VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [64]
“No,” said the woman tending the fuser. “We’re done here. Y’all got your full batch now.”
She began to walk away, leaving the curing rack where it was.
“Wait! Aren’t you going to move it?” asked Wayne.
“I’m not allowed,” she said.
“She’s right,” Kurt said to Wayne. “A class-two materials handler has to move it. It’s a safety rule.”
“So where is the materials handler?” Wayne asked in exasperation. “Hey, excuse me, can you get us this class-two mat handler?”
The woman stood on her tiptoes and looked around, then cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled:
“Hey, Jeeter! Git your ass over here and move this rack!”
“I’m busy!” Jeeter yelled back.
“I sa-yid, git over here!” the woman responded. “The ’Zilla is waiting!”
And Jeeter, as if magic words had been spoken, stopped what he was doing and came right over to move the rack.
When Amy arrived at Oakton around 11:30 a.m., she swapped her stylish Italian heels for black safety shoes, took her safety glasses, and headed for the plant. The guard at the receiving desk was on the lookout for her, and he called Wayne Reese. But rather than wait for him, Amy simply thanked the guard, said she would meet Wayne inside, and walked onto the plant floor – and the guard, of course, knowing who she was, had no authority to stop her.
From the customer tours over the years, she had a general knowledge of the layout, and she strolled down the main aisle at first with a sense of familiarity. But then she noticed that a lot of things were different from what she remembered. The organization now seemed less segmented, less “departmental.” It was clear, as she looked around, that different areas were performing different functions, but the divisions between them were less exact.
On the actual floor, there were the dark outlines, like dirty shadows, of where some of the machines had been before they were moved, and the holes where the bolts fastening them to the concrete had been. Now a number of the machines were arranged in groups – “work cells,” she remembered Wayne calling these – so that one or more workers could perform a series of tasks in one place, rather than physically move product material from one department to another. This was a move toward the Lean ideal of one-piece flow, in which – ideally – there would be virtually continuous movement and processing of material, with comparatively little time spent sitting or waiting. And the rate of processing and movement would be set to takt time and – again, ideally – the rates of consumption by each customer along the value stream from raw material to the ultimate buyer.
But Amy, as she walked along, also began to notice what Elaine had been warning about. There were racks and multishelved carts and bins on wheels – all filled with unfinished materials, what was known as work-in-process inventory, or WIP. The many and various holding devices laden with WIP were lining the walls and between the groups of work cells. They were arranged in neat, orderly rows, but clearly there was a lot.
Amy wondered what was going on. Huge quantities of work-in-process inventories were exactly what Lean was supposed to eliminate. Yet here was the physical evidence to the contrary right before her.
On the outskirts of Highboro was a warehouse and distribution center that housed finished goods that Hi-T kept in stock – standard items and replacement parts. Remembering the numbers that Elaine had pointed out, Amy could only imagine what that must look like. She envisioned opening the warehouse door and being buried under a deluge of quality, Hi-T parts.
From down the aisle came Wayne, striding along at a crisp pace.
“Good morning!” he called as he closed the distance. “You caught us on a busy day.”
“I can see that,” said Amy, pivoting in a full circle to survey all the activity. “Sure seems like everyone is hard at work.”
“That is the beauty of takt time. Everybody works at a comfortable, even pace so as to be busy all day, and yet not be overstressed or strained to keep up. Most people really like it; they say the time goes faster