Hi, I’m Luke.
Today on Out of Darts, we are going to go through our top 10 or more lean warehouse improvements.
Let's get going!
My name is Luke; I run a 3D print farm with around 80 3D printers.
The print farm is part of an e-commerce business selling all the parts, tools,
supplies, and accessories you could possibly want to upgrade your foam blasting arsenal.
Over the past six years, this business has grown dramatically.
We currently have a team of eight people, including myself, and
as we've grown has become more and more important to come up with lean
manufacturing techniques, processes, and improvements as we go along.
I got really inspired a few years back (maybe three years ago now) on my lean journey
after reading Paul Aker's book.
I highly recommend it if you haven't read it already.
It’s called “Two-Second Lean.”
He's got a variety of different books, but that one's a great starting point.
You can read it in about an hour,
maybe an hour and a half, depending on how fast you read, and it's a good place to get started.
So, we did a lean warehouse tour when we moved into this warehouse back in December of 2020.
Now it's been a little bit.
It's been a little over a year,
and we've had a chance to really get more organized and make a lot more improvements.
So, today I’m going to walk you around the warehouse, we're going to show you all the new
stuff we've done, and we're hoping to make this an annual video because it really encourages me
to stick with these improvements and make sure that every day we get just a little bit better.
Let's do it!
So here we're in our studio,
and one of the big improvements here was simply getting more blasters up on the wall.
We had bins everywhere, and it was impossible to find a blaster when we
needed to test it for a customer or test a configuration or an install.
So now we added two more full panels here and another panel or two over there so we can have
the majority of the blasters that we would ever need to reference up and accessible all the time
without having to dig through bins and label things and try to remember where they were.
Up here in our studio, we have two benches that get moved around in a rather tight space.
One's lower-lying for photography, so we built a custom bench that's got
a white roll on it for doing the photography.
But the big improvement here is we put wheels on both of them.
And rather than just wheels that can infinitely move around,
they are wheels that can actually be dropped into position.
So, my big bench here with four steps down,
I’ve got a rolling bench, and I can get this out of the way,
But then, when I want to do an overhead video where we need it rock-solid,
I can drop it back down on the actual wooden feet because this is just a homemade wooden bench.
That gives me a nice rock-solid surface to work
on, but I still have the option to move it really handy.
Next up, we've got our workshop.
We got this generally organized.
Our benches here are currently all cleared off.
This has been a disaster area for the entire first year that we were in the space.
So only in the last month or two did I actually get everything organized,
got rid of a lot of the clutter, gave stuff away, sold things off,
donated some stuff, and then ultimately got things at least a little better organized.
It's not finished; it’s not final, but it's at least a lot more usable,
and it saves some major time digging through piles of debris.
One of the biggest improvements we made was getting stairs to our studio upstairs.
We used to climb up a very rickety rolling ladder, which is probably not OSHA-approved or very safe.
The most massive improvement we made in the warehouse was finally adopting a zone system.
The entire picking area, which is where you grab a piece of product
to actually pack it up for an order, now has a specific zone and location.
So over here, for instance, you'll see this is “A3.”
They're organized by category, and each level is a specific area.
So, when you're picking, if you don't know what the item is, you can very easily locate it.
Additionally, the picking slips themselves are in order of the picking path so you can logically
walk to an item and know that the next item isn't behind you; it's always in front of you.
We hope to in the future implement a system where we're picking multiple orders at a time,
but it does involve more software.
One of the really nice things about the warehouse is we do have natural light.
However, we don't really have skylights,
so there's not enough light in the warehouse in general.
When we have dark and cloudy days up in the Northwest, we didn't have enough light,
So, we put light in…
Like here.
And here.
But not here because this is still an upcoming project.
Our print area definitely needs more light so
you can see the printer and see what you're working on.
But, I was trying to figure out the power requirements,
and even led strips when you're trying to light this many printers take up a little bit too much.
So, I’m gonna get that figured out next.
However, we did do a lot of other things in the print area.
First, we have these nice magnetic tags all over the place,
such as a “Testing: Luke” tag and “waiting on 3D prints.”
These various different tags allow people to know that it's not a production print
it's not to go out to a customer, but it needs to go to me or something else.
We also made a little warning tag for polycarbonate, so if you're printing
polycarbonate, you don't accidentally print something else or print the wrong kind of file.
These individual tags let us do a variety of different things.
Here's one that says “prep immediately.”
That means it's something that was rushed and needs to go out.
When you start a print, you’ll slap that on the printer, and then we know when the
print comes off that it's something that's important and needs to be done right away.
Right next to this one is another type.
These are the same dry erase magnets,
and here we put actual order numbers on them to keep track of what is for what order number.
So, you got your order number, you start your prints, or you start multiple prints.
Sometimes, you might have multiple orders on one print bed, but we'll write both down.
Now, these systems were both come up with by my two print texts,
our previous one, Eric, and our new one Carrie.
So, it's nice to see the team themselves coming up with great ideas because I
can't do it all, of course.
The best person to make an improvement in any
given department is the person who does the job day in and day out.
That's really important.
Lean can't just be a thing from the top down where you're forcing other
people to do stuff a different way for no reason that they may not understand.
It's really got to be about the team themselves figuring out what they want to do.
I feel like I keep saying these are big improvements, but they really are because
every little improvement you make can have a really dramatic effect in the business.
One of the big ones we've done during this illness era over the last two years is we
switched to one filament supplier, and they’re US-based, and that's Proto-Pasta.
Behind me, we've got all of the Proto-Pasta colors.
Each one is labeled with a sample swatch of the color for visual representation,
and it’s labeled with the actual name.
On top of that, because we only have one supplier, it's a lot easier to keep track of
what materials they have in stock, and we order enough in advance to keep on top of it.
What was happening previously is we had five or six suppliers,
and they were independently going out of stock all the time.
Proto-Pasta has fixed that problem for us completely by having a supplier here in the
US that has the US polymer ready to go, right around the corner here in Vancouver, Washington.
This is our prep station.
At the prep station, we now have cards for
virtually every single product that requires hardware or specialty preparation.
That way, if one of my team members comes over here and hasn't prepped it before,
right next to the bin is the hardware and the card that tells you what needs to be done to the part.
It makes things a lot more clear, especially when you've got a larger team and growing every day.
This is our grocery, where we've now combined all of the different
various hardware and parts that we frequently source into one place.
Now, these parts may exist in other parts of the warehouse,
no pun intended, but this is our restocking area so that we can go to one location and say,
“do we have enough of this on stock for future orders and for future needs.”
The next step here is to add Kanban cards to each that give us the lead time and
approximately how many we should keep on hand and notify us when we get too low.
This has helped a lot because having everything in one spot instead of spread
throughout the various stations of the warehouse makes things much more clear.
With the larger warehouse overall, we have embraced carts.
We use carts like these for picking, for putting orders on…
We also use them for outbound DHL, and we got one for UPS.
Additionally, we really like bins.
We use bins everywhere, of course, but we have specific bins for specific purposes.
These two bins are just used for product picking, meaning if it's a small order,
your order goes in here; if it's a medium-sized order with more items, in here.
A larger order, of course, gets a larger bin.
But this isn't used elsewhere in the warehouse.
That way, when we're wandering around the warehouse, like over here, for instance,
you don't have a bin like this getting confused with a customer order.
If we see this anywhere, we know instantly it's a customer order;
it’s not used for storage or anything else like that.
These are our two identical matching packing stations.
Two people can be packing at the same time; they have all the same tools,
so that in itself was an improvement, especially when we hit that holiday season
when we've got to work faster and have more people actually packing and picking orders.
Additionally, we now implemented a double-check system which is essentially
one person picks the order. Another person packs the order and verifies the contents.
We go so far as to triple-check things for international orders because, really,
for us to ship something to you and screw it up, that's really our worst fear,
and we want to make sure we get those orders out as accurately as possible.
Another improvement is revamping our office.
We had a real mismatch of different variations of computers, monitors, mice and keyboards,
and different variations of software that were incompatible.
We are 100% on mac, and the reason for that is I have 15 years,
20 years experience on mac, and I am the IT department.
So, one of the nice things we did this year is we got all matching laptops, all of which have USB-C.
You plug in the one USB-C and you get a mouse, keyboard, and monitor.
It's a 27-inch 4K monitor, so you can put two things up at the same time on screen
and see really nicely what you're working on, and it makes it very interchangeable.
I can jump over to this station or this station; my home office has the same setup as well,
so I only have the one computer, whereas I personally used to have two.
Additionally, other stations throughout the warehouse have the same setup,
making it really easy to take your laptop with you and be very portable.
Here you'll see our kit station.
This is where we bag and bundle a lot of different combo kits that have a little bit of wire,
a switch, a screw, some motors springs, whatever comes together in our pre-bundled kits, which are
sort of like pre-selected options for people, so they know they're getting all the parts they need.
One of the things that happens with these is they become a little bit problematic in
packing and keeping accurate, so we have these great checklists.
We used to put the checklist on the outside like you see here,
but they were becoming too cumbersome.
So, we now put them on the inside, and so when the kit's first bagged,
the list goes on the inside, and then when it goes over to packing, they'll pull the list,
and they'll look at it and double-check it again for actually shipping it out.
Each one of these lists is very specific to add-ons that wouldn't be bagged in here,
allowing us to make sure that we do this really accurately.
This whole idea was really Diego and Ashley -- my warehouse manager and one of my techs here.
They really came up with a good system to make sure that we don't make mistakes on these.
Sometimes the cheapest solution is the best one.
Everybody's got their own method for doing different various tasks,
and we don't all do everything identically depending on personal preference.
One of the things that we do frequently here is we've got our little rocket blaster,
and it's got four screws that need to be installed in the end.
Now Tarik and I came up with a really convoluted,
complicated mechanism to try to install multiple ones at a time and use a hopper.
It never worked; we spent way more time on it than it was worth.
I was going to make a custom jig, and meanwhile, Carrie just took a piece of scrap plastic,
a magnet, and made a way to just essentially hold that little magnet and push this in.
Now I offered to 3D print this for him, but this version has essentially been working for
months for him without needing replacement.
Meanwhile, Greg uses a completely different tool for the same job,
and I kind of like that. I think it's good that everybody finds what works best for them,
for their hands, for their dexterity, and their personal preference.
I really hope you enjoyed this video.
I love working on these warehouse improvements,
and some of my team has really gotten great at that as well.
If you have any questions, do put them down in the comments.
We're happy to answer them.
While I do appreciate emails, the volume of emails I generally get on print farm tours,
and behind-the-scenes stuff is pretty heavy.
So, if you email me about a specific question, you might be less likely to get a response overall.
To my regular viewers and new viewers alike, what other content would you like to see?
We are well overdue for a warehouse tour,
but if you compare and contrast our previous lean video and the current one, you'll see
that it was a pretty big mess compared to now, so maybe we should get that going pretty soon.
Do let us know if you'd like to see that in the comments, and until next time, I’m out of darts.