the product is made flows down to the area where we package it people are in the cells they pick package and ship everything 2 hours faxed to truck it's pretty amazing so this is another cell where we make the laser jam and Austin is laying out a tape measure on aluminum Pole to make the laser leveling device and it's a nice little cell that he works around and makes one product at a time again all of his tools are carefully shattered in Kaizen foam no struggle work should be easy he goes from one cell to

another cell notice where he grabbed the safety glasses directly above the saw goes ahead makes a cut and now what's really cool about this you're going to see is Austin's going to have to clean out the aluminum pipe he goes sticks in a vacuum hits it with a foot pedal it sucks the aluminum dust right out it's so fast and so easy this is an engineering cell and also where we make the best fence and those are the engineers standing up in the production area we do all of our 3D modeling and then we go

ahead and do stereography our engineering team and they both have their own scooters Doug's version okay so what happens Doug let off your foot so now you can let go of it as soon as I put my weight on then this little pad lifts up okay so there we go now it stands up now look at JT another engineer has another design his is the kickstand most that's how we think here at fast C you guys are crazy pretty awesome this is our shadow Board of all the products that we make so we do lateral

thinking we walk up we look at say hey we've made a part like that before we've got scooters here that allow us to get around the entire facility again this is the engineering cell right on the manufacturing floor where we make everything our wood shop is only missing one thing sawdust it's Immaculate all the tools are carefully laid out and organized so we can be highly productive again we're not about struggling we're about making work easy and fun everything's work supposed to be everybody enjoys work because work doesn't have to be a struggle this is

our CNC area where we make all of our molds all of our tool boxes are carefully shadowed out with our Kaizen foam system so when we go to get a tool it's right where we want there's no surprises like oh what happened to that tool I know that's somewhere we're not spending hours a day looking for things we know exactly where everything is so again work is enjoyable makes all the difference in the world when you take the time to make this happen now the way this looks like this is every day we make an

improvement these are our injection molding machines they Sumo Tomos they're really Hightech they're very cool they have robots on to remove the parts all the tools again are shattered out for the sumat Tomos these are all of our injection molds down below with the parts actually magnetically attached to them these are all the colorants and materials that we use with combon cards carefully inserted in all the parts are glued on the front and then this is our narrow aisle system for retrieving inventory which is waste which we're embarrassed to say but we have some of

it and we're getting rid of more and more of it every day as we bring on more and more manufacturing but this is a very cool system that allows us to work in a very tight constrained area now there the operator is actually not having to steer it because it's wire guided and notice how it's man up so he's up with the product so he can see exactly where he is so there's no damage to anything he can move at very high speeds because it's guided it doesn't require him to steer it when he wants

to retrieve something or put something away he can retrieve from both sides simultaneously it's really an amazing system to manage waste if you will and it works excellent now in the front of all of our inventory racks are build cells we have about 700 products and there's about 50 build cells where we actually build the products and we've done it really in just a 4x8 section that's very flexible we can change it for whatever product we need to build we have little stations set up with jigs and it just really works well we have the

inventory down below we build the product up above just a great system allows for a lot of flexibility and again it's very simple we don't have all these fancy workbenches we just use the racking system to do that now we have an automatic shrink wrapper which allows our people to build pallet loads because we ship a couple semis a day and what happens is they just drive that onto there push a button on the fork clip and then it automat atically starts to spin and wrap now the operator can go away do something else when

it's done it automatically Cuts itself then the operator comes back and retrieves the pallet puts the label on it and it's off into the truck it's a very efficient system and again relieves the burden off our people CU we don't want our people to work hard we want them to work smart the facility again is just magical to work in what are you doing cleaning wow why do we keep the fork Cliff so clean why do we we do all this this is the worst it'll ever be wow and you polish this like pretty regularly

or what what's the deal once a month everything gets maintained battery gets checked uh water levels so we keep everything in our facility almost perfect keep the Rope tight things are not perfect because we even have so this is our nudge aisle right here and you might wonder what does nudge mean it's junk spelled backwards it's our way of being funny so everything that we 3s out of our facility goes down there at the end I'll show you yes I'm riding a scooter down the aisle so down here at the very end we have all

the stuff that we take out of and sort out of our office so there's mine right there Paul's desk junk so anything we don't need we get it out of here and then we'll sort through this every 3 or four months and we'll throw a bunch of it out but we have yes bass cap has junk it's called nudge and we get rid of it out of our work area so that we always work in a perfect area that's clean and organized so we even do lean in our aircraft we have a corporate plane and

I fly that I just shut down my plane and I developed a lean procedure for shutting it down as you see I've got a lot of switches here that have to be turned off perfectly and they could in a position like this or like this and it's difficult to tell because of the kind of switches these are whether or not they're in the correct position for the landing configuration and the shutdown and see the red line I put across the top of those those red lines indicate to me that all switches are in the correct

position for final shutdown I just shut the plane down and you can see I've got the same thing over on this side and everything is in the correct position so autof fuel manual everything needs to be in that position with the the red line which indicates to me at a glance without any struggle that all the switches are correct so lean applies to the factory floor and to the cockpit and everywhere else there is a quick overview of fast cap and we get around this whole facility on razors because it allows us to overcome the

size of this place because it's 50,000 Square ft it is absolutely huge and I'm going to do one last thing to endend this tour just for fun I'm going to run up the stairs so you can see what it's like up above so you can see how beautiful this facility is so there you have it tour of bass cap the reason I did this is I get two or three tour requests every day and I just couldn't keep up with the demand I thought how can I make this process lean so I made a video

to kind of show people now you can watch it with your team you can pause it you can talk about it it's all there and the way we accomplished all this this is so simple we sweep sort and standardize everything in the morning when we come in everyone makes one Improvement we have a morning meeting we build a culture and then we work and I am fully engaged in the process the leader has to be engaged you got to keep lean simple and make a fun the rest is history and then we even have time

for a burger party on people's birthdays and today dogs of fastap who are just amazing super dances for we have synchronized dancing at fast cap 2o with the dogs so Clint what do you have there uh it's an oversized fast cap no for my birthday oh wow cool so so you make so you made that e nice never forget lean is simple and fun [Music] that