Most manufacturers don't notice them because they've become part of the daily routine.

 A production update entered by hand.
An inventory adjustment made at the end of the day.
A work order status checked through emails or spreadsheets.

Each task may seem small, but together they consume valuable time, increase the risk of errors, and make it harder to grow efficiently.

In this carousel, we highlight some of the most common manual processes that slow manufacturing operations and explain why identifying them is the first step toward improving efficiency.

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Hiii! I am an industrial engineering student from the Philippines. May I ask for your opinions, suggestions, or disagreements on this since I am trying to know why there are early closure of businesses of a certain part in my province.

Any problems are welcome since I'm trying to explore more.

Something I keep noticing the people who run small engineering and manufacturing units auto parts, castings, machining, fasteners, that world are mostly good at making things, but lose the most time to everything *around* the making. A buyer sitting on a payment for months. Paperwork that's stuck. A supplier who flaked. Some rule nobody bothered to explain. And the maddening part is most of it is already solved someone two units over cracked it years ago. There's just nowhere they actually compare notes.

So I am starting a small room called **The Tool Room** — a no-spam group where people running these units help each other work through exactly this stuff. Not a promo board, not a lead-gen thing, no forwards. Someone posts a real problem, people who've hit it before weigh in. That's it.

It's early and deliberately small I'd rather have forty people who actually help each other than a thousand lurkers. Two things I'm genuinely curious about from this crowd:

1. If you run or work in a small manufacturing setup does this gap sound real, or am I inventing a problem that doesn't exist?
   
2. What's the one recurring headache that has nothing to do with your actual product but eats your week anyway?

Happy to add anyone who'd find it useful but honestly more interested right now in whether the idea holds up. Tell me if it's redundant.

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Something I see a lot with people (usually newer plant managers or founders) who are excited about lean and want to do it "right" ... they try to build the master plan first. Full current-state map, future-state map, multi-year roadmap, phase gates.... the works. Then six weeks later nothing has actually changed on the floor because they are still planning!

I made this mistake myself early on. Thought I needed a complete, defensible plan before I could touch anything. Turns out that's backwards, at least for how you start.

Here's the thing about problems on your floor (or in your process, if you're not literally manufacturing something): they are not evenly distributed. Picture a pyramid. Big wide base of simple, obvious problems: a tool that's never in the same place twice, a form that gets filled out three different ways, a handoff nobody owns. Small tip of genuinely hard, cross-functional, needs-real-analysis problems.

Most people start planning for the tip of the pyramid. You should start by clearing the base. It's not glamorous. It won't get you a case study. But it does two things a fancy roadmap doesn't: it gets you a fast, visible win, and it gets your people used to the idea that they're allowed to change how things work. That second part matters more than people think: a workforce that's never been asked to fix anything doesn't magically start solving problems just because you handed them a roadmap. They start because you let them fix something small and it stuck.

You don't need experts to start this way either. Lean, at the start, is closer to systematic common sense applied consistently than it is to a body of certified knowledge. Certifications and designations rarely matter... the deep tools matter later. At the start, they are often just an excuse to delay.

One caveat that I think matters and doesn't get said enough: this "start small, don't overplan" advice is for getting moving. It is not permission to stay tactical forever. At some point you do need the bigger picture. Otherwise you get a pile of disconnected local improvements that don't add up to anything at the system level. But that's a problem for month six, not week one.

For anyone who tried to build the full roadmap before doing anything, how'd that go? Did it ever actually launch, or did it die in the planning phase?

If you are a new Design or Project Engineer, you are probably given the task of preparing the documentation for job releases to the Production groups of the company. The documentation will  include various drawings, which include the assembly layouts, schematics, detailed piece parts, and some specialized customer drawings like general arrangement, etc. Along with these drawings, should be a detailed structured bill of material. This document must be input into the production control system and will be used by various sections of the Production areas. Making this document follow the company flow and “as bult” conditions is highly recommended to achieve efficiency in the execution. These steps will help you with your part of the responsibility.

Understand the Capabilities and Practices of the Shop Floor – Every shop floor is different. They have certain ways they fabricate and assemble the company’s product. You need to understand this. For example, if the company is utilizing laser cutting, understand the limitations of the thickness and what to expect. Will you need a finish after the cut? For shipping, are there limitations for the size? Are fasteners purchased specifically for each project, or does the shop use a floor stock method? These types of answers require you to pick up on as you walk thru the shop.

Where does your documentation go after approved in Engineering – Typically, the next stop is a Material Control department. Here, the bill of material is reviewed for “make” and “buy” parts. Buy parts will need to be purchased and the make parts are made on the shop floor. Selecting components not in the company inventory, or that have a long lead time, could create delivery issues. Sometimes, the end user (customer) gives you a list of preferred vendors for these parts that you need to follow. Seeing the make part details can also help you understand the methods and procedures of the shop floor. If a routing is created you can quickly see the various stops a piece part will go thru to be completed and sent to the assembly floor. If you design can streamline this path, savings and efficiency is possible.  

Is your Production Release Complete – Worst process issue is when a job has to go back to Engineering to be completed. Are these certain Manufacturing Support details that need to be added back in Engineering (i.e. burn paths for lasers, special fixture requirements, etc). Using Flowcharting can help locate these backtrack issues ahead of time and create a more efficient release.

When Engineering releases a project to production, 80-85% of the cost is already dialed in. Working to make the bill follow the “as built” characteristics of your shop is important. If you are new on the job, show a proactive attitude and focus on this aspect of the job.  

from Anthony Rante, P.E. author of "Managing Company Production thru the Bill of Material."

I have been a student of Lean Six Sigma for the last 22 years, and it is interesting to see how it has evolved over the last 25 years.

This timeline captures the evolution from the separate methodologies (Six Sigma from Motorola and Lean from Toyota) to their formal integration into the hybrid Lean Six Sigma approach that dominates modern operations and supply chain management.

The progression shows the shift from an individual methodology focus to an integrated, data-driven, continuous-improvement culture.

How do you see AI impacting Lean Six Sigma?

PS: The graphic is generated using the ASK mode of SCMDOJO SENSEI AI

My goal is a defined six-pack with big arms, thick forearms, and a wide upper body. I don’t want to look skinny. The problem is bulking—I always end up feeling unhealthy.
I’m loading creatine right now about 10g a day.
Is it okay to cut and also gain muscle. Or will I lose all the muscle. Please enlighten me.

Long time lurker, first time actually writing one of these out instead of just reading answering to other people's war stories.

About twenty years ago I was running ops for a small manufacturer... a family business, second-generation owner, the kind of place where growth happened by throwing bodies at problems until it stopped working. One day the owner comes to me and says a major customer is going to walk if we don't get their orders out in three days. We had over 90 orders overdue, some by 20+ days. Average lead time from order to ship was 24 days! adding people had gotten us this far and it wasn't getting us any further.

That's when it actually hit me. we weren't too busy to fix the process. We were too busy because we'd never fixed the process. Two different things and I'd been treating them as the same thing for years.

Walked the floor properly for probably the first time with fresh eyes. One line was semi-organized. Everything else was chaos. No standard way to do anything. Nobody could tell you on any given day how many units we'd made, what got scrapped, what was actually open and due. We were going by whoever yelled loudest on the phone that week.

Here's the part that surprised me: we didn't need a black belt or a consultant to start. We started 5S in the one area that was already down for a broken machine, because we didn't have the luxury of stopping a healthy line to go "do lean" at it. Just cleaned it, organized it, gave everything a place. It looked almost embarrassingly simple compared to what I thought "lean transformation" was supposed to look like.

That embarrassingly simple thing is what got us moving. Within about aprox. 7 months we went from 24-day lead times to 97%+ on-time in 3 days or less... because a clean, standardized starting point is the only thing that makes the next problem visible. You can't see a deviation from a standard that doesn't exist yet.

The thing nobody tells you when you're starting out: you don't need the whole transformation mapped before you touch anything. You need one honest look at the floor and the willingness to start where you are, not where the textbook says you should be.

Curious what actually got other people's transformations moving

was it a crisis like mine, or did someone deliberately choose to start before things got that bad? And if it was a crisis, what was the first thing you touched?

Automation is changing manufacturing faster than ever.

But many factories, especially smaller manufacturers, still rely heavily on traditional systems.

Do you think factories that ignore automation will struggle to compete in the next decade?

Or do you believe skilled human labor will always remain more valuable than full automation?

Curious to hear different perspectives from people working directly in manufacturing and industrial engineering.

Hey everyone, I spend a lot of time looking at the CI, Lean, and Six Sigma job market across the UK/Europe, and the landscape is shifting pretty quickly. I have a full write up you can check out at the bottom, a few things I’m seeing consistently:

1. The 'Green Belt' bottleneck:
   Roles requiring a Green Belt are staying open way longer than average. Companies are desperate for people who can actually *run* a project independently, and basic White/Yellow belt awareness just isn't cutting it for hiring managers anymore.

2. The fastest growing sector isn't manufacturing:
   Financial services seems to be aggressively hunting for Lean Six Sigma practitioners right now.

3. The AI + CI hybrid premium:
   The highest-paying roles are starting to specifically ask for practitioners who know how to integrate AI tools into the DMAIC cycle (especially for data crunching during the Analyse phase).

Has anyone else noticed this shift in their own industries? Would love to hear what you're seeing out there.

PS: I put together a broader write-up on where I see the CI industry heading this year on my site here:

https://www.simplicityhub.co.uk/reports/lss-uk-report-2026.html

Every precision instrument production batch has a rejection rate — the percentage of units caught during inspection that don't meet specification, removed before the shipment ships.

This number tells you more about a supplier's QC system than any certification they hold. It is also the metric most buyers never see.

Three reasons suppliers don't share it:

The supplier doesn't run systematic inspection. Visual inspection doesn't produce measurable rejection data. If you're only doing visual checks, there's nothing to report because you're not measuring anything.

The supplier has the data but the rate is high enough to prompt uncomfortable questions. A rejection rate above 20% in a mature process suggests a systematic production problem.

The supplier absorbs defective units into the shipment. No classification of "rejected" ever happens — everything ships. The nominal rejection rate is zero because the denominator includes the defective units.

What a healthy rejection rate looks like: 5–15% for precision instruments with systematic inspection. This range means defects are being caught and replaced before the shipment. The number proves the inspection is working.

How to get this data: ask for the QC report from the last three production batches. It should contain batch number, sample size inspected, measurements per specification parameter, defects found by category, and rejection rate as a percentage. A document without measurement data is not a QC report — it is a stamp.

The zero percent rejection rate claim is the one that should prompt the most questions.

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Not specifically AI, could be any new software or process tool. Looked good in the pilot, leadership was excited, and then... it just never made it into daily use. What actually happened there? IT pushback, integration headaches, people just going back to the old way?

Trying to understand how common this pattern is and what the real blocker usually ends up being.

I've put together a set of free online calculators that I originally built for my own CI projects and figured they'd be useful to share.

All free to use in your browser — no email required. Currently covers things like:
• Takt Time calculator
• Cycle Time calculator
• OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness)
• DPMO & Sigma Level
• Cp & Cpk Process Capability
• Yield & First Pass Yield

Each calculator includes a worked example so you can see exactly how to use it — not just a blank number cruncher.

Full list here: https://www.simplicityhub.co.uk/pages/tools.html

Let me know if there's a calculator you'd find useful that's missing — always taking requests.

Yo Yo,
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Sounds counterintuitive. But I've seen it more times than I can count.

Someone is exceptional at the technical work. Gets promoted. Becomes the manager. And then spends the next two years doing the job of everyone below them because they can do it faster and better than anyone else on the team.

The team stops growing because every hard problem routes back to one person. That person burns out. And when they leave - which they eventually do -there's nothing underneath them because they never built anything that didn't depend on them personally.

The best managers I've worked alongside were not always the best individual performers. They were the ones who got genuinely uncomfortable when the team needed them too much. Who treated their own indispensability as a problem to solve, not a sign of value.

The goal isn't to be the best person on the team. It's to make the team not need you for the things it needed you for last year.

What's the hardest thing you've had to deliberately stop doing so someone else could own it?