Blue Lights - Capacity from Nothing

By Kevin Fox - its his story!

From all of my years in applying TOC, this is one of my favorite stories. I use it frequently in my consulting work and it’s totally true. In fact I’ve told it so often that I finally came across someone in the room who used to work at that company. He validated it 100%. If you walk into one of the dozens of places where I’ve told this story, you will likely to find they still talk about “Blue Lights”.

My story illustrates the essence and power of the Theory of Constraints as a process to expose and challenge assumptions that block us from seeing better solutions. Our paradigms and assumptions cause us to accept many things as facts, often without (properrly) checking them. This behaviour limits us. We seek a solution within a false frame of reference and that prevents us from seeing a simple way out of our problem.

If you are familiar with the brainteaser of the nine dots, arranged in a 3x3 grid you know your task is to connect the 9 dots with 4 straight lines - without lifting pen from the paper. You know what I mean. (I think most of you are familiar with this. If not let me know and it will be psoted.) Please enjoy the “Blue Lights” story. (You can take the teaser 3 steps further - find the solution with only 3. then 2 and finally just 1 straight line!)

I was very young, had only been in consulting for a year or so, when a company asked me to see if I could help them with a plant's capacity problem. So, one day I went to meet the plant manager. It’s never fun to be sent as thr corporate envoy to “help” a plant, so I knew I might be in for a difficult time.

The factory produces heavy metal bumpers for semi-trucks. They had a major bottleneck in their welding department. Orders were backed up, they were running at capacity making them run arond the clock 7 days per week. Space in the plant was already so tight that they already had plans to add room for 3 more welding bays - to double current capacity.

Early on the plant manager informed me the welding department was running at 93% efficiency. His message to me was; no room for improvement. My and my colleagues experience tells us that at least 25% more capacity can always be found in almost any plant. I was young and brash enough to tell this 30-year manufacturing veteran about this belief of mine and, that sight unseen, it would also be true in his operation. He probably thought my math skills were pretty weak because he reiterated they were already at 93% efficiency, so my claim impossible. To him it sounded like I was promising 116% efficiency!

I was not fazed. I finally convinced him to take me to at least look at his welding operation, since I had specially driven out to see it.

When I go to look at any operation I have the habit of formulating a simple picture or image of “what good must look like”. In other words, what imagine what I would expect to see if an operation was truly performing to its maximum capability. Since I am a completely non-technical person I put in my head an image of “blue lights” I as we walked towards the shopfloor.

I was quite sure that if a welding torch is not turned on, not emitting its funky blue light, then welders could not be welding anything. I decided to look first for how much of the time a blue light was shining from each of the three welding stations. (Yes I know even this is not yet the indicator of optimal performance. But, as you will see, in this case it was much more than good enough).

When we got to the welding area we quietly watched for a few minutes. The first thing I noticed was a welder turning off his torch, taking off his protective gear and walking over to his buddy in the next booth. He waited until he got his buddy's attention, who then also stopped to take off his gear. Together they returned to the first guy’s booth. They lifted the heavy finished bumper off the welding table onto a pallet. From the queue of work they then put a new not yet welded bumper onto the welding table. The second welder then went back to his booth.

I continued watching. Instead of welding the first welder peeled the protective plastic coating off the bumper in the places he had to weld. It took a good bit of time picking with his fingernails to get the plastic off. He then grabbed the other parts to be welded onto the bumper, clamped them onto the bumper, put on his gear and welded for no more than 30 seconds, before he was done. I looked at my watch, we had been watching for almost 5 minutes. Welding was only 30 seconds of the 5 minutes or about 10% of the welder's time was welding. (If welders are the constraint should he be doing things anyone else could do just as well?)

Meanwhile, another welder had just returned to his empty booth pushing a trolley. He used the trolley to jack up and move his finished pallet to the next operation. He returned after several minutes to consult his schedule for his next job. It turned out to be a skid of bumpers located against the wall, blocked in by two other skids he first had to move. Once he found his order he moved the two other pallets out of the way, got his skid to his booth and then moved the other two back out of the aisle. During all of this time he produced zero blue light.

It gets better! He again disappeared with his trolley to get the parts to weld onto the bumpers. He went to the storeroom, and returned several minutes later with his parts. During this time the first two welders repeated their two-man bumper-lifting dance several times.

From my simple and casual observation I estimated that “blue light time” could not have been more than 10% of available time and was probably lower.

As I watched, all I could think about was “wow, did I ever sandbag this guy” (meaning the plant manager). I told him I would find 25% more capacity. My estimate was low by one or two ZEROES!

Just about then the plant manager turned to me and said something I have never forgotten. He said, “You see, they’re busy all of the time!” And he was correct; the guys were working all of the time, steadily and focused on the job.

What amazed me is how the two of us could look at precisely the same thing and perceive it entirely differently. His assumption of what good looked was based on people being busy. I looked at it from the perspective of the operation and the work it did, the blue lights. His perspective totally blocks him from seeing any solution other than adding people. His perspective required him to invest in plant expansion and worse, take months to implement it. During implemetation of the expansion his company would anger more and more customers and lose hundreds of thousands in potential profits.

We ultimately got them to implement a very simple solution. They had a summer worker in another department (a non-constraint area of course). He knew nothing about welding. They moved him into the welding department to be the “helper”. We gave him a simple image to guide him how to do a good job. We told him we wanted to see more and more blue light from welders’ torches. His job was to lift bumpers with the one welder, move pallets of bumpers around, stage the next jobs for each welder, and get all of the parts they needed ready for welding. If the helper has extra time after all this (it turned out he did) he was to peel the plastic from bumpers for the welders, and do anything else that would generate more blue light time. (This is an excellent exsample of deciding how to exploit and then subordinating to that decision. The subordination was by the other (non-constraint) department that gave up the summer job worker.)

In less than three weeks the welding department totally cleared the area of work-in-process. This big backlog shipped out along with the on-going flow that continued to arrive at welding. They produced a record shipments month. I don’t know how much capacity was actually created, but it was more than enough to break the bottleneck, and if more had been needed that could have been generated equally easily.

What limits us as individuals and as organizations is our reliance on the assumptions and paradigms we hold, and our failure to recognize them as just that “assumptions” or "paradigms" and NOT facts. For success it is critical for us to, from time to time, question our assumptions and paradigms!