I ran into you at a coffee shop

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You were in my dream last night. Yes you, you’re the only one reading this right now. I ran into you at a coffee shop as I was walking around the town of small houses whose only road is a small creek with a few foot bridges to traverse. The humidity had gotten to your hair. There are trees here and there along the walk, they hide what’s around the town as best they can. But it was you who I ran into at the coffee shop. You don’t exist in this world, this dream world that exists solely in my mind and no one else’s.

We talked about something for a while, what it was I will never know, I never pay attention to conversations in my dreams anymore. You were the first to notice the mayhem outside, the first to grab me and pull me towards the door. Everyone was running, we were running, I never run. You reach the convertible first and I yell at you to start the engine. I tripped over the car, it was after all a small car in the town of small houses without a road, and fought to get myself to drive. I drove, fast and reckless for once, not smooth and steady until the road usually gives out under me and I plummet into the next level of a dream.

You disappeared when I reached what the trees that hide whats around the town and I lost the road to the river that’s always spilled its banks as it rolls towards the waterfall that leads into the town around sea world. This car would have survived that waterfall, it was small, lightweight, blue. But I lost it in the woods. The woods couldn’t hold onto me though, even though they sometimes do. I found the middle school.

The middle school’s left wing was open, much like the high school’s and college’s left wings. I blame only myself for creating this part of the world with what I had written when I was younger about the hall to the left, the statues that move, begging for your help.  I suppose I didn’t so much as find the middle school as I found the tree that leads to the basement in the middle schoool. I found its long tunnel that leads to a room with no exit, the one where the piles of garbage overflow from a hole in the ceiling through which I finally escaped. I never made it to the main foyer from the left hall, I ran into some people doing karate. They challenged me, but I ran, I didn’t feel like exerting myself in a dream, idiots.  I opened the door, but I didn’t get to see this through to the end though, because I remembered you. You were in the woods.

Crowd-sourcing Lean Six Sigma learning

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I’m an avid redditor of almost 9 years. I’m also a huge proponent of communities coming together and being able to share stuff.  When I saw that /r/leansixsigma was abandoned, I knew that I had to have it.  Claiming an abandoned subreddit like /r/leansixsigma is easy, because it’s as simple as filling out a three row form and clicking submit. If you’re interested, go and check out /r/redditrequest to see what the exact rules are and if you’re lucky, you too can have your very own subreddit!

Lean Six Sigma is all about the process. The process? Imagine going through a bunch of thought exercises and finding out what needs to be fixed, how to fix it, and how to make sure those fixes stick. The number one goal of this new community will be to create a community that will be about sharing their experience, their data visualizations, and their ideas.

If this sounds like something you’re interested in participating in, I want to have you on our team. I’m going to be recruiting team members using reddit. If you need, make a reddit account and post your interest in this post. You’ll receive modship and a proposed schedule for the Phase 1: Subreddit Start-up so that you can attend our future meetings (mandatory for participation).

Frustration about Lean Six Sigma “Pain Boards”

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“Can you cut the swirl in my hair shorter so that it’s mistake-proof and I don’t have to use extra hairspray?” I asked my barber at the end of my hipster-cut last night. She obliged and took it down another 1/4″ by the looks of it. Still had to use hairspray this morning though, oh well.

She poka-yoke‘d (pokey-yokey) my hair at my request, making it easier to style by making it harder to make mistakes in the morning. Making sure that any solution is fail-safe is a fundamental part of Lean Six Sigma, after all your team’s hard work, you don’t want it be undone because of lack of documentation, a lack of training, or a lack of a simple solution. Something like this shadow board…

A pegboard that has black

Shadow Tool Board

…makes it really easy to know what tools are being used. But not only that, what tools are being used most frequently? The ones that are always missing from the board. When those tools are missing, something has happened that requires tooling, that requires an operator to step away from his/her task (even if it’s only a slight turn to the left).

In Lean Six Sigma, boards are one of the best tools. White boards, tool boards, shadow boards, frustration boards, control chart boards, and on and on. I’m sure one day I’ll run out of room to stick boards everywhere, but before then, I have a new board that’s proving to be rather hard to research, a “Pain Board”.

A Pain or Frustration Board is, from what I understand, a simple white board that is located at a piece of equipment to track what issues the person running that piece of equipment experiences.  Ideally, that same person then puts in a work request to maintenance if the machine needs to be worked on, but starting off simple is another of those lean six sigma principles I often overlook. Why choose the hardest solution when the simplest solution will generate savings while we wait for the harder solution to mature? Quick wins in the battle again machine downtime are a necessity in every manufacturing environment, you either improve or get left behind.

My source of frustration is the lack of documentation on the topic.

I joked yesterday on social media that if you google “machine pain boards”…

If you google machine pain boards, you get a piece of workout equipment that causes pain.

Google “Machine Pain Boards”

…well, you get a result for painful workout equipment.  Thankfully, a lean six sigma friend of mine reminded me that they’re also called “frustration boards”. Don’t bother searching the term, the results don’t get much better.

This indicates a greater problem, not that I may be making up random words and claiming that they’re Lean Six Sigma tools, but that there aren’t enough people talking about putting white boards on pieces of equipment or machinery in their work places.

Quick exercise, drop a comment below if you want to share a picture of what you had, but when I was in college not that long ago, I lived in the student dorms. Everyone stuck a tiny white board on their door and we left each other messages, drawings (pre-dickbutt), or whatever we wanted to.  If you had one or wrote on one, what did you think of it or what was your best work of art?

So my goal of this and the following posts will be to generate pageviews and google page rank for the lean six sigma topic of Frustration Boards, Pain Boards, and their uses.