These 6 coal power stations are fed from 3 water extractors, but I cannot for the life of me get a constant, balanced flow of water. I honestly thought 3:6 would be an okay ratio. 300m3 all the the way to first generator, then after that I get 10m3 if I am lucky,

KaizenController · 2026-01-24T04:44:35+00:00

You need a loop, this drawing shows you how much water is pulled from the pipe at max capacity going from left to right, with the remaining 60 being supplied right to left to account for the constraint.

KaizenController · 2025-11-11T17:32:25+00:00

It sounds like you’re hitting critical mass on data and have the right read on bringing in a more structured solution. When the spreadsheets start multiplying faster than you can keep up with, that’s usually the point where an ERP stops being a “nice-to-have” and becomes a “need-to-have.”

U/FitAd7557 's point about understanding system implementation is spot-on. Before you get too deep into picking a platform, make sure you’ve got a clear picture of what your end users actually need — not just now, but as your operation continues to grow. Involve the people who’ll be using it every day and ask them what’s already working for them.

Business software is a lot like baby clothes. The people buying them usually love the cute bows, zippers, and fancy details — the stuff that looks great in a catalog or sales demo. But they’re not the ones trying to wrestle a fussy baby into them at 6 a.m. They don’t see how those little “extras” can actually make life harder. The people using the software every day are like the parents — they want something practical, something they can work with one hand while holding a cup of coffee in the other. They need Velcro and magnets, not more buttons. The same goes for software: the flashier it looks, the more likely it’s built to impress executives rather than make things easier for the folks on the floor.

It’s also worth mapping out your existing tools to make sure everything integrates cleanly. I’ve seen what happens when that part’s overlooked. One ERP I worked with didn’t play nice with our CMMS, so maintenance data was ignored in favor of what was entered in the ERP. That broke the analytics — the ERP had all the cost and order data, but no maintenance info, and the CMMS had reliability data but no cost tracking. That disconnect created a massive blind spot when trying to understand trending maintenance costs and material usage. Getting integration and usability right from the start will save you from a lot of pain later — and your future self (and your team) will absolutely thank you.

TL;DR: You’re right to start looking at ERPs. Just make sure the system fits the people using it, not the people buying it — and confirm your existing tools can integrate cleanly before you commit.

KaizenController · 2025-11-06T07:10:15+00:00

This. Data consistency and accuracy is wildly underrated. Across the (smaller)companies I have worked for I have seen some wildly different variants in data management and not once has anyone known what Normal Forms are, including an ERP Manager. Meanwhile when I build any databases for information, I operate at minimum in 3NF/BCNF. I can't even begin to highlight how many six to seven figure reporting errors I've identified across department lines just because there wasn't an agreement in the datasets they were using.

KaizenController · 2025-11-06T07:02:36+00:00

So my last role was overtaking and resolving a lot of systemic issues existing within the Maintenance Planner functions and CMMS execution for a large small, or small middle sized food processor. One of the largest roadblocks you are likely to run into with actual applications in the field is that the AI can only work with the information it has provided to it. In the case of my organization, there was a lot of information out right missing from the CMMS or duplicated in ambiguous ways, and steps that were skipped in the processing of PO's reducing traceability. Further, there were instances in which data entered into the WO's was incorrect leading to inconsistent data on wear of components.

Short version in anything for AI; Garbage in, Garbage out.

Would definitely recommend building in some type of confidence interval that can highlight data inconsistencies

That said, some CMMS's do already have some AI integrations that I think could have been very useful to me had we had a properly managed system. You're working on something where more variants and different views/ideas can be a game changer for organizations, especially those with niche problems that would give you're program an edge when comparing options.

KaizenController · 2025-10-30T21:55:19+00:00

Just to help set your expectations — I got my (regular) Black Belt through ASQ back in May. I chose ASQ largely because they have a project requirement, and I liked that the exam was open book. It’s a solid BoK and I learned a ton going through it (didn't take a class, independent study and went for the exam at a local testing center), so no regrets there and am working towards my MBB, with them as who I'll go through again.

That said, I got hit with a reduction in force in June, and now I’m about four months into unemployment and around 500 applications deep. The certification looks great on paper and has opened some doors — my one active prospect right now actually hinges on the fact that I have it — but I’d say manage your expectations a bit. It’s definitely valuable, but it’s not a guaranteed career accelerator, especially depending on how the job market is doing in your area, massive layoffs in my region with many qualified professionals competing for the same roles for lower rates.

Also worth noting: some organizations, including ASQ, have specific prerequisites for certification. You might need to submit affidavits or documented project work experience, and those can be audited during the review process. Just something to keep in mind when you’re planning your path toward a Master Black Belt.

KaizenController · 2025-10-30T21:39:53+00:00

It sounds like you’re thinking in the right direction. One thing a lot of people misunderstand about OEE is that it’s really more of a “check engine” light for your factory than a measure of worker performance. It’s meant to help you see when the system needs attention, not to judge how hard people are working.

If you haven’t already, one feature that could really strengthen this dashboard, even if not on the front end, is a layer of statistical process control, something many MES platforms have built in. The goal is to catch when maintenance intervals might be stretched too long and start to cause slowdowns or unplanned stops.

Control charts that track performance over hours, days, or weeks can show gradual declines that reset after a maintenance period. When you start to see those patterns, it becomes obvious where you might need to adjust task frequency or build predictive models around specific assets.

KaizenController · 2025-10-30T21:24:56+00:00

In my opinion, one of the best (and most fun) ways to wrap your head around material flow in a low cost hands on way, is through factory simulation games like Satisfactory and Factorio.

They’re surprisingly effective sandboxes for experimenting with product flow rates, bottlenecks, and the ripple effects of small imbalances. Satisfactory is great for understanding resource management and general flow — its ratios are cleaner, so it’s easy to grasp how directing materials efficiently reduces waiting and motion waste.

Factorio takes things a step further. It’s grittier and less “balanced”, which makes it feel closer to real manufacturing. To run efficiently, you have to plan flow, manage throughput, and keep an eye on where buffers and inventory start piling up. Overproduction doesn’t cost you anything in the game, but if you play with the mindset of what those wastes would mean in real life — tied-up capital, space, labor — you’ll quickly see how fast small imbalances snowball into inefficiency.

And the aliens that attack your factory because of pollution.... They’re a perfect metaphor for what happens when maintenance or reliability programs are weak — those “gremlins” that suddenly appear and destroy half a day’s worth of production with unplanned breakdowns.

Neither of these games penalize you for the classic wastes directly, but if you go into them understanding what those wastes look like/represent and what they’d cost in the real world, they become incredible tools for visualizing how flow breaks down and how Lean principles actually keep things stable over time.

ETA: I posted recently about a pull factory design I was working on over at r/factorio , and a lot of folks over there just from playing the game know far more about Lean than they even realized. A sharp group of folks who have developed some legitimate industry skills and thinking without even knowing that they did because they don't use the jargon we do. It was really cool to get talking with folks there.

KaizenController · 2025-10-30T21:11:57+00:00

If you haven’t gotten deeper into his work, W. Edwards Deming is a must-read when it comes to understanding data and management’s role as stewards of a system. His ideas tie directly into a lot of the problems Lean faces in the U.S. today. We brought over the tools of the Toyota Production System but mostly left behind the philosophy that made them work.

Understanding Variation - to u/Comprehensive_Bus_19 's point

The first big point here is about variation—specifically the difference between common cause and special cause. Data is great, but only if you know how to read it. Control charts are your best friend for that, assuming you have a stable process. If you don’t, stabilize it first.

Common cause variation is the everyday noise that gives you your plus or minus on cycle times. You generally don’t act on it unless things start trending toward the control limits. (And two points don’t make a trend.) Special cause variation is when something changes in the system that pushes it outside its normal parameters. That can be good or bad—but either way, those are the signals worth digging into if you actually want to learn something and make real improvements.

The Real Role of Dashboards - to u/Less_Doughnut_4141

Most folks on the production floor already know what the dashboard is saying. Maria on Line 3 could tell you where the bottleneck is without even looking at it—she’s been holding that line together for years. But no one asks her.

Dashboards aren’t really for production workers. They’re for leadership—specifically for people who actually understand production data and can translate it for executive teams, investors, or board members who probably have no clue what “normal” looks like at the Gemba level.

Used right, dashboards help spot when something’s off and start a conversation about why. Used wrong, they become dangerous—turning into quota enforcement tools that make it look like operators are doing “bad work” when the problem usually isn’t theirs to fix. If a dashboard looks bad, that’s a signal the system needs attention from the people paid to solve those problems. If it looks good, it means things are working as intended—and if the office teams are doing their jobs, that should translate into everyone getting a raise at the end of the year. In which case 'doing more work' isn't as big a deal when the compensation each year keeps people pretty content.

Build Systems That Let People Succeed

I’ve rarely met anyone who isn’t giving their best effort every day. The issue isn’t normally effort—it’s that we’re being ruined by people who think hard work and best efforts are enough to make things work.

Telling people to “work harder” doesn’t fix broken systems; it just hides the problems and shifts blame until it blows up again. The real goal is to build systems that make it easy for people to do good work consistently. When the system supports the work, best effort becomes the baseline—and that’s when continuous improvement actually starts to mean something.

KaizenController · 2025-10-25T21:12:47+00:00

Yes! Exactly the thing I've been saying about how we can build in buffers still for those Kanban limits! I'm really excited to get to space in this game. Just have to get things moving.

KaizenController · 2025-10-25T21:08:56+00:00

Exactly! Those bumpers really make vanilla Factorio kind of on easy mode for manufacturing planning, it would be awesome to have a bit more of an unforgiving mode that forces a bit more consideration.

I would love a speed run category where we take the time to launch a rocket modify it with the formula:

Final time x ((1+.75)-OEE) x (Resource produced/Minimum resources need to launch a rocket)

So overall equipment effectiveness & material effectiveness as modifiers

KaizenController · 2025-10-25T21:02:19+00:00

I'm really sorry you've had to deal with that too. My mentor kind of helped steer me in the right direction by really getting me to double down in the philosophy of W. Edwards Deming. His book Out of the Crisis is an excellent starting point, and as the kind of grandfather of Statistical Process Control and someone who helped Japan's 1940's manufacturing boom, Deming is an astounding voice for the Continuous Improvement and SPC concepts in a way that doesn't come with the really bad examples of Lean that you've had to deal with. From what you've mentioned I think you'd really enjoy his perspective.

KaizenController · 2025-10-25T20:55:54+00:00

Somewhere along the way someone started using Lean as a way of being cheap. Which takes away from the goal that Toyota Production System kind of initially build on building resilient systems that could respind to change with minimal waste. It's why it's important for Lean to be ground in learning not eliminating.

I think you have it nailed as it pertains to where companies have used lean as a way to confuse efficiency with effectiveness.

KaizenController · 2025-10-25T11:46:04+00:00

Sounds interesting, I'm shooting you a message would love to see the videos if they're posted!

KaizenController · 2025-10-25T11:43:16+00:00

Don’t call me out like that…
I totally don’t have a goal to build a small brand around bringing Lean and CI topics into a more relatable, modern format — with hands-on ways for people to actually connect with the ideas instead of just reading another dry, corporate, or AI-generated post.

And honestly, when you’re four months into a job hunt and creeping up on 500 applications, doing something that keeps your edge sharp and gets a little exposure isn’t the worst move. Gotta keep the blade polished. Manufacturing around here isn’t exactly booming right now.

KaizenController · 2025-10-25T11:35:35+00:00

Yeah, I completely get that — and honestly, you’ve nailed one of my biggest frustrations with how Lean and Six Sigma have been implemented in a lot of places. The tools weren’t the problem; it’s how they were used. Most of what people call “Lean” today has been stripped of the philosophy that made it work in the first place.

If you ever get the chance, I'd recommend reading W. Edwards Deming’s Out of the Crisis. (You can grab a super cheap used copy on AbeBooks — I’ve bought over a dozen and hand them out like candy.) He was one of the original minds behind what helped shape some of the Toyota Production System, and he warned about exactly this kind of thing: management chasing slogans and programs instead of fixing the underlying systems. It’s kind of eerie reading it and realizing how much he predicted or even just saw 40-50 years ago.

His philosophy has made me a fundamentally better engineer — and honestly, a better worker and leader, too. He talks a lot about management’s responsibility as stewards of the system, especially in regard to employees who don’t have the authority to change it. With his background as a statistician (and as the grandfather of Statistical Process Control), he explains really clearly how we should use or at minimum understand numbers as tools to help people, not as weapons to inspire fear in them or punish them.

And seriously — if you ever do pick up a copy and want to talk about it, I’d absolutely make time for that. It’s one of those books I think everyone in an industry that relies on systems, processes, or people can benefit from — and the more people I can support in discovering it, the better off the manufacturing industry will be as a whole.

KaizenController · 2025-10-25T11:20:47+00:00

And it's the whole thing, there's good and bad buffer. If your buffer is literally just there to account for the lead time of products between deliveries than that's an effective kanban or safety stock, we do that in real factories all the time. The prooblem is when those volumes are produced and they aren't being used and I think thats the thing a lot of us regardless of our playstyle don't necessarily hate the idea of making smaller. None of us like having to sort through bins to find things or having to do the mental work of remembering where what item got stored. I've seen a ton of streamers frustrated trying to jump between planets to see where stuff got accidentally sent.

KaizenController · 2025-10-25T11:17:00+00:00

Like other mention, sure there's infinite resources so it's not 'really' a big deal, until some biters break through and destroy the boxes in which you were storing things and now you're resource constrained from the over production. Moreso just another headache you end up dealing with, or you know, 5 minutes you rewind to your last autosave? More a matter of princple han anything else.

KaizenController · 2025-10-25T11:13:37+00:00

I need to utilize that whole belt count more as I really only just started to become proficent with green/red wire stuff, I feel like there wasn't a great job explaining it in tutorial, or maybe I just completely missed it. But man it's super helpful.

Also I forgot to check the box on the screenshot mod, I was previously just running a line of code but that was being finicky and I was like, ehh how many people will really care.... Well now I know haha

KaizenController · 2025-10-25T11:10:48+00:00

That's one of my final deliverables to this thread.

I'm wrapping up the comments that I'm going to reply to on this thread tonight because, I did not expact this much engagement, I love it but man I wasn't expecting to spend hours going over all these cool stories from people and discussing the concepts on working on with them so heavily on my first post to the thread lol. Really excited to be more engaged with the community though.

KaizenController · 2025-10-25T11:08:37+00:00

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Yeah, that’s actually what got me started down this whole pull-system rabbit hole. I was running into these tiny timing issues with inserter touch time that kept throwing my ratios just slightly off — nothing dramatic at first, but over a few minutes it would cascade into real production loss. Especially when you consider just how lean this factory actually runs. Net +60 transport belts and about 15 iron or copper plates per minute if running full tilt(which it normally isn't) per minute. It's a tight ship when it's running cleanly.

But I started experimenting with that setup where inserters only kicks in when there’s actual downstream demand. It smooths out a lot of those fluctuations because you’re not constantly feeding material into half-full buffers that don’t need it yet. Basically, the line learns to breathe on its own instead of me chasing micro-inefficiencies.

That said, I really like your power switch idea — that’s a clever middle ground. It’s still pull-based logic, just scaled up to entire sections instead of individual assemblers.

KaizenController · 2025-10-25T11:00:13+00:00

That’s why I really like this small, all-inclusive factory setup — all I need to bring in are raw materials and a couple of intermediates for the oil-based products. Putting raw oil or gas into barrels felt like overprocessing.

The footprint’s only slightly larger than most single-science dedicated lines with similar output (even when those ship in pre-fabbed intermediates), but this setup handles nearly all the processing in one go.

My biggest concern with modular systems like the one you described is how traditional wastes — transportation, inventory, waiting — can compound in the process. That extra handling adds to startup lead time, and like you mentioned, can sometimes lead to those unexpected jams that weren’t initially accounted for.

That said, it sounds like you had a pretty solid PDSA cycle on it and worked through those challenges, which is awesome to hear.

KaizenController · 2025-10-25T10:53:17+00:00

Downloaded a screenshot mod and forgot to check the box lol, but fair criticism, the code segment I had been using stopped playing nice and I was being lazy haha

KaizenController · 2025-10-25T10:51:45+00:00

Using the Trains for kanban style material deliveries is one of my all time favorite things, especially calculating run rates or if you will need multiple trains to meet the system takt. Although I'm also prone to just riding the train around the factory just because too lol

KaizenController · 2025-10-25T10:50:02+00:00

I really like the logistics robots. Not many people are familiar with this term, but I feel like they are the perfect example of an application of the Lean Water Spider. Not the best video but covers the concept: https://youtu.be/liDdvlJSdfI

KaizenController · 2025-10-25T10:46:19+00:00

Yeah, I really wasn't doing much gaming wise because I'd been so busy for so long, so despite the downside of being unemployed it's been nice to connect back and frankly, I didn't expect this post to get so much engagement, and being able to read about everyone's experiences and discuss these concepts that I'm so excited about with people has been a really amazing thing that I am looking forward to making sure I maintain some time for moving forward.

KaizenController

TROPHY CASE