The Power of Raw Video by Luke Haas, Owner of Elite Marble and President of ICPA.

Each POLYCON I seek to have one big take away or “ah ha!” moment.  At past POLYCONs these have included; using a drywall sprayer for spray granite,  ¾” foam for thick edge tops that were pre-cut, and working with a Theory of Constraints consultant (TOC), along with others.

The TOC work was a coincidence. I was rereading the book “The Goal” on the way to POLYCON 2016 in Raleigh, to try to re-inspire my work and try to break through some bottlenecks in the plant.  With the help of the consultant we met there, we created buffer zones inside our shop.  We started to look like a subway for sinks, not sandwiches, yet still we were missing something.

The feeling of “missing something” led me to countless internet searches and research.  Finally, I searched “Buffer Management Meetings”, which is a daily meeting held with key employees to discuss the status of work inside each of those zones and how the work was flowing, on YouTube.  I found Brad Cairns of the Lean Learning Center talking about making Buffer Zones more visual.

After the last POLYCON in Dallas, I spoke briefly with the presenters from ECI, who spoke about waste in the workplace.  The conversation inspired me to contact Brad Cairns to discuss what I felt was missing.  The first thing he asked was, “How’s your culture?”   I replied, “Well, it stinks actually.”   We spoke a while longer and told me he’d talk more once I read the book, 2 Second Lean, by Paul Akers and think about your culture. I read the book that night and talked with him the next morning.

Now months later, we are on a Lean Journey with our hybrid model of TOC and Lean.  We meet with our entire company each day for 20 minutes after lunch.  The start of everyday has 15 to 30 minutes set aside for employees to improve their own work space.  We document those improvements in a simple video from my phone and replay their work every day at the start of the meeting.  The video is raw, sometimes funny, and holds everyone accountable and excited to improve!  Since we started in May, we now have over 1,000 visually documented improvements the entire company knows about.  We have just started, and the process isn’t perfect, but that is the point, it is evolving and so is our culture to improve.

Simple, Raw, unedited video will change the way you see and do things, I promise.