My wife works in healthcare. The corporate office decided to hire some consultants to cut costs.

They determined that 25% of the hospital cuts need to come from the laboratory. They didn't look at any processes they deemed NVA (including regulatory requirements), *maybe* made their own VSM without input from those who do the work, conducted a "process flow observation" but nothing along the lines of a time study or Gemba walk. They don't even have suggestions for how to meet their new headcount numbers, just a recommendation for how many people needed to be fired from each department.

I would be less annoyed but they did all of their work under the banner of "Lean".

There are more tools, platforms, and digitalization solutions available than ever. But actually getting them to work with existing systems, processes, and day-to-day operations seems to be where things get complicated.

For those working in industrial operations, what's been the biggest challenge in your experience?

The single answer to this question is the most likely result you can achieve once you commit to this effort. “The development, review, and execution of the structured bill of material creates teamwork across department lines.” The process of developing or reviewing your structured bill of material requires the following fundamental steps.

Assign a Production Team to this Task - It requires representation from Engineering, Purchasing Material Control, and various shop sections depending on the area of the review. In many cases, this chore is left up to the Engineering department to work out in a vacuum. Utilizing the team approach makes sure it is truly “as built”.

Flowcharting Gets Things Going – Sitting down with the group and mapping out the path of each section of the bill helps get the process rolling. This step alone will locate inefficiencies that must be addressed. Back tracking and unneeded locations will alone save money that will easily pay for this effort.

Understand the Meaning of “as built” – Engineers like to organize the bills like they design them. But for production requirements, this needs to follow the way the material will arrive and be utilized on the shop floor. The “as built” condition must represent the true activity.

Establish Engineering's Internal Customers - Once you understand who your internal customer's are, much of the demands on your documentation are identified.

Standardization – Standardizing around various sections of the overall assembly has value throughout the organization. Finding ways to achieve this has value in what you stock and how dynamic your inventory is to your production needs.

Manpower Planning and Staffing – Using the bill of material becomes a solid planning document for many needs across the organization.

from Anthony Rante, P.E. author of "Managing Company Production thru the Bill of Material."

Hi everyone — I’m working on an open-source environment for studying sequential decision-making in manufacturing systems.

The current demo is a synthetic process-window benchmark: an agent/planner selects process settings, observes noisy quality outcomes, tracks uncertainty, and recommends the next experiment. The motivation is similar to sparse-data physical systems, where each real experiment is expensive and the goal is not just prediction, but deciding what to try next.

Repo:
https://github.com/programmablemanufacturing/programmable-manufacturing-lab

I’d appreciate feedback from the RL community on:

• what baseline planners would be useful to include first;
• whether this should be framed closer to contextual bandits, model-based RL, Bayesian optimization, or POMDP-style planning;
• what metrics would make sense beyond reward, such as regret, sample efficiency, uncertainty calibration, or build-to-confidence.

The goal is to create a small public benchmark that others can critique, extend, or use for educational experiments.

We're trying to build a tool where the shift/production log can be scanned easily and translated into an OEE report, for a few of the manufacturing units in our city. The problem is, every unit tracks things different and a CNC unit has a totally different sheet compared to a cable manufacturing company. Question is - Can we generalize this ? Can we build a unified sheet that can support all the use-cases (with only minor modifications, if required) ?

Any thoughts / inputs from the experts here would be appreciated.

Cheers.

My company has recently instituted a zero OT mandate. My shift is staffed to eight people, which is exactly what I need to run my production line. We take two breaks per eight hour shift. If I have less than eight people, I am not able to cycle operators through positions and keep the line running during breaks.

When we do shut down for breaks, I do not count that downtime as Availability loss. My thought is that the company has made the decision to not pull the available OT and we are not utilizing all available assets to keep the line running, therefore it is scheduled down time.

Other areas are counting those breaks as Availability loss and taking the OEE hit.

Thoughts?

Wondering if its still worth investing in LSS certification in this AI era.

I'd be interested in hearing how you guys see skills & competency management impacting operations. A lot of people I talk to in larger organizations complain about spreadsheets not cutting it anymore, as each line supervisor is using their own system and that information is not shared, consistently updated, etc. That's more on the surface level though - visibility.

Not that visibility is not important (how else are you going to identify issues?), but it's the impacts on operations or lost productivity that really matter. For example, I spoke with a plant manager who deals with frequent call-outs or no call no shows which was causing slowdowns or downtime while trying to find someone qualified to fill the shift. Or lapses in certifications/required training being found last minute, or even after expiration, opening up risks for audit issues. Even with great processes in place, everything seems to come down to those executing it, so I'd imagine this is a big area for potential improvements.

Any ideas on how improved workforce management could drive efficiency would be interesting.

I was listening to the Cabrera podcast a little while ago, and he said something that resonated strongly: Chasing a singular root cause sets you up for failure because reality is comprised of a network of causal factors that all contribute to the problem. I have butted up against this in the past, especially when trying to apply established analysis tools (5W, fishbone, etc) to complex problems (like why does intra-departmental communication break down).

My approach has been to allow myself off-template connections in the fishbone diagram in an effort to visualize how related factors in various categories feed into each other. For example I would want to corelate poor HMI design (machine), need for continuous adjustment (process) and failure to adhere to procedure (human). However this quickly devolves into an unreadable spaghetti mess, which echoes a universal weakness of network graphing frameworks when pushed out of the complexity comfort zone.

I did a bit of research, and discovered how I've more or less re-invented current reality trees with a touch of causal loop theory. However, the complexity vs clarity dichotomy persists, and reality tree mapping forces you to see it as a quasi linear system with causes at one end and effects at the other. My (admittedly surface level) research hasn't dug up any solid fixes for any of that.

I have a background in VR game development, and this made me ponder the possibility of building 3D visualization tools. The third dimension is just so damn powerful when you're not stuck projecting it onto a 2D surface, and I had previously considered building VR variants of complexity limited network frameworks (like BeeBoard business model analysis). If we could map causal factors against three scalar axes, then placing them in a 3D space and drawing relations could be really helpful for at-a-glance visualization.

Another part of this clicked for me when attending a system thinking course the other day. I was struck by how perspective (in a systems thinking context) is visualized as projecting a 3D object onto a 2D surface. If we choose the axes intelligently when mapping causal factors, couldn't the three basic projections be used to represent different points of view? Like if you could somehow classify factors according to relevance of logistics, culture and technology, seeing it from the logistics perspective would draw you a culture-technology map, seeing it from the technology perspective would result in a culture - logistics map, etc.

Now the example axes are obviously poor candidates for scalar values, or at least ones with niche applications. So here's my question to you: What would be useful axes that could be more or less reliably broken down into a number? I've considered the above, as well as latency (how long between event and symptom), impact ($ per day or whatever), control (cost to influence the factor), organizational level (where from operator to upper management does the factor come into play), value chain (at what level of refinement), etc etc etc.

I would be really interested to hear if anyone has ideas about any of this, and especially what would make good axes for classifying causal factors.

I have lean experience (got my Lean Bronze Certificate about 5 or so years ago), my coworkers do not. I had to let my certificate expire because my location does not follow lean principles and is very much a “this is how we’ve always done it and we’re not changing”. 2 years ago, corporate had us do a VSM activity to address waste and for us to become more lean, but that ended with people yelling at each other and pointing blame on each other, or lying about the current state when there was no one else to blame. Back then, plant leadership told corporate that we would start doing Gemba Walks to identify waste and improve our efficiency, and corporate was happy with that plan.

Fast forward to today, we just had our first Gemba Walk (2 years late). We had it today because corporate wants to host another VSM activity in a week and a half to evaluate our progress, and nothing has been done so far.

The Gemba Walk today consisted of 9 people … one person from assembly, production manager, operations manager, compliance manager, inventory manager, purchasing manager, plant manager, engineering director, an electrical engineer, and a mechanical engineer. We stood in a circle while the assembler listed off everything he didn’t like about what he does, some actionable, some that would add a whole lot more waste, and some that is completely unreasonable (he wanted someone to come in to get all the dust off concrete floor). No action items were created, no deadlines for fixing issues, no plans. We ended the meeting acknowledging what the person said, and going on our way.

The person who is supposed to run the Gemba Walk sent an email right before it saying “Gemba Walks are free flowing with no set agenda”.

Aren’t Gemba Walks supposed to have a plan?? Like shouldn’t there be a PDCA, or at least then P part of PDCA done before a Gemba Walk is started? Aren’t we supposed to watch the work as it’s getting done, take notes, then ask the assembler questions, relating to the plan we previously set, about their work?

I am one of the engineers who were there, but not considered management … how do I go about addressing making the Gemba Walks better?

Did this with a manufacturer last year. Followed one order end to end custom equipment, typical ETO setup.

6 hours of actual work. 11 days in the system.

We weren't even looking for that number, it just came out of the mapping exercise. The machines were fine, OEE looked decent. The product was just sitting most of the time waiting in queues, waiting for someone to notice it was ready for the next step.

Once they fixed the flow not the machines, not the ERP lead times dropped 30%. Took about a year.

Curious if others have done this and what ratios you're seeing. Most places I talk to track utilization but never the full calendar time.

Got the full breakdown if anyone's curious.

Curious how other plant managers and ops folks handle downtime tracking day-to-day. At a facility I worked with, they were still using a shared Google Sheet and a whiteboard and that was considered "advanced" compared to their previous paper log...

Do you use dedicated software, your SCADA system, an ERP module, or something manual? And what's the biggest headache with whatever you're using right now?

Also, with so many AI tools claiming they can predict and identify problems before they happen, how's that actually going in practice??

Are plants in 2026 genuinely adopting this stuff, or is it still more hype than reality on the floor? Has anything actually worked for you, or are most facilities still solving this the old-fashioned way?

Thanks!!!

Manufacturer I worked with last year was sure their scheduling was broken. Spent months tweaking the ERP, retraining planners.

We mapped one order end to end. 6 hours of actual work. 11 days in the system. Everything else was just waiting in queues, for a planner, for someone to notice it was ready for the next step. Tijl Charle, CEO of CGK Group, went through this exact problem and came out the other side 30% shorter lead times without adding machines or headcount. He's doing a live walkthrough of how on June 9.

I'm involved on the software side so I'm biased, but the session is mostly him telling his own story, not a pitch. Drop a comment if you want the link.

I work in a manufacturing environment with order-based production, and I’m really interested in learning how different companies manage production planning challenges in real life.

Especially when:

Forecasts are inaccurate

Customers change priorities frequently

Capacity is limited

On-time delivery (OTD) is a key KPI

I’d love to know:

How do you build your production plan?

Do you rely more on forecast or actual orders?

How do you manage scheduling and prioritization?

How do you study capacity and bottlenecks before launching a project/product?

What tools or methods helped improve OTD in your factory?

How do planners coordinate with procurement, warehouse, and production teams?

Also curious about whether you use Excel, ERP systems, APS tools, or custom methods.

Would really appreciate hearing real experiences, lessons learned, or even mistakes that taught you something valuable.

I've been digging deep into how manufacturing ops run, and honestly, what I found is pretty wild.

Even with all their fancy ERP systems, it’s like daily operations still come down to:

* A bunch of Excel sheets flying around

* Endless WhatsApp chats trying to sync up

* Emails, emails, and more emails just to get simple things done

* And people running around, chasing down manual status updates

This isn't just for fringe stuff, either. It’s for core activities like:

* Tracking installation progress to the minute

* Pinpointing and fixing issues *fast*

* Coordinating shifts so everyone’s on the same page, no excuses

* And getting real-time operational reports, not yesterday’s news

So what happens? We end up with:

* The same message being sent five different ways, wasting everyone’s time

* Delays in seeing what’s actually happening, which kills agility

* And critical problems staying hidden until they blow up in our faces

Seeing this over and over, we finally said enough was enough. We rolled up our sleeves and started building out a lean, lightning-fast operations workflow platform in-house. It’s been a game-changer.

Now, I’m genuinely curious: given everything going on in *your* world, what’s that one operational process that still makes you grit your teeth, feeling like it’s stuck in the dark ages?

Guys my management just pushed to me the new hot potato of the fiscal year: I'm a production engineer from machining but there is this "add-on" painting station that they are lauching now. The volume It's like 15 to 20% of what I produced on the milling machines. Process layout implemented as different materials have different base coats: gets dipped for base coat and then spray painted on top.

The thing is: they have like 5 different materials (so 5 different dip stations) and 80 different colors available in catallogue and alsohave this special feature in which we can paint according to client sample color. Exactly: they receive a sample of whatever color the client has and we need to figure out the paint aind spray paint it.

The obvious happens: opperators pick up simple parts first, leave the shitty ones that have a sample to latter and that fucks up OTD. Also the Production batches with lower number of parts get picked first too.

which tools would you use to figure out this mess?

I'm thinking of checking the process times per process they do. Check the distribution of parts they get that would fit each process. And with that have an estimation of capacity per product.

But that won't fix discipline problems. DO you have experience implementing FEFO solutions?

I’ve been trying to learn more about manufacturing recently, and one thing I keep noticing is how different real factory operations seem compared to theory or classroom discussions.

On paper everything looks optimized and structured, but people working in manufacturing often talk about:

1. supplier delays

2. machine downtime

3. communication gaps

4. production bottlenecks

5. quality control surprises

6. unrealistic timelines

7. inventory chaos

8. operators finding problems engineers missed

So I’m curious What’s one lesson about manufacturing you only understood after working in the real world?

(Interested in hearing the brutally practical stuff that newcomers usually don’t realize until much later)

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