You Are Doing it Wrong

In this introductory episode Dr. Chris introduces the podcast.  He goes through the twelve steps to successful implementation indicating many Lean implementations are done incorrectly.   The reason being they only focus on pockets of improvement, and not true systematic change.   Dr. Chris introduces himself, the purpose of the podcast, the format moving forward, and the first guest.

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Hello, and welcome to the Dr. Chris Podcast. It's a podcast where we talk with people that we've worked with over the years about the 12-step process and the challenges, successes, and lessons learned. Hope you enjoy it. If you have any comments, please email us podcast at HarrisLeanSystems.com. Good morning, if you're from my generation. If you're from a different generation, uh it could be good evening or good night. Uh, my name is Dr. Chris. Uh Chris Harris and um work for a company called Harris Lean Systems. Been doing a long time. Started in uh 2001, and here we are sitting after the pandemic in 2021. And I had a guy the other day, he he asked me, he said, Why don't you start a podcast? And I thought, well, I don't really want to start a podcast. I don't know why anybody would want to listen to one. And then I got to one about lean and and our theory on why you're doing it wrong. And it made me think about all the different people we've worked with over the years, all the different companies we've dealt with, all the different products we've dealt with, all the different scenarios we've run into when it pertains to scheduling and material flow. And I got to thinking, well, if I could have different people on the podcast with different views, it may be something really worthwhile for people to listen to. So this is the introduction to that podcast. Um, we don't really have a good name for the podcast yet, but the plan is to have somebody on every podcast to talk about a piece of the system that we implement and to give you an insight as to what they ran into, what they learned, what they would do different, why it worked, why it didn't work, and to give you a view of different organizations. I think one of the things that we run into as lean people is we don't come to the realization that the original lean system is from Toyota to make cars. And when I go into a facility, they don't make cars, they make lots of different parts, they make lots of different part numbers, they'll do whatever the customer asks them to do, whether they have to change over eight hours to run five minutes or not. So we're stuck in a lot of factories with a very mass manufacturing mentality from a design perspective, trying to maneuver their way into an arena where the customer is the focus. I taught it in university for three years, and um, while I was doing that, I tell people I work 24-7. I work 24 hours a week, seven months a year. And so I had to come up with something to fill my time, right? So I got into triathlon. So if anybody ever has a question about triathlons or you want to come on and talk about triathlons, um, if we can link it to lean in some way, we'll do that. But it it it was a fun hobby. But I also went around and spoke, and I would give a speech, don't worry, I'm not going to bore you with a lecture here, but I would give a speech on what your supply chains are doing. So I asked people, I said, Do your customers want more options faster or less options slower? Well, obviously, they want the first one, right? They want more options, they want them faster. And I said, Are your supply chains getting smaller and quicker or bigger and slower? And inevitably they would say bigger and slower. Well, those two things don't match. So we have competing philosophies, you could say, in the way that we run our business. And what that leads us to is every facility I go to, well, I shouldn't say every, 95% of every facility that I work with, their biggest problem falls into two categories scheduling and material flow. So if you think about a the best way to explain this is my brother, he is, I'm sure he'll be on this show eventually. I'm gonna push it off as long as I can because if you've ever seen the movie Twins with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito, I would be Danny DeVito in this relationship. So um, I'm sure he'll be on here at some point, but we're gonna push it off as far as we can. He is a U and okay, let me see if I can get this right. An Ivy League Urological Robotics Surgeon. Here we go. Ivy League trained urological robotic surgeon. So some people tell me that he's pretty bright. Now, you know, I'm his big brother, so the verdict's still out for me. But anyway, when I was working 24-7 at the university, I uh had some extra time. And you think about my brother, right? The guy is brilliantly trained, right? He can save your life, which makes for very bad conversations at the end of my day. You know, I call him up and he's like, What'd you do? I'm like, hey man, we you know, we we put in a level schedule, we put in a uh a good material flow route, it runs really good. I'm like, what'd you do? He goes, Well, I saved three people's lives. I mean, how do I compete with that? Really? I mean, I'm a doctor, he didn't even write a dissertation, so I don't I don't know why he gets the title doctor. Sorry, a little pent up uh, a little pent-up feelings there. But he calls me up and you know, he's he's Ivy League trained, right? He's never had a business class, but as soon as he gets out of his residency, he goes to uh a rural area in Kentucky to start a practice. Well, he calls me up, he says, Man, I go in early, I don't get to go to lunch, I don't get to go home until six. It just feels like I'm I'm treading water in a sense. And so, hey, I've got time, I'll come down and help you. So I go down and I realize that man, he's just like a factory. And when I say just like a factory, it is just like I approach a factory, any factory. And it's this I said, when you're in with a patient, I'm not gonna go in there. One, it's probably illegal. Two, you're a urologist, and I really don't want to know anything about that. But it made me think about how we operate in factories. If you think about what you do in a factory, when you're with a patient, or in other words, you're adding value, you got a machine that's stamping out a part, or you got somebody selling a product, you're pretty good at that. Because if you weren't, you wouldn't be in business. That's not what's killing you. So that's not what was killing my brother either. What was killing my brother was everything that happened before the patient got to him, and everything that happened after the patient got to him. So I started looking, I said, man, you are just like a factory. This is all material flow and scheduling. Because we have an overall philosophy at Harris Lean Systems that if I can get you the right material in the right quantity and the right mix, you can make it. That's the whole thought. And you look at when you draw a value stream map and you get to that bottom right-hand box, that's the telltale box, and it says the processing time is three minutes, the lead time is 35 days. Well, the money's not in that three minutes, the money's in that 35 days, but we've been trained for years to look at that three minutes because that's what we know to work on, and material so difficult. So the reason the name of this first episode is you're doing it wrong, is because I hear lots of different people talk about lean in lots of different ways, but I think we missed the point. So when you look at lean as a direct result of the Toyota production system, that's the key. It's the overall production system that is necessary. I've talked with some people and they have corporate edicts to have so many Kaizen events a year. I don't know that that can ever get you to a lean state because if you're not effectively tying those together, then you're just having pockets of change, and what you might be doing is just creating a new bottleneck or creating multiple bottlenecks. We we believe in Kaizen events for two reasons. One is to accomplish or fix a problem that can't be fixed without one, or to teach a concept. But if you're looking to transform your business, it needs to be a systematic approach. What I find us trying to do is we try to go out and hire brilliant people to come in and run broken processes, and then we get frustrated when they get the same results. So as we go forward and we implement systems, I believe we should be focused on the systems that provide the tools necessary for people to do their job. I believe I can change one person, me. Now, my wife, she can change two people, but I can change one person, right? But if I develop a system that is safe and efficient, all the tools are there, I believe people will respond. So I really put the onus on us as lean thinkers and lean designers and lean engineers to develop a robust system that can be run and improved by normal people. So our first step in that is to draw the value stream. All right, so we draw the value stream, and as we draw the value stream, there's going to be one process in there that we're going to use to react to customer demand, and that's called the pacemaker. So the pacemaker is the last step in the process where I can schedule and flow from that point forward. That's what we want to be, and we want to build that around. We want to build everything around that pacemaker. So if you think about a traditional production system, so let's say we have stamping, assembly, I mean stamping, paint, and assembly. Well, that stamping machine is the most expensive piece of equipment that I have. So as a business guy, I want that stamping machine to run, run, run, and never change over. So you do that. Well, now paint, which follows stamping, paint only has the choice to paint whatever stamping puts out. So now I'm pushed into a batch production. Well, now assembly only can assemble what excuse me paint has put out. Well, there's this guy standing at the end of the line called the customer that nobody cares about. And really, after World War II, that was a perfectly good model, right? Because people would buy, it was a very sales-based economy, right? People would buy whatever was on the shelf. But at some point, people started to go to the customer and ask them what they wanted. And that's when things started to change. So now you look at it. If I say what does the customer want, and I go back to assembly and I design assembly to provide exactly what the customer wants, now I've got a great place to build my system. Because now I go back to paint and I design paint for what assembly wants, and I design stamping for what paint wants, and now my whole system is built around the customer. So choosing that pacemaker is key because that's where all lean implementation needs to begin. So once we choose that, we're gonna go there to work. And that leads us to the next step. So if you if if you are following kind of what my thought process here, I need the value stream, right? My model value stream, that's the first one I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go to the pacemaker now. I'm gonna fix that. But I don't care what you make. I mean, I'll be polite and ask you what you make, but I really don't care because that's not where the money is. The money is moving material and schedule. But I do need to know what production is capable of. So step number three is to create an operator balance chart. Not necessarily so I know what how you do it, but I need to know what you're capable of. So that operator balance chart, which will lead me to step number four, which is standardized work, will give me a run plan. So I would wager right now, if you're listening to this podcast, if I went to your facility and I went up to the production supervisor and said, show me your standard work, show me your one up and your one-down plan, that they probably couldn't do that. I um have a really soft spot for production supervisors. Uh, my first job out of college, I my undergraduate degree was in history and political science or baseball, depending upon how you look at it. I really wasn't much of a student until I got out. And then um I went and I was a production supervisor in a UAW facility, uh uh Tier 1 automotive. And um, it was a tough environment, right? Just the the training was difficult. They walked me out and said, You see this yellow line? I said, Yes, sir. Walks me 250 yards, says, You see this yellow line? I said, Yes, sir. It passed me on the back, says, Good luck, son. I was trained. That was tough. But as I I kept looking at, I think back, the production supervisor is in almost an impossible job, right? The uh the scheduling people send him an order to make a hundred hamburgers, and the materials guys bring him a bunch of hot dog buttons. This is where we come up with ham dogs, because I measure that production supervisor on how many he produces, not whether he makes the right thing or not. So we've got this disjointed process, and I I feel that we ask our supervisor to just survive. So when I got into triathlons, why my kids are so tired of this story, but I like it enough. Since I can't see you, I don't know if you're gonna like it or not, but I'm gonna tell it anyway. So I I'd been a runner and I was learning to swim. So I would go to the university and I would swim, and and I'm swimming every day. I'm swimming about 1500 meters in the pool. Well, in the pool, there's this nice clear water and a black line that you follow down the down the lane. And I was in Indianapolis and uh they had these sprint triathlons, which are just awesome at Eagle Creek, and it's like a 500-meter swim, a 10-mile bike and a three-mile run, something like that. And I tell my wife, I said, I'm gonna go out there, yeah, I'll probably swim it in about 12 minutes and uh ride my bike, I'll be home at 11:30, something like that. And so I get there, and what they do is they're letting everybody off every two seconds. And so I'm in line as I get closer and closer to the water, I get more scared and more scared, or scarder and scarder, if that's a word. So I get up there and the guy says go. And I forget everything I learned in the pool. I kind of just jump in with all fours sprawled out like a spider monkey, man. It's just awful. And then I'm swimming, and all I can think about is the Titanic, because I see arms and legs and everything kicking and moving. And 50 meters in, I realize I'm treading water, and there's a 16-year-old girl on a surfboard asking me if I'm okay. She's the lifeguard. So I'm treading water, and I don't know if I'm okay, don't go anywhere. So then I completely black out. And the next thing I remember, I'm on the side of the course by about a 16-year-old guy on a surfboard. And he says, Do you need to hold on? And I said, Well, I'd be disqualified because I've told everybody at the university that I'm doing this, I can't get disqualified in the first 50 meters. He says, You can hang on to my surfboard for 20 seconds. So I hang on to his surfboard for 19 seconds, and then I swim to the next surfboard. And I go from surfboard to surfboard, I get out of the water, I think it's 26 minutes. I take two steps running to my bike, and I feel the water that I swallowed from this lake go up into my chest and back down. So I walk to my bike. When I was in that water, all I was thinking about was surviving. I was not thinking about getting better or swimming faster. And this is what I find that we place our production supervisors in if we don't give them good standards, good standardized work and good standard plans to react to changes in demand. So as we go through these first four steps, choose a model value stream, select a pacemaker, create an operator balance chart, and then create standardized work. All I'm looking for is to tell me what you're capable of because I need to know what you're capable of so I can deliver material and schedule you. I don't really care how you put it together because you know how to do that. That money's not there. The money's not in taking that three minutes of processing time to two minutes and 40 seconds. The money is taking that 33, 35-day production lead time and getting it to 10. That's where the real money is. But you have to have a systematic approach to do that. So once I get those first four steps, and and what we usually do is break you into three teams. So that would be my production team. Then I get into the material flow team, right? Where I'm looking at how am I going to get the material there? So I also have a PFEP scheduling team. So step number five is create the PFEP, which is going to the PFEP is plan for every part. It is the kind of the DNA of your plant, and we're going to use that information to build a system. So if you think about how you currently deliver material, I think I need to be totally transparent here. I have a complete disdain for forklifts. We ask forklifts to do things they were not originally designed to do. It is not designed to deliver parts to an individual. And then if your forklift is 100% efficient, that means it's 50% efficient, right? It goes out full, it comes back empty. It can only deliver one part number. It can deliver a lot of one part number, but it's never going to get that part number to the fingertips. And then you look at the safety aspect, the forklift's probably the most inefficient piece of equipment that you have. So I am not a fan of forklifts, especially one of the rules that we set up is we do not want you to have a forklift on the production floor. You can have it receiving, you can have it in shipping, but not on the production floor. What I want to do is I want to set up a material flow route that's like a bus route. If you look at the relationship between production and materials, that relationship is not necessarily a pleasant one. In all the years that I've done this, I've never seen a uh production person pick up a phone and call materials and say, I just wanted to let you know you're doing a great job today. Right? They only call the production people only call the materials guys when there is a problem. But one of the reasons for that is there's never been a systematic way to deliver material, right? We've always been very reactive in how we deliver material. I'll bring it to you when you're about out or when you're out, and so then we also have a disjoint disjointing disjointive process between scheduling and materials. So I'll give you a schedule, which is totally irrelevant to whether I have the materials or not, which makes no sense, right? You would never say, Hey, I'm scheduling a barbecue for tomorrow, but we have no meat. Why would you do that? But we do that in many. Manufacturing all the time because we really don't schedule, right? We just take due dates and send them to the floor, and then our production supervisors trying to figure out the best way to make it, and then they go and they look at materials and figure out what materials they have to make, and they do the best they can. Well, now we're we're in my first triathlon, we're just trying to survive, we're not getting any better. So I want to put in a route that's just like a bus. So the first step is the PFEP, which gives me the information. The second step is a purchase parts supermarket where I put these parts in one place, like a bus station. Now I can control my inventory. One of the things that I'm looking at is it is to really reduce inventory because it just covers up all my problems. The lower my inventory, the better I'm gonna run. Now, you'll never hear me say get rid of all your inventory because sometimes it's very necessary. Right? If I'm looking at two machines and I can't get them to run 100% uptime, if I couple those machines together without any inventory in between them, now I'm just multiplying my downtime. And I don't want to do that. So there's there's certain times where even though it's still waste, I'll still put an inventory. And this is one of those times because I'm buying these parts from a supplier, and they're not gonna be able to ship me exactly what I need when I need it, right? There's gonna be some part, for example, if I get one shipment a week, there's five days worth of material on that truck. I've got to have space for that, but I don't want to carry 50 days of material. So what the supermarket does, it allows me to have a maximum inventory level so I can control it, and then it's always stored in the same place. Now that leads us to another discussion, which is you've got different parts in your facility, right? You have some parts that you run all the time and some parts you run very rarely, and then you have a big group in between. So we have what we call runners, repeaters, and strangers. We're going to build the system for runners because those are the ones that are run all the time. The definition of a runner is my value stream is wet with inventory. The definition of a stranger is my value stream is dry. So you're only going to make a stranger when you get an order. Well, that leads us to the other question that we like to ask is okay, what percent on time do you want to be? And everybody wants to say 100%, but that's not true because that last 2% is so expensive. To run that last 2%, you have to carry every possible scenario in your in in inventory. That gets really expensive to service that last 2%. So we want to have a plan of how we control that inventory. Then the next step is so we've got our plan for every part, our supermarkets. Now we have to put in the pool what is the informational system to make sure that those parts are continually moving. I think the best illustration of this is if you buy parts from overseas, all right, and your lead time is 50 days, but you're getting a shipment every week. That means your pipeline's full, right? It just keeps coming. Same type of thought process. I want to make sure my pipeline is sized correctly to continually provide routes on a cadence, which leads us to our next step, which is to create the route. So the route right now, most people move their material like a taxi. They take it to a specific place, they drop it off, and then they go around looking for something else to do, looking for a fare. I made a guy really mad one time. I didn't mean to do this, but I didn't look at my ticket. I was coming back from overseas and I was in New York, I think it was Newark, and I went to the wrong terminal. And you know, those aren't Kentucky airports, they're they're big airports, right? And so I had to get a taxi over the next terminal. There's this young guy, and I said, Hey man, I need to go over there. And he went and asked this guy, said, Do I really have to take that guy over there? Because he didn't want to take me, right? He'd wait in line all that time, and now he's gonna get a real little fare, and now he's gonna come back and get in line. And that's kind of what our forklifts are like, right? They only take out stuff when we need it, they take it out, they're really inefficient. Um, if I ever walk the plant with you, I'll point out your forklifts because they are just most of them are empty. Sometimes they don't have people on them, they're just not an effective way to move material. So the route that we want to put in is a route like a bus where I'm coming by you every cadence. I coach people to try to do a one-hour route. And the reason for that is I can carry two hours at the line. And if I deliver every hour, that gives me an hour buffer. So that's not a lot. If I start to go two hours, now I gotta think about how much inventory I'm gonna carry out there. And if I go 15 minutes, that means I'm driving really fast. Now that's not to say either one of those are incorrect. I just usually start at one hour because the cadence is the key that I'm going to come by every X. Now I can start creating trust between the production and the materials organization. And that leads us to the next one. Once we get that infrastructure of material flow in place, now I go back upstream to my work and process steps. So step nine is to go back upstream in your work and process and optimize those machines to where they can schedule themselves for all their runners, and then I'll place the strangers in. And then after I do that, I start to write standardized work for everything, the route, the production pull boards, right? And then I go to step 10, which I mean step 11, which is to create a level schedule, and that's a big one. We most facilities I go don't schedule, they drop orders, and there's a big difference. So when I worked at Toyota, just a lot of brilliance in what those guys did. When I worked there, we made a car and a van. Um, this was I'm not going to tell you how many years ago it was, but it was a lot. And the way that they would schedule, as I look back, is just really smart, right? If you think about a car, you can get a top-level car, let's say that's an XLE, an L E as a middle, and a C E as a bottom. Well, the XLE's got more options, right? Which makes it more difficult to build. And then the van, I think, was harder than the car. So as you schedule that, you build a really hard van followed by a real easy car, followed by a medium van, followed by a medium car, followed by an easy van, followed by a hard car. That way you're scheduling this thing to be produced in an efficient manner. And we as organizations do not traditionally do that. We drop orders. Now, the guy running the machine, he might try to do that. He might try to set those up. But generally, we don't have a system that does that. And then finally, step 12 is how do I go to living on singles and doubles? We, as uh, for those of you international folks out there uh that aren't baseball fans, I have to confess I am a baseball fan. I am particularly a small town baseball fan, so I use analogies from baseball. And us as lean people, we are so used to living on triples and home runs that it becomes very difficult for us to go to living on singles and doubles. So, how do we do that? And the glass wall process is a process that we try to implement to be able to do that. And we try to implement the lean implementation with the daily running of the facility. Because if you don't link the two together, the daily running of the facility will steal your time every day. It's gonna take priority. So I have to I tell this story you walk into a plant, you take two steps today. You're like, today I'm gonna implement lean. You take your third step, first fire hits. You leave for the day, say tomorrow I implement lean because the business will rob you of your time. So we have to find a way to link those two, and we use the glass wall process to do that, to link both a daily running meeting, a lean implementation meeting, and now I've got everybody there, all levels of management. And the one significant action that we have found to really drive singles and doubles is audits. So you audit for two reasons verify the process and get improvement ideas. But if you're if your audits are not layered, meaning that you're not auditing the auditor, you're gonna fail. So what I like to do is have the team leader audit every job in their team every day. The supervisor gets with the team leader and they audit one together every day. The area manager gets with the supervisor, who gets with the team leader, they do one per week. And then once per month, the top individual on site gets with the area manager who gets with the supervisor, who gets with the team leader, and they audit once a month. So now I've got all levels of management there once a month to verify the process and implement any improvement ideas that come about. So that's where we can live on singles and doubles. I apologize for the long diatribe there on the 12 steps, but to intro into this podcast, what will happen is I will have various people that I've worked with over the years come in and we'll pick one of these steps that they've dealt with and they learned and how it equates to the overall system as well. So I just wanted to give you an overview of what that system is and the approach that we're going to take in this podcast. This is a proven method that we've used for many years. And I just think that people are doing it wrong when they're not taking a systematic approach. If we're not looking at how we schedule and how we move material, we're just leaving so much opportunity on the table. And one thing that we know is that our economy is driving us to be more customer focused. So we have to be more flexible. Well, how do you be more flexible? It's got to be in the material. So when somebody tells me they have a high mix, low volume, or high mix, low volume, or high mix, low volume, the volume never concerns me. I always listen to the mix. Because if you have high mix, that means you have to be really, really good at material flow. Because my overall assumption is if I can get you the right material at the right time, you can make it. So I would presume that this is the most boring podcast that we will have because I didn't have anybody on here to talk to. I plan to have somebody on every time. Um, I'll just keep asking people until somebody says yes. But I think my my next one, I've already approached a good friend of mine I've worked with for a few years. His name's Greg Good. And um, he's got some funny stories of how we implemented and what we went through. And uh it'll be really good to talk with him. We consider ourselves a material flow organization, that's what we do. We really look at the material flow because my assumption is if I get you the right material at the right time, you can make it. So, as we um we kind of wrap things up here, I want to uh thank you for listening. Um, I don't know who you are, but um you can send an email to our website at harrisleansystems.com, and I'll get that email if you want us to talk about something or you've got questions for us to answer. Uh, my plan right now is to try to do this once a month. Um, people call me uh Chris or Dr. Chris, but so when I was at the university, I was called Dr. Harris, but my dad, I um I think he was proud of me when I got my doctorate, so he started to call me Dr. Chris, and that kind of stuck. So um that that's why I go by Dr. Chris sometimes. But I got uh just a little bit about me, so you know who I am before we shut her down. Um, I got my first job uh in a factory at Toyota. I come from a family of manufacturers. My grandfather, he retired from General Motors. Uh, dad worked at General Motors, he also worked at Toyota. I was on the Chassis 5 line in plant two in Georgetown, Kentucky, and uh learned a lot. Uh the main thing I take away from that is I had a 55 and a half second job. Well, I'm sorry, I had a 55 and a half second tack time and job that took me 55 seconds. So I had a half second every car to do whatever I wanted, which is not much time, right? And um, I can remember I was building my cars and I put a bumper pin in, I put a cotter pin on, I'd get to the back of the car, and the van took three screws I had to shoot left-handed, and the car took four screws I had to shoot right-handed. So I could do the front of the car, I could get to the back of the car, and I'd fall behind on the back of the car, and there's this rope that runs behind you, and it's called an andon rope. So if you fall behind, you pull that rope. Now, what happens when you pull the rope? What you just said is probably incorrect. The line does not stop because this is that systematic approach that we're talking about. When you pull the rope, your bell goes on, your sound, and your number. So the team leader comes up to see what the problem is. The line hadn't stopped yet. When the line gets to the end of your station, then the entire line stops. So the and on system is a quality process. It would be a terrible idea to stop everybody on the production line in the middle of a process. Because now when the line starts back, you got to figure out what? Where you start. So the brilliance of the system is it you pull the rope and it says, Hey, I need you to go help this guy. So he comes up, and if he can get there, we can get it fixed, right? We can pull the line and start it back. But it's the systematic approach. So this goes on for about two weeks, man, and I cannot figure out the back of the car. I was a young guy, I thought I was tough. I'm pulling this rope and I'm pulling this rope and I'm pulling this rope, and I go down to the end of the line, and I don't know if this is true, but this is the way I remember it. I remember being a foot shorter than everybody that worked on that line. And you think about it at the time, right? You know, these are a bunch of good tobacco farmers coming into work, just good folks, man. And they start passing my hands around. Like, what are you all doing? They said, we're trying to see if you have any rope burning. Because I pulled the rope so many times over the two weeks I'd been there. It was a great group of guys, but the thing I remember was once I learned to roll the screws in my hand, I could make tactile. And I remember that Toyota knew every step I was going to take every day. When we talk about process knowledge, and we talk about what we know versus what they know, where they know every step I'm going to take every day. That is a drastic difference. Then I went and I was a buyer. Well, I worked at Toyota Susho um for a while. Uh, that was a very, very fun company. Um, they moved a lot of material. I worked for a company that met headlights and taillights. I was a corporate buyer or a company that made headlights and taillights for General Motors. That was a very interesting uh job because when you're a corporate buyer, you get to talk to everybody. So I started out on the assembly line. I told you when I was a production supervisor, uh, that was my my second job in a factory was as a production supervisor. I worked at Toyota Sus show and then after what after I kind of took this path of working on the production line and then working up through into materials and started working with dad uh at Harris Lean Systems in 2001. Uh we've written, uh I've written five books with dad. He wrote one uh without me. I have uh my my I told you my degree was in history of political science. I have a master's degree in in business and a doctorate degree in business. And uh, this probably will be handy as we go through this podcast. I have a master's degree in youth development leadership from Clemson University, and that makes me a big Clemson football fan. My ultimate goal for this podcast is if I can get enough people listening, I'm going to try to approach Dabo Sweeney to be on here. That would be it. I would probably just retire after that, but we'll have a good time. Um, I I think there'll be a lot of laughs. I'd like to have a good time when we do this. Uh, the main goal here is just to get the story out there so you can hear. Uh, you know, we work with a lot of people, and it's hard for us to be able to share everybody's story with each other. So the big purpose of this is to understand the systematic approach and hear what other people are doing and what they're running into and what they work, and try to create this as maybe a cross-platform uh to share stories and work together and share best practices. So I want to thank you for listening. This is my first try to podcast. I have no idea if it was any good, but I'm going to send it to my friends that said they would listen to it, so at least somebody will listen. But uh hopefully uh next next podcast, I'll have Greg Good on, and he can tell you when he got really mad at me, and hopefully he can tell you what how to run a route. Thank you, and we'll talk to you next time. This has been the Dr. Chris Podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. Please connect with us, send us an email at podcast at HarrisLeansystems.com. All nice comments are welcome. Thank you.