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Monday, October 20, 2008

More on kaizen

When ever I see pictures of other shops or get the chance to walk through another shop, one of things I am looking at is how there tools are stored. Even the smallest improvement in tool storage can have big impacts on productivity. This is how we now store our saw blades and table saw accessories. This table saw is very common in everyones shop, just a standard cabinet saw with the 50" fence. I had been wanting to build this cabinet for years, so I have had lots of time to think about it.

We figured that saw blades have two main categories, in and out. All out going blades meaning going to the sharpening shop, in are case Atlantic Carbide great business in Somerville. The in bound blades then get categorized by machine and purpose. The drawers are for blade changing tools and safety tools. This particular saw is in the center of our shop, and now will also store all the table saw blades for the whole shop. You can see that the drawers are more like pull out trays with a specific location for everything. The theory here is that everything has it place and everything is in its place.

What's best about this cabinet is that it is the result of a Kaizen event that we had on Saterday afternoon. It was difficult to get the event going, it is hard to motivate guys to get into the event. The events start out by us talking about the problem we want to improve. We are a quiet bunch, creative types and introverted. It is the kaizen events leader to get the conversation going. I think that is the stumbling point, and what we need to overcome to improve our events.

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