Patrick Adams  00:00

Hello, and welcome to the Lean solutions podcast. Today’s guests are Dr. Michael Sanders and Sean fields. This is this is a little different than our normal episodes we have two guests on today. So we’re gonna have some really great discussion. But before we do that, let me just introduce the two guests. So Sean fields is a 35 year industry veteran in a wide variety of sectors, including oilfield equipment manufacturing, food processing, and job shops. As a seasoned professional, he has worked in all phases of business, including the shop floor quality, safety and engineering. And in addition, he is the co author of the book quantum lean, which we’ll be talking extensively about today. And then my second guest, Dr. Michael Sanders with a career that began as a welder’s apprentice, and includes stints as CEO and president in food, energy distribution and high tech, Dr. Michael Sanders draws on a vast array of experience to serve as a co founder and business advisor for beehive Fund, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting industry. He is also the co author of the book quantum lean. So welcome to the show, both of you. Thank you.

 

Dr. Michael Sanders  01:45

Thank you. 

 

Sean Fields  01:45

Thank you much.

 

Patrick Adams  01:47

Now, I’m looking forward to having this discussion. Obviously, the two of you have a vast background of lots of different experiences. So I’m looking forward to diving into that, and just having some open discussion, especially about the term quantum lean. That’s a different term that many of us probably have not heard before. So I guess I’ll start out by just asking the question, why quantum lean? And what exactly is quantum leap?

 

Sean Fields  02:16

Well, I’ll say, Okay, I’ll start but why quantum lean? One things that happens is when you know, in our experience, you know, one of the environments that we were commonly in, are working with job shops, or, you know, businesses that only make maybe 30 of something or even fewer, you know, custom environments. And one things that we found is, you know, both Michael and I had learned the whole lean, you know, framework and the conventional Lean approach to actually making operations more streamlined and efficient. But what we ran across, especially in the job shop environments is that Lean is formulated and explained, from a viewpoint of mass production, the vast majority of the time, and people at these businesses have difficulty making that translation into their specific environment. And like, for example, if you get into a job shop, there’s, they, they have the common threads with mass production. But some of the things that are bigger issues there, really get glossed over in conventional lean, like, for example, Value Stream Mapping, the things that are important to hit in a job shop get missed in a Value Stream Map there, they don’t have symbols to address it. And so what we found is that we needed to take an approach that honored the idea of lean, but enable people in different environments to apply these ideas in a simple and straightforward way that they could relate to. And so that’s what led to quantum lean, the fundamental the thing that it’s aiming for is the same as a conventional lean idea. But the manner in which you get there is, is very different. And we argue it’s a much simpler, a much more relatable way to get that done.

 

Patrick Adams  04:03

Okay, makes sense. And, and I want to just back up a little bit, because we will dive into the steps, the key steps in quantum lean, but I want to back up just a little bit here. Michael, can you maybe just fill our audience in a little bit on how you and Shawn met and maybe even you know how this discussion of quantum lean even started and you know, where how you guys got to where you are today with this?

 

Dr. Michael Sanders  04:28

Oh, certainly. First of all, thank you for having us in your program. And it’s easy way of putting this how we got together is probably reference to my background a little bit. I started my career when I was very young in welding, and then of course, fabrication and then consumer products and then went into automotive food and oil and gas and so on. But my schooling I started first with biochemistry degree and then at The end of my undergrad with my capstone project, I came up with a compound which led me create a company and through that I produce, I produce products that were low fat, low calorie, and so on. Then six and a half, seven years into it, I sold my interests and went back to get my masters and PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering, because through working in variety of different organizations and my own businesses, I realized that I really don’t know much about processes. And I really, really need to sharpen my knowledge of processes and, and understanding of how the organizational system and the processes work. I met first time, Shawn in 1996. And he was in a program of helping manufacturers improve their production systems efficiently and effectively. Also, he was very much helping them with standards and so on. And I was into improving from quality and manufacturing side as well. So we met at first time, and we worked together for several years after that we departed, I went to Michigan, and became a professor and faculty in a university in Kettering University. Actually, that’s you know, GMI. Then after that, I came back to Texas, once we found out that our system works very well, we joined back together to completely roll it out. In Michigan, I personally tested the quantum Lean approach, which has two very critical pillars. One is we are product centric, we emphasize on that all the time, product centricity is our approach. And secondly, simplicity leading to high quality and time reduction is our second pillar. Why independently and Shawn independently practice these approaches in different industries. And we concluded that it works very well. Then we got together in 2006, around May, and we launched the practice together with different industries. That’s really when we clicked but early on our practices in 90s, and early 2000s, I would say 2002, half of 2001, we were heavily involved with conventional lean practice. But on the side, we were testing our theory and trying to gauge and see why conventional Lean approach is not working in custom shops or facilities that don’t produce so many of the same things. Once we independently vetted our approach to make sure that it works well in every environment, then we got together and we started launching the whole thing together as a team. And ever since this has been very successful majority of the companies we work with actually better than 60% of them are the companies have taken initiatives with conventional lean, and can’t really go for and then they find out about our system, they come to us and we go there, we kind of tweak it and bring their attention to product centricity and what they were missing. And it makes it much easier for them transition and launch their Lean journey. That’s when we started working very closely.

 

Patrick Adams  08:11

Very nice. So what would you say would be the key steps? So if we were to, you know, kind of lay out quantum lean? And for maybe someone who’s listening who works in a job shop, and they’re looking to deploy this into their organization? What would be the first steps? What would be how would you coach them through that. And, Shawn, I don’t know, if you want to speak to this one. Yeah.

 

08:37

Now, that’s great. But the thing that we tell them really this is every time is pick a product, a very specific product. And what you go for is one that’s a bread and butter for your plant, especially if you’ve never done lean before pick one that you know really helps pay the bills, and one that you work on quite a bit of the time. And get very specific, if you have to get down to a serial number, you get specific and there’s a reason we say that. And the reason we say that is that the thing we’re going to ask you to do is follow the path of the product through a facility and document the time it spends in the facility. And you do it from the viewpoint of that product and only the product. You know, one of the things that people get confused about a lot of times is when you’re tracking time, they’ll start trying to track time from the viewpoint of a person. Or maybe it’s from the viewpoint of a customer or maybe it’s from the view of a receipt of a resource or a product. We say track it from the product you’re following and that’s it. It gives you consistent means of judging what’s going on, you just pretend like you grow the product and what is happening to you. And we say you track the time in one of three ways. We you call it either a delay or nobody no person or machine is touching you. There is a non conversion that we just categorized into four things. And I’ll be simple about not not elaborate on that. And then we talk about conversion, which is anything else. And that’s for simplicity, because we have, or very specific ways of looking at non conversion, and then anything else can be conversion. And the reason we do that is, and I’m sure you’ve seen this, Patrick, but you go to companies, and if you’re in that whole environment of value added non value added, you can get a reasonable number of debates, where people are going, Oh, well, this is value added, oh, no, it’s not, that’s it’s non value added. And, you know, we really don’t care. All it is, is a means to an end. And so we’ll just shortcut that and just go to conversion, non conversion. So you classify the times according to those three categories. And then there’s a set of guidelines where you’ll first attack whatever category occupies the plurality of time, most of the time, that’ll be delay, sometimes it’s actually conversion. So whatever is occupying the plurality of time start attacking that, and the reasons that you have the different pockets of time and the experience of that product. And what we found is that people have a lot easier time relating to it, you’re only dealing with three, three categories. And you’re just following the product. And you can keep things very consistent and very understood by everybody, and you have people harmonized. So that’s, I hope I explained that well, but that’s, that’s the in a nutshell, what the process is. Sure.

 

Patrick Adams  11:23

And would you say, when you say, you follow it, follow it through this is we’re talking about like a custom product or a, you know, something that isn’t made, you’re not making, you know, 20 of these widgets an hour or whatever it is, this is a one time thing. So where do the when you when you follow that through, and I like to say staple yourself to a component of the product, you know, follow it all the way through the system to the end, right? So when you do that, the the output of that, how do those the learnings from that particular product? How does that how do you use those to replicate that into into other custom products, if they’re going to be a little bit different? Based on the you know, how you follow those through that the, you know, the the lifecycle.

 

12:12

Let me see if I can take a shot at this. So well, when we talk about products, it is inclusive of all types of products, yes, we focus on custom shops and shops that don’t produce as many of the same thing. Because our approach works they’re very, very well doesn’t mean it doesn’t work in other shops, it works in every type of manufacturing, or even industry. So when we talk about product, product changes form, shape fit in every stage of its life, before it gets out of the manufacturing, or all of the company that offers it to a customer. Obviously, product itself has a lifecycle we’re not talking about that we’re talking about initial portion of its lifecycle when it gets out of the organization that offers the customer. During that time that the product is in that organization, it changes form, fit, shape, and so on. So it starts with a simple, if you will, pure number, that’s a product to us, because that pure number is a result of a work of certain resources that spent time until they achieved a point in which they got a Pio number from a customer and that Pio number in a manufacturing setting, let’s say triggers all the other operations. So when we look at that, and we say okay, from the moment that this order is introduced a facility to produce and complete that order and fulfill it until it becomes a complete product, and goes out to the customer. During that time, what is the experience of that particular product? What’s that encounter in every step of that particular line of tie? That’s going to be categorized and say, Okay, it’s experiences delays, conversions and conversions. By definition, it’s so simple. Everyone in the facility understands no matter what the rank is, whether they are operators or CEOs or managers, they all come to the same simple conclusion that yes, the product goes through these experiences and accumulate time until it is fulfilled completely and leaves the facility to the hands of customers. Now, if we understand that, then we don’t have to worry about being obsessed with resources. As you know, a lot of organizations are resource obsessed, the utilization of the resources, the space allotted for resources or the cost of the resources or even goes to human resources to try to make sense out of their man hours, overtime, and so on and so forth. And we get involved in so many variety of different measurements and metrics, and then we try to identify where are the wastes? A mirror are the areas that we can improve. And we get obsessed with these resources. And often doing that makes us ignore what happens to the product. In our view, from quantum lean standpoint, product is the only entity in every organization of any type service, or manufacturing, that has no voice literally in the organization yet makes all the success and failure basically, without product normalization would exist. So sure dot product, nobody will have job with our product, there wouldn’t be any necessity to buy any equipment or to design anything. So you have a result of all these activities and into product that we offer to the customer. So when we look at this, and we say product is the king of everything we have to understand its path, then we can effectively help it get out of the organization as fast as possible. And the faster it gets out, the more advantage to the organization in both ways internally and externally. Internally, it says critical amount of time and money, externally, it becomes the last man standing at the best offering with respect to the competitors. So you have a great opportunity to focus on one entity as opposed to variety of resources, get entangled with them and put a lot of additional resources to make sense out of those resources, and how you utilize it, or you control them, we don’t even worry about it. Because we believe every minute of the product that’s being fulfilled in its fulfillment process is the most critical measurement of that organization’s health. And that becomes very easy because everyone relate to it, everyone from every activity or tasks that they take on, they contribute to that particular time of the product, that contribution is broken down to three elements as experience of the product, delay conversion, and non conversion means once we do this, then it’s much easier to control.

 

Patrick Adams  17:07

Okay, that that makes sense.

 

17:11

And something, something I would add as well, like you have asked about how you pick one product and a customer environment, how does that benefit the others thing you’ll find and is that if you benefit one product, it, it tends to benefit all the products, like for example, you’re going through and you find the majority of the of the time for the product in the shop is due to terrible scheduling, they have terrible scheduling practices, which blows up the whip. If you implement a good scheduling system, like let’s say drum buffer rope, for instance, and it shrinks that whip it’s going to benefit every product that goes through that shop. Or if you discover all most of it the time is people looking for tools, you implement something like buy this, that’s going to benefit every product that goes through. And we have found that time. And again, when you even when you’re employed, let’s say most of the time is conversion. If you start improving conversion steps, a lot of the steps you take to improve those conversion steps on a product will will benefit other products as well, when you’re relying out the workstation, retraining people, things like that. So really, by attacking one very specific thing, you can actually benefit everything. I mean, that’s a very frequent. And the reason we go for that really specific thing is because it’s one way of streamlining and simplifying, because if you start asking people about every product that goes through, the first answer you’re gonna get is it depends. You know, and because people start thinking about every conceivable, you know, possibility, but if you zero in on one product, one order one serial number, even, it has a way of focusing people and you just follow that thing through, it’s experienced.

 

Patrick Adams  18:57

And you hit on this briefly earlier, Shawn, you choose a product, what? Out of all the products that that these different facilities are working on at any given time? How do they narrow that down into one particular product?

 

19:13

Yeah, well, ideally, you go for a bread and butter. That’s, that’s ideal. The second thing and we didn’t talk about earlier and we should have is that you also try to pick a product that’s in the middle of difficulty. Like you’ve got all kinds of jobs that go through all kinds of products go through some are the job from hill where everything went wrong possible. Some are gravy jobs, you wonder how on earth did I get paid to do that? A bit to what we go for something in the middle of difficulty because that’s where you’re going to get the biggest impact quickest, and you’re going to actually be able to make to influence things in a positive way. Because if you picked a job that was expedited through a shop, you’re not going to make any discovery because you know, basically the waters were parted for that product. It sailed through. Whereas if you pick something that’s kind of in the middle of a kind of a typical, not not unbelievably difficult, not unbelievably easy, that’s where you can really make good influence on improvement.

 

Patrick Adams  20:14

Yeah, makes sense. So you talked about value stream mapping earlier and probably for some that are listening in there thinking, you know, this is seems very similar to value stream mapping. Can you just talk a little bit about what sets quantum lien apart from maybe some other approaches like value stream mapping, for example?

 

21:33

Well, I’ll give it to Michael in one second. But quantum, the quantum Lean approach is three symbols. That’s it, you’re just diagramming is the product and the delay mode, non conversion or conversion mode. And that’s all you’re doing. Value stream mapping has 26 symbols typically from what I’ve seen, sometimes even more. Now, that right there, you’ve got a simplicity. The other thing is that in a Value Stream Map, your frame of reference changes. Sometimes it’s a view from a resource, sometimes it’s a view from, you know, from a product or customer, it just takes on all kinds of viewpoints. That’s a thing that muddies the water. And the other thing that we have found is that it ends to people often don’t know what to do, once they get a VSM, it’s, that’ll pretty much be a confirmation bias, where they just decide that the value stream map is telling them to take certain actions based on the own biases they have. Whereas with quantum lien, you have a you have a consistent systematic approach to generating priorities. And it’s up to you whether you follow them, but it generates priorities in a consistent and objective way. And so I’ll ask Michael, to keep to fill in on that.

 

22:54

Yes, yes, exactly. We want to make sure that all the biases are aside, sometimes improvements are prioritized based on management’s desire or a focus on certain areas. Therefore, Value Stream maps can be directed towards achieving those kinds of desires, whether it’s cost reduction in certain area or trying to buy equipment, which is capex and so on, we try to avoid those because that creates an some kind of environment where you’re not really seeing clearly where the priorities should be. And the idea of trying to focus on improvement priorities with respect to machine utilization or acumen priority or human resource cost reduction, and so on, really, clouds, the entire improvement process itself, we believe improvement in every organization happens when truly the product timing system of that particular organization is reduced. So if from order to ship of the product is X hours, let’s say if you reduce that by 1%, we believe we have done improvement. But oftentimes we end up argue and we’re going to reduce man hours, we’re going to reduce utilization of the machine for quantities produced and so on and so forth. And we don’t really pay attention how long it takes for the product to go through. And that’s not true improvement in our opinion. So it’s important to really put into perspective of what you’re looking for, like Shawn explained, these 26 symbols which were initially introduced for value stream maps can be used in many different forms of shape or for many different purposes. In our approach, it is three simple symbols. Now we believe continuous improvement is what Lean believers lean practitioners preach for. We want to create a system where continually you improve your organization, if continuous improvement is truly their desire, it must apply on everything, including the practice that you take. If you’re practicing lean, why don’t you look into proving that practice itself. So if you improve that, you’re going to realize many of the symbols that you use and confuse the heck out of the operators and five rank and file really are not necessarily you need to improve that practice as well. And that was the initial focus that we had, when we saw these practices don’t work in environments where operators can truly understand you expect an operator, let’s say a welder to expect a welder to remember all these symbols and what to do what not to do just is not their cup of tea, then you realize you need to improve the approach you have. And that was the initiation of our discovery of quantum lane. So we literally improved the Lean approach. That’s what we did. Yeah,

 

25:57

yeah. And I would add, the other thing is that then we call it product path diagramming in quantum lean, but it applies to any environment, because the thing we’ve seen is with VSM, or via value stream mapping, is they’ll change it up for office, they’ll change it for product development, or for production. And the product path diagram, the three simple approach applies in any environment. And so it has the versatility where you don’t have to modify it, the fundamental principles remain. And really, it goes after the same thing lean does, it just does it in a simpler way. And the other thing I would add is that you can even apply the three simple approach to work methods improvement and and setup reduction. It basically follows the Smith process is like, like, if you follow the three simple approach to a setup, you’re you’re following the Smith that the single minute exchange of dye process, without actually consciously following the single minute exchange of dye process, it works the same, it ends up working the same way. It just, it’s been a little bit, it looks a little different. But it ends at the same point. The versatility is something we found was nice. Yep.

 

Patrick Adams  27:08

Absolutely. And I love

 

27:12

it, Patrick, if I may add in a nutshell, our approach is much faster, simpler, consistent. It’s sustained by the employees themselves. And it costs substantially, I mean, a fraction of the cost of regular or conventional Lean approach to any improvement. That’s where our organization of nonprofit comes in. So we are definitely the number one in creating results, faster fraction of the cost, and ensuring that stays consistent and sustains many of the improvement projects that are done by conventional lean after the practitioners leave. They have very little life hours last period.

 

Patrick Adams  28:05

A question that came to mind while you were explaining, obviously, like I said, I love the simplicity of of what you guys are doing. So will in a traditional Value Stream Map, you’re mapping both the material flow as well as the information flow. I’m just trying to to envision what you know, a visual map might look like that you would create or are you creating a visual map? So two questions do are you looking at material and information flow or only the product flow? That would be the first question. And the second question is, can you give us a vision of what this might look like? Is there something visual up on the wall? Is it done in the computer? What were you know, what does it look like?

 

28:53

Yeah, that’s well, it’s both it can be on a computer or on a wall. And I’ll try to explain it, it will sound a certain way, but I’m going somewhere with it. But it’s really showing what are the states of the product as it’s going through the shop. And so we have those three symbols three, three state, which are and I’ll try to describe it, but the conversion is a just a square. And if color is allowed for it’s a green square. And then the non conversion is a yellow square with dashed lines. And the delay is just the big D, like your industrial engineering symbol for delay, and we have a red color for that. I’ll give a little digression. There was a person participating in one of our sessions many years ago, and the guy said, hey, what if we all started doing that with red, yellow green, and we went Oh, wow, that’s a great idea. So from that point, we did red yellow green, because to me, it gives it really helps the thing pop and you can really see the visuality of anything, but it just shows all those states and that’s all we that’s all we document we don’t document literal information flow. And in a way it documents material flow. But it’s just saying, Where does this product stand. And what we found is that when you generate priority, if information becomes an issue, you start going back from that priority and tracing back and solving that particular problem. But you, you can keep yourself focused on what is going to get you the most impact quickest, you know, then you go for that. So that’s, that’s how I then Michael, do you have anything to add to the description I gave her?

 

30:31

Yes, Patrick. Metrics? If it is okay, May I share a picture video?

 

Patrick Adams  30:37

Absolutely. If you want to share a picture, the video is is being shown, we also will have some that are listening in and will not see the video. So if you want to show a picture, and then if you could just explain maybe the picture itself, that would be great.

 

30:54

Okay, here it is. Here’s what Shawn is talking about our flowchart and his product path diagram. And it uses three symbols conversion and conversion and delayed delays demonstrated by a big D like industrial engineering symbol, then we have non conversion and conversion in yellow and green. So this is what what he’s talking about. Now, if you look into this and try to make a flow of the product path, I can offer you a second slide, which shows you how this is done. Let me go ahead and share with you another slide, please stop this and go to the next one.

 

31:40

a picture’s worth a picture’s worth 1000 words right now,

 

Patrick Adams  31:44

you’re pulling that up, Michael, for those of you that are listening in, go to you go to our YouTube channel or our website. Also, I believe, Spotify shows video. So if you want to see the video with some pictures that Michael is sharing, feel free to to go check it out in any of those channels. All right. Go ahead, Michael.

 

32:05

So are you sure here is a product path diagram for a simple process or simple product being produced as you see only three symbols used in every step, until product is finished. So very, very simple, very, very visual. And you have the time element in their time per finished unit, as you see. And the information is within each box, whether it’s been converted, non converted, or delayed. So this is a simple way of demonstrating what we are talking

 

32:41

about. Very nice. And I think, John, and I think you suspected this, but there’s a famous there a certain simulation done for Link courses, where people build Lego airplanes. That’s what that that’s what that diagram is about is you’re diagramming the actual assembly of the Lego airplanes. So that’s very cool.

 

Patrick Adams  33:02

So when a team develops this, this product flow map, what do are they also creating a future state? Or what’s the how do you get from current state snapshot to an action item list of you know, how are we going to reduce or eliminate those delays that we identified?

 

33:24

Well, like I’ll take an example. The the example I will show is if we’re doing that Lego airplane simulation, there’s a certain path that takes where you make improvements in the operation. What the way you generate the future state is you go through and you say where does most of the time of the product reside? For starters, in in almost any plant, it’s going to reside in a delay mode, like the product is being delayed for reasons of excess work in process build up. It’ll it’ll also be delayed due to you know, people waiting on resources, things like that. And what we do is you first say, Okay, since delay is most of that time, let’s look at the delays and drill down on the different delay, delay points for the product. And we we categorize like, is it mostly coming from if it’s mostly due to whip or work in process, it’s going to probably be due to a scheduling issue like your scheduling technique, if it’s due to waiting on a resource, like an operator looking for tools, and we see that that’s where most of the time resides. Probably we’ll be looking at a five s. But what we do is we say what are the reasons the different delays are occurring, and then we attack the reasons for that delay. In the example of the Lego airplane simulation. In an ideal world, the first thing that we would attack is the shop for control for that thing, because most of it is just due to a completely wonky way of how you release your material and how you you know how you schedule your If resources, and so once, then our future state would reflect what we think we’re going to do to the delay. If we get the scheduling done. And we would have a, we would have a flowchart with that new situation. Like Michael, if you can find it, can you find the flowchart for phase two of that simulation, because you create this future state. And you can, like you saw that one that was really had a lot of stuff going on, that you’d see a face to, and go there. The crazy thing, Patrick, is that when we teach this kind of lean Basics class, we actually slow down the rate of improvement. Because if we apply quantum lean full throated, the class will be over in about 30 minutes, we stretch it out, we actually take a more conventional approach to improving because if we did quantum lean fully, it just goes a lot faster. But like this is an example of a future state after one round of making lean improvements, you know, this is what we expect to see going forward, if that makes sense. So,

 

36:07

yes, it gets simplified, easier to understand. And you’ll see the product path becomes much easier and less time spent. That’s really the

 

Patrick Adams  36:17

Yeah, sure. Sure. No, that’s great. It makes make sense. I love the visuals. And again, the simplicity is just amazing. Michael, you mentioned the the nonprofit. Can you expand on that a little bit just kind of changing gears here in just a little bit? Just can you talk a little bit about the work that you guys do from a nonprofit perspective?

 

36:45

Sure, we have three different objectives in our nonprofit one of them relates to businesses, mainly small businesses, small organizations, small manufacturers, and so on, we help them improve their operations and preserve, more profits become better, and what they do are more competitive, and therefore opportunity for hiring more people. And that’s one of the remarkable achievements that we have done with many, many small organizations. And when we work with them, normally, we charge a minimal amount of money because we try to offset our costs. By being nonprofit and getting more donations from other companies we have worked with sometimes large companies, we help they donate to us, and we use that money for small companies. Therefore, if it cost of consultancy, let’s say for a company costs $100. With our approach, they can save up to 70 80%. But in the old days, we tried to offer free services. But as you know, when you offer free services, many companies don’t really take it seriously. So it doesn’t go far. But when they have a stake added, even if this $1 is Stakeout, it, suddenly things that start changing. So our board decided to have that. And that’s when we offer our quantum Lean is exclusively offered by our nonprofit. And there are a couple affiliates we have that we also allow them to offer that. But whoever wants to learn this process or approach with quantum lien and offer them, they have to go through our process and get vetted and learn about it. And of course, they get the rights to use all our slides and everything else after they are been approved by us. And that’s that’s really a simple process. But we do help small organizations very effectively and very commonly.

 

Patrick Adams  38:40

Sure. So if someone wanted to go through that process, obviously, anyone can go out and purchase the book. But if they wanted to learn a little bit more about the the process itself and utilize, you know, some of the tools that you guys have, would they go to your website to sign up for that? Or would they send you a message or what’s the next step for someone interested in more information

 

39:03

so they can go? Certainly, thank you for asking that. And they certainly can go to our website, and they can request assistance from us. And our website is www dot beehive fund dot orgy. And you can see our booking there you can see our articles and you can see our offerings. We also have online training sessions and courses we offer. But mainly our practices are, like I said, very quick turn around to organizations, so their investment is minimal, but their gain is substantially higher. In fact, we take pride in and announcing that for every dollar you spend, you’re going to get a minimum of $9 back if not $20 back in it in the first 12 months period. So we really, really are all about implementing actual improvement and And standing behind.

 

Patrick Adams  40:01

Sure. And Shawn, if someone wanted to get the book, is it only available on the website then? Or is it available out on Amazon? Or where would they go to find the

 

40:11

book, it’s available essentially everywhere, Amazon, of course. And that if you want to go to Barnes and Noble books, a million, whatever that and all kinds of other very reputable booksellers, so you can get it virtually any of those spots. And so, and if you and if you, if you somehow did have trouble finding it, just reach out to us. And we’ll point you in a good spot.

 

Patrick Adams  40:34

Perfect. And what we’ll do is we’ll take the link for your nonprofit organization, as well as the link to the book, we’ll put that right in the show notes. So if anyone’s interested to grab a copy of that, or reach out to you guys, for more information, they can definitely do that. And with that, I would I loved what you guys presented, I think, obviously, we only had a short amount of time. So there’s a lot more that could be talked about, I’m sure. As a teaser, because I’d love to have you guys back on to dive into this a little bit further. But is there is there one thing that you would say about quantum leap that you would say, you know, this is one area we could go a little bit deeper in? Or maybe it’s one or two areas that we could go a little bit deeper? And what would that be out of everything, you know, the entire approach? What would be the one or two areas that you think would be worth going a little bit deeper into?

 

41:26

I would offer? I think the product path diagram, I think is very worth going into, especially if you’re saying how would I apply it to setups or working? Like, if I’m improving a literal conversion operation? How would I do that? And also, just how do I, you know, going into it even a little further for how do I, you know, use it to improve my operation? And if we do put it in the book, but there’s always There’s always more you can kind of like in the book you wrote, you could you could have written more, but you had to stop somewhere. So you know, you have you have to stop a little bit. So

 

41:58

yeah, that’s also add to that. I would also add to that, if anybody, any company who is interested in truly improving their operations, saving money that lasts and consistently carrying out their internal improvement initiatives in a sustainable manner, they owe it to themselves to take a shot at this quantum the quantum Lean approach. It is very simple. It’s very doable. It definitely ensures low cost as well as very, very high return.

 

Patrick Adams  42:35

Amazing, I love it. I’m looking forward to learning more about quantum lean. I appreciate the two of you and obviously enjoyed meeting you down in Orlando this last year. As we’ve done, we spoke at the same conference. But looking forward to seeing you both again. And just appreciate your willingness to share. You know, your skill set and the work that you’re doing with quantum lean with the rest of the lean community. So thank you both for for what you do.

 

43:04

But thank you, Patrick, for the opportunity. We really applaud you for your program. You’ve done a fantastic job, you definitely bring great meaning to the community. We are definitely behind you. And we appreciate the time and your wisdom as well.

 

43:19

Thanks. Thanks very much, Patrick. Yeah, you obviously do great work, and we’re, it’s great to be on your program. It’s a It’s definitely an honor. So

 

Patrick Adams  43:27

thanks, John. All right. Take care guys.