Arriving at Techno Aerospace

(air whooshing) - Hey there! Welcome to another edition of Gemba Live! So we are here in Miami, Florida, and we are on our way to Techno Coatings, which is a division of Techno Aerospace. Now Techno Coatings has been a customer of Gemba Academy for a few years, and we've been talking about coming here to visit them for over a year and we finally were able to make it happen and we're super excited. We went in yesterday and kind of did a walk-through and met with Philippe and Juan Pablo and their team and kind of worked through the agenda, and it's jam-packed. Now Techno Coatings, as you'll see, they do plating of parts and they service the aerospace industry. So it's a high-mix, high-volume environment, as they describe, which as anyone that's been practicing lean knows, that's probably the most challenging combination that you can have. So they're not able to calculate traditional takt time across their entire company just because their mix is changing so often. But as you'll see, they had some really creative ways to work around situations like that, so I think that's going to really resonate with those of us out there who maybe don't work in a traditional low-mix environment, 'cause Techno's definitely not low-mix. We're going to look at other things such as their Hoshin Planning process, how they go about deciding on whether or not to wear uniforms. They're going to kind of talk about that. I don't know what they're going to say there, but that's going to be interesting. We're going to look at how they create cells and they've got a really cool quick changeover example that they want to share with us. So we've got tons to cover. It's an incredibly busy agenda. I think we're going to have more footage than we know what to do with here by the end of the day. So let's drive the rest of the way in and see how it goes! (inspirational instrumental music)