We were three weeks into an engagement: food manufacturing, a mid-size facility, and one line with a downtime problem that had been “worked” for over a year.
Engineering had looked at it. Maintenance had patched it. The plant manager had escalated it. A capital request for new equipment was already in the queue.
On a Wednesday Gemba walk, I stopped to watch a line operator do her changeover. She’d been on that line for six years.
Without my asking, she said: “You know it runs fine if you do it this way instead.” She showed me. Forty-five seconds of a different sequence. Nothing dramatic, just not what was written down.
We ran it that way for the rest of the shift. Downtime dropped by 70%.
The capital request never got approved, because it never needed to be.
Not a one-off
That wasn’t a one-off. The person closest to the problem usually has the best working theory. They just don’t get asked, or the system doesn’t make it easy to answer.
Most organizations don’t have a system for drawing out what the floor already knows. So the knowledge stays local, and the problems stay systemic.
If your system doesn’t surface operator knowledge, you’ll keep funding solutions to problems you don’t actually understand.
Chapter 1 of the book, The Floor Knows, starts from exactly this idea. The Execution Gap by Gerald Tice explains why manufacturing transformations fail in the last 100 feet, and lays out the method for closing the gap. Get the book, or start with the free Companion Workbook.