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#262 - Normalcast, Swiss makes Ghee, and the Okuma MB-4000H is Here!
231 Plays3 years ago
Topics:
- Grimsmo's Swiss could have an air leak OR a bad batch of coolant
- Okuma MB-4000H is here but the coolant tank is delayed!
- Willemin, Kern, and Speedio Updates
- Saunders shares his tour experience at Creations Unlimited - Video Coming Soon!
- Decision Making & Organizational Chart Changes
- Emphasis on Communication, ERP Data Tracking
GOOD READS
Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business by Daniel Meyer
Small Giants: Companies that Choose to be Great Instead of Big by Bo Burlingham
High Output Management by Andrew Grover
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Business of Machining Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machining. This is not a solo cast. It is episode 262 and my name is John Saunders. Hello. My name is John Grimsmo. It was great to listen to your solo cast as a very, it's funny how much I think I take for granted that you need the back and forth to have this work. It's just what it is. Yeah, it was super awkward.
00:00:27
Speaker
It was nice. It was good to do good to get out and also glad to be back on the conversation.
Reflective Benefits of Podcasting
00:00:33
Speaker
Yeah. On the note of solo casting though, I would really
00:00:39
Speaker
Encourage folks and I find myself drawing on my list of sort of people I look up to some of whom I know some of whom I don't know and just sort of thinking whether you're in a Great place and you're just thinking about what's the right next steps? You know with this person guide me to do or frankly you're in a up against the wall or in a having a hard time with a decision And so forth. It's a really good technique I find to have that kind of solo Conversation with yourself because you can't always call up everybody and anybody and just get their guidance
00:01:09
Speaker
Yep, and that's I mean, that's what I appreciate about this podcast is because I feel like I'm in my head a lot Like always having that conversation with myself and it's nice to be able to you know Talk to you either on or before the podcast or something. Yeah It works. Yeah. How you doing?
00:01:26
Speaker
Good. Yeah, business is flowing. Things are excellent.
Oil Change Issues with Swiss Lathe
00:01:31
Speaker
First little issue I wanted to bring up. Our Swiss lathe runs oil. We've had it for two and a half, almost three years, I think. We topped up with a new kind of oil, different brand. We added a gallon or something because we were low. Oh my gosh, the shop smelled like it was on fire. It was just disgusting smelling. It's mixed between vegetable oil smell and on fire.
00:01:53
Speaker
And so we're like, Oh, okay. Well, that all that oil was really old. Anyway, maybe we should just swap it out and put all new blossom Swiss lube in it, which is what we've been running. So Pierre pulled out all the oil, cleaned the whole sump, cleaned everything super spic and span and put brand new oil in it. The same stuff we've been running just brand new. And for two weeks now, we've been dealing with foaming issues where the high pressure pump will just put so much air into the oil that
00:02:20
Speaker
the pump alarms out and it looks like clarified butter coming out the other end like it's it's like looks like what like clarified butter that Canadian thing yeah maybe I don't know but it's like
00:02:34
Speaker
millions of little air bubbles. Instead of this amber clear oil, it's just gross looking. So we've been dealing with that, trying to find all these, is there an air leak here? Is there a vacuum leak here? Is the check valve bad? Is this O-ring bad? Is this fitting bad? This is going through and Ansel and Pierre have been really having a struggle with this one. I'm trying to get it figured out.
00:02:55
Speaker
Talking with LNS and you think it's something perhaps got changed during the cleaning or could just be a different batch mix. That's what I'm wondering. Like we're at the point now we're talking with, um, or we have a call into blazer today to see maybe it's a bad batch. You know, we have the drum, we know the batch number, um, et cetera. We do have another new drum. That's a totally different batch number from like a year different.
00:03:20
Speaker
So I'm like, if you can't figure it out today, let's pull all that oil up, old oil out, new, old oil, put the new stuff in, see if the problem is still there. Maybe it is just the oil. Maybe we're chasing our tails, trying to find an air leak, you know? Do you still have the old oil? Probably. Put it back in. Yeah. You know, that's your control. That's a good idea. Does the Freddy suck oil? Okay. It could, but it's coolant.
00:03:47
Speaker
I would rather get a second one. Not mix the two. Yeah, that's a fair point. I was just going to say, what's the easy way to pump oil? Maybe just to pump. We have this thing. It's like a plastic lid that goes on top of a 55 gallon drum that you put a shop vac line into, and it creates a whole vacuum out of the thing. It was just like a $50 lid.
00:04:09
Speaker
And we use that to empty it out with an actual shop vac. That's perfect. So it's like a dust deputy, but huge. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. I wonder if they make foam preventatives for... I've never heard of oil foaming. That's what's weird. It's actual air bubbles are entering, which I guess is what foam is. But yeah, I don't know. Interesting. They know more about this high pressure cooling pump than...
00:04:34
Speaker
Most people, because they've been going through every single little feature and calling LNS a bunch of times. So it's frustrating. What does it mean you can't run the lathe? Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah, they've been trying to manually run it and override the alarm and make one part at a time and get a couple of parts through.
00:04:53
Speaker
Something's wrong. Yeah. That's no good. So maybe it is the oil. Maybe it is. Maybe the transfer pump inside like broke, cracked or something. I don't know. Somehow maybe air is getting into the system. Yeah, right. LNS was telling us if it's not leaking anywhere, then it's got to be in the suction side where the transfer pump sucks oil out of the tank and pumps it to the filters. Because if it's leaking after the filters, it'll leak the oil all over the place.
00:05:21
Speaker
But if it's in the suction side, it'll just suck in air and aerate the oil and then etc. And we don't really have any leaks.
00:05:28
Speaker
Is it something like bleeding your brake syndrome where you just, because you changed the oil, you've got air in the system that you haven't purged? Possibly. And there's a purge button right on it that cycles the pump and lets it do it. So we've been doing it all by the book, trying to purge it. But yeah, that's the thought too, is maybe there's a huge air bubble, but it's so much air that, I don't know, it's coming from somewhere. Yeah, right. It seems on it. I'm with you.
00:05:54
Speaker
I'm kind of hands off on this. They're just giving me updates every day or two. So for me, from my perspective, it's like, wow, you guys have a good challenge on your hands. But to them, they're like pulling their hairs out. Like, yeah, like super stressful. But we're close. We're so close.
00:06:09
Speaker
We completely changed the topic, except it's why bleeding the brakes was top of mind. I did a brake bleed on the 944. And William, who's eight, is old enough to reach the brake pedal if he's like just crouching down in the driver's seat. So I showed him how to pump it up and hold it in. And we had an account system. It's like, pump, pump, pump, hold. And then I'd bleed it.
00:06:34
Speaker
And I'll tell you, it's like that, it's like that quintessential father-son moment. Like it was, it made bleeding your brakes a thousand times more fun. Just, just like super cool. Absolutely. That's good for you. Yes. And then, and then I went to change the pads and realize the pads were seized on. And so I ended up having to pull all four calipers and the rotors and the shields and disassemble the whole brake system. So that whole bleed was moot, but it's okay. It's practice. Yeah. Yeah. He knows how to do it again. Nice.
00:07:06
Speaker
Well, we also have a coolant issue, but it's a different level of issue, which is frankly preceded by some awesome news, which is we
New Horizontal Machine Setup Challenges
00:07:17
Speaker
got our horizontal. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. So it showed up, man, two semi trucks for the machine, two semi trucks for the rigors, just lots of packages, parcels, skids, crates. I mean, the amount of.
00:07:33
Speaker
Stuff relative to a vertical is pretty crazy. Really? I think some of it is because of just the way that either it's the way that these machines are stored in assembled versus a vertical or some of its COVID related. So we got a machine that has, I think, no
00:07:56
Speaker
tool magazine. So it was stored, it was stored in the US in a warehouse, like a port warehouse as this condition.
00:08:05
Speaker
I don't know if this sort of machine ever would have gone to like the Okuma USA Charlotte headquarters, like Argeno said, where they do some of this prep work there, which would reduce the amount of work they're doing here. But nevertheless, they've got to add the tool matrix. They've got to take sheet metal off to replace or add the six unit APC. And then what's crazy is yesterday, the service techs on their first day here were opening up box with what looked like servo drives inside of it.
00:08:35
Speaker
They don't, I asked them, I'm like, they don't ship the machine with the circle tribes installed. And I'm thinking like maybe it's some sort of a shipping risk, um, or ocean freight risk, which didn't really make sense. Cause I feel like lots of machines come that way. And then they were saying, yeah, there's such a.
00:08:50
Speaker
COVID delay on supplies that they throw the machine on a boat to get it here and then they ship the smaller stuff separately later. I guess, yeah. And they just put it together at the plant, at the customer. Yeah. Weird. So it's apparently a two-week install, which again seems crazy. How long did your current take? Days, three days. Yeah, right. With the Aroa. Yeah.
00:09:15
Speaker
So we'll see how it goes. The bummer is a sort of a miscommunication. We'll see what we can figure out here. They had told us that the chip conveyor was delayed. And so we knew that. And so we were thinking like, OK, we just have to deal with chips on our own for the first six or seven weeks. Not ideal, but we can make it work.
00:09:40
Speaker
frankly, that's a lot of the initial work we were going to be doing was cutting some fixtures and proving out some programs. So we're ready to go. And we've got tombstones. We've got fixtures already made. So we're, we're, we're not, it's not like we're going to be delay or not like we're sitting here waiting a long time to get it running. Um, but we're not also looking to start cranking out high quantities today. Well, the chip conveyor
00:10:02
Speaker
in this case is also the coolant tank, which was not the case with our Genos. Our Genos came with the coolant tank. And then when the conveyor, which ironically was also delayed, when the conveyor came, it had a separate or replacement coolant tank. So I was just thinking like, okay, we don't have a conveyor, no big deal. Well, now we don't have a coolant tank. That is a big deal. So we're a few hours into sort of figuring out what that's gonna look like.
00:10:30
Speaker
Man, I was just thinking, it feels like two weeks ago that you're like, I think I should get a horizontal. So I recorded a video kind of remembering back to why I enjoy doing what I'm doing on YouTube and so forth. It's just like sharing the story, sharing what we've learned, hopefully more successes than lessons learned, but nevertheless, sharing it all. And right after I signed the PO for the horizontal, which was only about four weeks ago,
Decision-Making in Business
00:11:00
Speaker
I literally immediately just turned on the camera and recorded this. We bought a horizontal video because I wanted to kind of capture in the moment why we did this.
00:11:09
Speaker
And then I was rewatching the first draft of the edit. The video's not out yet, but it should be up pretty soon. And, uh, it makes it sound like it was, like you just said, it makes it sound like the purchase just came out of nowhere. And in reality, it's been something that's been on our radar for a long time. And then, um, I realized coming through, you know, October, November, December, then January and where we are at staffing, where we want to be automation, fixturing design, like all these things made me realize this is something we need to get on our radar now. And then you started to hear about.
00:11:38
Speaker
Potentially six months plus lead time. That's when I realized it's kind of that's where the scarcity factor drove me to say no No, we need to get a machine here now. Yep. Yep, and that's what I'm realizing more and more is
00:11:52
Speaker
I mean, leaders like us, it feels weird to say that, but we spend so much time thinking and planning and learning the industry and learning our business and growing in our own heads. And then we are finally ready to make a decision. And it seems like it's out of the blue for a lot of people, but they don't, because it's the first time they heard it. But for us, it's like, I've been working on this for a year. Like, you know, this is not new to me, but I, it's that disconnect between like, really you're surprised. And they're like, yeah, as first I've heard of it.
00:12:18
Speaker
I'm not always good about sharing all the updates of my thought process because my thought process is messy and it takes time. I just let it percolate for weeks and months, whether it's getting a new machine or changing the business or doing anything. That's how it has to be. I hear you.
00:12:37
Speaker
How is the shop update for you in terms of either Willamyn or the idea of a brother or other stuff? Yeah, the Willamyn still hasn't moved, although Angela and I talked about working on it today. We will very, very shortly in the next week or so probably throw it all back together. Like the spindle is out and all the wiring is out and it just has to be put back together. So we need like a solid day of just focus to do that. Very much, okay, so we've had the Kern for
00:13:06
Speaker
Just over two years now. The past year has been basically non-stop running. It's been amazing. I'm going to have Tina from Kern USA come up here for like a week and do a full like deep dive on the machine, recalibrate, inspect everything. Make sure it's all good. Do any preventative maintenance that we're not doing, things like that. And we're going to schedule that for the next month or two. Something like that. Because I'm like, it's such a big investment.
00:13:36
Speaker
If it goes down for any reason, like we've had some little issues, like I gotta replace this sensor or this damper or something like that. Um, be good to have somebody just.
00:13:44
Speaker
go through it with a fine tooth comb. It runs so much that I can't afford not to have somebody look at everything, right? So I'm looking forward to that. It's not going to be cheap, but it has to be done. The point I'm bringing it up is I asked her last night, I was like, okay, so if you're thinking of coming in a month or so, I'm thinking of moving the machine five feet over and putting a speedio beside it. Should I move it before you come? Because if you're going to level it and make it perfect and stuff,
00:14:13
Speaker
it makes sense that I should move it before you make it perfect. So which might kind of push me into the actual decision of getting this video moving the current and do that.
00:14:26
Speaker
which I've just been stalling on, just percolating, thinking about it. I want to do it, but timing. Okay. As far as the speedio, I still think it's the best choice. I want to do it. I'm just waiting for the right moment to decide that that's what we need to do right now. It feels like you need somebody to nudge you out of this part of indecision that you're making.
00:14:54
Speaker
I don't know, what am I stalling on? I'm stalling on the money kind of, we can afford it, but I don't know. I don't have a good reason, but a lot of things going on right now. That's a fair point. I don't want to rush into too many commitments that I can't handle at once. So I want to clean up a bunch of commitments I have right now, like the Willamond being apart for so long.
00:15:17
Speaker
If we move the Kern, I don't want it to be down for two weeks. I want to be ready and staged and have everything in place within reason so that we're making the right smart choices. It's like we don't need this video today, but we will increase our production once we have it. You know what I mean?
00:15:35
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Well, I think you're on the right track, though. I mean, I would move the current today, because you wanted to settle, frankly. But on the speed, you don't just think about the cost. Think about the opportunity, the upside, the downside. There's a very low risk decision compared to the earnings or the current. And I've got that all written out, and it all makes sense. And financially, I'm in 10% down, and payments will be easy, and not a problem. How would you react if?
00:16:04
Speaker
you reached out to the brother dealer and then they said, you know what? We actually just sold out our allocation. It's going to be nine months now. Yeah, that would suck. Yeah. Well, so think about that. That's true. That's true. Well, I talked to them a month ago and machines are in stock in Chicago then. So yeah, I guess it's been a little bit since I've caught up to date with that, but you're right. Yeah, that would really, that would change my delayed plans if I waited too long, you know? Yeah. It's a really good point.
00:16:33
Speaker
It's a great way to think about the decisions, the team you have. We know we were talking on a separate conversation about sort of this idea of
00:16:46
Speaker
Team morale, attitude, expectations, so forth. And it's kind of like one simple way to keep yourself honest is to say, would I hire this person again? Or would I secretly breathe a sigh of relief if that person said, you know what? I've chosen choosing to pursue a different opportunity. You know what I mean? If somebody told you brothers were no longer going to be available for sale in Canada, we'd be like,
00:17:08
Speaker
I could say face and back out of this decision. It's a little bit weird way to say it. You know what I mean? For sure. For sure. No. You'd be like, I want that machine. I want it now. I know how to use it. Yeah. If they were all of a sudden not available, I'd be like, okay, I got to find a used one now. I still want this to happen. That's a really good way to look at it. Yeah. Because I've definitely had those decisions where circumstances come up and you're like, whew. Okay. Yeah.
00:17:29
Speaker
It's kind of forced into the decision I should have been making on my own kind of thing. Yeah. It does seem like you need a nudge. I'm not going to nudge you today, but think about that. Yep. And like I said, maybe Tina coming up to work on the curve is like, well, I guess I got to move it now.
00:17:45
Speaker
Yeah. Which will match the whole process.
Tour of Dennis Rathi's Automated Shop
00:17:48
Speaker
Maybe Tina, seeing a prospective or other purchase, will convince him to say, nah, let's step you up into a current. Yeah. I've talked with them at length about a second current. And I still think both cost and usage, I think a cheap three-axis machine next to it is the right choice for us right now.
00:18:09
Speaker
That is a great segue into what I spent last Wednesday doing and the reason I wasn't on our normal podcast, which is touring a shop that I've been really excited to tour. Dennis, Rathi, and I have been talking for years online.
00:18:25
Speaker
And finally, you know, between COVID and the fact that he moved to shop pretty impressive from the Bay Area in California up to Idaho, not only like nine months ago, had meant that we just never got around to Pennsylvania date for this tour. And so finally flew up to Boise last week and met Dennis and toured his shop and just
00:18:46
Speaker
Absolutely awesome. Um, a lot of really good takeaways in the video, which we're going to start editing now. It'll be out here in a few months probably, but boy, great example of.
00:18:58
Speaker
a shop that's making incredibly good use at ultimate high end automated five axis. They've got three or four grove machines and they've got a YASDA, YASDA's being some of the best machines period. And then they have more brothers than I've ever seen in my life. I didn't even keep track. I think he said he's got 12. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's crazy.
00:19:25
Speaker
And that's what I love. You know, there's the machine tool nerd side that loves talking Hermlas and Kerns and, and, and microns and groves. Like it's very cool. But then there's the, um, practical side that very much loves to see what Dennis has done of, Hey, they've got three and four axis brothers that are doing what they need to do incredibly well, incredibly efficiently, very much under the automation marathon, not sprint mentality. Yep.
00:19:52
Speaker
So they've got a compact, it's an incredible setup, an Aroa Compact 80 that's shared between two brother, three axes that have plus two platters on them, like five axes, just orientation though.
00:20:05
Speaker
And it's not a particularly fast platform, but he's using EDM fixturing as milling fixturing because it's so much cheaper. And, you know, the way he's using round bar and loading these fixtures and letting them run, it's just, it makes you smile. Yep. That's fantastic.
00:20:23
Speaker
Yeah, we've known him for years and we chat with him all the time. We get all these little snippets and a picture of what he's working on and a little corner picture of the shop, but I still don't have a full perspective of what the shop looks like and the grand scale of it. You might hear, okay, I've got a just, I've got a couple of groves, I've got a bunch of brothers, but until you put it all together, it's awesome. We're very much looking forward to that video.
00:20:49
Speaker
Yeah, it was weird, too, because it's it's a great size shop. I don't remember the square footage, but perhaps if I had to guess it's somewhere between a 10 and 20,000 square, but it's a single room. So it's a digestible shop. Like if you go up on the mezzanine, you could just look and it's just one shop where you could hold your breath and run from one end to the other. It's not huge, but we had been walking around for probably over an hour.
00:21:13
Speaker
And I still didn't realize that there was like a horizontal open one other corner and they had just, they had a Makino in one corner as well. Then they just got a NTX, like mill turn from DPG. I did see that, but it's just like, it was, uh, it was impressive. Yeah.
00:21:29
Speaker
That's fantastic. Yeah. As well as we go on. Been working on a little project on and off and parts came in today for it. So we have two buildings in our shop. One is the manufacturing side of the machine shop with offices attached as well. And then the front building is our finishing side where all the knives get put together. He treated, anodized, finished, sharpened, all that. So we've got the team here and the team there.
00:21:53
Speaker
And every day we're transferring parts from one shop to the next. And we don't always know when parts are ready. And there's a lot of like, you know, the finishing guys will come over to the machine shop and be like, are the parts ready? And we're like, no, give me 20 minutes. And they come back and forth and communication issues, right? So we're trying to figure out like a simple, easy way. It's not complicated to just alert each shop that, you know, a transfer needs to happen.
00:22:19
Speaker
thought about doing like, you know, Wi Fi, IoT kind of sensors and lights and things like that, but it gets complicated. I don't want to open up my the app on my phone to like trigger a light in their shop. Yeah. And then we've got
00:22:36
Speaker
I'll show you on the video, but just a little remote control with five on-off buttons and plugs that go into the wall, and the remote will turn on and off the plug. No Wi-Fi, no nothing, just radio frequency. We use these at our house, actually, because it's an old house, and one of the rooms doesn't have any light switches at all, so we just have lamps in each corner. And you pick up the remote, you're like one, two, three, four, and then the room lights up.
00:23:01
Speaker
the question that I answered today was will this remote go through two buildings basically through all the walls between one and the other so I had one I was on the phone this morning with one of my guys and I'm like okay I'm gonna click the on off button you tell me if that thing keeps going and I'll just walk as far away until it stops and I got to the front building outside and it still worked and then I walked in the door and then I stopped working yeah and I'm like no this would work so well we could just trigger a light so
00:23:29
Speaker
Now I'm thinking like, can I boost the signal somehow? Can I get a little signal amplifier? Is this easy or is it complicated? That's where I'm at right now. I would not go.
00:23:40
Speaker
I'm laughing because back in the late 90s, maybe early 2000s, there was this company probably still around called X10 that had like kind of scammy products around like clickbaity, infomercial home automation. I loved it because for like 80 bucks, you could buy all of these remote and 110 relay switches. It was really cool. It looks like it's exactly what that is.
00:24:02
Speaker
Why don't you just have like an Alexa, is this too much for you? Like an Alexa dot and it just says Alexa turn receiving light on.
00:24:12
Speaker
Yeah, we don't currently have an Alexa, Google Home, like a central thing. And there's a lot of cheap ones out there. And I was kind of worried. I was reading into it a lot about possible security risks on networks for the really cheap ones. I don't know. So I was kind of looking to not commit to something like that yet.
Communication Challenges Between Buildings
00:24:32
Speaker
But Alexa could work.
00:24:34
Speaker
Yeah. Let's just do a closed circuit TV. I thought about that. Yep. Just a little webcam would be amazing. Yeah. Just do that. Yeah. So I might do that too, but it's fun. You don't have conduit between like a buried line between the two. There is for Ethernet.
00:24:50
Speaker
I don't know where it is or if we could snake through it or how big it is or anything, but I know they buried it. You're going to have to go between the two buildings. Okay. But the shops are hardwired with ethernet too, so I don't know if there's some sort of local wifi thing. I don't know. We're talking about the solution. What's the problem? The problem is that the finishing guys, if they need parts, I want them to look at something and know if there's parts to go pick up.
00:25:16
Speaker
So it reduces the back and forth, and the questions, and the waiting, and the answers. Just hands off, like, are the parts ready? So is it, but is it, quote, unquote, pulling from finishing? Or do you want machining to push? Both. Machining to push. Like, here, parts are ready. OK, so really, it should be machinist A rolls a card over to the,
00:25:40
Speaker
the sort of shipping area, if you will, staging area and then hits a button to notify finishing to come pick stuff up. Yeah. And even a simple doorbell would probably do it, but it's not always an instant thing. Like if you, if you click the button and the light turned on in the front shop, that would suffice. Like that would be like, you know, since somebody's going to have to walk across a parking lot anyways, why not just have the machining person wheel it all the way over to finishing and put it in the finishing inbound?
00:26:09
Speaker
box area. Something we're trying to avoid, I guess, at the moment. I'm just probing why. That's a good question. Why? I don't know. I think it's a weird discrepancy between the handoff, like when are the parts done? When does my job end and your job begin kind of thing? As a leader, sometimes you just have to step in and be like, okay, just walk them up front when they're done. They're not done until they're at this table. That's a good point.
00:26:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's that's where you got to step up as a leader, right? And I'll tell you, it's a good segue. I'm gonna see if I can find a quote real quick. Here we
Leadership and Setting Expectations
00:26:46
Speaker
go. Yes, perfect. So I've really enjoyed this book called setting the table by Danny Meyer. He's a good Yeah, yeah, he's a he's a restaurateur. But the reason I think it is a
00:26:59
Speaker
exceptional book is that it is a legitimate book about his story of not just being, because he's not a chef, he's a restaurateur. So he is a business person. It took him a while to realize that. But it differs from some of the other sort of faux business books, which are about other things, like frankly, even relentless, which I really liked, but Tim Grover is not a business person. And when he tries to make these parallels between the
00:27:24
Speaker
Chicago Bulls playing the NBA Finals and making a business decision is a little bit of a stretch. The way Danny Meyer talks about scenarios is, I think, much more organically relevant. Frankly, he's a lot more candid about his successes and his journey. There's a quote on page 198 that reads,
00:27:45
Speaker
With each year I've spent as a leader, I've grown more and more convinced that my team, any team thirsts for somebody with authority and power to tell them consistently where they're going, how they're doing, and how they could do their job even better. And all that the team asks is that the same rules apply to everybody.
00:28:01
Speaker
Now in isolation, that sounds like maybe he's a little bit of an authoritarian. I assure you, he's not. You'll get that from the book. But you can still be a very fair amicable, I guess you could say. He's not the kind of guy who's, what's that Gordon Ramsay guy who's always yelling in the kitchen on the TV show. Danny Meyer is a pretty even keeled, level-headed guy. But it doesn't mean it's still not the case where
00:28:22
Speaker
John Grimsman needs to say, okay, machining, your job is to let finishing know they're done by wheeling the parts. And then there's a taped off area in the finishing department where you stage the carts or boxes that they know need to be processed in. Dennis had the same thing that we didn't get into in crazy detail, but we were in their QC room, amazing two Zeiss CMM, all this equipment. And I asked him, I said, what happens in this process? How does someone in the CMM room
00:28:51
Speaker
need to know what to do. And I was like, do they create tickets? Do they, is it a verbal telling? Is it, what's the communication? And, uh, from memory, it was two things. It was number one, they have a racking where I believe it's a push system. So the machinist will move the parts into QC and put them on rack, which creates a order along the rack. I think that they get first in first out kind of order. Bingo. He was also saying that they use Microsoft teams extensively.
00:29:22
Speaker
which kind of has me thinking about whether we should look into it or not, but it's just a way, I don't really know what Microsoft Teams is. I mean, I know it can use like Zoom and clearly it has a chat function, but I don't really know what Teams is or what makes it different or so forth. But it sounds like that could be something where then Angelo could just message on Teams over to Frasier, or Nusheenie could message to Finishing and just say, hey, parts are ready.
00:29:48
Speaker
Yeah, obviously we text each other extensively, but it doesn't always work. Yeah, exactly. That seems like it could get noisy. And I find I enjoy my days better when I have less digital distractions. It's just, if I want the distractions, if I want to be in that mindset, great. But there's a lot of times where I don't care to have that. But if somebody needs me, then that's not a reliable way to get me. Yep, exactly. The other thing I started doing is
00:30:18
Speaker
Most of the time when I read a book, I'll take some basic notes and I'll type those up in a Word file that I've had for like 15 years of notes of each book. The thing I started adding at the top when I sort of mentioned, hey, February 2022, I'm reading, or March, I guess, I'm reading, setting the table. What I started adding now is
00:30:39
Speaker
a bold line note to myself of when and why I think I should revisit these notes or this book. It's like Danny talks a lot about when his restaurant empire grew from one to two to four to eight or whatever.
00:30:56
Speaker
he realized he needed to change his whole philosophy around how he cultivates and hires managers and how he builds that org chart. And so I kind of made a note to think, hey, that's something that we've been thinking a lot about here lately is
00:31:10
Speaker
how flat of an org chart do we have here at Saunders? We're seven to 10 people, depending on how you consider part-time or interns. So I think Danny Meyer was at 600. It's very different. But I used to think, and maybe it did work for a while, that we were relatively flat, kind of coming from the no one's too good to do anything. We have our focuses, but this is kind of how we work. We just focus on getting it done.
00:31:37
Speaker
Lately, we've been having a little bit more of a deliberate structure that's different than that. It's new enough that I don't want to call any verdicts. On the flip side, it's going to make sense. It's going to work for very good reasons. It's been good to start. It's a coincidence, I think. At least I think it's a coincidence. I've been doing that while I've been reading this book, but reading the book has made that very relevant.
Organizational Growth and Evolving Management
00:31:59
Speaker
Yeah, it makes it clear like reading small giants recently and I just finished reading High Output Management by Andrew Grove, the founder of Intel, one of the founders and CEOs of Intel back in the day. I loved High Output Management. It was
00:32:18
Speaker
It's written in 1985, so it's 80s corporate management style, which it puts so much more light onto my typical hatred of 80s corporate management style. But I get it now, I understand it so much deeper than I did before. Because like you said, we're trying to create like a flat, you know, everybody's important, everybody, nobody's too good to do this, whatever like that. Reading that and a bunch of the other books I've been reading helps
00:32:44
Speaker
establish a need for leadership and management and how to, how to hire and train and fire people as necessary, um, to do that. And yeah, so we've been going through a bit of a management shift over the past few years, um, but even more so recently in the past six months or so. And it's, it can be difficult and messy and you know, lead to some mistakes over time, but it, it has to be done and you have to try out different things. And, uh,
00:33:13
Speaker
over that process, we're evolving into a solution that is now starting to work and starting to jive. And change is hard. Nobody likes change. But in order for the company to grow and to thrive, you've got to try new things. Yeah. Well, dude, I love the phrase. I heard it from you. I don't know if that's its origins, but what gets measured gets managed. And that was our big goal this year with Lex and Freshdesks and Shopify was to try to look at that in
Data-Driven Business Enhancements
00:33:41
Speaker
Julie has really done a great job at tracking historical sales that drives inventory and has been absolutely key. And then Ed is really taking that data and looking at, okay, what needs made and how are we handling that side of the team. And it's great because it gives them data driven
00:34:02
Speaker
decision-making and it gives, you know, we don't measure people right now based on that, but, but we do in the sense of like, that's the expectation and that's a good thing. You know, um, this is what we need to do. Yep. Well, as far as measuring people, like they said in the attraction book, imagine if everybody has a number.
00:34:21
Speaker
You know, like in our company, it's how many knives did you finish? How many packages did you ship? How many parts did you make? Everybody can have a number that is worth reporting sometimes. And it's a neat way to look at it because it lets you, if you can track something consistently, day by day by day, you start to get into a groove and you're like, oh, today, I could have done better today. Cause I know my normal is, you know, 10 or something. So what happened? Oh, I was dealing with this problem.
00:34:50
Speaker
I have actively resisted that, and that may be a mistake or it may be something we evolve into doing, but we thought for a while, like, hey, every Friday lunch, tell me.
00:35:02
Speaker
how many report in, how many VF2, how many modify spaces were made on the VF2. There's too many, first of all, there's too many exceptions to that, but ultimately it's not the goal I care about. Because what I care about more is how are sales doing and then are we then meeting the production level there and having a buffer.
00:35:25
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, we've always viewed our production as production comes first, sales comes second because our demand is thankfully very high. So it's not like, oh, sales are down. It's like production is, you know, production is, I don't want to say more important, but it's more, needs to be tracked closer than sales do in our business anyway, the way we run it.
00:35:48
Speaker
So yeah, probably four or five years ago, we started to actively start tracking our production and it was brutal at first. We didn't like it, didn't want to do it. But now we can't not do it. Now it's the number that drives the company. Yeah, right. That's a really good point because you are inverted from us and frankly from a lot of companies. For sure. But the same rules apply. If sales is your primary driver, then you track that as Julia is doing. You're seeing the need and the benefit from doing that.
00:36:15
Speaker
But I mean, now we track our monthly knife production, we do Rask and Norseman, we add them together, but we do calculate them separately as well. So we know we make, you know, this month to date, we've averaged this many knives per day, per working day.
00:36:31
Speaker
And then by the end of the month, we know, and now we've done it for so many months in a row, we know what a good average is and what a bad average is. And we can, as a team, we discuss this almost every day. We can discuss, OK, obviously we know production is dealing with coolant issues right now. So we haven't been making pens for the past two weeks. So it's going to kill our number. Yeah, right. But we all understand that. We know that. That way the finishing guys aren't like, where's my pens? I need pens to finish.
00:36:58
Speaker
No, communication is everything and we still suck at it in a lot of ways, but we're trying really hard to see the holes and to grow and fill those gaps. That's part of what also has driven this change on our end. In fact, it may have been the catalyst was realizing that communication is incredibly handicapped when the org chart is so flat. For example, if I need
00:37:24
Speaker
Julie to be creating data sets around sales and then coordinating with Ed, and then they can kind of work within their respective departments, if you will, about allocated resources and priorities. That's a much better way to do it than, and in a good way it limits my involvement. That makes sense.
00:37:44
Speaker
Yep. And so that each person in the shop knows where to bring various information, like, like who to tell that they're going to be late in the morning or who to tell that a tool broke or that we are out of paper towels. You know, I need to order paper towels or buy them. We still suck at that part, right? Paper towels. Yeah. I'm still going to Sam's Club. We'll figure it out. Yep. Yep. I just ordered from Amazon yesterday, like four huge packs of paper towels. And I'm like, I feel guilty getting an Amazon shipment of just paper towels, but
00:38:11
Speaker
you know, figure it out over time. It's that or I'm going to Costco and buying them myself. And honestly, my time is very valuable. So yeah.
00:38:18
Speaker
I got to share a Lex win. We've ordered from a couple of our material suppliers, literally for years with probably somewhere between 50 and 100 orders per year. I mean, lots, lots, lots. We have never once had an issue that I can recollect. These companies are major companies that put out huge quantities and I would assume that they have lots of ISO type certifications around how good they are because they're just really good at what they do. Well, we had placed a PO maybe 10 days ago
00:38:48
Speaker
And once a week I check Lex to see what's inbound, if there's any flags. And what was odd was we hadn't received this material and I checked the PO and we had received the other, there were two line items on the PO. And so I thought, that's really strange. And I thought, man, did we forget to check it in? But then I checked to see if we got an invoice for it and we had not been invoiced for it.
00:39:12
Speaker
And so I emailed my sales guy and he was like, wow. He's like, yeah, we goofed. We forgot that order got lost or we forgot to process it or somehow. And again, I can't emphasize it enough. Like it would not surprise me if this never happens again, because I feel like these companies are that good. Yeah.
00:39:28
Speaker
Sorry, especially because they sent us an order confirmation receipt. It would be different if the sales guy just got distracted and forgot to enter the order. Anyway, it was a real win that Lex did its trick and told us, hey, this material never showed up. You should check on it. That's perfect. Yeah, we need to get there too.
00:39:47
Speaker
Is GURP still a thing? Yeah, it's still a thing, but it's on hold. Although I'm working on the inventory side of things right now. So I'm really excited about that. Good. Yeah. What do you have to do today? That.
00:40:03
Speaker
Oh, really? Like literally after we hang up, I'm going to go talk to Fraser and we're going to fine tune the inventory side and get caught up. It's been on hold for a little bit, but it's so close. It's like we just need to do a couple of things and then start to break it, like test it hard. Yeah. And as you know, like a business our size now has a lot of inventory and a lot of moving parts that it's no longer able to, I mean,
00:40:28
Speaker
You could do Kanban cards and all that. I guess we haven't given that enough of a chance, really. But otherwise, we're relying on individuals to track and monitor and watch inventory levels and flag an alarm when it gets low. And at least the too many mistakes, we all do it. I want a system that just knows everything. Yeah. You need this, John. Yep, absolutely. And that's got to come from you. Yep.
00:40:57
Speaker
Cool. So what are you up to today? Go smell the Akuma. I'm going to go hug the Akuma again. And let's see here. We had a couple hiccups yesterday on separate vendor issues and shipping issues. Got those sorted out, which is great. Doing some video review edits. I actually just found some org chart software. The other thing that Danny Meyer talks about is a inverted or a V-shaped org chart with the idea that we
00:41:23
Speaker
you know, it's my job to support the people above me or in that order and I do like that a lot, but I don't know that any, I don't know that it's going to lead any crazy realizations, but I also think there's a lot to be said about communicating or even over communicating what responsibilities are and expectations as we start thinking about, again,
00:41:47
Speaker
how Saunders creates data and expectations amongst everyone in the team. That sounds all wishy washy talk. I'm gonna work on that though. Absolutely. Cool. So yeah, it's been good. Nice. Yeah, I've realized that there's a difference between
00:42:04
Speaker
I guess structure and clarity. I've been kind of avoiding structure because it'd be too rigid and blah, blah, blah. But when the staff doesn't have enough clarity to know who for what, for when and how they thrive when there is that clarity. I just know what to do. We need that thing. I know who to talk to and how to do it. So clarity and communication. Awesome. Yeah, man. I'll see you next week. All right, dude. Take care. Take care. Bye. Bye.