Shift seams
Night crews inherit half-started kits and a verbal “almost done.” We write the seam so the morning does not rebuild the afternoon.
Shin-sir Hsiang · Taichung Hsieh
The grid is how work
actually moves.
AppAnchor Grid sits with owners of small and mid-size plants, then draws the real path of a job — not the one hanging in the conference room. SME Process Improvement Consulting, practiced at walking speed.
Read the method →19mapped lines last season
8 wkstypical Value Stream Clinic
2008first floor notebook opened
63 minaverage first diagnostic walk
Flagship program
Value Stream Clinic
Eight weeks on one family of work. We stand at the first and last stations, time the waits nobody owns, and redraw the grid until the next job can be predicted without a war room.
Owners leave with a wall map, a handover script, and a short list of stops they will not reopen. The clinic is not a catalogue of lean slogans.
See the clinic syllabus
What we tighten
Four places queues like to hide
Inspection loops
Quality that sits in a tray overnight is a second production plan. The grid makes that wait visible and owned.
Owner exceptions
Rush jobs that leap the board look generous until every other due date slips. We price the leap in hours, not goodwill.
Tool cribs
A missing jig is not a culture problem. It is a square on the grid with no named steward.
From the floor
Notes after the maps went up
The Value Stream Clinic did not speed our CNC cells. It stopped us from launching a second job while the first still sat in QC.
Lin Shu-fen, production owner, precision parts — Dali
Handover Discipline Studio was useful. The night supervisor still skips two lines of the script when the dock is busy, so the map is not magic.
Wei, metal finishing — Taichung City
★★★★☆ · “Constraint Walk for Owners” · Posted after week three. We finally named the press that everyone walked around.
Platform note from a packaging converter
Journal
Recent writing from the studio
Cycle time without the stopwatch theatre
If the timer only comes out when a consultant is in the aisle, the number will not survive the next rush order.
Handover maps that survive shift change
A wall chart that looks complete at 17:00 can be fiction by 17:20. We write for the person who was not in the meeting.
Why SOPs gather dust in Taichung workshops
Laminated instructions fail when the grid of work has already moved and nobody updates the plastic.
If the next job still surprises you, walk it with us.
A first diagnostic walk is a conversation on the floor, not a slide deck. Write from the address you already use for freight, and we will answer from Shin-sir Hsiang.
Write the studio