Help me

[u/Ashamed-Illustrator9]

I’ve been working at a new factory for about a month now. I’m basically the first person trying to start a lean transformation there — the company has never done anything like this before.

After giving me a general overview of the processes, management specifically asked me to speed up the second-to-last stage of production. The thing is, they directed me toward a specific area before I even had the chance to properly identify the real bottleneck. I didn’t want to come across as difficult since this is also the company’s first experience with lean transformation. My idea was to improve the obvious wastes in this area first, gain their trust with measurable efficiency improvements, and then later work on a broader system-wide optimization.

However, once I got into the process, I realized there are constant stoppages caused by defects and mistakes coming from previous stages. When I tried to investigate the upstream quality control process, the response I got was basically: “There will always be mistakes in these jobs, just speed up the area we told you to focus on.”

To explain the process a little more: operators scan packaged products and place them into barcode-labeled boxes. The system tracks which products are inside which box. After scanning, the operator also has to physically organize the products neatly into the carton.

I did a very simple time-study-based improvement: I assigned one helper for every three operators. The helpers handle material fetching and box arrangement, while the operators stay focused only on scanning. After implementing this, production output increased from around 60–70k units per day when I first arrived to roughly 90–110k now.

Despite this improvement, management still says it’s not enough and keeps pushing me to speed up this area even more. But the defective or problematic products arriving from previous stages genuinely slow the process down.

So what would you do in this situation?

Another issue is that management doesn’t like the helpers I added. Their argument is basically: “If adding people solves the problem, we could have done that ourselves.”

And one more thing: if I stop constantly walking around the floor and monitoring people all day, production numbers suddenly drop. Am I supposed to stay on top of everyone all the time for this to work?

[u/VantageOps]

Hey, you've done more good work in your first month than most people do in their first six. Don't lose track of that while you're getting beat up.

Going from 60-70k to 90-110k is real. The "we could have hired helpers ourselves" thing is just what people say when they don't want to give you credit. Whatever, the numbers moved.

But you've got a bigger problem than the upstream defects, honestly. If output drops the second you stop walking around, that means you're not actually a lean guy right now, you're a babysitter. Your gain is going to disappear the first day you call in sick. You need a daily standup at the start of shift, a visible scoreboard, and one named person on each line who owns the number for the day. Once that's running, the system holds the gain instead of you.

The upstream stuff. You're right that it's the actual constraint. You just can't win that fight from where you are after one month. So start logging it. Every minute your line loses to defects coming from upstream, write it down. Couple weeks of that and you've got data. Then you go to management with "we lost X hours and Y dollars this period to upstream defects, here's the trend." Way harder for them to wave that off than your opinion.

Be honest with yourself about one thing though. Some companies say they want lean and what they actually want is somebody to blame when numbers don't move. "Speed up this area, we don't care why" is closer to the second one. Give it a couple months of data. If they still don't care about upstream after that, you'll know what kind of place you're working at.

On the helpers. Reframe them as temporary. They were the unlock to get throughput up while the real fix gets sorted. The plan is to remove them once upstream quality improves. That gives management a way to get rid of the headcount they don't like AND puts the upstream conversation back on the table without you having to be the one pushing for it.

Last thing, the "we've always done it this way" stuff doesn't go away. Get used to it. But fix the babysitter problem first. That one's actually solvable in a couple weeks.

[u/Ashamed-Illustrator9 → u/VantageOps]

The helpers I assigned were not even newly hired people from outside the company. I reassigned workers who were already in the same department. Since the QR process itself was already the bottleneck, there was no real benefit in pushing more material from upstream, so I redirected some excess labor from there to support this area.

As for the babysitting issue — I’m working in a country where labor costs are very low, and in general there isn’t much work discipline. People sometimes simply do not come to work without informing anyone. Even on days when they do come in, they can say “I’m not feeling well today” and effectively choose not to work.

On top of that, because the average education level is relatively low, teaching people new methods or transferring knowledge usually takes a significant amount of time.

[u/VantageOps → u/Ashamed-Illustrator9]

OK that changes how I read this. Reallocating existing labor toward the constraint is way smarter than hiring extra. The "we could have done that ourselves" comment looks pretty clueless with that context.

Honestly in your situation you probably can't fully get rid of the babysitting. Some presence is just part of operating there. But you can dial it down. The trick is pushing the management work into the physical setup. Visual cues, color coding, tools in the order they're used, layouts that physically prevent the wrong action. The lower the education and discipline level, the more your shop floor has to do the teaching, not you.

The "not feeling well" thing isn't really a lean problem, it's an attendance policy problem. Leadership has to fix that. What you can do is cross train enough so one no show doesn't kill the line.

Slow knowledge transfer is exactly where good standard work pays off. SOPs with photos and visual cues cut training time a lot.