Aloha. Today I'd like to address a subject that's been swirling around me for the last number of years. Where did you get the name Slee, Learning Without Scars? It's clear in a classroom that learning with you is not without scars. In fact, there's many scars to be experienced. Well, all teasing aside, it was meant to reflect the fact that from the time that I started in the business, I was always involved in finding and fixing problems. I was hired, as many of you know, in 1969 on a contract to find and fix a problem with an inventory control system that had been installed by a consulting group. It took us some time. The inventory was doubling and tripling and quadrupling. And in those days, there was a problem in how a square root was calculated. But along the way, I had the opportunity to spend a day a week with a man by the name of David Steele, who was a senior partner of the consulting company that put the system in, and he trained me. I was given an opportunity that very few people have, where I had him to myself one day a week for many, many, many months. It was wonderful. From there, I put together a model. with two people from Caterpillar, Bob Kirk, who was kind of the father of inventory management in those days, and Larry Noe, who was one of the earlier members of dealer data processing, the dealer management system that Caterpillar offered to the dealers. And we put together a model that simulated all of the different inventory management packages that were available to the industry at that time,1969. And we ran through all of these different packages, and I came to the conclusion that they were all plus or minus 5% of each other. It was more or less a choice of personal preference. And what I wanted to be able to provide was a tool that everybody in the business could understand how it worked so that there wouldn't be a need for any specialized skills. So we got that done. But in the course of that, the company recognized that I had some kind of skill in being able to troubleshoot, find problems and fix them. So I was given that opportunity in many different instances. One of the first ones was in designing the distribution center. We had a U-shaped building with two shops going down the long arms, if you will. And we had a small warehouse that was put together for the original building. And we needed to expand on that. So we constructed a building that was 300 feet by 300 feet by 30 feet tall. And that was part of the process of designing warehouses using a computer program, which is in essence the very first consulting work I ever did. But that brought me to the confrontation between floor mount rider trucks or cranes. And we chose the floor mount trucks. We used wire guidance. We put rails up on either side of the shelving. So in effect, it was operating the lift truck as if it was a train going down an aisle. That brought us into activity design of warehouses where the fast-moving parts are in specific locations and specific elevations. And that led then to building order stations on the shop floor. where the mechanics would be able to go pick up a phone and call the parts department and transmit the order that they had to somebody wearing a headset in the parts department. We put six or eight of those workstations around the shop floor. We had about 150 technicians. And in that workstation, we were using microfiche at the time, so we gave the technicians all the tools they needed to determine what their parts were. They could print it off and then get on the phone and transfer the order to a lady who was very quick on a keyboard. I think there was one man involved in the whole thing. And we had three people taking orders for 150 mechanics. Worked very well. And then we delivered the part to them with a wire-guided vehicle that was essentially like a robot. My point is there were many different things that we did that were early in the phase of development. One of the other things that was beneficial to me is I got involved with Caterpillar in their inventory management study with Dr. Chang, who created a package for Caterpillar dealers that manage their inventory based on the Poisson statistical formula rather than normal distribution. Poisson is different in that it skews, it recognizes activities on the majority of the parts, activities in slow-moving parts,12 sales a year or less. And similarly, I was given an opportunity to get involved with the Ketopiler Service Management Control System, where we defined and described job codes and set up methods to determine standard times. All of these things fit my personality to a T.I get rather bored very quickly. So being able to move from problem to problem and be involved in analytics and determining what the solutions were was an excellent application for me. This isn't invention, as Robert Barker, who coined the word paradigms in the 1980s, indicates. This is innovation. This is looking around and finding what tools, what methods, what processes work. And that's where the innovators are. And this is about the same time that we're looking at continuous quality improvement. Deming's approach in Japan was starting to flood over into America, which morphed into Six Sigma, which has morphed into 5S and now 7S, and activity-based management. All of these various tools allowing me to bear the scars because of the mistakes we made so that the students in our classes in Learning Without Scars don't have to go through the same thing. The classic example that many of you are aware of was the first Vidmar cabinet that I put in place that had... 17 drawers in it. It seemed like every order that we processed during the day had a part that was in that cabinet. Again, it was a mistake. And that mistake I translated into scars. In a normal business, when you make mistakes like that, you're prone to be fired, to lose your job. Well, the students of Learning Without Scars and the people that come into our employee development process They don't have to go through those scars. I've already experienced them. So that's where the name came from. I hope that calms down some of the comments, particularly from those that have been in many classes with me, indicating that it is a difficult process. Learning is tough. You have to be disciplined to want to learn. And then the question becomes, what are you going to do with it? I hope that helps a little bit in understanding the name. I look forward to talking with you the next time. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com. The time is now. Mahalo.
