[0:02]Well, hello everyone. It's time to take a tour of Fastcap. Fastcap is located in Bellingham, Washington, just about two hours north of Seattle. Up in a little tiny town called Ferndale right on I5. It's a beautiful place. We have about a 50,000 square foot facility. It's just really, really cool place to work. About 110 windows, lots of natural light everywhere coming in. We're going to take you inside. Now remember, it's simple. It's not fancy. So when you get inside, just a big overview. We got three big ass fans keeping everything cool and lots of natural light everywhere. When you walk in the front door, it's all stand up. We made all the desks out of our fast pipe system. Everything simple. Now, people always say, well do people like to stand up? We wouldn't have it any other way. Is it difficult to stand up? Sure. It takes a little time to get used to it, but we love it. Everything's on wheels. Everything's flexible including the filing cabinets. Now, this is looking from the office back into the shipping area and from the shipping area back in towards the office. You notice there's no walls. This is our order desk and it's all on wheels and it's all color coded based on the day of the week. So whatever day of the week is, the invoices are that color, so we can quickly tell whether or not we're behind or ahead, whether or not we have flow. When you look up on the wall, all the boxes that we ship in are all color coded. So it's easy to identify what size box is the perfect size to ship in and then when you need to find it, it's color coded down below as well. All LED lights, all radiant heat. It's just an incredible place to work. So this is our grocery aisle and right here is our shipping terminal. So 90% of all of our finished products are right here. We build the convonnds every day and everything's clearly done through visual controls and the last five digits of the UPC code. So if you want to know what's there, there's a picture of it right here and all these labels have been made by us. And it just allows us to manage our daily picking. As you can see Thomas is down here picking an order right now on a cart that we made. And it's just very simple. This one main aisle all the way down to the shipping terminal and it's out the door. Our showroom, our conference room very simple, stand up, no chairs, the meetings don't last very long. Our graphic design area, again, everything stand up. Everything's on wheels. Everything's flexible. We want to be flexible because our needs are always changing. All our tools are carefully shadowed. We never search for anything. We never struggle because the minute you struggle, you have waste. Hi, I'm Graham and welcome to graphics. This is the most magical cell in the whole building. We produce all our labels and inserts for over 700 products right here in this tiny cell that's this big. Back here, we've got all our paper racks of the different labels we use. Over here we've got our computer where we develop the a six step process that anyone can come off the street, follow the very basic steps and get the job done in two to three minutes. And then over here, if ever anybody runs out of paper, we've developed a very simple Kanban card system where anyone can understand exactly what they need to do for any process. All right, so at the end of the day, we've got a great process that that allows anyone to come in on their first day and run a $150,000 printer for a giant company producing all the labels and inserts just out of the first day. Our bathrooms are beautiful, fresh flowers, granite countertops, polished concrete floors, the day toilet seats. I mean, it's really a great place to work because we want work to be fun and enjoyable. We keep it sparkling clean every day. Callie cleans the floors with automatic floor cleaners. We have two of them and everything just stays at a very high standard. This is our sandbox where we meet every morning for our morning meeting and a new person leads it every day. Our kitchen, open to the entire facility, no walls. We even have a lean dishwasher. It does a load in just two minutes. No batch work. Our main production line, everything flowing towards the shipping terminals. You'll see how that works here in just a minute. It's very cool. See that's an aisle where the product gets made, flows down to the area where we package it. People are in the cells, they pick, package and ship. Everything two hours fax to truck. It's pretty amazing. So this is another cell where we make the laser jam and Austin is laying out a tape measure on an aluminum pole to make the laser leveling device. This is a nice little cell that he works around and makes one product at a time. Again, all of his tools are carefully shadowed in Kaizen foam. No struggle, work should be easy. He goes from one cell to another cell. Notice where he grabbed the safety glasses directly above the saw. Goes ahead, makes a cut, and now what's really cool about this, you're going to see, is Austin's going to have to clean out the aluminum pipe. You goes, sticks in a vacuum, hits it with a foot pedal. It sucks the aluminum dust right out. It's so fast and so easy. This is an engineering cell and also where we make the best fence and those are the engineers standing up in the production area. We do all of our 3D modeling and then we go ahead and do stereo farming. Okay, so this is our engineering team and they both have their own scooters. Dug's version. Okay, so what happens, dug, let off your foot? So now you can let go of it. As soon as I put my weight on, then this little pad lifts up, but then I put it off of it. There you go. Now it stands up. Now look at JT, another engineer. He has another design. His is the kickstand most. That's how we think here in Fastcap. You guys are crazy. Pretty awesome. This is our shadow board of all the products that we make. So we do lateral thinking. We walk up, we look at it and say, hey, we've made a part like that before. We've got scooters here that allow us to get around the entire facility. Again, this is the engineering cell right on the manufacturing floor where we make everything. Our wood shop is only missing one thing, sawdust. It's immaculate. All the tools are carefully laid out and organized so we can be highly productive. Again, we're not about struggling. We're about making work easy and fun. Everything's work goes to me. Everybody enjoys work because work doesn't have to be a struggle. This is our CNC area where we make all of our molds. All of our toolboxes are carefully shadowed out with our Kaizen foam system. So when we go to get a tool, it's right where we want it. There's no surprises like, oh, what happened to that tool? I know that's somewhere. We're not spending hours a day looking for things. We know exactly where everything is. So again, work is enjoyable. It makes all the difference in the world when you take the time to make this happen. Now, the way this looks like this is every day we make an improvement. These are our injection molding machines. They're Sumitomos. They're really high tech. They're very cool. They have robots on them to remove the parts. All the tools again are shadowed out for the Sumitomos. These are all of our injection molds down below with the parts actually magnetically attached to them. These are all the colorants and materials that we use with Kanban cards carefully inserted in. All the parts are glued on the front. And then this is our narrow aisle system for retrieving inventory, which is waste, which we're embarrassed to say, but we have some of it and we're getting rid of more and more of it every day as we bring on more and more manufacturing. But this is a very cool system that allows us to work in a very tight constrained area. Now, the operator is actually not having to steer it because it's wire guided.
[7:31]He wants to retrieve something or put something away, he can retrieve from both sides simultaneously. It's really an amazing system to manage waste, if you will, and it works excellent. Now, in the front of all of our inventory racks are build cells. We have about 700 products and there's about 50 build cells where we actually build the products. And we've done it really in just a 4x8 section that's very flexible. We can change it for whatever product we need to build. We have little station set up with jigs and it's just really works well. We have the inventory down below. We build the product up above. Just a great system. Allows for a lot of flexibility and again, it's very simple. We don't have all these fancy work benches. We just use the racking system to do that. Now we have an automatic shrink wrapper which allows our people to build pallet loads because we ship a couple semi's a day. And what happens is they just drive that onto there. Push a button on the forklift and then it automatically starts to spin and wrap. Now the operator can go away, do something else. When it's done, it automatically cuts itself and then the operator comes back and retrieves the pallet. Puts the label on it and it's off into the truck. It's a very efficient system and it again, relieves the burden off our people because we don't want our people to work hard. We want them to work smart. The facility again, is just magical to work in. What are you doing? Clean it. Wow, why do we keep the forklift so clean? Why do we do all this? This is the worst it'll ever be. Wow, you polish this like pretty regularly or what what's the deal? Once a month, everything gets maintained. Battery gets checked, uh, water levels. So we keep everything in our facility almost perfect. Keep the road tight. Things are not perfect because we even have junk. So this is our nudge aisle right here and you might wonder, what does nudge mean? It's junk spelled backwards. It's our way of being funny. So everything that we 3S out of our facility goes down there at the end. I'll show you. Yes, I'm riding a scooter down the aisle. So down here at the very end, we have all the stuff that we take out of and sort out of our office. So there's mine right there, Paul's desk junk. So anything we don't need, we get it out of here and then we'll sort through this every three or four months and we'll throw a bunch of it out. But yes, Fastcap has junk. It's called nudge and we get rid of it out of our work area so that we always work in a perfect area that's clean and organized. So we even do lean in our aircraft. We have a corporate plane and I fly that. I just shut down my plane and I developed a lean procedure for shutting it down. As you see, I've got a lot of switches here that have to be turned off perfectly. And they could be in a position like this or like this and it's difficult to tell because of the kind of switches these are, whether or not they're in the correct position for the landing configuration and the shutdown. And see the red line I put across the top of those? Those red lines indicate to me that all switches are in the correct position for final shutdown. I just shut the plane down and you can see I've got the same thing over on this side and everything is in the correct position. So auto fuel, manual, everything needs to be in that position with the red line. Which indicates to me at a glance without any struggle that all the switches are correct. So lean applies to the factory floor and to the cockpit and everywhere else. There is a quick overview of Fastcap and we get around this whole facility on razors because it allows us to overcome the size of this place because it's 50,000 square feet. It is absolutely huge. And I'm going to do one last thing to end this tour just for fun. I'm going to run up the stairs so you can see what it's like. Up above so you can see how beautiful this facility is. So there you have it, a lean tour of Fastcap. The reason I did this is I get two or three tour requests every day and I just couldn't keep up with the demand. I thought, how can I make this process lean? So I made a video to kind of show people. Now you can watch it with your team, you can pause it, you can talk about it. It's all there. And the way we accomplished all this is so simple. We sweep, sort and standardize everything in the morning when we come in. Everyone makes one improvement. We have a morning meeting, we build a culture and then we work and I am fully engaged in the process. The leader has to be engaged. You got to keep lean simple and you got to make it fun. The rest is history. And then we even have time for a burger party on people's birthdays and today, happily my birthday. They have my dogs at Fastcap who are just amazing. You love our animals. Super dances for. They have synchronized dances at Fastcap too with the dogs. Oh, so Clint, what do you have there? Uh, it's an oversized Fastcap. No, for my birthday. Oh, wow, cool. So you so you made that, eh? Nice. Never forget, lean is simple and fun.
