This all happened nearly three decades ago. Since then, the company has been through a series of mergers and acquisitions. Thus, the only thing I can be certain of is that things are different today—at least I hope so.

It was Tuesday afternoon of a traditional five-day kaizen event. Monday morning had been spent training the team on the basics of “just in time,” including some fundamental principles and a 1:1 flow simulation to demonstrate some of the possibilities.

Beginning midafternoon on Monday and continuing into Tuesday morning was “walk the process”—mainly looking at material flow, where things bunched up, and things that wasted people’s time (there was no shortage of that). By Tuesday afternoon the team was being guided through the process of developing a “vision”—a fairly idealized version of what would be possible with some changes.

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