Patrick Adams  

Welcome to the Lean solutions podcast where we discuss business solutions to help listeners develop and implement action plans for true Lean process improvement. I am your host, Patrick Adams. Hello, everybody and welcome. Our guest today is Jim Huntzinger. And Jim began his career as a manufacturing engineer with Toyota and then was transplanted to North America to support Toyota. In 2005. Jim founded lean frontiers, which I’m sure many of you have heard of, they run some amazing summits all over the United States. But he developed and operates the immersive skill point workshops for job instruction and Toyota kata, he also launched a new business in the free market healthcare arena through several virtual lean and free market healthcare events, and the United in care summit. So lots of different things are happening with Jim. I’m not going to mention the many books that He’s authored. We will put those in the show notes. So if you’re interested to look into those and read up on the many books that Jim has authored. So welcome to the show, Jim.

Jim Huntzinger

Thank you, Patrick. Great to be here.

Patrick Adams  

Absolutely. So in your introduction here, I mentioned lean frontiers. And I love to talk about Lean frontiers because I am on your email list. And I get all of your event updates. And I’m always interested to see what the next event is going to be. And before we hit record your we were just chatting about 2022. And you know what the agenda looks like? And are we going to be live? Are we going to be virtual? So I’m just excited to hear a little bit more about Lean frontiers opportunities for people to get developed. But before we go into that, can you tell the listeners maybe how lean frontiers got started?

Jim Huntzinger  

Sure, I’d be happy to, as you mentioned in my bio, my background is engineering engineering operations. And I was a manufacturing engineer, engineering manager and so forth. The way the wailing for tears got started going back quite a few years as I was in those positions. When I came out of school, I went to work for a Toyota Group company that was transplanting in North America to support North Toyota in North America, company, ice and Saiki. And they manufactured, obviously, automotive products supplied in the Toyota plants. I didn’t take that position, because it was a Toyota Group company, I took it because as a plant startup, and in machining and assembly, and that’s where my interest was. That’s why I took the position. And of course, got sent to Japan to get training on a void production system on our products, ice and plants to work with machine tools, vendors that were building some machine tools, and so forth into come back and kind of ramp up production in doing that. So I was there for a few years. But I wanted to get more involved in the process development part of it because of course that was done by that guy that Japanese engineers I worked with. And then we just kind of picked up the baton on the move and ramped up. So I left there and went to Wisconsin, and took a position with Briggs and Stratton. And literally on my second day there, it dawned on me that the rest of the industrial world did not work like this place I just left. And one of the reasons they hired me because I was supposed to know what this Toyota Production System thing was. So that really changed my view. And but that’s that really my time there really became a sandbox to really, actually really learn what the I guess Lean or Toyota business model really was. And at that time, there was no Internet, there were really no books, there was nowhere to go to learn it, for the most part, so we really just had to learn on our own. And that’s one of the reasons they hired me and supposedly knew something about that. So it’s the course of doing that. We went through a very massive, I guess, lean implementation on the shop floor, obviously, in particular. And in the course of doing that, actually, even to this day, even though that goes back now 30 years ago, still one of the biggest implementations I’ve seen at an organization and also with great speed, relatively speaking. Sure. But one of the things we had to do is we were making all these changes on the shoplift, truly taking traditional manufacturing, batch manufacturing, and make it into true one piece flow cells. Mostly in machining, it’s what in assembly, one of the things they wanted us to do was do an ROI on these changes we’re making. So by default, I really weren’t interested in doing that. Because that’s not what my background was, I wouldn’t do much fun. And but it forced me to get involved in their accounting system. They did traditional standard costing, and of course of going through that process, how they went through and calculated their cost, because we were doing doing costume of different components who manufactured I realized that all the information, as we calculate the cost was incorrect, just by the way, they went through the process, the allocation process and so forth. And that greatly disturbed me because as a fortune 500 company, we made every business decision based off that information. So that led me down a road with one of the divisional accountants where we’re doing a lot of this work to go in and talk to him. And I went in and said, Jeff, you know, the stuff is wrong? Well, I know Jim, but you know, corporate requires us to do so we need to do it. But yeah, but it’s wrong. Anyway, that would have been a multi multi month dialogue with him and I had to talk through that because I had no background in accounting. And I was trying to understand what was going on. And finally, one day I was in there talking with them, and I was describing to him what I felt how you should, you know, develop costs for components or products. And he finally said, Come like, come take a look at my computer screen. Is this what you’re talking about? And he kind of talked me through it, it was just something he had done in an Excel spreadsheet. I said, Yeah, that seems to make sense to me. Well, ultimately, as that division, that’s what he did to track our costs of the components and what we did, and, and today, what we call that would be value street costing. And that’s essentially what we did. At that time. I mean, there was hardly any books out on lean, let alone on anything lead accounting, our technical term for it was Jeff spreadsheet. So we use that to, to make our decisions, and so forth from an internal standpoint and all that, and he would track our costs, it’ll step that forward a little bit. Why was it in Wisconsin, I was getting my master’s degree? And I made the choice to take a thesis route. Because I wanted to write up my thesis on this thing we’ll call Lean Accounting, sure, just to try to codify it to get my head around what I learned and all that. And in the course of doing that I had help from a number of people, I got to know some of the people that are the pioneers in this arena, like Henri Fumie, Gene cutting, and Mark luzio That really pioneered what we call Lean Accounting day, Brian Maskull, and so forth. And they helped me out with it. Also, some counting professors that have done a lot of work in this arena, one in particular, Tom Johnson, who did some a lot of original writing in this arena. And then of course, Doc Hall, who’s one of the founders of ASME. So she’s your manufacturing excellence. So I went through that process and wrote that thing up. And after I got done with it, you know, I was happy to fulfill that requirement. But I kept thinking, you know, I’ve tapped into a pretty unique group of people, there’s got to be something else I could, I could do with this, people either write up some paper. And in the course, this goes back to 2000. For fall 2004, I saw a call at one of the semi annual conferences, I asked, and by then there’s some lean conferences and some things going on. He certainly did a lot in that arena. Sure. And I saw doc there and said, Hey, Doc, do you think it’s possible to do a summit on lean and a specific subject, under lean? Let’s say accounting, Doc just kind of looked at me not and said, Yep, I think he could, I think he should, why don’t you go do that? I always say I was dumb enough to go do it. I knew nothing about conferences. And really, we went from the idea. And in about five months, I went to the first Lean Accounting Summit in 2005. And when I call it all people like the Brian masters, and always all I just said, Sure, Jim, count me and let me know what you want me to do. And that’s kind of how I got started. In 2005, I didn’t do that as a company. And I just did it after you did it. You know, we had over 300 people at the first one, it was more boys that seemed to work pretty well and should do it again next year. Sure. So did it again next year, the next year, we had over 400. Same thing. It went pretty well, we should do it again next year. And by then I said about I had done a lot of research on training with industries. And I thought maybe we could do the same thing with it. So going into third year, we launched a DWI Summit, and also the third year the Lean Accounting Summit. And as I rolled into that year, I finally realized I was spending all my time doing it. So really, I realized I had a business going eventually, that’s where Lean frontiers came out, as we kind of need this umbrella organization. We launched another summit as well. And kind of organically we’re we’re by way into I guess, starting up lead frontiers, that when the original intention,

Patrick Adams  

right at first kind of morphed into that. Sure. Yeah. That’s amazing. I love that. I love just hearing the history and the background of how that got started. And obviously now you’re helping to develop the skill sets of so many lean practitioners. I think not just in the US but around the world, right? You guys are

Jim Huntzinger  

Yeah, yeah. Around the world. We did one event in New Zealand a number of years ago actually trying specifically to get you New Zealand ramped up, just not on anything specific. But on lean. We had some lean accounting there. It’s Lean management, and a variety of things that they like to remember the name of the organization that’s their comp or National Organization of trying to help manufacturing. But we’ve also for a number of years been doing a European TWA anakata Summit. Nice. So we’ve probably six years now okay, at least been doing it in Europe, and it really has fairly good traction with TWA and Kata. try to get something like Lean Accounting engaged over there. Sure, it seems to be a little bit harder to get the Europeans over that particular hurdle. But yeah, so doing things and also we do have a lot of overseas people a lot from Europe, some from south central South America and a little bit from Asia that will come to our domestic events as well. That’s great.

Patrick Adams  

So for those that are listening in right now that maybe they’re hearing about Lean Accounting for the first time, can you just give us maybe an overview of what is lean accounting? And maybe how is it different from traditional accounting that most might have heard of and know about?

Jim Huntzinger  

Sure. The, I guess, the Lean Accounting group, as we, as we developed it, kind of came up with two terms to it, or make more descriptions. One is lean accounting, and other one is accounting for Lean. So a Lean Accounting would be specific things you do, I guess, in accounting and your functions, tried it, make it you know, more flub flowing, more smooth, more productive, in a sense, that accounting for Lean, which is really kind of kind of the work and arena I did originally was more around? How do we account for Lean? So maybe not with there’s techniques, but maybe not accounting, per se? But how, as far as accounting people, how do we support the changes the organization are doing from a lean perspective? So are we giving the right information? Are we giving them valuable information? are we contributing to those efforts? So there’s kind of I guess, those two basic aspects to it? To do that, and again, that’s what I discovered when I went through that process years ago with Briggs is how do we, how do we make the accounting in this case, the costing system, because it’s looking at things kind of internally, and then, you know, aggregating it up depending on you know, the component up to maybe an engine model, and so forth. But how do we do that? So we’re giving accurate information. That’s the other key thing is traditional accounting does not give you information, but it doesn’t give you accurate information. It’s truly reflecting what your costs are, and also really what the resources are being consumed, per particular product or component. And that’s where I found the failing of it. And that’s what disturbed me, yeah, we’re coming up with cost numbers, but they’re not reflecting what it’s truly costing us. And now we’re making decisions off that incorrect information. So how good or is our decision making when we don’t have valid information to make the decisions with?

Patrick Adams  

Yeah, yeah, the output is only as good as the input. Right? Yeah. So when it comes to lean accounting, would you say? I know, obviously, you mentioned your background in manufacturing, does lean accounting apply to only manufacturing? Or does it apply across any industry?

Jim Huntzinger  

It certainly would apply across in any industry, they do they evolve, or I should say, evolve, may modify bit, you know, if you’re in discrete manufacturing, there’s some different aspects to it than if you’re something like more process manufacturing, like, you know, say, beverages or something like that, also to maybe a little bit different with if you’re in some type of service industry as well. But the key, the key thing is, are we reflecting the cost information that’s showing what truly our resources are consuming? You know, again, whether that’s equipment, whether that’s people, whether that’s materials, are we reflecting properly, what we’re doing as an organization, so we have valid information to make decisions from I mean, essentially, even if you go back historically, with accounting, that’s really what it’s for, is mainly is our is giving us information, so we can understand what we’re doing from from a costing from a financial standpoint. So even if you if so it’s like this, if you have a traditional accounting system, which is an ag, widget an accurate when you aggregate that up for the aggregate standpoint, to an organization, it will be correct and a sense of, we’ve spent this much money and we’ve made this much money, but it’s really back down to the decision making thing was you parsed down in the organization? Are you accurately looking at the different components of the organization with good information, and that’s where it becomes important, right? And historically, that’s how accounting really developed going back 100 and 150 years, because if you go back 100 Back to the early 1900s. They actually were doing in many ways, what we would call value stream costing today, they call it that, but they were calculating their cost in that manner. And they understood the flawed direction, you could go and end up with this aggregate inaccurate costing, they understood that over 100 years ago, but unfortunately, many United States which drove the rest of the world, we went that route anyway.

Patrick Adams  

Right. So and obviously historically, you know, we can talk about the work that’s been done and obviously you you’ve had a lot to do with the work that’s been done around Lean Accounting, you know, over the past few years going forward and you know, today and going forward, things are changing, right? The world’s changing technology is changing. COVID happened which caused you know, a lot of changes, we have the supply chain issues going on. So today and going forward, what do you see for Lean Accounting? Do you think Lean Accounting is still relevant? And will it be relevant as we move into the future?

Jim Huntzinger  

Yeah, absolutely very, very relevant. I didn’t say that study was relevant. But they’re still still most organizations have not moved in, or even a lot of Lean organizations move in that direction. Or maybe they just do some aspect of it. But it’s really, and again, this goes back to what I learned early on, when I was at Briggs and Stratton and somewhat reflecting on my time at ISE. And ultimately from a lean perspective, from a physical perspective you’re trying to flow, trying to flow your products trying to flow your services trying to flow information to support that. So first and foremost, do we have flow? And ideally, if you can get there, one piece flow or as close to one piece flow as possible. So for example, a pole system pull system you put in place as a compromise, because maybe didn’t feasible yet to do one piece flow? Sure, for whatever reason, a whole variety of Trudel real life reasons you got to deal with, but that’s still the objective. So are we working towards as part of the continuous improvement are we trying to work to do there, and on top of that, is your information in this case, financial information, reflecting that accurately, and helping drive you to that? So I guess, unless everybody has perfect flow, and is accounting for properly, there’s still more work to do. And certainly, you still go into a lot of places, even a lot of places have been doing Lean for many years. And there’s still things they can significantly improve from a flow perspective, flowing their products and services, and also obviously tying it in to the customer needs and desires and demands. Right? So yes, it’s still very, very relevant. It’s still a lot of work to do in that arena, even within the Lean community. Absolutely.

Patrick Adams  

I agree. 100%. I mean, there’s always going to be waste or problems in any process that we look at, you know, whether the world changes, technology changes. So obviously, in accounting, there’s still going to be challenges and waste and opportunities to continue to get better and improve. So I agree 100%. So, so at lean frontiers, you know, you guys have done summits on CATIA, T with accounting. I mean, there’s so many different areas that you’ve that you’ve tapped into. I’m just curious if there’s any aspects of lean that you think are potentially untapped? Are there areas that we can still look at as opportunities from a lean perspective? Any thoughts on that?

Jim Huntzinger  

Yeah, certainly, um, there’s a variety of one, one, certainly the whole, the logistics and all that there’s still a lot of work to do in that arena. Sure. One that we’re striving to, we’re trying to work to spend more time in is one on product product development front, although there’s some work, certainly some good work that’s going on with that, and also conference, the LPD Lean product and process development exchange, it’s been going on for a number of years. And I was involved with that, when that was launched. More on the side of the process development, which interestingly enough, you know, lean came out of manufacturing, and, you know, particularly, you know, least Toyota and the early ford motor company out of automotive from a manufacturing standpoint. But actually, even though it came out of that, our ability to do good process design, again, even even within the Lean community is still very lacking. Most organizations that have been doing Lean for many years, usually go back and they’ll go back and Kaizen or processes, and there’s usually not a lot of work on how to design our processes up front. So we deploy them actually very lean are in a very ideally, one piece flow focused standpoint, most companies still don’t do that even ones doing you know, have some level of maturity in Lean. And that also needs to be coupled with the product development. So there’s been more work in the product development side. But there really, it really should go Musto tandem with the process development side. To do that we still are too much in the Kaizen mode, instead of in less development, develop it. And they’ll say correctly, much better upfront. And the reason for that is a couple of reasons. One is the potential capital savings from that, especially when you get into discrete manufacturing, things like that their equipment intensive, is huge. There’s a huge amount of capital savings that can be had in that arena, if it was done. The other side of it is it can really increase your ability to make continuous improvement, because instead of spending the energy on redesigning things that should have never been designed that way in the first place, let alone you’re still not reaping the full benefit quickly from a flow perspective and all that plus the capital is you put yourself in a better place. So you’re actually in a better place when you do the continuous improvement of fine tuning it further and further and further. So from a time perspective over time You’d be accelerated a lot more from I guess, you know, flow perspective. If you did that work up front from a, you know, a manufacturing process engineering standpoint, again, very few companies really do that. 

Patrick Adams  

I agree. And that’s been my experience as well, for anybody that’s listening in that maybe has never never thought about product and process development. Or maybe they have a traditional product development process in place. What would you say, you know, should be the approach for someone that you know, needs to look at that, or, obviously, you’re saying it’s important, we shouldn’t be looking at it. For someone that hasn’t, what would be the first steps? Or where, you know, what do you think should be the the overall approach that someone should take, if they’re going to go down that road of Lean product and process development,

Jim Huntzinger  

like say this, you know, like with anything in this, the first thing would be get your get your leadership engage and understanding as well, and kind of goes without saying, but the other million, I’m certainly coming from a more discrete manufacturing side, just because that’s where my background is, would be getting your, your manufacturing engineers or type of people, and not just the engineers, but also the leadership arena, understanding that and working on it. Now, what that means is, well, it’s not only the work, the technical work of doing the, you know, the process development, thinking about it differently. And I’ll come back to that in a moment. But that means they need to be tapped in and engaged with the product engineers, the, you know, the manufacturing personnel, because those people need to be involved. And if we go, you know, if you go down the DWI arena, that’s kind of all good contributing part of that, certainly the financial people, because that’s when we think we did, and also the financial people, and also the marketing people know, what’s what’s, what is our what do our customers really want? Right? Do they really want to remember that one time we did this years ago? Twice a week, we get our marketing people and ask them, so what’s, what’s the volume we’re supposed to be looking at? And they would tell us and every week, every couple times a week, they would tell us the same thing? And it always keeps going, Well, why do you keep asking that? And the answer was, because the way we’re going to allocate our capital is very dependent on what the volume you’re anticipating we’re going to do. So if it changes, that’s going to change the way we’re going to allocate our capital, because we’re really driving into do this a true one piece flow. So if the volume went up by 30%, that’s going to change our capital outlay needs, what they say is, we should just do, you know, one time capital, well, the reason companies do that is they design for some big volume that they’re never going to do. So that’s where a lot of that wasted capital comes into play, then you hope volume goes up to that, if you can win, I’ll go right sizing your processes, you’re going to deploy less capital. And if the volume goes up and assuming you’re making the right design on the process, then you can more easily increment up to volume as it increases. And if it doesn’t go up, then you at least have it laid out all this capital that would do otherwise, because we tend to buy for these batches instead of for one piece flow. So really getting those people engaged in all those different aspects of the businesses that they got to have a relationship with, and work with in order to make an overall better decision for the organization. Sure.

Patrick Adams  

Have you ever been in your experience? You know, and having cross functional teams involved? Have you ever found that having numerous areas of a company involved like product development and process development? Does it inevitably invite waste into the process? You know, whether it’s through lack of communication, or multiple sign offs, or whatever it might be? Have you experienced that at all? And what would you say because I agree with you cross functional teams is definitely the way to go in all of those different areas. What would be your approach to try to minimize or alleviate, you know, some of that, because what we’re trying to do here is break down the silos get people involved, opened up the communication, but again, I’ve also seen where you bring all these people in, and all of a sudden, our, you know, heading down rabbit holes and spending a lot of time, you know, spinning our wheels and things like that. So I’m curious to hear your thoughts on that.

Jim Huntzinger  

Yeah, I think that one’s gonna somewhat vary depending on your type of organization, industry and a variety of things. But I’d say one is having again, in my background, we just select the folder. This wasn’t like an initial conscious effort. But we really had a core team. And this was really driven around the manufacturing engineers that were driving this that kept us focus in in tune on what our objectives were. So it helped us buffer out a lot of that noise, like you’re talking about that comes into play. Not that we didn’t have some, because we certainly did have some but it helped us buffer it quite a bit. The other thing was, as we went through it, we became more in a way more conscious of it. And so part of that becomes the iterative learning that you go through, especially if you’re caught by a person, that type of iterative, iterative, iterative learning that you go through. So We’d go in, as we go through this, we go, you know, next time we do this, whether it’s a bit part of the big project, or sometimes you do, you know, same processes over again, just as the nature of the overall large, we’re developing an engine or a plant or things like that. So when we do this next month, let’s think about it. Let’s think about how we can change, you know, fine tune, I guess, that particular pattern. So we have less of the noise in place, do we need to communicate up front? Do we need to just get him in a room beforehand and talk through so we can help? Here’s what we need from you guys. If you need this from us, let us know and timing and things like that. So it was more of just thinking of analyzing and thinking through the process as we went along, to try to, you know, kind of hone it in as we went forward. And certainly when we got to the end of it, we said we learned a lot, we made a lot of improvements. Boy, we go through that again, next time, we just had this better vision on how to go through it more effectively. So really it’s a combination of patience and impatience, I guess, you know, you’re going to have some, you’re just always going to have some level of inefficiencies, but to be conscious of it, analyze it, to discuss it through. And that’s why reflection becomes one of the reasons why reflection becomes so important to reflect back through that. So when you do go through the cycle, you’ve done a reflection, so people are certainly more aware of it. So each time you just get a little bit better, a little bit better, a little bit better through it, and then some level of documentation, documenting it without also overly documenting it. So you want to know what path you want to follow. But you also don’t want to make it so restrictive that you can’t, again, learn to change as you go.

Patrick Adams  

Sure. No, I appreciate that. That makes sense. And I want to change gears here just a little bit. Outside of product and process development. We’ve talked about that. We also talked about Lean Accounting. I’d like to talk a little bit about training within industry and TWI, because I love TWI. And I and I love the work that you guys do from a summit perspective and just application of TWI. But um, you know, for those that are listening again, that may have never heard of DWI. Or maybe this is maybe they’re new to TWI. How does TWI fit into the lean business model?

Jim Huntzinger  

I’ll maybe start off by explaining it by explaining some of the background ideas. Thank you. So going back, going back to days, and we like talking about Briggs, we did a lot of good. We did a lot of good process design, from overall process to particular machine tools to fixturing, to lay outs and all that kind of stuff. The interesting phenomenon I noticed there was, once we ramp up, we did have some problems on getting the repeatability of output, you know, to tack time and all that. That was a struggle we had. But I’ve also worked for a Toyota Group company and was in Japan and I’d say, you know, depending on the plan to company more than Toyota Group company plans, you saw consistent output of the operators. So I do enough to know that Japanese people are humans like everybody else. They’re no different. There’s a color there is but they’re humans. So there’s got to be some other thing that they’re using as you know, in a Toyota Toyota Group company that they’re using that we don’t know about. I just knew there had to be but I had no idea what it was. So that has been in my head for a number of years as we went through that. And this would be in the late late 90s. Misaki might publish his book gamba chi Zan, and Jeff Liker published one of his first books called Becoming lean, which was a collection of chapters by a number of people. And I read likers’ books first. And then John ships chapter it happens. I mentioned this thing called TWA in just a couple sentences. I read that I wondered what the XM World War Two program got to do with the Toyota Production. fascinate moved on. Well, a few months later, when I got that book done, I read a book about the Buckeyes and, and there’s several pages in there that discussed this thing called training within industries. And I went, I’ve got to find out what some World War Two program let me just kind of briefly reference. It’s a bit to do with the Toyota Production System. So I started trying to dig in research and really didn’t have any work, nowhere to go. But I just started digging and researching things and eventually found out I was calling agencies in the government calling the archives just news. It’s been World War Two and the government did it and all that. But I finally was able to find out that the Depository libraries had had information on it, and still didn’t know anything about it. And I was going to the Milwaukee guys in Wisconsin at this time in the Milwaukee Public Library and try to dig through their archives to find something on it. I found a few little brochures and things like nothing, nothing really explained. I kept digging, and eventually I found something that referenced a report that was done at the end of World War Two. So I got that at that time. This is before the internet through Interlibrary Loan. I got a copy of the report they did when the TWI grew out of World War Two. It was nearly a 300 page report, took it to Kinkos, copied it, returned the book And with Wow, a 300 page government report, that didn’t sound like fun reading, I stuck it on my shelf. So then it sat on my shelf for months, but it kept poking at me. And I thought, I literally sit spin a year more kind of trying to dig around to find it. And I finally thought, you know, I spent all that work, I probably should pull the thing down and read it. So I pulled it down and started reading it. And as I’m reading through it, all of a sudden, I start reading things that reference things that are related to some when we’re on break, we brought in the Shinji jitsu group, which is some guys from Toyota suppliers that actually wants to help bring in what we call the Kaizen workshop. In the US today, they’re in the late 80s. And I, we had gone to some of those, and we’d use those guys at breaks. So some of their material was their material reference, and the things I was reading in this report, and the report was just. It was fascinating for me anyway. But the other thing it had, it actually had names, the training manuals they used in the war. So I went back to my local library, and ordered these things through an interlibrary loan. And when the first one showed up, you know, a number of weeks later, I went to call the library and picked it up, sat down in the library and started reading through this training manual for Java methods. I’m reading this thing. And it was so strange, because back to I knew there was something that the Japanese in this case, really Toyota, was doing differently. But I didn’t know what it was. But I know there had to be something. Also, when I read this, I knew this is it. This is that difference. And there’s verbiage in there that was identical to some of the materials I had from the Shinji Jitsu, which materials it one j, one Japanese stuff, it was English stuff. So that made that click, and I was literally looking over my shoulder going, oh my god, I can’t believe I’m reading this. I can’t believe this manuals are mighty 42. And this is this Japanese secret. So that’s what got me going down there. And I was able to get the other manuals, and really start really, truly learning what it was about. And ran, you know, ran across some more people that had ran across it actually reading some of the same books I did, and digging into it. And that’s really what spawned out what eventually became I said, we’re in the third year, third year, the TWI or the Lean Accounting seven, we launched TWI. So that group of people, let’s let’s launch this thing back out. But it was that thing that was that piece on. How do you get this consistency to get your output and the operators working consistently? You know, our day to day? Yeah, that’s that missing element?

Patrick Adams  

Yeah. So how would you explain TWI in a brief, you know, couple of sentences. And then what do you think? Or do you think that it? How do you think it fits into the lean business model?

Jim Huntzinger  

Yeah, kind of back to your original question. A long, roundabout way?

Patrick Adams  

No, it’s good. I love that.

Jim Huntzinger  

It described TWI it’s how you originally were and that was the problem they had during the war. You know, all the boys got sent overseas. So we had all these green people come into manufacturing, and a lot of women who just parked in the home. So at the time, we had the greatest demand on our manufacturing, truly the greatest demand in our history. And we have all these new green people in place. How do we get things ramped up? So how do we train people as effectively and safely and and productively as possible, and that’s, that’s what developed the TWA, which actually it has its own roots back into I’ve been able to trace it back to the early 1800s, a German educator, educator and philosopher who developed a five step method on educating children. That’s the original origin of what we call TWA today, and that was brought forward. His name was Johann Herbert. There’s European her patients there were some American, her patients, and one of the American her patients who was actually a vocational trainer in the late 1800s, early 1900s took Herbert’s five step method and developed it into force, the four step method, which is the method we know today, to train people in vocational skills, particularly in shipbuilding. And therefore, it actually he wrote in, I think, 1919, a 500 page book on just the four step method of job instruction. And it is a brilliant book in detail, but the guys out in world war two took that and that’s what they brought forward in order to get those people ramped up. So it’s how we train people as effectively, productively and safely as possible. And as forceps are fundamentally the scientific method, right? So is that came into Toyota, and actually even into their training department and to eat to know when he was trying to implement this flow model, the Ford flow model, and for about eight years, mostly unsuccessfully, TWI came in and that became the vehicle he was able to start having success of getting people to work in this different environment, running multiple machines and running, what we call flow or one piece flow today. That’s when he had his breakthrough and all that. Now, how does that flow? really related to the lean business model? So it did that, from that statement point from Toyota could do it for companies today. But the other thing it did as those people got trained in TWI, you know, job instruction, then job methods, you know, how do we break down a job and re, I guess reassemble it more effectively. And then how do we train, so we do it repeatedly. So And essentially, that’s, that’s that standard work from a Toyota perspective, it’s J AI, j, m. And then the Kaizen part, which is the J M. And then the standardization part is J AI. So that’s, that’s why they get that constant improvement trajectory that keeps going up, where ours, a lot of times improve, and then they taper off and go down, we don’t have that JMJ AI component there to keep that going, going, going in an upward trajectory, and then with the Jr, the job relations, to put people in what we call like a safe environment that they can go in until they have confidence that they can deal with problems and deal with them effectively. So that’s the three things I do. So now they make that environment. But of course, a Toyota over the years is as their people learned it. And they move up into positions, they’re taking that four step scientific analytical method, plus now they have skills, the skills of improvement, the skills of instruction, the skills, and they’re all four steps, all based on scientific method, and all interrelated to the job relations. And you’re applying that to other things within the organization. So that’s how that kind of interest the other things involved. That’s how that integrated up through Toyota, that’s why it becomes important from a lean business models perspective, because it puts this pattern of behavior and thinking into people at all different levels, they can utilize that in all different types of problems and projects they work on. That’s where it becomes so powerful,

Patrick Adams  

very powerful. And I’ve seen it myself personally, applied in many different places and have helped apply it in many different organizations. And it is a very powerful approach and definitely something that you know, anyone that’s listening in, that doesn’t know about TWI should definitely look into it. And even, you know, look into maybe an upcoming TWI summit that lean frontiers may be hosting next year. And as we kind of wrap up today, Jim, I love to hear about this next year, you know, anything new that lean frontiers is doing? Anything that’s coming down the pipe? Also, you know, what is 2020 to look like, from a conference or summit perspective for you guys. And then how can people get more information?

Jim Huntzinger  

Yeah. So for us, I guess one thing, the way the summits are going to look at 2022 is we’re going to be live. So yes, we’re looking forward to that we’ve Missing You know, I guess seeing everybody physically together, miss seeing that. And that’s really the feedback we’ve got from people who call it ‘ attendees or presenters’ as they can’t wait to be somewhere with everybody and learn and share a network in that way. So we’re looking forward to that one thing we’re doing, you know, our, you know, our usual summits will be in a play. One thing we’ve ventured into the last couple years, and we continue, we’re moving down that path is in healthcare. So we’re doing things in healthcare. So one is certainly in part a, I guess, lean healthcare, there’s been a number of that’s been going on for a number of years. And we’ve certainly got more healthcare organizations that come to our summits, and actually present and share our summits. And that’s, that’s great. But in the aspect we’re spending more time in is actually the economic model of health care, looking at the economic model. So our current healthcare system is not a free market health care model, it’s actually a third party model. And third party economic models are never effective and never efficient. So we’re actually working on things from a free market healthcare standpoint, with people involved with that and some organizations involved with that to ideally do what we really wanted, I should say, ideally, what our objective is, is to actually change our healthcare system to a true free market health care system. So I always look at it this way. So from a financial impact for all of us as consumers and spending money and, and healthcare and by that I don’t even mean insurance, I just mean going to the doctor, getting a broken arm set, operations and so forth. The biggest impact, the biggest cost improvement is going to a free market model. So that’s the biggest part of it. The other thing is, what I want to do is if you can take that better economic model, and overlay why called macro and micro and I don’t mean that from an economic, macro, and micro, I mean, the macro being the economic model, from a micro model, lay the lean business model over the top of that, we’ve got so much improvement we can make in the healthcare system. It’s unbelievable, you know, our estimates of people I myself and work with in this arena, if you could reduce the cost of our health care, you know, over/over across the aggregate by 75%. And it’s a $4 trillion industry. So that means it truly if we went to this free market model and people became lean at a minimum we take a $4 trillion industry and reduce it from a cost perspective to a one, only a $1 trillion industry, which means now we have $3 trillion. We could invest in all kinds of other stuff, invest in other activities, invest in improvements in healthcare and technology. So there’s all kinds of things we could do with it. So that’s an arena we’ve been we’ve been working in last couple years, and working this year to, you know, further ramp that up and get that involved with it just by just by coincidence, a, there’s only a few, a couple of these around the country, a free market surgery center just opened up in our area, the Indianapolis area, just in the last month. So we’ve been engaged with them and the efforts they’re doing with that as well. So we’re pretty excited about that. Just from something we have an interest in and a passion about, as well as with, you know, again, like the Lean stuff, just the advantage everybody can get from it with those types of practices.

Patrick Adams  

That’s right. That’s amazing. Love to hear more about that as well. I know that you launched the United and care summit right that yeah, ties in with that. If anybody wants more information about the summits in 2022, the agenda or the schedule for the year, how to get registered, that type of thing, where would they go? Where would they find that out?

Jim Huntzinger  

They can find that out if you just go to our website, lean frontiers.com. All the summits are listed out there for 2022. The agendas, although we don’t have the agendas fully, we’re in the process of setting them. But you know, the location, the dates, cost, agendas, presenters, all that information can be found on lean frontiers calmly as well as with you mentioned beginning our skill point workshops in our webinars. And also, we have a resource page. So there’s videos, podcasts, book references, article references, so there’s just a lot of webinars for information free and available information people can go get to continue to learn.

Patrick Adams  

I love that. And we’ll make sure that we throw the website into the show notes too. So if you are listening in, you can go right to the show notes. Finally, in solutions.com, forward slash podcast, or the Lean solutions podcast.com. You can find the show notes there with a link directly to the Lean frontiers website. Jim, it’s been great to chat with you today and just learn about all the amazing work that’s being done. We talked through Lean Accounting, we talked through product process development, we discussed TWA, we covered a lot of subjects in a short amount of time. So thank you so much for the time and just the work that you guys put in at lean frontiers.

Jim Huntzinger  

My pleasure, Patrick, thank you for having me. And thank you for having a conversation with me and and look forward to having you present our events.

Patrick Adams  

I’m looking forward to this next year. I’m excited about this in person for sure. I’m looking forward to meeting everybody and getting back together. So thanks again, Jim. All right, thank you. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the lean solutions podcast. If you haven’t done so already, please be sure to subscribe. This way you’ll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined. Please give us a review. Thank you so much.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai