Patrick Adams 

Welcome to the Lean solutions podcast where we discuss business solutions to help listeners develop and implement action plans for true Lean process improvement. I am your host, Patrick Adams. Hello, and welcome to the Lean solutions podcast. My guest today is Jim Huntzinger. Jim was actually a guest back in December, around Episode 64, where we talked about Lean Accounting, and we’re going to do another deep dive into Lean Accounting today with Jim. Jim began his career as a manufacturing engineer with Toyota, and then transplanted to North America to support Toyota. And in 2005, Jim founded lean frontiers. So if you’ve, if you’ve seen any of his his amazing videos, they run tons of really great summits, training, workshops, all kinds of great activities and events. And we’ll throw some links to that in the show notes. So you can go back and, and see all the amazing things that are happening at lean frontiers. But Jim also authored many books to include lean cost management and roots of Lean training within industry. So welcome to the show, Jim.

 

Jim Huntzinger 

Thank you, Patrick. Great to be back.

 

Patrick Adams 

Absolutely. Yeah, it was a good conversation last time. And I thought we could take some of the topics that we talked about, and maybe dive even deeper into into some of the the things that we talked about in episode 64. So So let’s just start out for those that are maybe haven’t heard episode 64. Can you just tell us a little bit about your background and how you got involved with Lean Accounting?

 

Jim Huntzinger 

Sure, my background is engineering and operations. And I started off coming out of school going to work for actually for Toyota Group company, not because it’s a Toyota Group company, but because there’s a plant startup, so I, in my part of the plant wasn’t even built. So I got the opportunity to go through the whole startup, in machining, mostly machining some assembly. And from there, I went to work for Briggs and Stratton in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at a time they were working on a lien implementation. And that’s one of the reasons they had an interest in me with a background with a Toyota Group company and my machining and assembly background. But I got involved with the accounting because one of the things they wanted us to do the core, corporate folks wanted us to do a ROI on all these physical changes we were making to the shop. And in doing that, which I really didn’t have an interest in doing that, because it wasn’t my background, and I plenty of other things to do. But I got, I had to dive down into their internal accounting system to do the ROI on the changes we were making. And what I discovered with that was, it was inaccurate information. And it bothered me because at that time, a fortune 500 company, we based all our business decisions based off that information. So I actually quite horrifying that this information we were using for decision making was not accurate. So I really dove tried to dive in to, you know, why? Why is it inaccurate? And what would be a better way to derive internal costs, in this case, for decision making. And that led me to when I did my master’s degree, I took a thesis route. And I, because I wanted to do it on I guess what we’d call it a Lean Accounting, just because I kind of wanted to capture what I you know, learned at Briggs what the research I had done on it. I guess the, the model, the costing model that I put together with the help of a lot of people, I worked in one of the divisional accountants as well, I’m really just kind of captured what I learned. Now today, we would call it value stream costing, although back then we didn’t even have the term value stream, let alone value stream costing. So that’s how I kind of got into it. And the once I got done with the thesis and I tapped into people like you me familiar names now like or if you meet Jean Cunningham, some of the people the were the pioneers in Lean Accounting, sure, to help me with my thesis. And after I got done with that, it was like I’ve tapped into a pretty unique group of people here. What else? What else can we do with them and this information, and that’s kind of eventually the Lean Accounting Summit sprung out of that, and eventually lean frontiers sprung out of that. I got engaged in all this.

 

Patrick Adams 

And I really do want to talk about the Lean Accounting Summit and the leadership summit, because those are coming up. But before we do that, so when you did your thesis with Briggs, you know, I just have to imagine that there’s so many listeners out there right now that are that are thinking to themselves after hearing what you said they’re probably thinking to themselves, I wonder if the data that I’m receiving is correct or not. Right? What what did you find, you know, in doing your thesis and even just in your in your career since then, even with other companies, what do you find are the reasons why the data is not correct?

 

Jim Huntzinger 

Yeah, if they’re using a traditional costing system, in most cases, the information is not accurate. It’s just it’s basically that it does design of the system. Although it wasn’t malicious design, it was set up decades upon decades ago. But it leads to the wrong information. So what I found that what got me going on it, there was as I dove into trying to calculate their ROI, we, there we have these things called Cost Per 100 sheets. And it was derived out a very traditional type of calculating, based on, you know, machine hours and labor hours and things like that. But what tipped me off was, I was working on crankshaft machining on a particular model. And there’s about, I don’t know, 30 or 40 different variations is crankshaft. So we had, we had a cost line item cost for all those different variations. And as I dove in on how to calculate the cost, using the cost per 100 sheets, and the way that the information was captured, I discovered that the one of the lowest volume versions of that particular crankshaft, which was just a little under 3% of the overall volume, it is around a million of these things we produce per year, this engine model, so a million crank shafts, and then versus one of the highest volume of those of that model, which is a little under 70% of the overall volume. And the one at the lower volume had a bunch of extra processes on it, hardening gear shaping, extra grinding and turning. So expensive processes and more. But it showed us that we produce that substantially for substantially less our cost was less on that one, then the one that had a pretty straight shaft and pretty easy to manufacture. So I knew the information was wrong. So that’s what got me then I knew that was wrong. So I started asking these questions and try to follow up on why, why in the calculation does it drive up to these wrong numbers. And through the course of time, I figured out why which is related relates to the allocation process, which just does not allocate information according to the way resources are consumed in most organizations. That’s really the the genesis behind it. And also to the difference with with moving to, I guess, say moving to lead, in this case, we were implementing flows were rippling, not just flow, but true one piece flow, versus the old departments which were 10s of 1000s of parts of work in process. So just the logistics of tracking all that on top of just the way that information was tracked and captured in the department. It wasn’t that people were they were capturing the information wrong in a lot of cases, not because of any again, not because of any nefarious reasons, it was just so cumbersome. Of all the parts, all the processes, all the people three shifts, tried to do it, it was literally impossible to capture the information, let alone the way the calculus was behind the algorithms behind calculate it was just wrong to write. So you just use it up with this mess. So as we move to one piece flow, the physicality of the changes, simplified it. So we knew these machines were dedicated to a particular product crankshaft, this particular model, we knew the people were dedicated to it because we sell your eyes, we knew the floor space, we even at one point thought about getting a meters like on your home, because we can monitor the utilities. And we think that we can get it dead on accurate account of the utilities. We knew the tooling went to and everything. So just by the physicality, it became easy to track literally like line items in a ledger. Sure. And we changed originally, when he went as I worked with the divisional accountant on this. Prior to us doing this 85% of the cost associated with our different components was this nebulous overhead glob that we really had no idea what made that up, or what percent made that up. And 15%, we knew and a lot of that was just material costs. Okay. On the other side of doing it, we got to where 85%, we knew exactly what the costs were, we knew exactly the labor, the machines associated with it for space tooling on and on and on. We knew exactly what it was the 15% was actually resources consumed, or the 15% leftover, which was overhead. It was brought in that case, that company at that time is broken down in three components. So that overhead, what we call focus factories is a term we use we call values Tuesday, focus factory overhead, divisional overhead and corporate overhead. Well, even with those, we knew the breakdown percent of those and that was very accurate. Between those, you know, the the little percent that was left and corporate overhead was more nebulous, but it was such a small percentage didn’t matter. The other thing that allowed us to do is we could literally change any of these allocations, like we can do literally on an hourly basis became so easy. We didn’t have to because things are stable, but we could have so just gave a accurate system, easy to manage, and easy to make modifications if if they needed to be made.

 

Patrick Adams 

Right. Right. That makes sense. So I mean for many organizations In May lean organizations, you know, they’re making changes to processes probably pretty frequently. I mean, what do you think? What would be your recommendation to when, you know, individuals should go back and even reassess? You know, what, after they’ve done a good, you know, if they’ve done a good assessment of, you know, what the costs are and what the numbers are for a particular process or an area? I mean, how often should we be going back and looking at those to make sure that they’re accurate? Because, again, if we’re, if we’re making improvements, if we’re, you know, updating processes, if we’re bringing in new products, and things are moving around and changing? What’s the frequency that we should be looking at that?

 

Jim Huntzinger 

I my answer be? It depends, but I’ll explain what I’ve done. So as we in this should be the case, and like I said, we were truly working, we really only had one design parameter from a manufacturing standpoint, at least as we made the changes, and it was one piece flow. So whether we were looking at machine tools, layouts, people fixturing, you name it, it was couched in that design parameter of One Piece flow. So when we did that, again, as a result of that, the physicality made itself evident when we should make those adjustments. So for example, instead of how much labor hours are put in this one, five horsepower, crankshaft is a processes through the department. And all that you you wait real, that’s where they could really track it real well, but we knew when we went to sell it, sell your manufacturing, we knew at this volume, we had four people in the cell, we knew at this volume, we’d have five people in to sell, so became self evident in a way and even self tracking, because we knew those five people were in there. So really, the only time we’d have to make modifications to it would be if we made maybe possibly some change of a machine tool. So okay, well, now we’ve changed out this machine tool. So now we need the depreciation assigned to but again became much easier, because it was dedicated to that line. And it just made it made a bit of literally made a change in a line item in an Excel spreadsheet. So it just was very self evident when you had to make the changes. And a lot of the changes. Were just automatic insure people working. So today, three people were in there last week. So in a way we we didn’t have to make the changes, they may just may on theirown accord.

 

Patrick Adams 

Very nice. That’s great. And what would you recommend? It would be the first steps for someone that’s listening, that’s going you know what, we’ve never done any kind of analysis like that. I wonder if our cost of our accounting is correct. If it’s way off? What What would you say would be the first steps for someone that’s that’s asking that question,

 

Jim Huntzinger 

I’d say really probably two steps that need to go in some level of parallel one is you need to, you need to change to one piece flow as much as wherever you can, and push yourself. And that leads in probably another part of the conversation is really, truly designing for one piece flow, because traditionally, people are doing Kies ends, and that’s all good. But since your existing equipment probably was not designed for that, that means you’re just you’re stuck on some level of compromise. Sure. So you also need to start thinking anytime you introduce a new process machine fixing or what it might be, design it differently than what you’ve done traditionally to try to accommodate for one piece of it. Now, I know that a lot of times it’s a lot easier said than done, depending on the product, the type of machines you use, and processes are really thinking through that. The other side of it would be is really understanding how you derive your costs. And sometimes it takes a lot of digging, because a lot of times, even the most time, even if the five financial people have no idea. They know how to run their their tabulations and things like that. But they really don’t have a clue of where those numbers come from. And what’s actually where you’re actually pulling to get those numbers. So what those numbers actually mean going back into your operations at a tangible level. That’s what I was digging through, trying to figure that out. And I had a couple, we call them supervisors, they were foreman, I should say foreman of those departments that knew those things and knew how they were calculated. I mean, they didn’t think about from lean turns, they just knew how to do it. So they gave me tremendous help on looking at this stuff and trying to figure out what the heck this means, where those numbers derived out of what that where that’s coming from and what they’re tracking on parts and labor and machines out in the shop. And that just took me quite a while to dig through. So spending time on that just to fully understand, in this case, fully understand what was behind why the system didn’t give good information. And that helps you understand that which should help you going forward with okay when we set up this new circumstance, I guess one piece flow whatever you want to call it flow, it should make that easier to understand and also should make you understand better. Why, why it is better, not only from the physicality of production, when peaceful or less inventory can be more responsive to your customer and better quality and all those attributes, but also through how your financial information is derived as Well, and it just simplifies it, I should find more time it just simplifies that ability.

 

Patrick Adams 

Hello, everybody, I hate to interrupt this episode of the lean solutions podcast. But I wanted to take a moment to introduce you to my book, avoiding the continuous appearance trap. And instead of you hearing from me, I’d like for you to hear from Paul Akers, author of two second lean, and his thoughts around the book

 

Paul Akers 

Lean is for 2% of the people in the world. There are an awful lot of posers out there. People that do Lean because they’re mandated to do it, they think it will work. But there are very few people that embrace lean with their full heart, head and emotion to create a true Lean culture, one that is not full of posers and posturing, but full of authentically when they have total participation from everyone in the organization. Patrick’s book uncovers the essence of what those organizations look like, and what the posers look like caution. Are you in the fake zone, or the real zone?

 

Patrick Adams 

Thanks so much, Paul. If you’d like to get your copy of avoiding the continuous appearance trap, you can go to Amazon or you can go to avoid continuous appearance.com. Grab your copy there. Now, back to the show.

 

Patrick Adams 

Yeah, that makes sense. That’s great. No, that’s great advice. And there’s also a ton of resources out there to obviously your your book, Lean cost management is a great resource for people that are learning about Lean Accounting for the first time. And also, we have a Lean leadership week coming up here in September, September 21. That week, which is broken down into a couple different areas. And one of those is the Lean accounting and management Summit. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

 

Jim Huntzinger 

Yeah, the first thing we started doing, or I guess it’s now it’s been over 70 or 17 years ago was the Lean Accounting Summit. Derive actually, that book you mentioned my book is actually that’s actually my thesis put into a book form. So the the case study, I kind of use and there’s modeled after what I went through, Briggs and Stratton but so in that is there’ll be you know, lean accounting, and as lean accounting, so it went on for years, a lot of the subject matter that came out of that associated and also the people that would tend to attend, were people involved in management. So a lot of the subject matter on management, you know, I guess better management, Lean management activities just kind of evolved in that summit. So eventually, we really purposely tried to develop tracks and sessions that kind of addressed the management side of things, because obviously, the financial aspect of an organization is well not tied to really should be integrated with each other from the management side of it. Since my whole, the whole story behind how I ran into this accounting stuff originally was about that, the way we manage the business, using this accounting information. That’s how they tied together, we had bad accounting information, using it to manage the business. So those how those evolved. And eventually, we changed it from Lean Accounting, some of the lean accounting and management Summit, we also had another sub it was originally the Lean HR Summit. And we changed it just because it really became more about more than just HR is really about people development was at the essence of it. And we were running those close to each other but separate summits, and a number of years back, we were holding it in Savannah, Georgia, and we actually had to cancel and postpone it because of a hurricane. So as we reschedule here a few weeks later, after the hurricane, the venue, they only had a certain numbers of days available. Okay, so we just had to run them together. Sure, fine, we got them together. But the reflection we got on that was the people there for the people developments. And you know, I really enjoyed one being around the accounting and management people I learned so much from him, I sat in on some of those sessions, and it was wonderful, really opened my eyes. And we got the same feedback from the, you know, accounting and management people. So going forward, we said, well, we just need to, we need to run these things together. People are getting good synergy out of it, they’re connecting and networking. And out of that kind of developed, you know, Lean management week around Lean leadership week.

 

Patrick Adams 

Yeah, that’s great. Now, that’s what a great value for you know, people that are that want to attend one but you know, have the ability to hit up the other one while they’re there too. So that’s

 

Jim Huntzinger 

it will tell people to bring bring your team bring your management team, because, you know, the more things you can attend, the more things you guys will see in real time and can communicate just within your own organization. And hopefully, it means you can go back and be in a better position, knowledge wise and, and with some parallelism between your team to make some significant changes happen.

 

Patrick Adams 

Exactly. And what we’ll do is we’ll throw a link to the registration for Lean leadership week into the show notes. So if you are interested to bring your team to to Lean leadership week, coming up In September, you can find the link right in the show notes.

 

Jim Huntzinger 

I’ll add on that real quick. We were this year on the on the Lean accounting side is, we’re gonna have a special track for one day where people that are new to it, Nick kakko, who’s been, you know, a thought leader, a practitioner, and a thought leader in Lean Accounting, and author and all that, he’s going to have one track he’s going to do for one day, that’s really just going to focus on getting people up to a level to understand what good good practices and how to apply it in a Lean Accounting. So if you’re somebody who’s wanting to really come out of it with some good working knowledge, it’ll be there this year.

 

Patrick Adams 

Oh, that’s what a great opportunity for sure. Let’s, let’s dive into one other topic. Before we close to today, Lean Accounting and process development. How do the two connect Jim,

 

Jim Huntzinger 

I guess is this again, it kind of correlates back to what I was saying earlier, as we started, how I ran into that change, when I when I was doing this years ago. And so essentially, if you look, if you look at just look at accounting in general, particularly, and I guess it wouldn’t be true just in manufacturing, even in service industry, accounting should really be a reflection of what you’re physically doing, whether it’s a service, even in health care, or manufacturing, it should be a reflection that in a way, that’s what you’re trying to do with the accounting information, we want to financial reflection of what we’re actually doing to provide for our customers, product and services. So that’s the main tie in and that’s what I ran into our Do we have an accurate reflection, from a financial perspective of what we’re doing. And you know, I discovered we weren’t, which was troublesome to me, but you want that. So the reason it ties in is, since it should be an accurate reflection, it’s really just a truly a reflection, because I guess, no matter what your figures are telling you is are you really providing a good product in a timely manner and making a good margin on it to your customer, and all that. So in order to tie the tie, really tie them together in order to do good processing, and then hopefully you have extract the information. So you get a good reflection with the accounting information. You need good processes in place. I mean, if you’re in a lean environment, kind of already know. But how do you do that? And how do you? How do you make good processes? How do you continuously improve productivity, because really, fundamentally, that’s what you’re doing? improve productivity means you’re going to have improved profits, improve margins, and doing it in a way that you’re not, you know, you know, beating your people to do it, but do it in a very systematic, a very people orientated way, which still leads you to better productivity. So the process is tied to because that’s what the account, you know, when you do the accounting are costing is reflecting, but it leads back to really, truly understanding how good are we are we are processing? And really is to some degree, not not even necessarily relative to your industry, but relative yourselves. Can you be the best in your industry? And even if you are, because many companies already are? Can you be much better than what you currently are? And that’s where we need to get to how do we make ourselves better, you know, literally on a daily basis. That’s right. And then it’s, again, continuously improving. And I know that’s, it’s hard to be a little bit tangible or granular on that. Because every you know, business and in product and processes are different, but really getting a good grasp on on your processes. And that’s why I will say the one piece. So that’s one thing that helped this early on. As far as a measurement, we were tying everything to are we doing one piece flow, or are we not? And if we’re not, how do we get there? Like said fixturing, tooling, machines layout, everything? How do we get there, and it made us think about our processes much differently and made us modify? You know, we had a lot of existing equipment that we had to use. So made us think about that differently. It made us modify that. One, one example I had, we had some grinders, we had some grinders, the manuals we had on them were older were dated prior to us getting bombed and Pearl Harbor, oh, wow, we’re still using them. So how do I take this machine that was certainly wasn’t designed for one piece flow? And how do I make it operate in that circumstance without spending a lot of money? And it’s a try. It’s, you know, experimentation, you know, for those in with Todd and all that we running experiments, but we’re able to get it there. And also to when we bring in new equipment, how do we think about it differently? How do we design it differently? How do we work with machine tool vendors to get them to think it through differently to be able to provide that for us and again, a lot of experimentation but we never found we never found hurdles that we couldn’t get get over but we had to do a lot of thinking digging and experimentation to get there.

 

Patrick Adams 

Sure. Yeah. And speaking of KATA  know, some people that are listening in might be thinking, oh my goodness, I can’t I can’t even imagine how we would get to one piece flow. But But remember that’s that You know, something that’s maybe the longterm ideal state, right? We only need to figure out how to get to the target state. So maybe you’ll say, you know, how do we how do we start moving lots, you know, one piece one lot at a time, or, you know, just think about what’s that next target state and just figure out how to get there. Don’t worry about how to get to one piece flow right away. Right?

 

Jim Huntzinger 

It’s, it’s absolutely an iterative process. And again, in reflection back, I like to say this was before this is even before that, when we started, all this stuff is before the term Lean, I guess, the machine to change the world had been published, but not a lot of terminology around it. But that’s why we, for whatever reason, we felt focused in on one piece, well, we just, we knew that was, it was a better way to process. But we also knew there’s a gazillion hurdles to get there. And that’s where our experimenting. So we were, we were kind of using I guess the improvement kata. Now, we weren’t using it in a systematic standpoint, like you see with what Mike discovered and articulates today. But from a basic process thinking and behavioral pattern, that’s what we’re doing. We’re just going through constant iterative steps, running all kinds of experiments, sharing it all the engineers we are sharing with each other, because we’re all working on different projects, different components, different machining lines, and assembly lines. So we’re trying to share all that, as you know, as best as we could. And you know, again, in reflection, it made a big difference. We made a, it didn’t feel like at the time because it felt pretty sloppy at times. And we certainly had experiments that didn’t work. So ignore that didn’t work that did work. But when you reflect back the course of that time, the learning we got out it was was incredible.

 

Patrick Adams 

Very nice. Now that’s great. And that’s exactly what what people should walk away with is, is not trying, don’t try to figure out how to get there. Just figure out how to get Take, take that next step. And then maybe you don’t, maybe you don’t get where you need to be but you but you ask yourself, what did you learn? Right? And that’s a success. Yeah.

 

Jim Huntzinger 

What did you learn? What did you learn? How can I? How can I modify the experiment? So I could run it and I think maybe be more successful the next time around? Exactly, exactly. And, and sometimes, like said, sometimes it failed multiple times. And sometimes we’d be success successful the first time. And a lot of times, if we were, we’d be shocked by it. Sure. He expected it to fail, right? He’s like, I was sure it really worked. We need to look at it a little closer, because we thought it really should have failed.

 

Patrick Adams 

That’s great. So and I’ve talked with a lot of people to that, and I’ve heard that, you know, Lean Accounting and process development maybe have gone as far as it can go, what work do you do you think still needs to be accomplished in these areas? Because I think you and I are probably in agreement that that’s not the case, right?

 

Jim Huntzinger 

I’ve always found this interesting. And all the years I’ve been involved with this, I think that the area that needs the most work is processed, good, good flow processing process development. Of course, there’s more organizations that can utilize the practices of Lean Accounting, and all that. Plenty more. But it’s interesting, because if you look, at least as it came into the US or North America, lean are what we would call it our Toyota productions. It really came in through kind of Kies ends and original, which was really about how do we try to implement flow. So coming in here really originated there. But now here we are several decades later. And I would say the most work still needs to be done in that area. If you look at the way people still process things, it’s still very much in a batch the way processor design machines are designed, there’s still a lot of batch thinking. And the idea is to ideally, get completely away from that. And what are the hurdles that keep you from doing that. And one thing I found from a process or machine standpoint, is most cases new technology is not needed at all. You just need to think about the current technology differently. And I’ve discovered that and things like die casting, foundry work machining, certainly in assembly, even laser cutting and things like that. We don’t need new technology, you just need to think about the existing technology differently. And you can do it again, some of the hurdles are how do you convince others? How do you get machine tool builders to think differently, but we have the technology, we just got to apply it differently. That’s right.

 

Patrick Adams 

Absolutely. Is there anything else that you think process development can impact?

 

Jim Huntzinger 

Yeah, product development, because that’s really, we talked about that the financial or the accounting, it’s really the end, but it’s really the product development. And we have there is a lot of good Lean product developed work that’s gone along out there. But it’s back to the process, but that really should be done the process and the product should be done in tandem. And again, when you do that, that’s when you’re if you do your accounting, right, the reflection becomes even much better. Because, you know, again, depending on the business is the biggest financial gains to be made are in that product in process development and implementing a good Good, good. I guess good flow. So if you think if you think about Toyota one reason they can stay ahead of their competitors is they already have that embedded in there multiple major iterations down the road with it, right between the product development and the process development. They just been doing it, it’s more natural for them. So if you’re just starting on it, you’re, you know, it’s better than maybe some some people, but you still have a ways to go. But the better you can get to that it’s back to, like, all the learning, I said, we did. It was It felt very sloppy in many ways it was, but if if I’d still be in that same place, and we still be doing it here, several decades down the road, we’d be doing so effectively, at such a high velocity competitors, I wouldn’t have had any competitors. Because we’d be just that much far ahead with all that knowledge in and with all those experiments behind us, you know, rolling forward. So the sooner people get started on doing that, just the more knowledge you gather, and the way the higher leverage you have that experience.

 

Patrick Adams 

Absolutely. Jim, Jim, this has been a great discussion in again, I think we could probably talk forever about this. I mean, we product development, we could go down a whole nother path. But we talked about the Lean Accounting Summit, what are some of the other events or resource opportunities that are available through Lean frontiers that people can tap into?

 

Jim Huntzinger 

I guess our next, our next coming. Our next upcoming summit is July 6, and 7th the Lean coaching Summit, which is really well it’s about but it says lean coached about how do you know what are the different ways to coach people horizontally, vertically up down, yourself, all those types of things. So it’s just and that’s what we want, you want a very if you look at the different things like I was talking about, whether it’s product development, process development, you mentioned kata, Twi training, it’s industries, all those to do well with those have absolutely have an aspect of coaching with it. If you look at the Toyota, if you look Toyota, they never said, Hey, let me we’ll hire you come in and go sit down these lean classes, and then you’ll go do something, it was always let’s go work on a project together. And through that actual real, real work, you’ll you’ll learn how we do things. And it’s all that’s it’s all coaching, you have somebody with more experience a higher level that helps mentor and coach you through that to, you know, just to be more successful, and then that person eventually will coach and mentor someone else. So it’s about that. I guess we also have our skill point, workshop skill four point for job instruction, and skill point for Toyota kata. So, those we offer, you know, several times throughout the year, and they’re really just, they’re an immersive workshop. We’re not only just learning job instruction or Toyota kata, but you’re practicing it through several days on actually in a real in a real manufacturing simulator. So it’s a full scale, life size manufacturing simulator to go in and learn and practice, practice, practice.

 

Patrick Adams 

Yeah, I love that I love I love seeing pictures and videos when those pop up of the that’s that space. That’s a really cool, you know, value add opportunity for people to tap into.

 

Jim Huntzinger 

Yeah, so there are a lot of fun there a lot of fun. Yeah, absolutely.

 

Patrick Adams 

Where would people go to find, you know, the different opportunities that are out there that let lean frontiers provides?

 

Jim Huntzinger 

Yeah, just if you go to leanfrontiers.com it lists out our summits that we have, you click on that, or workshops, and also to mentioned about place people go we also have a resource page. So we have all kinds of videos, podcast, links to articles and books on all the different subject matters broken out, you know, per subject matter lien accounting, Twi kata, whatever it might be. There we have, we have online learning, webinars that we’ve done, and we’ve done some with you. And we have one coming up later this year. We’re looking forward to seeing go and just to hear, hear practitioners and thought leaders to talk about different subject matter. So go to our website, there’s lots of opportunity, not only for our events or workshops, but just a lot of opportunity of online learning and resources available that you can utilize anytime.

 

Patrick Adams 

Perfect. Well, thanks a lot, Jim. And I’ll make sure that we throw throw that link into the show notes again so that people can go there to to find your your website. And I just appreciate you coming back on to the show and talking to us some more about Lean Accounting and looking forward to the the upcoming summit. I hope to be out there for the Lean leadership week in September. So I hope to see you in person. It’s nice to get back in person and seeing everybody together. And we were talking about even before we hit record about how engaging these these live workshops are and are these live summits are now because people are just so excited to be back together. Right?

 

Jim Huntzinger 

Yeah. Just just can’t wait to get back together. So yeah, and it’s definitely reflected in that. Well, thank you for having me always enjoy our conversations.

 

Patrick Adams 

Absolutely. Well, I’ll see you in September.

 

Jim Huntzinger 

All right see you then.

 

Patrick Adams 

Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the lien solutions podcast. If you haven’t done so already, please be sure to subscribe. This way you’ll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined. Please give us a review. Thank you so much