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Two successful entrepreneurs talk about manufacturing, lean principles, and the freedom they are pursuing in life and business.
lean built 93 prescript
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Andrew: [00:00:00] So I have in my hand a cool device called PLAUD, P-L-A-U-D, really cool, which is an AI transcription device. when I first got my E Ink tablet, my remarkable part of the goal was to put an e-brake. On my brain because I think way faster than I talk, and I talk way faster than I walk, and I walk way faster than most people walk.
Jay: My mind is blown. I You are, I've called you the, brother Speedo of humanity. Okay. But to think that in Andrew's fast talking, fast walking brain is, it's even faster.
Andrew: So, really funny thing, my wife took a vacation last week and, went for five days out to [00:01:00] Boston.
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And she went with my older sister.
Jay: Okay.
Andrew: And picked her up at the airport yesterday and I was like, you know, how was the trip? Because obviously we kept in touch, but part of the goal of a vacation. Where my wife, who's got five kids and my sister, who also has five kids, Uhhuh. The two of them just take a girl's trip for, you know, four or five days and they don't have to be bothered by the things that are going on at home.
Like, yeah, I'm cooking the food, I'm doing the laundry, or not doing laundry. Yeah. That's so good. I totally did not do the laundry. That's awesome for them. Yeah. But I picked up my wife at the airport and one of the first things she said was. Your sister walks so fast. So it's a Henry quality. It's a Henry quality.
So my older sister and I were born 13 months apart. Okay. And so we were thick as thieves all growing up. Okay. And she walks at least as fast as I do.
Jay: So it's nature and nurture.
Andrew: It's
Jay: both. Yeah. I love bit. It's all the above. [00:02:00]
Andrew: So and so I'm using tools like plot. Yeah. Because when you have a Zoom call, a Google meet, any kind of online call where every single person is, you know, coming in from an ip, it's not that hard to use a, an AI agent .
Who's also in the chat, like fathom to keep track of who says what and give you a transcript after the fact. But if you have an in person meeting. That doesn't work. And applaud allows you to basically just put this little module Okay. On the table and transcribe the whole meeting. . And it won't necessarily.
Correctly identify every speaker each time they change, but it always, in my experience so far, identifies every time the speaker changes. . So it keeps track of a new person said this, a different person said that, and then you can go back and edit the transcript afterwards. I see. Speaking of editing transcripts, [00:03:00] yesterday we posted my episode, which was just a Matsuura update and despite my best efforts at Enunciation, .
The AI transcripts did not ever catch the Matsuura. Oh, okay. Right. And, and put it through with a single U and just auto-populated it everywhere. And so yesterday I was like, frantically scrambling around editing transcripts, trying to put that extra U in because you know,
Jay: oh, oh, okay. What you need is to control H your life.
Okay. So control, control H is, I don't know, you're on Mac. I don't know if there's a command H, but find and replace. It finds all the single U Mat Soros and, uh, changed it to, I'm gonna say double U'S two u's. Yeah,
Andrew: yeah, yeah.
Jay: Control
Andrew: h check it out. So I couldn't spell Matsuura until I bought one.
Jay: I, I mean, I was thinking is it two A's, is it two T's?
Is it two u's? It's two u's. It's two u's.
Andrew: Got it. Okay. Matsuura two UU Yeah. I [00:04:00] always thought there were also two Rs,
Jay: but there's not. Oh, yeah, there's not. Is there? Wow. Yeah. Wow. But how many pallets are there? 10. Okay.
Andrew: On my machine, I bought the baby brother. Yeah.
Jay: Great. Hey my question is, let's talk privacy on plot ppl a u d.ai for those listening.
Andrew: Like what, what does that look like? Well, it is complicated, so if you sit down and have a conversation. Lemme back up. There are laws about recording conversations. . They vary by state. Some states are single party consent, which means as long as one person involved in the conversation consents to it being recorded, it can legally be recorded.
Some states are two party consent, which means two plus.
.
Anybody involved all have to give consent for the conversation to be recorded. For that reason, I don't use plot to record phone calls. Right. I only use plot to record [00:05:00] in-person meetings internally in our shop. . Where I would otherwise be typing up or writing up notes to share.
But PLA gives me a transcript that I can then edit and everybody gets the same transcript. . You know, we have a weekly admin meeting where there's four of us around the table, and if each person takes their own notes. It's like a solo game of telephone. Oh yeah. Yeah.
Jay: Oh, so, and then you obviously know that, hey, when we're in this meeting, we will record it via ai and do I have your consent?
Yes. Do I have your consent? Yes. Yes. Yes.
Andrew: Yeah. Is that how you handle it? Yeah. Okay. There's a, there's a variety of ways of handling it. Like you don't have to ask for consent every single meeting. If it's a weekly scheduled meeting, we say we are going to record and transcribe this weekly meeting .
So that we all have a shared list of action items afterwards that is comprehensive, that's not dependent on anybody's individual notes. That is a transcription of our conversation. [00:06:00] Do that once and you're done.
Jay: Yeah. In college I'm like six credits away from a associate's degree in criminal Justice, and I had a criminal justice teacher that was teaching constitutional law and .
Every, I had 'em for like three or four classes. Every year or every beginning of the class, he said, I explicitly do not give you consent to record me. If I find a recording device, I will go after you criminally and civilly. I was like, wow, okay. This guy knows his law. So, you know, that's obviously, I don't know the laws here in California, but I would never record someone without their permission.
But I mean, shouldn't you put that in writing with your employees? I think that would be another layer of protection. It's in the transcript.
Oh, well played. Got 'em. Yeah. So
Andrew: I will quote one of my favorite movies. Training day. It's not what you know, it's what you can prove. Yeah. And if you have the transcript of the conversation and everyone consents at the beginning of the conversation. . [00:07:00] You have consent.
Jay: Yeah. So well, when we sh really quick, when we shoot videos and there's people in the shop, you know, whoever's behind the camera say, Hey, obviously we have a YouTube channel.
You're a rigger. I, is it okay if you're on camera? Yes. Hey man, you're probably gonna be in the background. We're not gonna talk to you. I've only had one technician that said, no, I don't wanna be on camera. Great. No problem. And it was like, he's not gonna be on camera, period. And then I called the them and I said, send a technician who's allowed to be on camera.
You're messing with us. You know, and they did. The next story. Ha. New guy, change my guy. True story. Yeah.
Andrew: . Uh, so we are getting spun up on our Matsuura, which is really exciting and it's wild. Like, is that a positive statement? Spun up. Yeah, spun up. Okay. Just means like getting momentum to speed. Okay.
Yeah. Uncomfortable. Like, it's like when you, I mean, I grew up. I was born in 84, so I grew up, I was like a real person in the early nineties. . [00:08:00] Which meant that I was writing like. Huffy racing thirties, like single speed BMX bikes. Yeah. And like when you try to start on an uphill, you have to pump that sucker.
Oh yeah. You cannot just downshift and, and get an easy gear. Yeah, you've gotta go hard. Yeah. You gotta, yeah. And so, yes, like. Five axis palletization is complicated. Yeah, sure. And learning a new control, a new interface is complicated. . But it's been really fun. I'm enjoying it. And the only down, I mean really the only downside is that machine eats a ridiculous amount of air.
It just eats a bits ridiculous amount of air. So, and that's, that's supposed to be like that, that's not like a loose fitting or something? No, it's not a loose fitting. We've checked, there were, there was a loose fitting. We fixed that. Okay. But the machine overall, it's just a big complicated machine.
There's tons, tons of tubing. Tons of pneumatics. Yeah. It eats a lot of air [00:09:00] regulators checked. Right. It's eating enough air. It's eating the appropriate amount of air. Okay. Talking to other Matsuura owners. All right. And, and part of that is just like the same way in a building, you want positive air pressure.
.
So that dust leaves the building stays out. Yep. Yep. Doesn't come in. It's eating an appropriate amount of air, but. There are two things. This is a mod. This is, had been, this has been on my list of improvements to make to our brothers for years. They have a constantly flowing spindle air purge.
.
That's just plumbed in. And I have seen other brother owners wire in a solenoid where that air purge only runs when the machine is in cycle. I think I've mentioned this before on the pod.
Jay: You, you had, but I, I couldn't remember what. They had wired
Andrew: that into so brothers. So one of the main things I would say to anybody who's considering a brother is these machines are designed for 24 hour a [00:10:00] day industrial production.
. They have a robust input output board. They have a lot of open M codes. They are designed to allow you to build the machine out and automate it in a way that does what you want. . And then run it just flat out all the time. That's cool. Yeah. The idea that the machine would auto shut off.
'cause if you turn off the main air feed to the machine, it alarms out. . Okay. . But if you have, after that sensor, you have a solenoid that's tied into your IO board, that only opens when the machine is in cycle, then you can leave the main air feed on all the time. And that spindle purge won't bleed any air.
. Unless you're actually running. 'cause the whole point of it is. To blow chips outta the spindle taper off of incoming tool holders to make sure you don't lock up . On a chip in the taper. So, so
Jay: what would define in cycle like what do they wire that to? A [00:11:00] light? The spindle. Like what?
Cycle. Start button. Okay. There's gotta be some something that is always sending, you know, a one versus a zero saying Turn on, turn off.
Andrew: I'm not sure 'cause we haven't done it yet. Yeah. It might just be the power to the green button. Oh, okay. Yeah, sure. Yeah, so certainly anytime you press, press, cycle start and the green button lights up and stays lit for the whole cycle.
Jay: Yeah.
Andrew: Whatever that circuit is, whether you use it or just queue off it, it's your end cycle indicator, right? . And so there are two things we wanna do for the Matsuura. So the Matsuura has a really cool function with our, which our brothers do not have, which is that you can set timers for shutdown and wake up.
You can have the machine turn itself on and run unattended warmup cycles. Great. And the Matsuura has a long warmup cycle. . So unattended is good. The downside is [00:12:00] it has to have air pressure on tap in order to turn on and warm up. . Which means if I want that machine to turn on at 7:20 AM .
And warm up for 40 minutes before we open up the shop at eight, I have to leave the air system on and open all night, and the Matsuura bleeds air like crazy.
Jay: . Okay. We've tackled this and by tackled, I mean discuss it. We've got a plan because we're, we're gonna go this direction as well. So you can have electrically activated ball valves.
Like we have this giant ball valve that powers our airlines. Yep. So that can be put on a timer in the PLC of our, we have pole, uh, do we have polar, Eaton? Polar, I think they're synonymous. Uh, air compressors, you can program them to come on and off. So there's that. The tricky one, which I think we've gotten around was how do we turn on the dryer?
The [00:13:00] dryer is a standalone thing. I feel we got really lucky because a smart plug with at least our, the polar brand of Dr. Dryer that we own will just turn on, you put, you know, you don't have to physically push a button on a keypad to turn on. Yeah. It is a digital, digitally activated and, uh, you know, if you've got a switch that's just, you can toggle it to the on position.
Great. Um, this one just, that works. So you, you could definitely do that. Well there, there are two
Andrew: things. So a y, several years ago, I remember John and John on the business of machining, talking about putting basically a pneumatic fuse on air systems that have to stay powered pressurized overnight. .
So if you have a line failure, a fitting failure ending blows out. You are not just running your screw compressor full out on an empty charge all night and burning it up. And so if we're gonna leave the air system pressurized overnight. I do want a pneumatic fuse at each compressor. 'cause we got two [00:14:00] side-by-side caers.
. And I do not want either of them to beat itself to death overnight if for some reason, like, who knows? A tornado hits our building and breaks an airline and the compressor runs all night and flogs itself to death.
.
Not what I want. And the second thing is what? It flogs itself. It just, it's well said.
I'm a Protestant. I make fun of Roman Catholics. I hope they get a good pope. Oh, that's so good. Um, and then the second thing is there are two ways we could control a relay or a solo way at the Matsuura. And one is an independent uncoordinated timer . Where we set the timer on the machine and we set a separate timer on some.
Electronic device that opens a solenoid at a certain time.
.
And I, anytime we can tie two things together versus having them separate, that dependency is a fundamental lean improvement. Yeah. Yeah. I want to [00:15:00] have the solenoid that feeds the machine. Open when the machine powers up. . Because I do not wanna have to keep track of, oh, I set the machine to turn on at six, but I forgot to reset the solenoid.
It only opened at seven. So the machine turned on at six, alarmed out for low air pressure, and then at seven it opened and bled air for an hour. Right. And the machine can't reset itself.
.
Andrew: I want the thing, this is very much in line with the lean principle of. The answer should be found in the place you ask the question.
That's right. The solenoid should be controlled by the machine that needs the air.
Jay: Makes sense. Tell me, talk to me about remote monitoring for these Matsuura. Certainly they've got some type of, you know, industry 4.0 connectivity.
Andrew: Yeah. I have none of that set up yet but it is embedded. I have none of that set up yet.
Jay: Okay. Do you have knowledge of it?
Andrew: So, yes, you can. I [00:16:00] mean, in our case, and this has actually been one of the, well, lemme back up. . We published this Matsuura episode and I had a bunch of feedback, most of it positive, some of it negative. . I also wrote a our whole team put together shared notes.
On the entire ordering, delivery, installation process, compiled all those, edited them, cleaned them up, you know, deleted like items. If three people said the same thing, we condensed it into a single bullet point.
Jay: Okay.
Andrew: And then we sent that off to Matsuura and we still do not have this MX machine networked properly.
We are still USB transferring to it. Mm. Okay. That'll come though. And yeah, it'll come. It was. Clearly networking. This machine was a pain point in the installation process. . And the documentation that our Yama and tech had that was provided by Matsuura was either out of date or incomplete. [00:17:00] And when he tried to implement it, it bricked the Matsuura os off the machine.
Whoa. Okay. So Matsuura is fundamentally a fan with a whole other layer over top. . And Matsuura has done a really good job of making that secondary layer. Very intuitive. . Clear. Easily comprehensible. Lots of helpful hints. Lots of indicators. It's not like straight up fan. Okay. Straight up fan is miserable.
Yeah. The Matsuura interface is way better. But if you try to network and connect it and you mess some things up, you break the Matsuura interface and you end up with like a weird glitchy me, like a weird glitchy fan thing. . And we were able to recover back to the original state, but we have not been able yet to connect the machine to our network.
. And so. That was one of the single biggest pain points that I highlighted in my email to Matsuura saying, Hey guys, whatever their, this part of the process was [00:18:00] of networking. We have a fairly conventional network. We have both brother and Doosan machines on it, and they have no problem. The instructions that were provided to add this machine to our network didn't work and caused additional problems.
And so all those remote access things are dependent on you having the machine networked, which we currently don't.
Jay: . Okay. So it's definitely a machine thing or is it an interface thing? Uh, like do you think the machine, like a, an identical Matsuura. Would work. It's just yours does not,
Andrew: no, it's a, I think it's a general operational documentation problem.
Jay: Okay. All right. So they should, yeah. 'cause I've got, uh, I think it's our VF four will just stop networking and you have to just hard reboot it.
Andrew: I mean, Matsuura is not our first networking problem. In October of 2022, we received in two [00:19:00] identical, like serial number sequential. Our four 50 is we bought from yama, Amazon Brothers.
Okay. That I bought at IMTS and we couldn't network the second one successfully for a year and a half. I remember us talking about that. Yeah. It was agonizing. We went through every DCIP, every network every menu setting. We went through machine settings, parameters, we dug through all kinds of stuff.
It was just like, it should work. It's like, well, but it doesn't, so, so what was it? It shouldn't working. What, what was the deal? It was a combination of settings and having to execute things in a certain order and then reboot. It was one of these things where it's like, who would know?
Jay: Yeah. Geez.
Yeah.
Andrew: And we, and we did eventually get fixed and that machine has now talked comfortably to the network ever since then, and it's been great. But that basically killed an entire CNC machine for us for almost a year. . We defaulted to running all of our production parts on mill four, not [00:20:00] Mill five, because I didn't wanna walk over there with a USB stick.
We used Mill Five only for backup, which means it has way less hours on it than Mill four. And when we finally got it networked, it's like, okay, let's shift. Let's run mill five every day and like try to catch back up. Like we have worn the tires bald on the right side of the car. Right. We've been drifting to the right for a long time.
Yeah. Drifting. Drifting to the left. Actually. We've worn. Yeah. Whatever. . We've worn the tires bald for a long time. Let's compensate. And man. . It still boggles my mind like apple devices. They *just work. Yeah. Yeah. And they have for years and years and years and years, they've just worked. Yeah. And then I spend way more money on a complex machine, and it's like, I don't, I don't see your network.*
*I don't, I don't think you have wifi. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure we have wifi. It's like, I don't, I don't see it. *
Jay: Yeah. I was listening to the, gosh, what, what [00:21:00] podcast was that? I'm gonna say that it must, I don't remember, but it was, it was the, uh, founder of Chatter where machine connectivity was Yep.
Pete Ham. Yeah. Yeah. And, and Pete, who, man. So would it have been, so Pete
Andrew: now works for Toolpath,
Jay: right? Yeah, that's why I'm confused. Maybe it was, ah, I don't remember tips and chips. I don't remember.
Andrew: Anyway,
Jay: anyways, so that, that Pete put out into the ecosystem, this free connectivity tool, which again, I don't also don't remember what it was, but it helps, you know, it's like a, it's like almost like a wizard I guess.
And I figured, I think we're gonna need to use that. 'cause we've got some machine connectivity issues that we're gonna be facing pretty soon with this machine monitoring system. And I think this will like, solve everything so. I , but
Andrew: have you I'll text, I'll text Pete and ask him.
Jay: There you go. Yeah. Um, but I know maybe that's worth a shot.
Andrew: It was really interesting. [00:22:00] He had, there was an episode that I listened to where he was talking about the whole process of trying to VC fund chatter and then eventually rolling into the Toolpath family. And it was really interesting to me to hear how the VC environment.
*You. It's like it's even worse than an elevator pitch. Like you have to Yeah. Relentlessly sharpen your pitch. To catch the first 10 seconds of attention of an a DD millionaire, right? Who, who doesn't understand machining at all and just wants to hear certain buzzwords like it's like a bachelor.*
*You need to, Subconsciously* trigger the fish to bite without it thinking about it. Uhhuh like, if you try to talk it into how good your lure is, it's not going to, you have to wiggle something in front of their face that they can't help but bite on. Yeah. And Pete's obvious distress at how counter.[00:23:00]
Counter human that environment was and how frustrating it was as a shop owner who runs machines and makes things and knows how machining works. . To be just constantly pitching people who don't care and can't be bothered to learn.
Jay: Yeah. And are not in the ecosystem. You know, that's another thing.
Andrew: *So this is, this is still the single biggest thing that I think is awesome about Toolpath. Is that they are consistently building a team of people who have time on machines. *
Jay: *. Yeah. Very *
Andrew: *true. If you have a whole team of people in customer service, in product development, in implementation who have all spent significant time on machines, .*
*You're going to avoid a lot of the completely avoidable, idiotic problems. A software engineer would jump into with both feet. *
Jay: *. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm* pretty sure it was the Within [00:24:00] Tolerance podcast, which I need to re-listen to 'cause it was such a great episode. But no, that whole thing of *software developed by non machinists or just solutions.*
*And there's, you know, when I was at IMTS, I was touring different software solutions. And, um, not to throw anyone under the bus, but at one point I just, I, I told the guy, dude, the demo, gotta stop you. It's just not for me. Oh, why not? Look, machines have a, because you obviously dunno what you're talking about.*
*I mean, the dude knew it really well, but I didn't need to know everything. And I was asking him, Hey, this is what we do. Show me if yours does that. Well, let me give you an overview. I don't want an overview, you know. It was it was probably like feature creep. I think that's what happened.*
*You know, so to this point, we're developing in-house software just to do exactly what we want. And it's a 2.0 version. We have a 1.0 version, but it, yeah, it's just you know, one thing that, that I found interesting in my convene group, there's about 14 companies represented. All of us, all of us have *[00:25:00] *custom written software.*
*Not custom written like we wrote it, but we had. Third parties write custom written software. . Because at some point the company gets big enough where you can't go with an out of the box solution and you're too small to go with an SAP. Well, you know, you have to have custom written software and it's like your shipping software.*
*That's a, that I love that system. That's amazing. What's an SAP oh, SAP is like a big, like, like, uh, Hawes uses SAP enterprise software. Yeah. It's enterprise software. You know, where, you know, it's a million dollars a month support a loan bill. We're not there, so *
Andrew: No, we're not either. No. Um, but you mentioned our shipping software and I wanted to give you a lean example from today.
.
And it was, we had a bunch of new orders. We had a new product launch this week, and it was all stuff that we had been pre-building inventory in prep for the launch. And at the end of the day today, what *we ended up with *[00:26:00] *was a clear. Kind of breakdown. . Of our shipping process. And what I mean by that is we only wanna pick orders we can ship today.*
*Okay. There is no point in picking more orders than can get out the door by the shipping cutoff for a carrier. . . If we have a fulfillment team and their job is to pick and ship orders, it is of no value today. To have everyone leave with 20 picked, but unshipped orders, *
Jay: right. There was work done that didn't need to be done.
Andrew: Well, it, it would've been better to pick 10, ship 10
.
*Than pick 20, ship zero in the last half hour of the day. . And so in this particular case, it's really interesting to me as an owner how. How easy it is to fall into the trap of thinking *[00:27:00] *that my perception is shared. Okay. It's not, *
Jay: *yeah. That's *
Andrew: *great.*
*My understanding of how the business operates and what it does and what we should do next is not often shared. . It's a great point or is often not shared. Yeah, no, it makes sense. Yeah. And the outcome of that is that we can end up in situations where I walk through the building and I see them and go, well, that's obviously inside out.*
*We should be doing this other thing because of these lean principles. And at the moment, I can't solve it. I can't fix it. Like the shipping deadline is right on top of us. . This is what's happening today. Making sure that every opportunity where I notice a discrepancy between how I think the principles should be applied and how they're actually being applied.*
*It's not to say that it's my way or the highway, and that my understanding of lean principles *[00:28:00] *is the law. I'm not judged dread, you know, I am the law, but. When we see batch work happening where it shouldn't. . When we see defects being caused where they shouldn't because the process is being run in a way that it shouldn't, like that is the pinnacle of opportunity for me to lean in and say, okay, this is exactly where the rubber meets the road.*
*This is exactly where the lean principles and lean phrases we talk about in our morning meetings. Apply right here. . This is it. And it's really hard as an owner to step into those situations and give that critical feedback without being negative. *
Jay: Well, you know what? I've found that when I do that, it's okay.
Going back to A Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is, Nope, I don't know if it's that book. I get these two [00:29:00] books mixed up. But anyways. *Seek first to understand and then seek to be understood. And I think there's missing content. A lot of times when I've stepped into situations where I say, Hey, we should really be doing it like this.*
*What's going on? Can I help you? You know, and I'm trying to approach it, you know, as, as helpful as possible. They're like, yeah, just, just let us do it because we tried it that way and you know, we have to do this, this, and that. And that's how those conversations go. And then other times guys are like, oh yeah, I just wasn't thinking great.*
You know? So I, I find that that's one of those hard things for me is I, I don't have the full context. So, and then it's kind of like an odd thing. It's, it feels like a jerk, Hey, why are we doing it like this way? I'm not criticizing you, I'm not mad. I'm just wondering why you're doing it like this. It seems a little bit, you know, kind of like the Unle way and, you know, six outta 10 times, it's like, yeah, I wasn't thinking.
But four outta 10, it's like, no, this is, the most optimized way to do it. Thank you for asking.
Andrew: So super nerdy book book plug. . *The book, the *[00:30:00] *Amateur's Mind by Jeremy Sillman. Mm. I'm kind of a chess nerd. I was a big chess nerd in high school. Less so now, but I'm getting back into it 'cause my sons are starting to play chess.*
My oldest son just joined the chess club at school this semester, which is super fun. Cool. Uh, but one of the things that's really interesting is Jeremy S's an international master, a well-known coach and teacher in the chess world. He said at a *certain point I realized that my approach to teaching was failing in the sense that I was addressing mistakes students were making as though I were making them and not inquiring into their thought process, their state of mind and their articulation of the problem they were trying to solve.*
*That's good. And so he did a whole series of studies and then wrote a book about. Basically reviewing a bunch of games with the students and asking them to *[00:31:00] *explain their thought process at the move where they made critical errors.* I like that. And what was really instructive to him was the things that he was thinking about where he is like, well, the student, I mean like why would you blunder like that?
You obviously shouldn't have done that. That's wrong because this and this. The student was not going, I don't know what to do. I'll just move a piece. . They were going, I'm really worried about that rook over there and so I'm gonna do this. And failing to recognize that that rook wasn't actually dangerous because of some other factor they didn't see.
.* I see. And so it was the blindness of expertise. Where you can't look at somebody else's solution and go and if you can't, if you can't enter into their mind, you're actually too well trained. You skip over the suboptimal solution that they look at and go, *[00:32:00] *well, this is better than what I initially thought.*
I should do this instead. And you can look at it and go, well, that's obviously not right. You should do this other thing instead. Right. Yeah. Really interesting book. The Psychology of Experts Solving Amateur Problems. . It's really
Jay: deep water. So that, that brings to mind in the last podcast, two things that I, that I really enjoyed.
Number one, you can't watch your kids load the dishwasher. And I, I can't related 'cause I'm like, I would not do it that way. Do you know? And is, is there a process in their minds? Probably not yet. They keep doing it and they'll find their own mistakes. And you know, if I come back, you know, in the morning and a, uh, dishwasher has probably 80% of capacity that it could have had, it's still a dishwasher filled with clean dishes.
That's the nice thing. Yeah.
Andrew: So my only comment on that is I worry less about total throughput . Than I do about defects. If a [00:33:00] kid puts all the spoons in the same pocket, in the silverware drawer.
.
And we end up with no clean spoons in the morning because all the spoons nested and stayed dirty.
Yeah. I'm less worried about, did you fit every coffee cup in than I am worried about It's breakfast time and we have no clean spoons.
Jay: Right. Tangent on that, Paul Akers had a video about how they standardize in their washer. Dishwasher at work. You know, this is where all the spoons goes, where all the forks go, the knives.
I showed that to my wife going, isn't that brilliant? Like, they've standardized, you know, by attaching a spoon to everything and yeah, it gets washed over and over. She's like, that would never work. The spoons are gonna nest. They're, they're gonna sit together. So, okay. The other thing I really liked is, how you're, you talked about you're going to be documenting the process for your Matsuura, which is brilliant. That's what you should be doing. The question is, I'm gonna give you three choices.
.
Do you, you know, that the processes will change, so A .
Do you not document it yet until they've [00:34:00] been, kind of gone through b. Do you document them and just say, this is how we're gonna do it and we're gonna put some time into it and we're gonna, we're gonna QR code it and put it on Vimeo, you know, or C do you just record it with your iPhone and just, you know, Hey, just point to here's a Google Drive.
You know, kinda like rough document it. I know your answer, but talk through it. You know my answer, which answer? I know your answer. One, two, or three. It's all the above
Andrew: D it's actually three. Mm, so in the Lean Built Podcast video clip that was posted today on Instagram. Okay. You can see that we have a GoPro camera mounted viewing the control and the work door on the Matsuura, and we're using that to document processes.
Hold on, let me pull it up.
Jay: Okay. Are you sure you don't want all the above? There are processes that you don't know [00:35:00] how to do yet. Well, so
Andrew: we don't, it definitely not one. And so the reason I reject one is that you have to have some SOP as a starting place. You have to know where you are, to know where you wanna go.
You can't *step off of nowhere. And so I appreciate Ryan Tierney . At, uh, lean Made Simple saying, document your process. Whatever your process is. Yeah. I don't care what it is. Document your process and the ability to document processes is getting easier and easier. Like a year and a half ago, we started an SOP team in the company, which was a handful of employees, and their job was to capture and standardize SOPs across the company, and that was capturing photos, capturing videos, and then sitting down with whoever was the SME, the owner for that process.*
Pulling information out of them, asking questions and building documentation, and that worked. [00:36:00] And we have way more functional SOPs now because of it. But I look at things like plot and go, I could have a person sit down and simply dictate to this and have the AI clean up the summary. Then capture a handful of images and paste them in and .
The SOP would be done. . Nobody has, nobody has to sit there and type the whole thing up. . I could even say, you know, take the transcript from Claude, feed it into chat or some other AI and say, you know, this is the format for our SOPs. Take this cran transcript, edit it. Condense it, and format it as a Henry Holster's, SOP.
With key QA points and steps, bullet pointed in order to complete the process correctly.
.
And they would just do it. Yeah. We don't have to have anybody type that anymore, and that's crazy. Yeah. But for our Matsuura, the reason we have a GoPro mounted just about the control is so that Chris, who's our lead [00:37:00] programmer, anytime he wants to capture anything that he's doing at the machine to share to the team, all he does is reach up and press record on the GoPro.
. Okay. He doesn't have to get his phone out. It's hands free. It's mounted on the side of the machine. It's pointed where he already wants it, which means all the videos are from a consistent perspective and they're not moving and it's plugged into an extension cord. So he doesn't have worry about the GoPro battery being dead.
It's just powered. . That is a great hack that we can then take and video, transcribe, feed through an ai, do whatever with, or just dump in a Google Drive and say, Hey, I. Here are 10 videos that Chris recorded of setup and operations on the Matsuura, and not super helpful as a q and a where I'm like, I'm trying to figure out how to clear this alarm.
Let me go through two hours of video. But if I, if I wanna refresh myself on, Hey, here's how to integrate the pallet pool. Here's how to schedule pallets, here's how to load a [00:38:00] series of tools and have them all touch off on the first time they get loaded into the spindle. I can just watch the video and it's all there.
Jay: . Yeah. Yeah. I, I like that approach. Especially harnessing AI to do this stuff that has been a hindrance in the past because man, oh man, I, I've told my, my guys, this is why I would, okay, so I said I knew your answer, but I don't know your answer. My answer would be probably all the above, and that's pretty ambiguous, but I would, I, I just know that when I onboard people.
Or we get a new machine and we're basically onboarding ourselves. . Um, the burden of having to capture process that isn't quite fully baked. Yeah. It's just another there, it's another, you know, CPU cycle that's taking brain power. Yeah. Well, no, it's huge. Yeah. So I would say, yeah. And you guys are, you guys are farther along than I realized, you know?
'cause we, we haven't talked on the podcast much about since you received the machine, but you guys are like, yeah, you guys are there. So it does make sense that you, you can standardize [00:39:00] at this point, run with processes. Well,
Andrew: so it's not even so much standardized processes yet. . It is just.
Learn the ins and outs of the day-to-day operation at this control Uhhuh. Yeah. How to load and set tools, how to cha, how to call pallets, how to schedule things, how to clear alarms. It's just learning a new control. Yeah. But I call that process like what's the process for putting tool 28? Yeah. But it's a micro having a go, having a GoPro pointed where you can see the keypad and see the control screen.
Yeah. And record audio as a person is talking. . Is so valuable.
Jay: Right. I. You know what we did? We bought a Insta 360. And at that just the the concern with having to bring the GoPro into the frame and at the right, like, width. 'cause you can go like super wide or you can go narrow.
Uh, even that right there, it's just like, dude, just stick it. We, we 3D printed a magnetic mount for the, you know, the quarter inch mount on the bottom. . Just stick it and just start talking. [00:40:00] And then Nathan, my media guy can just come in, then he can crop in. On this literal 360 degree spherical capture in the .
You know, in 360 software, that's changed how we do stuff. 'cause in the operator, he doesn't have to be a video producer or a a, a syn, a director of, of photography. He just plops it right next to him and he knows that it can see everything. That's been a game changer for us.
Andrew: *Yeah. So we are living at a point where as shop owners.*
*We are like swimming up a waterfall of technology to *
Jay: *Yeah. Oh, that's well said. *
Andrew: *Yeah. Yeah. And I stole the illustration completely from, uh, CS Lewis, uh, crackles and Narnia, the last battle. . Based from Upper Waterfall, love that boat. But the idea that if we are doing SOPs the same way today as we* were doing them a year ago.
We are not behind the curve. We're falling off the face of the earth. . Like [00:41:00] everything is accelerating so fast that if you don't as a company regularly dedicate some time to simply experiment with new things, the time you invest in that experimentation will be dwarfed by the time you waste doing it the old way.
Like having an employee sit down with paper notes. They took in an in-person interview with another employee. . And then type them up and then put in bullet points and then bold certain things and then put in hyperlinks. It's like, no, we have AI now. Don't type that.
Jay: Yeah, no. If you look historically at different business case studies is a lot of technology or products has been.
it's just been, uh, discovered based off of like, Hey, at on Fridays after lunch, put together your own teams and brainstorm. We don't care what you produce. You can play pickleball, whatever you want, but the goal is for you to collaborate and work on passion projects. You know, and I think Colgate [00:42:00] was one of them that did that.
Maybe 3M had a program like big companies. At which like these, ubiquitous products in our households and, and lives were created out of those projects. A lot of, like, some of the Google, uh, you go into the Google ecosystem and those are little passion projects put together by a team of, you know, four or five developers.
That's huge. That's amazing.
Andrew: *Yeah. That, that constant prospecting and experimenting with new things. When your company stops doing that, when you personally stop doing that.*
*Yeah. That's when death occurs. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's when you enter the slow steady decline *
Jay: *to obsolescence. How about, how about this? You've, you've kind of retired, uh, to use a human term like you've entered retirement as far as your development, like it's, you're not hustling, you're not.*
Grinding. You're not just doing, you know, cool stuff and developing new technology. I, I find some parallels there. Hey, can I ask you a quick question? Shoot. I'm on your, uh, Instagram. Explain to me this. [00:43:00] Another key becomes a knob post. It's a, okay. Let you describe it from the listener. There's a 3D printed knob.
It's got a very much, uh, indicate a D direction indicated indicator. . Um, and it's on some device.
Andrew: Go. So on brothers, you only have a couple of keys and they're not integral to the day-to-day interactions with the machine at all. You don't have to toggle between key modes in order, 'cause there's no pallet pool, there's nothing else going on.
On the Matsuura. There are several places where you have keys. You have to switch one way or the other. If you wanna manually, you know, rotate the pallet pool, you have to switch out of auto mode into manual mode. If you wanna do certain things in the workspace, you have to switch out of auto mode into setup mode.
And there are multiple keys, and I have a decade of experience now of looking at keys in the brother and completely ignoring them. Okay. I don't even see them. we took all the keys out of our brothers and we ground the heads off them and then put them back in the machines. So [00:44:00] they're basically flushed to the key slot.
You can get 'em out with pliers, but because you never need to interact with them and they're sharp metal things you could bash your hand against if you're trying to hit the e-stop, we just cut them off. Oh, I love that. Okay. And that was like the number of times I was looking at. I'm like, oh no. Like if you're, if you're trying to e-stop a brother.
You have to be like Doc Holiday on the draw on that e-stop. You have no time. . So you have to like, you don't even have time to look where your hand's going. You just have to mash the face of the control. . And a few times I just mashed the key right next to the e-stop and hurt my hand. Wow.
Okay. You know what? I'm not doing this anymore. These these square, sharp corner keys that are useless, I don't use them for anything. I never turn them. Yeah, let's get them outta here. But if you pull them. The machine doesn't function normally. Really? There are certain things you have to, well, like the key is missing and it's like, I need a key in this Y Yeah.
[00:45:00] Like it, yeah. You have to have the key in place. The key is designed to live in place. Wow. And so I wanted the key to live in place and I never wanted to hit the head of the key again. Yeah. So I literally took them over to a vice and I took an angle grinder and I chopped the heads off all the keys and then put them back in all the controls.
Mm. But on the Matsuura. Those keys are actually knobs, they are switches. You have to toggle back and forth to change the mode in which the machine is functioning. But if you visually look at them as keys, you go the key's there, the machine's fine. And the idea that I would have to know or care which direction the key is turned.
It doesn't compute. I see. Okay. And so adding a press fit 3D printed knob handle to the key fundamentally changes how I view it. I look at it and go, that's a thing that I should normally interact with. And it's position is [00:46:00] variable in the normal course of function of the machine. .
Yeah. And so it's mostly psychologically for me to go. That's a thing. I can actually, it's not a, if I wanna lock the whole machine up, I turn the keys all left or pull 'em all out and the machine is totally locked up. It's like. No. If I wanna be manual mode and do this or that, I have to turn the key to that position.
Jay: Right. Okay. That makes sense. That's, that's great. That was a super
Andrew: long answer to your very brief question.
Jay: Well, I mean, I dig that stuff because a, a quick Okay. Someone going way back to maybe it was one of our first few episodes working Genius, Patrick Lencioni. Okay. Yep. So I am a inventor and discerner and so.
Me going, wow, you guys have this problem. Oh my gosh, let me invent something. We'll put it over the key and it will indicate like our, kind of like our, um, you know, you need a key to open panels on all of our, Doosan machines. And it's just a simple hex, where's the key? It blends in with stuff. It's the same paint color as the side, you know, [00:47:00] we 3D printed a rack and then finally it's like, why don't we just 3D print little magnetic knobs that just go on it.
We'll, we'll Pearson brand it and everything. It'll be awesome. We did, you stole it hundred percent from us. Yeah, that's where I saw it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So that's why I asked, I'm, I'm gonna steal this key idea. But you know, for me, like we don't, there's keys on the side of the hos control that puts you in setup mode, whatever.
It's like we never actuate those and when they are actuated on accident, 'cause a guy reaches past it bumps and rotates it. It's like, why is this machine not working? Why can't I jog it? Why can't I handle jog it? Like I tried to handle, jog a machine the other day. I'm like, Alex, what is going on? Oh, you put it in, you know, production mode instead of setup mode, which is crazy.
You accidentally keyed the machine into suck mode. Yes, exactly. Sucks. Yes. Into
Andrew: struggle mode. So yeah. That's interesting. I love that. Well, those, those kinds of things are. Often highly dependent on a particular brand of machine and its control, and the individual quirks. Even in brother, the change from the C [00:48:00] zero zero control.
. Which is what all of our machines are to. The D zero zero control meant a whole bunch of different safety settings like the C zero zeros. Very straightforward, no touch touchscreen. Everything is soft keyed. I mean, everything is like bubble keyed. . Or soft keyed screen, but there's no touchscreen.
You're never touching the screen on the D zero zero, lots of touchscreen interaction, lots of variable menus and lots of things, but the D zero zero has certain safety features that you could easily work around on the C zero zero that you can't work around on the D zero zero. Wow. Okay. And that makes the machine, depending on what you're using it for.
Substantially more friction full to use. .
Jay: Yeah. We've got one machine. It is a, I looked at the serial number and the, the data manufacturer just today because it's the next to go and it is a 2015 VF two beautiful condition still. And it is just one of those odd machines. It's, it's the non next [00:49:00] gen.
It's got an umbrella tool changer. We use it for very few things, uh, but they're specific things and, and we love them and everything. But it's just the fact that it's a non-standard. I'd rather replace it and replace it with some type of automation type thing. But it's like it's saved our butts so many times.
So that's an episode right there where, you know, how do you cycle out old machinery and it's only 10 years old and it still looks almost new. It looks like a year old. When, how do you pull the plug on on machinery like that? And for me it's gonna be floor space. 'cause one of the things I'm considering.
Is another five axis machine with pallet pool so we can run again unattended and just, you know, get those other, you know, 16 hours unused out of Yeah. Machines that, you know, floor space that is occupied by machines that have saved our butts. So there's like an, uh, almost like an emotional attachment there, but on paper math, it doesn't make sense for that machine to occupy that piece of real estate.
Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have, I mean, [00:50:00] for me, we have all of our brothers standardized on the same control. . Everything maps across, it's amazing. And they're also super space efficient. Yeah. They're very compact insurance. Right. Yeah. And so I don't feel, I have not yet felt any pressure to offload a machine.
. Although, although recently I did have a thought. It seems like we're outsourcing more Swiss work than I'd expect. Maybe we should get rid of our Doon and get a Swiss, and then immediately the next day, Chris needed to make some parts that clearly were right for the Doon that would not have worked on a Swiss.
Yeah. And I'm like, okay, okay, okay. Okay. Well hang on to the Doon. It's great. It's awesome. It's not either or though. You should just get a Swiss, right. Maybe we should add a Swiss.
Jay: Yeah, that's another podcast. We've got a lot of content coming. You don't have a Swiss, do you? No, but I had an opportunity to buy one.
Um, I just, we just didn't have the floor space. It was a floor space issue. [00:51:00] And there are parts, and we've got some, some new components that are coming online that are, would be perfect for like a 32 millimeter Swiss. It'd be amazing.
Andrew: Um, mm. Yeah. One of my favorite shop tours was I visited a shop up in Indianapolis that had dozens, dozens of star swisses.
. All with 12 foot bar feeders on them. They were running 24 hours a day. They had one operator per three machines, and they were running one shift a day.
And they were just producing a ridiculous number of parts. Yeah. It was inspiring.
Jay: Yeah. Man, owner, I don't owner get the, I don't get the 12 foot bar feeders though.
I'm, I'm missing something there. Why, why would you have 12 feet of shop floor occupied when you could go with like,
Andrew: you know? 'cause these guys were making a lot of fasteners. Okay. And they were making several, a lot of 'em were making relatively long fasteners, like nine to 12 inch long fasteners. Oh, okay.
Which mean your cycle time per bolt. Sure. That you were [00:52:00] machining like you're consuming your entire bar. In 14 parts and it's like, okay, well then you can't get unattended runtime out of a, you can't get an overnight runtime.
Out of a six foot bar, you gotta have 12 foot bars.
Jay: Yeah. Okay. 'cause our I Amca bar feeders, we standardize, all of our bars are four feet and we just rack 'em up and it'll feed up to, I think I wanna say six feet.
Yeah. That's interesting.
Andrew: These guys particularly, 'cause they were running a lot of long-ish Swiss parts. They wanted that longer bar to get more parts per bar in order to be able to load the bar and get 16 hours of unattended runtime overnight. I see. Okay. Yeah, it was really cool. Yeah. It, it gave me a lot to think about and I still want a Swiss and, uh, between the Tornos star citizen citizen's, the one I want.
Jay: Uh, I had an opportunity to buy a used, uh, Ganesh, which, you know, my, my lead machinist John, he's a lead machinist on the [00:53:00] laid side. He worked on them for years, and they're just, they're just bulletproof. They're just great machines. And, uh, I thought, you know, whenever we dip a toe into a new technology, I typically want to keep it very inexpensive.
All go used. And then find the issues and then we go new, and then we'll, we will be more informed. You know? 'cause it's hard to buy something new for the first time that you know nothing about. So that would've been something. There's one still available, but again, it's a floor space issue and it's a timing issue.
We just don't need it yet. But, um, yeah, by the end of the year, I don't need a
Andrew: Swiss yet, but that doesn't stop me from wanting. I
Jay: know, I know. That's the want thing. I love it. So,
Andrew: all
Jay: right.
Andrew: Alright, good to talk to you. Yeah. Good night Jay. See you.
[00:54:00]