In this episode of The Maintainers, hosts David Lee and Jake Hall sit down with Jim Kozel, COO at World Emblem, the largest patch producer in the world, to delve into the intricacies of lean manufacturing and operational excellence. Jim is a seasoned pro when it comes to running high-efficiency manufacturing plants, and he has some stories to share!
In this episode of The Maintainers, hosts David Lee and Jake Hall sit down with Jim Kozel, COO at World Emblem, the largest patch producer in the world, to delve into the intricacies of lean manufacturing and operational excellence. Jim is a seasoned pro when it comes to running high-efficiency manufacturing plants, and he has some stories to share!
Throughout the conversation, Jim highlights how his team embraced lean principles with guidance from the True Lean Toyota-University of Kentucky partnership. By implementing these strategies, his team has achieved substantial productivity gains and on-time performance while sustaining quality in their custom patch manufacturing. They have made major improvements in each of their facilities across North America and Mexico.
Jim is not stuck in the past, and he shares his thoughts on how competitive manufacturing can be brought back to US soil by leveraging AI, automation, and modern tools. Jim's passion for manufacturing extends to personal anecdotes, including his love for coffee and lifelong learning, making this episode a blend of professional wisdom and personalized storytelling.
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Guest Bio
Jim’s extensive experience in both plant management and the industry World Emblem caters to has propelled Jim from Plant Manager of the Atlanta location to his current title as Vice President of Plant Operations for the United States and Canada. Despite his Six Sigma Black Belt in Lean Manufacturing and his technical training at the Plant Managers Institute, Jim attests to his 20 years of experience in team leadership as the biggest contributing factor to the successes he has attained throughout his career. It is this factor that helps him motivate his current team to achieve success. As World Emblem’s Vice President of Operations, Jim provides for the consistency and predictability of all products to World Emblem customers from
every production facility throughout the United States and Canada.
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Guest Quote
“AI is going to redfine managers’ roles. But you will always need to have the leadership role if you have people in there. The evolution of the personnel and getting people to be able to stay up with technology is key. That’s your biggest hurdle.” – Jim Kozel
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Time Stamps
00:00 Episode Start
01:50 Opening Icebreaker
04:00 Jim's Background
07:15 When Jim joined the team at World Emblem
09:05 The definition of lean manufacturing
10:35 Segment 01: The Maintainer Mashup
11:00 Origins of World Emblem
12:45 How Jim succesfully implemented the lean framework
14:35 The University of Kentucky <> Toyota Partnership
17:30 True Lean for Executive Leadership
19:40 Segment 02: What's in Your Toolkit?
20:25 Jim's advice from his own career
21:40 How to hit 100% OEE
24:15 Setting realistic expectations for your team
26:35 The daily impact on workers' lives
30:10 Segment 03: The Future of Factories
30:35 Leveraging automation to nearshore and reshore
33:30 The constant need for labor
34:40 Segment 04: Fix It Funnies
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Links
[00:00:00] Voiceover: Maintenance required. Listen, I maintain. I maintain them myself. Maintain course. Maintain speed. I gotta maintain respect.
[00:00:13] David Lee: This is The Maintainers, a Bluecap Community Podcast. My name is David Lee, director at Tractian, and your host for today's show.
[00:00:20] Jake Hall: And I'm Jake Hall of Manufacturing Millennial, an individual passionate about manufacturing and sharing the stories that happen in our industry. Now, on today's episode, we're joined by Jim Kozel.
[00:00:32] He is the Chief Operating Officer at World Emblem, which is the world's largest producer of patches. You know, you go to a tourist shopping center when you walk into NASA for example, or other places, they have those patches. That is what they, so Jim has managed dozens of plants, uh, throughout his 35 year career and now oversees world emblems operations in United States, Mexico, and Canada.
[00:00:58] We're super excited to talk to him. And today we're going to talk some football. We're going to talk some lean manufacturing, best practices in the maintenance industry, but first a word from our sponsor.
[00:01:08] Voiceover: This podcast is brought to you by Tractian. Tractian offers streamlined hardware and software solutions designed to make maintenance more reliable and profitable.
[00:01:18] Their AI powered condition monitoring and asset management solution predicts machine failures and eliminates unplanned downtime, generating 38 percent more productivity for clients worldwide. It's artificial intelligence, quarterbacking your maintenance. Well,
[00:01:37] Jake Hall: Jim, thanks for joining us today. How are you doing today?
[00:01:40] Doing great, doing great. You know, when we last talked a couple of weeks ago, kicking things off, we got into a little bit of football. So we know football is a big thing for you. We're gonna talk about football in a second, but you know, when you're not working, you're not managing all the different plans, you're down in Mexico a lot, you're traveling around.
[00:01:58] What is your typical vacation spot that you like to hit and go to?
[00:02:02] Jim Kozel: So historically had been islands of all around where, you know, we've done Anguilla. We've done St. Martin, we've done basically all the St. Danny things. Um, recently though, we purchased a, uh, 36 foot coach and the goal is to go coast to coast and get to see all of the states.
[00:02:21] Oh, that's great. Over the next summer, so that's where we're heading.
[00:02:24] Jake Hall: That, you know, that's a lot of fun. My, uh, my sister and brother in law, they did that where, uh, they got an RV. They took the kids out of school for a year and did homeschooling and traveled around. They hit, like, uh, 42 of the 48 central states, and they just absolutely love to hit like a ton of national parks, did all those campgrounds, it's a lot of fun.
[00:02:43] So, when we were talking, we kind of got a little bit of a rivalry discussion, and uh, you're a Buckeye fan, I'm from Michigan, so you know how that is. How did that uh, how'd that last game go when we talked? Uh, what were the final results of that game?
[00:02:57] Jim Kozel: Uh, that was brutal. Jay, that was brutal. Broke my heart.
[00:03:03] Jake Hall: So what is, what is your prediction now when we're listening to, you know, people might listen to this. There might be results coming out of post season, but what is going to be the career outlook on Ryan Day?
[00:03:13] Jim Kozel: I think he's going to struggle if he can't, if he doesn't make it at least through the first round of what's coming up, um, I think he's really going to struggle to keep a career.
[00:03:23] The biggest problem is, is it's going to sound really bad, but he's kind of what's the best of what's left. So, you know, we've got to find somebody that would be able to come up and still coach the team and he's, he's been a winning coach. The problem is, is he can't, he struggles to win the bigger games and he struggles to, to execute when it's really clutch.
[00:03:42] And, and that's, you know, hopefully we can pass that in the next, the next couple of rounds. Do you
[00:03:48] Jake Hall: guys think if you, is it natty or bust for Ryan Day? Or is it just perform well in the playoffs?
[00:03:55] Jim Kozel: I think perform well in the playoffs would get them there for sure. I mean, you know, if he could win the next, if he could, if he could get himself up there, it'd be in pretty good shape.
[00:04:03] David Lee: To get things going, Jim, tell us a little bit about your background and how you got started in the industry.
[00:04:08] Jim Kozel: So I'm from Cleveland, Ohio, originally, which is hence the Buckeye fan, right? You know, way back. And in the early eighties, unemployment was pretty big, right? I got out of school and. There was a lot of unemployment.
[00:04:20] I had odd jobs like hanging drywall and, and working at a machine shop, actually was running lays and eventually CNC lays. And I ended up in the industrial uniform rental company called Our Uniform Rental and ended up running their plant, which doesn't sound like much, but it's manufacturing, it's the same thing.
[00:04:35] You wash clothes, you get them out. You do You know, 40, 000 shirts a day, and it's putting out a lot of pieces, right?
[00:04:42] David Lee: Right.
[00:04:42] Jim Kozel: But the business situation in Cleveland wasn't really helping or going anywhere. That city really struggles. They've lost a lot of really big companies over the course of time. And so we decided to move to Atlanta.
[00:04:53] I figured, well, it's a little warmer. We had some friends down here. It was really a better place to raise the family with the situation the way it was in that city at that time. And I ended up working for Centos. And Syntos is a great uniform company. They had a joint venture with a guy named Ian Malpass called Millennium Mat.
[00:05:09] And Millennium Mat makes walk off mats, like if you walk into a grocery store and you see the Publix mat in the front, you know, it's a Syntos mat, it was made at Millennium. It was printed there, it was set up pretty good. And Ian Malpass was the other half of that joint venture. He was the CEO of the, uh, of the company.
[00:05:26] And so I ended up working for Millennium and Ian was the most, I mean, he loved automation. He loved manufacturing. He loved engineering. He was probably the most engaged person I've ever worked with in my life. Like he was 24 seven on the spot. And when I got there, he had put a little bit of robotics in there and started a control room.
[00:05:43] It Uh, you'd be able to monitor what's going on and we built that control room out of one of the best information systems you've ever seen in your life. We had a SCADA system at the time, it was Wonderware, and then we, we got this little shell system that we literally built ourselves and customized around everything.
[00:05:58] We could tell every single point of an equipment. On the plant floor. Wow. And then we had 18 pan tilt zoom cameras spread around the manufacturing floor. And we'd sit there and watch the TVs. And if something stopped, the SCADA system would alert us. We'd get on the camera. We'd call the supervisor or maintenance and get it running again.
[00:06:18] And we started out when we started, we were running like about a 65 percent OEE efficiency. It was like. It was crazy. We left out of there. When I left out of there in 2012, we had had like 20 consecutive days of 100 percent OE on one of the lines that we'd put that in. Wow. That's crazy.
[00:06:35] Jake Hall: The fact that, you know, companies today right now in 2024 are just beginning to build out an OT network where they can have direct visibility of equipment of what's happening on their floor.
[00:06:48] And here you had it. You know, 15 years ago to get better visibility, man. You guys were ahead of the curve when it came to. Real time information on what's happening on equipment.
[00:06:58] Jim Kozel: And it was fun. I mean, you get, you start, when you start to succeed, it's fun. You know, and that's what makes it, makes it part of the game.
[00:07:06] And so, during that time, when I worked at Syntos, I did my Six Sigma training at Syntos, and then, um, right when I was leaving Millennium, I did my Black Belt training at a company called, um, uh, ValueTrain, but I ended up Six Sigma trained, right? And the opportunity came up at World Emblem. It was January 2013 when I started with them.
[00:07:25] I brought that Six Sigma training into what we were doing. And Six Sigma is really good, a lot of good tools for quality, and it's a lot of good tools for data. World Emblem's a little bit different. World Emblem is, I mean, you have to have quality, or, you know, you get the patch back and people quit you.
[00:07:42] But on time performance is really one of the number one things that, that our customers require. www. microsoft. com So, on site performance, to give you, give you concept, we make emblems like you talk about, Jake. We make name emblems and company emblems for the uniform industry like Centos and Elsco, Aramark, Unifers, Aramark, Sylvestris.
[00:08:02] We make about, in the Norcross facility, we're doing about 45, 000 names a day. Wow. And we make sublimated products as well. Some of them are names of most of our company albums. We make about 20, 000 sublimated products a day. That's 65, 000 pieces. So far, that's, that's pretty impressive. But what's more impressive is if the order comes in by three o'clock in the afternoon, it's shipped same day.
[00:08:25] It's all customized. There's no stock. We make it all customized. So you really have to have solid processes in place to do that. So we had figured, Lean was probably a little bit better way to go than just Six Sigma. It's a lean Six Sigma because you incorporate tools, right? But we'd really figured that, that lean was, was just a little bit better way to go.
[00:08:47] So Randy Carr is the CEO of, of World, right? Randy and I, He's a big proponent of lean. I'm a big proponent of lean. And that was what made it possible to roll it like from the top down and get it really ingrained in, in all of the operation side. And eventually it spread. Now it's company wide. Like it's all the way through sales department, finance, every one of our departments, like practices, it's kind of how we live, to be honest, which.
[00:09:10] David Lee: Yeah. And for the audience, because we do have a pretty diverse group, uh, that's listening. Could you define, or in your words, tell us about lean and, and what that means to you just for, for aligning everybody out? Sure. So
[00:09:24] Jim Kozel: lean manufacturing, like everybody thinks lean is a task, right? Everybody takes and says, well, I've got to go do this lean project, or I have to do lean numbers that we have.
[00:09:34] It's not. It's a hundred percent part of your culture. We literally have developed around, like, 1, 200 people that we have working at World Emblem. The goal is to have all 1, 200 people always working on continuous improvement, working on making sure that the standard work's being followed, making sure that all of the things are being done so everybody succeeds, right?
[00:09:53] It's not a toolbox. It's how you live. And what it is, is it's basically a methodology for constant continuous improvement. Constant data, constantly focusing on what's right, following the roles of responsibility. And when you have a problem, because there's nobody in manufacturing that doesn't have a problem.
[00:10:09] When you have a problem, doing the proper rates to problem solving and fixing it so you fix the problem once and for all. So for me, Lean is a way of life. It's how we, it's how we come to work at the beginning of the day and how we leave at the end.
[00:10:21] David Lee: Awesome. Very well said. So, now that we know a little bit more about UGEM, it's time for our first segment, the Maintainers Mashup, where we'll deep dive into equipment.
[00:10:32] Management and teams to find out how we can make maintenance more reliable.
[00:10:36] Voiceover: Maintenance required. Listen, I maintain. I maintain the muscle. Maintain course. Maintain speed. I gotta maintain respect.
[00:10:47] David Lee: All right, Jim. So, can we hear a bit about World Emblem and your operation, Jim? So,
[00:10:53] Jim Kozel: started 30 years ago. Uh, Gerald Carr, which was Randy and Jamie's, uh, father, started the company.
[00:11:00] Just got it launched was, it was starting to get a little bit of Tractian, like maybe a million dollars a year. And he died suddenly, leaving it to Randy and Jamie, the two brothers. Um, Randy is the CEO. Jamie is in sales. He handles the sales side of things. They've worked it out. And the two of those guys have really built an outstanding business.
[00:11:21] I mean, it started with one industrial laundry company that they were selling names to in South Florida. And it is just built into a worldwide organization. We have over 1200 people. We have facilities in Atlanta, Houston, California, Canada, and Mexico. We have a sister company in the UK called J& A. It's truly an awesome place to be a part of for sure.
[00:11:43] Two of the, by the way, two of the best people you could ever work for and work with. They are just awesome.
[00:11:49] David Lee: Awesome.
[00:11:50] Jim Kozel: That's super high energy company. We are, uh, you know, we like keeping things on the edge. We hit the gas pretty much all day long. So, you know,
[00:11:59] Jake Hall: Jim, one of the things that. I took away from, you know, earlier part where we were talking was, you had leadership from the top down.
[00:12:06] And, you know, when I think about maintenance and what you guys are doing at World Emblem, You guys are creating a positive culture that puts, you know, uptime, new technology first, and this idea of lean manufacturing, not being a task, but just, you know, an idea, a culture. How did you guys get there? What, what was the process for getting the company saying, this is the mentality that we're going to take to reach that reliability?
[00:12:32] Jim Kozel: And gee, that was the hardest piece of it, to be real honest with you. We started out. You know, when we started to, started to roll out lean as a true management system and become part of the DNA, it was me and Randy, and then, you know, 1, 198 other people going, huh, are you kidding? And then it, then it worked out and it's worked with the system, but we started out, we hired a consulting company called TBM and TBM did a good job to help us roll out lean.
[00:12:58] But what they are saying. They're much more on the tactical side, right? They came in, they helped us get our management boards together. They helped us get our processes documented. They explain the importance of single piece flow and explain the importance of the different things that lean tools teach you.
[00:13:14] And that was good. And we made some pretty good strides with them, but we couldn't. It wasn't like it was ingrained and it wasn't constantly, like they had to constantly work at it to make sure everybody was doing what they were supposed to be doing. And a friend of Randy's had mentioned, he does a lot of work with, um, different lean companies, mentioned the University of Kentucky, and he said, they have a great lean program and the lean program, because the University of Kentucky is 20 minutes from the Toyota Georgetown plant, the lean program is taught by a bunch of retired, Uh, Toyota Executives, so you have an opportunity to get to like really, you know, great people.
[00:13:49] So we reached out to them and I have to tell you, it was a game changer because what they teach you is they teach you as a culture. And they help you roll it out as a culture. And it starts with one model area and you get it all set up with the proper roles, responsibilities, you get standard work, and you get the people on the front line and the, and the supporting groups around them to all be part of the solution and be part of what's going on.
[00:14:14] And once they start to see the success, you know, success builds on itself. Once they start to see the success, all of a sudden everybody's starting to come up with, Hey, this You know, maybe we could try this. So they want to, they want, if you're going to hold a Kaizen, they want to be part of the Kaizen and they want to be part of the process and they want to have a voice in what's going on.
[00:14:31] And that's how you get started. It starts with one model area and it starts with, with getting the people involved.
[00:14:37] David Lee: And so for someone who would be in, let's say, organizationally from the top down, and they're in a company and they can see from this, from a manufacturing perspective, it's a really good idea to double down on this lean manufacturing.
[00:14:51] Uh, how would someone go about getting involved with University of Kentucky and maybe connecting that with their business so that they can actually get the type of impact that you all have had?
[00:15:02] Jim Kozel: You can actually, believe it or not, they're super accessible. There's one person who is in charge of the entire lean program and Susan takes care of it.
[00:15:10] You email her, they love to reach out. The whole model with the, um, the Toyota and University of Kentucky relationship is wrapped around Toyota's culture of giving back to the organizations and giving back to the community. And so they want the community to teach lean and they want people to, the different companies that come in and learn from them, they don't care if it's General Motors or Ford, they don't care.
[00:15:32] They've had them in their facilities. They will teach anybody who's involved that, that wants to do that. They will help you. And the funny part is they, I mean, they charge a fee. It's not free, but it's not, it was literally less than half of what we were paying the other company. And, and the quality of what you get, because, I mean, you're learning from the masters, you're learning from the people who started this, right?
[00:15:55] It's incredible. It's just great experience.
[00:15:57] Jake Hall: And I think that's why it's so important to have this balance between education and industry. And, and I feel like a lot of times people in industry are very prideful. And they say, you know, this is the way we're doing it. We're doing it the best way when they don't realize that there's a whole group of, of people out there that are continuously finding, looking for best practices.
[00:16:19] And if we're going to see if, if companies do a better job plugging in with, you know, local state associations and organizations or local education, it could dramatically help them improve on the manufacturing floor.
[00:16:32] Jim Kozel: Yeah. And that's what I think a lot of, where a lot of people fail is they try to reinvent the wheel.
[00:16:37] They're constantly working hard at doing something that somebody's already solved the problem. Somebody already has that process in their place that they could help you out with. It's just a matter of asking. And people do it internally in companies too. And this is what I try to do, what Lean is all about.
[00:16:50] And we're constantly preaching to my team. You're not in this alone. You can have a problem. That's okay. We all have problems. Get the people to help you. Rally the team. Rally cross functional teams. Don't be so prideful that you want, you know, I'm going to do this, you know, I'm going to keep sales shut out of this problem.
[00:17:09] I don't want sales to know. You let sales know, Hey, we have this problem, you know, and this is what we're working at, come help us. The more people you get involved in, the more people you reach out to, the more successful you'll be.
[00:17:20] David Lee: Yeah. And, uh, implementing something like this and going to a program like University of Kentucky, who would that be for?
[00:17:27] Is this for, in your opinion, all different manufacturers, or is this for a specific segments or. What's your opinion there?
[00:17:34] Jim Kozel: So they offer, one of the classes they offer, they actually offer several, but one of the classes they offer is a, uh, true lean, they call the program true lean, it's true lean for executive leadership, where they explain to your executive teams what it's all about.
[00:17:48] And where that's important is if you don't have the, if you don't have the buy in from the CEO down, if you don't have the top people involved in it, it's going to struggle. It may be successful, but it's really going to struggle. It's not going to, Because, you know, your CEO and your, your C level and your executive team, they set the culture in a company, they really do.
[00:18:07] But the overall, if you take a look at when you're trying to roll this thing out, if you start out with a model area and you just take a small group of people and you just work through it, you can control it. And then it'll just, it kind of like grows, it's kind of like a plant, right? It just starts to grow outward in there.
[00:18:25] If you get your executive team with, all on the same page, you're good, but they also offer what's called TrueLean University, where they've got, it's a, it's a three week, one week per month program that they offer, they teach TrueLean, and it's everything from eight step problem solving to, um, roles and responsibilities, the whole, it's like everything, soup to nuts of TrueLean, right?
[00:18:49] The Trulene program, when I went through it, because I still took the class, even though I had the education, I said, I want to learn from the masters. I want to learn from the people who started it. I took the class. And in that class, you had everybody from Boeing to a gas station called Quick Trip up in the North.
[00:19:05] Not, not the, not the Quick Trip in the South, the one with the K, not the cube. With the K, not the cube. And they had it because they, they do a lot of like food production, you know, all the foods that you buy under the sandwiches and stuff like that. They had their team in there. You can have, I mean, you could be a small company, you could be a big company.
[00:19:22] It didn't matter. There was a lot of people in that organization that were just wanting to learn to improve their organization.
[00:19:30] David Lee: So we've heard about how WorldEmblem operates. So now let's transition in our second segment and let's talk about you and how you Excel, uh, what's in your toolkit.
[00:19:43] Voiceover: We're going to fix it.
[00:19:44] Get the tool. Pick the one right tool. The right tool for the right job.
[00:19:51] Jim Kozel: Being, I am a major avid reader. I mean, I read, I read the physical printed books and, and Kindle. I am huge on Audible. I believe my car, if I, one time I had an hour drive, both directions to and from work, I honestly think I've ended up with like a master's degree in about 18 different subjects from that, from listening to Audible, uh, huge reader, huge Audible, but I really believe again, it falls exactly where we were just talking about, get a mentor or get a couple people.
[00:20:20] And if you're trying to accomplish something, ask for help and ask people to help you, and you, you'd be surprised who will actually say yes. CEOs from companies you never dreamed when you sit there, go, Hey, do you have a half hour? Can I spend a little bit of time with you? They will. You can reach out to anybody.
[00:20:36] And so I think my biggest part of the toolkit is don't be so prideful, be, be a humble leader and ask for help and, and, and try to seek out advice from people who've been there, done that. That's the biggest key. I'm also big in like, I have, you know, the good part about as you get old, you have to have patterns or you'll forget everything.
[00:20:53] So, you know, I started every day out with the workout. From the workout, I go through a whole, whole process of between the reading and I start the day out right. Same thing with lunches and dinners. I'm just really pattern oriented, which helps if you get great habits and you put them in your pattern, it's a big deal.
[00:21:10] Jake Hall: Yeah. That is really big. Awesome.
[00:21:13] David Lee: All right. And so. You're welcome. I'd like to actually hear a little bit about some specific stories on how this was applied. And for example, you mentioned that you all hit a hundred percent from an OEE perspective, right? Actual stories on how to get from point A to point B or how that actually took place.
[00:21:27] Uh, could you share maybe one or two stories about that?
[00:21:30] Jim Kozel: I can, I'll give it two. And the one that is really funny is, so our very first product was a name emblem for what at that time was Aramark, right? And so we've been making names for 30 years. And Randy boasts out, when I was a kid, I worked on the plant floor and I've worked all of these processes out and they're the best.
[00:21:47] And we've always tried to improve over and the best improvement we've ever had prior to about a year ago, a year and a half ago, was about a 5 percent improvement in productivity. And even then that was us just pushing the people and trying to find a way to rally it. It was tough, right? So when we rolled out this whole thing, we had the annual planning and lean is called Hoshin.
[00:22:09] So we do our Hoshin planning. And, uh, they were saying, well, what's that, what's like an exceptional goal. And so like, I'm going to do a 7 percent improvement across the board, all products in the U S and then we're going to do a 6 percent improvement across the board, all products in Mexico. So we go ahead, the first product we choose a single, or we call single head was names, right?
[00:22:30] First product we pick out is names. And they're like, how are we going to do this? And we literally followed, we made the name emblem, our model area, we rolled out Trulane, we followed all of the eight step problem solving and Kaizen procedures that we had learned through the Toyota organization. We paid one of the Toyota guys to come in and consult for us and help us through the process.
[00:22:50] And they're like, we ended up with a 15 percent improvement, 15. And we've also figured out a way to get the next seven for next year, even though I've said seven for next year, but we've targeted 15 again for next year. So you're talking a better than 30 percent improvement on a product that we've made for 30 years.
[00:23:10] David Lee: Wow.
[00:23:10] Jim Kozel: Crazy.
[00:23:11] David Lee: We went
[00:23:12] Jim Kozel: into Mexico. So that was a, that was a model line in the United States. We went to Mexico and if you've ever seen on caps, there's like a PV plus or PVC, I love it. You can buy it. It's not a cap, right? For an embellishment. We make that. It's one of our newer products. And that department never ran on time.
[00:23:29] We could never get the product out the door, no matter what we were chasing our tails in that thing. We decided, well, let's make PV plus our, our model area in Mexico. We did the exact same thing. We rolled out through lean. We had a consultant come in from Toyota. We got the whole process laid out. We did the roles and responsibilities, standard work.
[00:23:46] We did the whole thing. We have not been below 99 percent on time since, and we've had a 50 percent improvement in the productivity and the quality of that facility. So it's crazy when it's, and it's so, the worst part is it's so simple, it's very simple. The formulas are easy, but it's very hard because you got to get people just to buy in and get people to be a part of the, part of the group.
[00:24:09] So, so we, we talked a little
[00:24:10] Jake Hall: bit about that Trulene program with the Toyota university and the Kentucky partnership, but what's that timeline look like when you're bringing them in, Jim? What, what, because a lot of times from projects management pays for a project and they say, okay. We're going to come in, we're going to put in some sort of digital solution and it's installed.
[00:24:29] And five days later, they're saying, okay, what, tell me how much has improved, how much money is this saving me? And they think all of a sudden, a lot of this stuff is just almost instantaneous turnaround. When immediately, when you flip a switch, what is that timeline that you guys have experienced when it comes to.
[00:24:47] We're taking this new concept. We're beginning to implement it. We've rolled it out on the floor and now we're starting to see some improvements. What is a timeline like that? And
[00:24:57] Jim Kozel: so we are that company you talk about. We were kind of the other way. We put in a process and we flipped a switch and then 14 milliseconds after the switch is flipped, we're looking, okay, what's the benefit, right?
[00:25:08] And we're that, we're that company. We were that company. It is painfully slow in the beginning when you roll it out. You have to take your time, you have to create the standard work, you have to put a lot of thought into the roles and responsibilities. It is painfully slow in the beginning, but as it grows steam, it snowballs.
[00:25:29] So like we, we rolled out the PV Plus and it took three months just to get a 24 person team trained the way we wanted them to. The standard work written and the process running the way we wanted the process to be ran, right? Yeah. It took the next three months, we did two other departments and the next three months after that, we did six.
[00:25:51] So it grows quickly. And then once it grows, because everybody on that 24 person team in PV Plus is a, is a problem solver. And then you start adding the next department was like 50 people. Now you've got 75 problem solvers and it just builds on itself. To be real honest, it's a journey. Man, we started with TBM three years ago.
[00:26:10] So we're three years in. And we haven't touched the surface of what we're able to do in that organization. Just so just, and it's, it just keeps growing and it keeps, it's crazy how much it makes a difference.
[00:26:23] David Lee: Absolutely. And then from the perspective, uh, focused on maintenance, how does this impact like the maintenance workers lives specifically or that department or what does that look like, uh, typically?
[00:26:34] So I'm going to bring up the maintenance
[00:26:37] Jim Kozel: part is really kind of neat. They are obviously an integral part of that. Everybody talks. When you talk about true lean, you talk about lean manufacturing, anybody who's actually manufacturing the product is value add, anything else is a support, right? So everybody's putting all of their focus like on the machine operator, because if the needle's not going up and down, you're not making money.
[00:26:55] But the reality of the fact is the support teams obviously are super, super important. Maintenance is a key. So maintenance is in every Kaizen. They're at all part of the eight set problem solving. They are all trained in the lean. They all have a voice. And I'm not talking just the maintenance engineer.
[00:27:10] I'm talking about even the guy who's doing the PMs on the machines. And let me give you a reason why this is you. I'll show you the value of a second. Okay. On a Tejima sewing machine, when it's making out a name in between the letters, it has to stop and cut the thread, move over and start the new letter.
[00:27:27] Right. Makes sense. They go ahead. And if you have, it's a little hook knife that comes out. And if that hook knife is dull, or if the timing's off a little bit, or if a presser foot adjustment isn't perfect, it leaves a little thread when it cuts, or it doesn't cut at all, and it gets caught in QC and somebody has to pick the emblem up and actually hand trim that.
[00:27:46] Doesn't sound like much, right? But if you add one second to every emblem, because we have to trim the things because the hook knives are not being maintained properly, it's a simple hook knife, it's nothing, right? One second equals twelve and a half hours of additional labor per day that I have to spend to produce, which in some cases gets it to where you don't make the FedEx and UPS pickup, which means you're out of time performance and your customer is affected.
[00:28:12] One second, 45, 000 pieces, one second equals twelve and a half hours. It's nuts. So my maintenance team, because again, they're part of the, they're part of the Kaizens, they're part of the problem solving. Gets even deeper than that. They go ahead and they start changing out the hook knives as predictive.
[00:28:28] They're going to do a predictive maintenance. We're going to, we're going to change hook knives out. But then they realized that 70 percent of our envelopes use white thread. So the needle, which is needle three, we have all every colors standard across every Tajima machine in every name, every one of our facilities are all the same.
[00:28:44] Needle three is white. White thread needle three gets used 70 percent of the time. So hook knife wears out quicker. So they've got it down to which needle they have to change at which interval and throw the hook knife away to save us. And it's huge. You can't, I mean, the maintenance department is priceless when it comes to that stuff.
[00:29:04] They're also, I'll tell you something else. You know, everybody, when the first thing you do, when you get a resume from a manager, it always says they got lean manufacturing. The first thing they notice is 5S, right? You go on any one of my facilities, any one, it doesn't matter where you go, it's all the same.
[00:29:18] Go into a Norcross facility, I've got machines from 2004, 20 year old machines that look like the day they rolled off of the factory. They're clean, they're well maintained, we don't put operators out there that are untrained. An operator would not hit a machine until they've gone through the training properly.
[00:29:34] Nothing worse than an untrained operator will beat the crap out of your equipment every single time. Our operators want their equipment to run right, so they don't abuse it. Our managers don't want to have to downtime, so they don't let them abuse it. I don't want to replace the equipment, so I'm making sure they don't abuse it.
[00:29:49] Everybody is all on the same voice. They all have the same desire. And so yeah, though, maintenance is like, you can't even begin to talk about what that makes, the amount of difference that that makes. I
[00:30:00] Jake Hall: think that's a good roll into our third segment, which is the future of factories, where we cover what new trends are happening, what we're seeing across the industry, really where we should be looking ahead.
[00:30:12] Voiceover: Meet the future. To our futures. What future? The factory. My factory. Everybody's factory. I love your factory. My factory. My all.
[00:30:23] Jake Hall: So when we look at, uh, New innovations that we're seeing, you know, when it's coming to modernizing the workplace, where do you think the industry should focus, you know, when it comes to their organization?
[00:30:34] Jim Kozel: So, so many companies have offshored, you know, they've gone to China for, for stuff, or not even China, Taiwan, any of the Far East. And I think they realized right at the tail end of COVID when all of the shipping lanes got blocked, that maybe that wasn't the greatest idea, because there was a lot of product interruptions, you know, coming across that during that period of time.
[00:30:54] Now you have the threat of different tariffs going on, you have some of the part of it is unstable politically on the other side, the world side, you don't know what's going to happen with Taiwan, you don't know what's happening with China, it becomes a problem, right? Even if you near shore, you can near shore to Mexico, and we have a huge facility in Mexico, great people by the way, it's an awesome facility.
[00:31:15] Even if you're near shore to Mexico, Mexico's not the cheap labor country that it was. It's not bad labor. Actually, what's happened is even though the cost of the labor has gone up, the type of labor you can get in Mexico now has improved, like it's, This, there's some good quality people out of that, that we have in our facility, like super, super good.
[00:31:33] So you don't mind paying a little bit more, but it's not the cheap labor that it was. If you want to stay competitive, you either have to nearshore or reshore whatever product you got. And the only way you can do that, in my opinion, is either have really locked up procedures, something that the efficiencies have to be built in.
[00:31:51] You can't just run your companies like you ran it 10 years ago. You have to automate. Automation's gonna be the key. And I honestly believe if you take a look at ai, I think ai, everybody's looking at AI while you'll get scheduling or you'll be able to do less, I think you're gonna see, um, I think you're gonna see AI really play a part in machine design.
[00:32:09] So look, if you need a specialty machine to automate a line that hasn't been able to be automated before, I think you're gonna be able to create that equipment through using ai. So on the engineering side, I think that's gonna become just as critical as well. But if you don't automate it, if we can't reshore it, you're done.
[00:32:26] Amazon created this whole need where people want to have something in minutes. They don't want to wait three days to get a product out. You can't run out of product and you can't have service interruptions. It can't be done.
[00:32:38] David Lee: Awesome. Now, so on that note, obviously we've had a very interesting last few years and we see that the future is, is looking really bright.
[00:32:48] Weirder and weirder by the day. What type of obstacles do you see or large challenges when it comes to, uh, how things are going to go for factories in the future, whether it be personnel, uh, the next generation, as you mentioned, AI and the implementation of it, what type of hurdles do you see coming?
[00:33:05] Jim Kozel: I think the biggest thing is going to be on the personnel side.
[00:33:08] I, I think AI, AI is going to take care of, of some of that, but you know, my father was a General Motors retiree. You know, and when he was, you're talking a long time ago. And I remember when I was a kid, he was talking about, oh, you know, they want to bring robotics in and they're going to replace all of our line workers with robotics and everybody's going to become unemployed and the world's coming to an end.
[00:33:30] And if you take a look, robots have been now in the systems for 50 years plus, and guess what, we're still looking for workers. AI is going to do the same thing. It's going to redefine managers roles. It's going to redefine some of the stuff they got, but you still have a leadership. You'll always need to have the leadership role if you have people in there.
[00:33:48] And I don't ever foresee like a hundred percent dark plant in every industry. So I think, I think the personnel is going to, the evolution of the personnel and getting people to be able to stay up with technology is key. That's your biggest hurdle. You take a look at the other part of it too, and we're seeing it now, and I think it's going to continue to get worse, is the, um, the skilled trades.
[00:34:09] If you take a look like your welders or your tool makers, a lot of that stuff is really, we struggle to find people that are really good electricians. You know, you, you, you just, people don't want to do the skilled trade. They want to program and they want to write, you know, create websites and write code.
[00:34:26] That too has got to be one of the bigger hurdles we have to get past.
[00:34:31] David Lee: Awesome. And so, before we say goodbye to Jim, let's jump into our final segment, Fix It Funnies.
[00:34:40] Voiceover: The fix is in. It's making a really funny noise. Alright, fix it. Make it funny would be great, if you could make it funny. Your fate is fixed.
[00:34:48] David Lee: That's what makes it funny. Make sure it's funny.
[00:34:51] So, we like to talk about different work hacks, things like that, uh, creature comforts, things that make your day better, like cliff bars, insoles. Do you have any life hacks? Hacks that you've garnered over the last decades, uh, that you implement on a day to day basis.
[00:35:07] Jim Kozel: I'm the worst at being a coffee snob. Like the worst, like it has to be like, I have a specific type of bird grinder. It has to be a specific bean. Roasted in a specific way. Yeah, for sure. I am, uh, for sure. It's the caffeine in the coffee, but it has to be good coffee. And I laughed when they first gave the world emblem.
[00:35:28] They were buying Folgers. Broke my heart, but I fixed it. In a couple years. So what are you guys buying now? My boss got used to seeing, my boss got used to seeing like a Jamaican Blue coffee being on the expense report because I was that
[00:35:41] David Lee: fucking old jerk. So what is,
[00:35:45] Jake Hall: what is the go to coffee? You know, maybe, maybe in the days of the technology, it's the coffee that is making, you know, all we need.
[00:35:51] There you go, right?
[00:35:54] Jim Kozel: Love the Kona, love anything with a Kona blend, but it's got to be about a 30, 30 percent Kona blend and the same with the Jamaican Blue. It's gonna, it's gotta be a high, high percentage and it's getting more and more expensive as day goes on. But yeah, I love a really good cup of coffee.
[00:36:07] So
[00:36:07] Jake Hall: if you weren't in this industry, Jim, what would, what would you be doing? Would you be, would you be a coffee connoisseur traveling around looking for all the, you know, the different types of beans? Would you just be in your, in your, uh, your car more traveling across the country with your, with your new vehicle?
[00:36:23] What, what would you be doing if you weren't in this industry?
[00:36:26] Jim Kozel: You're not far off, Jake. Actually, it would be roasting or finding out the mechanics. I mean, it'd be the manufacturing side of the coffee, of the coffee product, right?
[00:36:34] Voiceover: Okay.
[00:36:35] Jim Kozel: It'd be more like the, more like the, how, how they roast and how they make it.
[00:36:39] You know, to me, I, there's a part of me will always be in manufacturing of something. There's so many different things that are made that are so interesting in the way they're made, and I've had an opportunity to benchmark a lot of different companies and see it, manufacturing, it's, it's probably the, the biggest part of the core of my being for sure.
[00:36:58] Absolutely.
[00:36:58] David Lee: Awesome. And so. Nowadays, are you enjoying any sort of specific content? You mentioned Audible earlier, uh, we're on a podcast as well. So, uh, whether it be Netflix, uh, Apple, iTunes, whatever the case may be, what are you consuming nowadays? And tell us about that.
[00:37:17] Jim Kozel: Huge, huge. I mean, and my Audible is so eclectic.
[00:37:21] Like I have. Everything from Ayn Rand, Atlas, Shrugged on Audible, all the way through, I mean, I'm a huge, uh, history buff, right? So, you know, Abe Lake can't, you know, Ben Franklin, a lot of the different audibles wrapped around that audible, Steve Jobs, the book on jobs is really, really good. Um, although Arnold Schwarzenegger's book, so I do a lot of autobiography, a lot of history and just huge inaudible and it's everything is, it could, it's very, very seldom fiction.
[00:37:54] Like Anne Aran is probably one of the, one of the few fiction books I have. It's almost always nonfiction. But it's, it's not boring nonfiction. I'm not reading textbooks, but it's, there's so much to learn. And I laugh because I just got done reading or listening to, uh, Ben Franklin's Outback, right? And you listen to it and you go, holy crap, 200 years ago or 220 years ago.
[00:38:17] And it's still the same. Like everything still applies. Right. How can you have, how can you have knowledge like that or, or fighting foresight like that, that's timeless and just learn from it?
[00:38:29] David Lee: Yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's like they say, history doesn't repeat itself, but it definitely rhymes. That's totally right.
[00:38:36] Yeah. Awesome. Thanks again for coming to the show, Jim. It has been absolutely wonderful to have you. This has been The Maintainers, a Bluecap Community Podcast. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, as we are on most major platforms, so you can be notified immediately the next time an episode goes live.
[00:38:57] Voiceover: This podcast is brought to you by Traktion. Tractian offers streamlined hardware and software solutions designed to make maintenance more reliable and profitable. Their AI powered condition monitoring and asset management solution predicts machine failures and unplanned downtime, allowing clients to save an average of 10 million every trimester.
[00:39:18] It's artificial intelligence quarterbacking your maintenance.