Shayne Daughenbaugh 0:00
Hello and welcome to another episode of Lean Solutions podcast. My name is Shane. In the studio with me here today is Andy. Andy, brother, how are you doing?

Andy Olrich 0:09
I’m tip top mate. How you going? It’s been a while, and great to be back on with you again.

Shayne Daughenbaugh 0:13
Yes, I’m very excited about that, and I’m very excited about today’s topic. As nerdy as that sounds, today’s topic is about batching, and this is something that you know. I’m sure that in in your work, you’ve also had different conversations with people trying to explain how when we’re talking about lean batching is not a good thing. But I’m I’m very interested in this because batching is one of those things we do on our every day on the regular. Like I batch how I do dishes, I batch how I fold my laundry or how I do my laundry at least. I batch how I do lawn work. There’s so many things that we batch, and it just makes sense to us in batching. But there is a different way of looking at it, and I’m very excited about who we’re gonna have on today. And I’m just going to let you take it from here.

Andy Olrich 1:03
Thanks, mate. Yeah, really exciting. It just it seems one of those things when you first look at it, it’s like it doesn’t make sense. It’s it’s better to do it all at once, and it’s more efficient. We can see lots of things happening at once,

Shayne Daughenbaugh 1:15
right?

Andy Olrich 1:16
Well, it looks that way, but yeah, I I won’t wax on about that. I’m going to bring on my mate Jimmy James Martin. All right, so great to have a fellow Australian on the podcast today. And I met Jimmy a few years ago, and yeah, really have been a keen follower of his work and and some of the different methods and tools and industries he’s been working in. But where he’s at today, Jimmy is the Continuous Improvement Program Manager at SRA Solutions, and he works closely with senior leadership to drive strategic growth, operational excellence, and business transformation across the whole organization. And I’ve seen it. I’ve been there. It’s a fantastic facility, and his role includes mentoring and coaching the management team, supporting strategy deployment and execution. Obviously, he’s leading a fantastic lean adoption and program there, and really cool small scale, but also the big hit is the high impact continuous improvement initiatives across the business. So, I’m just thrilled that he was was keen to come along. And Jimmy, great to have you here, mate. How you going?

James Martin 2:18
Thank you very much, Andy and Shane, that’s great, great opportunity. Thank you very much for the invitation. I really appreciate it. Our pleasure, yeah,

Andy Olrich 2:28
pleasure.

James Martin 2:29
Yeah, no, it’s batching’s a great, great topic, and what I wanted to try and try and talk about today is just the not just the shop floor impact and and what you can see, but how you can really look at extreme anti-batching or pro-flow, as some people like to say, it’s all about flow. Make it flow like a river. One of my bosses used to say that all the time. How do you make it flow like a river? So not not not just on the factory, but throughout the whole organization to execute the strategy, that’s our that’s our philosophy, and it can be really challenging because, as you said, Shane, it’s it’s our it’s it’s a normal human behavior to to batch because it’s that localized efficiency and all the machines and everything in the world set up to batch, but it’s actually bad, and we read about it in the all the books. Say, you know, don’t batch any batching. Don’t do it. So I wanted to try and, well, you know me, Andy. I try to be very practical. So I’ve got try trying to trying to articulate hopefully today some stories that can really resonate with people so they can see the impact of some real life examples of batching and why it’s why it’s bad and how extreme you can take this thinking because you can really get into it if you if you push push anti batching hard.

Shayne Daughenbaugh 3:57
So so take us take us to a specific time where you watched batching, I don’t know. Did it quietly wreck a team’s flow? I mean, you talked about, hey, we’re trying to be pro flow here. So can you take us to a time when batching did the opposite of flow? You know what happened on the ground, and what tipped you off that it was the batching that was the problem and not the people or the process?

James Martin 4:21
Yeah. So I’m going to wind back to the ’90s. Whoa, whoa, easy one. Sorry, sorry,

Andy Olrich 4:27
mate. I, I, I don’t remember that. I’m, I’m too young for that.

James Martin 4:30
Yeah, yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. I was really lucky. Part of my manufacturing degree, they don’t. I don’t think they offer it in Australia anymore, but they actually had a degree around manufacturing, so I was all focused on that. And there was this subject called lean, and I was a young youth student, had no idea what this lean stuff is. What does that mean? No idea. Anyway, I really loved it, and I ended up doing my thesis to to attain my degree. With with Wilson Transformers, and it was to get rid of batching, so, and and that was such a fantastic opportunity with Wilson Transformers. I was supposed to just you know work there for a few months, and I ended up working there for seven months and got right into this project. But we eliminated batching in ovens for baking and cooking the coils in the transformers,

Shayne Daughenbaugh 5:23
okay, and they

James Martin 5:24
thought of this really awesome innovation where they could connect up DC current to to the taps on the windings and heat them with with the current going through the winding. So they connect all the taps together because you’d have various taps coming out of a coil, and you put them in a press, and you could actually, you could actually instead of waiting 14 hours overnight. So this is your your your question showing where can you see the impact. Well, you couldn’t finish making a transformer. You had to make a whole bunch of coils ready for the next day to put into the transformer to fill it with oil and test it and blah blah blah. So the process had to stop. We had to fill up the oven, turn the oven on, cook them overnight, come back in the morning, then take them out of the oven. Then I mean, if anything had gone wrong with the oven or something, you got this whole batch that you okay? Yeah, exactly. So it’s not just the waiting. There’s all that risk because you’ve got everything, all your day’s work, rolling over to the next day. So if anything goes wrong, what are you going to do the next day? Yeah, and and they change that process from 14 hours to as little as one and a half hours to three hours. So it’s an incredible transformation. So we tripled, literally tripled