I was working at Kodak… and my Sensei, Mark Chamberlain took me to a production/manufacturing room that was full of boxes, film, etc…
He asked me, ‘Young Grasshopper… what do you see?’
I said… ‘boxes, rolls of film… Conveyor… everything seems to be working ok to me’.
He didn’t say anything to me. We just left. Anyway, I joined the ‘Lean’ team… and was part of lots of activity, projects, etc… I learnt a lot you could say.
After about a year. He took me to that same room again.
He said, ‘what do you see?’
I replied… ‘well, I see a lot of waste. I see that they could optimise the conveyor by moving it to the left, that’ll give more space to the operators. Also, I see no visual indicators – can’t see any colour coding for the boxes, there’s no indication to when they have to leave…’ he stopped me. Smiled and said nothing. And we left the room.
