Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1253723
66 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2020 room. I come in with something that's admit- tedly going to take them a little time to change the way they do things, but in the long run, it will make them healthier and make more money. I have had some success having them make the right changes for a while, but because it does require a little discipline, they slip back into bad habits. With the scenario I men- tioned, with running the line with a skeleton crew through lunch, one of the things that I do when I first visit is I use my Profit Pro software and model their company. I ask them if they can give me some high-level metrics like how much money they made last year, how many workers they have, and how much they pay them. In about an hour, I can make an Excel model of their company and show them that if they don't shut the line down over lunch, they'll make this much more in profit. I've had a few companies that have agreed to try these things, but the tyranny of the urgent takes over, and in a couple of months, they're back to scrambling. There's also a lot of what one of my colleagues called "flounder- ing time." When I do a productivity audit at a company, the managers are shocked by their low uptime numbers, and they tell me, "That can't be right. That doesn't apply to our com- pany," but world-class uptime—the amount of time the line is running—is about 30–40% because 60–70% of the time, the line is down. Meanwhile, 20% is more typical, and 80% of the time, the lines are not running. A typical reason for poor uptime is that a company that has a lot of changeovers might try to be orga- nized and ready, so they have a whiteboard where they write down the things they need for the next job. But when it's time to get going, they find they can't find the stencil or some com- ponents. Some companies lose an hour and a half on a regular basis because they can't find the stencil or some components. I even worked with a com- pany that was pretty orga- nized, but part of their getting set up for the next job, they called "shopping time." They could find 80% of the components quickly, and then 10% of the components they needed for the next job; they have a storage facility where some of their components were mislabeled. The remaining 10% would take three hours to find. If they could get a handle on these things and set up a system to try to min- imize them, these places could go from mak- ing 2–3% to making 8–9% profit. However, I haven't found many to take me up on that. Matties: It sounds like the first thing that they need to understand is where they're leaking efficiency. Do they have a basic benchmark? Are they documenting or understanding these times? Lasky: With the first story in my book, when I told them that their uptime was only 10%, I was asked to leave! I was invited to the company by a young guy who attended one of my work- shops. They had two assembly lines, and they couldn't produce enough, and they were going to install a third assembly line. Fortunately, they were a captive facility, so their business was assured. I said, "Why don't we measure your uptime to see if you could develop a little more productivity. Then, you wouldn't need it to buy another line." I asked for some metrics, ran some calculations, and came up with an estimation: "Your uptime is 10%." Again, let's understand what that means; the line is run- ning only 10% of the time. One of the junior executives, a guy in his 40s, got so angry. His face was red, and he started