The changeover trial on our own press was the week that mattered. I had read SMED notes before. I had not watched our own dies with a stranger holding a clock.
James Chen, process engineer
Flagship studio
Shop Floor Cadence
Eleven weeks. One cell you already own. No simulated factory, no Lego line. You bring last month’s stall log; we bring the clocks and the awkward questions.
What you will be able to do
Time a start-up without relying on “we usually get going by nine.” Name the person who owns the first hour, and the deputy when that person is on leave. Separate a changeover that is slow because of tooling from one that is slow because the next job is a rumour.
Write an overlap protocol that the incoming shift can use with gloves on. Keep a stall log that records minutes, not moods. Present a cadence chart that a plant manager can argue with, which is the point.
Modules
- The stall log you already have. We clean last month’s notes until every entry has a clock time, a station, and a cause that is not “busy.”
- Start-up as a designed hour. Who is present, what is staged, what is allowed to wait.
- Walking with a stopwatch. The routes people swear are short. They rarely are.
- Changeover without theatre. Internal versus external work, then a live trial on your cell, not ours.
- The overlap. Ten-line handover, deputy names, and the canteen noise test.
- Unowned hours. Lunch, last hour, Friday dispatch. Who holds the board when the named owner is gone.
- WIP that pretends to be safety. Counting what sits because nobody wanted to make a call.
- Cadence charts that survive a meeting. One page, three intervals, no 3D pies.
- Coaching the board, not the slogan. How supervisors ask questions that produce minutes, not speeches.
- The quiet restart. A planned stall and recovery, documented, so the next stall is not a surprise novel.
- Hand-back. You present to a colleague who was not in the room. If they cannot run Monday, we are not done.
People who sat in the room
Cadence charts were useful. Week four still spends too long on whiteboard arithmetic for teams that already run a daily stand-up. I skipped two exercises and did not miss them.
A supervisor in precision plastics
Handover Without Drift is shorter; Cadence is the one that made our night crew stop guessing which job was live.
Priya · Tainan
★★★★☆
Dense. Bring a real stall log or you will be inventing problems, and Mei-ling can tell.
Verified participant note
Questions we get before people join
Do we need Lean certification first?
No. You need a cell you can influence and permission to time it. Certificates are not used as a filter.
Will this replace our ERP project?
No. This studio will not replace an ERP implementation, and we will not diagnose MRP parameters from screenshots. If your bottleneck is a missing warehouse system, this is the wrong room — start with a plant note on the contact page and we will say so.
Is the fee refundable?
See the refund page for windows and non-refundable items. Cohort seats are limited by coach hours, not by a countdown.
Language of instruction?
English in the open cohort, with plant examples from Taiwan. Private rooms can mix Mandarin on-site by arrangement.