Lean Legends | Norm O’Hara | Springfree Trampolines
Norm O’Hara is the General Manager of a sporting equipment factory based in Southern China. He’s also a lean manufacturing enthusiast who’s excited to share the improvements he and his team are making on their journey toward organizational excellence.
In this episode we talk about:
Treating improvement videos as a product
Cultural challenges of applying lean in China
(And how to overcome them)
The power of building a physical bridge between two factories
Reducing the number of people moving items around from 40 to 4
And his desire to run a “world-class business”
Check it out!
Links:
Playlist with 119 improvement videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzZiVpXQCLUmIUeg5Tx4P3BbBtfIfRsUt
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/normohara?originalSubdomain=cn
Book a Lean Made Simple Tour: https://www.leanmadesimple.com/book-a-tour
Welcome to Lean Made Simple: a podcast for people who want to change their business and their lives one step at a time. I’m Ryan Tierney from Seating Matters, a manufacturing company from Limavady, Northern Ireland that employs 60+ people. Almost ten years ago, I came across this thing called “lean” and it transformed my life… now I want to share this message with as many people as possible.
This podcast unpacks our learnings, lessons and principles developed over the last decade in a fun, conversational way that will hopefully empower you on your own business journey — whether you’ve been doing lean for years or are just starting out!
Check it out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or any other podcast platform by searching “lean made simple.”
Thanks and all the best.
— Ryan Tierney
Magic Moment: “We didn't even know we were bad.”
Full Transcription of Episode
Norm O'Hara (00:00):
If you feel like you're pushing a locomotive, you're doing it wrong. There's been a lot of times where it's felt like that. The idea of fix what bugs you is that you're willing to raise your hand and say, "This bothers me."
Matt (00:11):
Guys, welcome back to Lean Made Simple, a podcast where we help people transform their business and their lives one step at a time. We are here live at the 2 Second Lean Summit. It has started to get a little bit more quiet. The last few episodes, Norm, honestly has been music. There's been people clinking wine glasses, and so this is where the real wisdom will start to come out in people.
Norm O'Hara (00:32):
Oh yeah.
Matt (00:32):
Yeah, yeah. We're pulling out the big guns here. This is the after hour show. Do you know what I'm saying? Really, really delighted to have Norm O'Hara here with us. Norm has come all the way from China.
Norm O'Hara (00:43):
Yep.
Matt (00:43):
Can you tell us the name of the factory and the area?
Norm O'Hara (00:45):
Yeah. I work for a factory called Dongguan [inaudible 00:00:48].
Matt (00:47):
Love that.
Norm O'Hara (00:49):
It's in the city of Dongguan, which is about an hour and a half north of Hong Kong if you're trying to find it on the map.
Matt (00:54):
Awesome. There's a lot of cool companies represented at this summit. There's people who make doors, there's people who make chairs. I think Norm probably wins the award for the most fun company, making trampolines, so spring free trampolines.
(01:08):
I have to say, this is what I wanted to say to you off mic, but I want to do it now. Norm has made a massive impact in our business already, just from the very, very get go from right off the bat when we've jumped into Lean because you have this unbelievable video series on YouTube that I've sat and I've watched every single video.
Norm O'Hara (01:27):
Oh, thank you.
Matt (01:28):
It's one thing to read 2 Second Lean or listen to a podcast or something. It's another thing to see improvement after improvement after improvement, even in something like trampolines. We make podcasts, we don't make trampolines, but it gets your brain-
Norm O'Hara (01:42):
Yeah, it does.
Matt (01:43):
... in that rhythm. Thank you. I really, really appreciate it.
Norm O'Hara (01:44):
Oh, well, it's our honor, really. It's a privilege. Thanks for watching.
Matt (01:48):
Absolutely. We'll be sure to put a link to that in the description as well and would highly recommend working your way through that series. Can you share a little bit about why you decided to make those so high production?
Norm O'Hara (02:01):
Yeah, what we decided right at the beginning with our videos was... Well, let me go back one step. One of the key parts of 2 Second Lean is a morning meeting. When we decided we were going to do this morning meeting, we had to ask ourselves, you're going to have 200 people. We've got 200 staff attend this meeting every day.
(02:21):
What we decided to do, it was going to be a 15-minute meeting, and then after that you had 15 minutes to get your work area cleaned up and make any improvements. It was half an hour a day. What you end up getting is with 200 people, that's 100 hours of labor that you're spending just doing training and getting ready for the day.
(02:40):
Our thinking was, okay, we want to make sure that in that half an hour it's as full and dense as possible. When we started, we actually had people, they'd do a video and they're kind of shifting it around and explaining it. Some were long-winded, and you'd get two, three, four minute videos. We were like, "Ah, every one of these videos, a minute of video is actually costing us 200 minutes of labor time."
Matt (03:04):
Wow, yeah.
Norm O'Hara (03:04):
And so we said, "We've got to get these down to a really concise length of time so that we can show them," because we show about four to five every day at our factory. And so we actually treated our videos like a product and we said, "You've got to make these videos a certain length. It's got to be clear enough that even if the sound is bad, because sometimes it's right in the factory, that you could almost watch it and you could understand it."
(03:29):
Now, we do voiceover and things like that, but that was the idea. It has to have really good production value. For folks out on the factory floor, sometimes that's not always the top of the mind kind of thing, but we said, "Make it really good production quality. It's got to be just 30 seconds. That's our target. If you can do it faster, perfect." But the idea was you had to do a really, really tight high quality video. It's worked really well for us. That's kind of something we really pride ourselves on.
Matt (03:56):
It really shows. I have to give you another compliment, you've got a great voice. No, seriously.
Norm O'Hara (04:02):
Oh, wow.
Matt (04:02):
Honestly, the voiceover component to it is very, very well done.
Norm O'Hara (04:06):
Oh, well, full disclosure, almost all... Well not almost, all of them were actually done in Chinese at our factory when we're showing them during the morning meetings. I just do the voiceover for the ones that I put online. Thank you though.
Matt (04:18):
Well, we appreciate the extra time for making it accessible for guys like us. It's very, very cool.
Norm O'Hara (04:21):
That's great.
Matt (04:22):
Onto the official first question. Norm O'Hara, how did you first come across Lean, and what was the before and after effect of your life?
Norm O'Hara (04:30):
You know what? We started Lean about five and a half years ago. We always think of it in three buckets. You've got the bucket of the things, and then there's the bucket, there's the things you know that you don't know them. They're out there. I haven't studied it, but I know about it. And then there's a third bucket that's the scary one that you don't even know What's out there. That's probably by far the biggest bucket in most of our lives.
(04:57):
We had heard about Lean. I'd heard Six Sigma and Toyota Production System, all these things, but we really didn't think it applied to us. We didn't think it had anything to do with us. One day of our engineers was out working in the factory and we had some machines we had to move that it was a little bit tight, and so he was trying to figure out how to configure them.
(05:18):
He came and got me and said, "Hey, come look what we've done." They had put three machines kind of so that you could stand in the middle and you could just do one, two, three just like that. We were like, "Hey, that's really cool. That's a good idea."
(05:33):
About a month later one of our customers came to visit us. His name is Paul Crawley. He makes this great product, The Net Return. He's a customer of ours. He said, "That's a U-shaped cell. That's really good." I was like, "Oh, is it? I didn't know." He said, "You know what you need to do, you need to read Paul Akers' book if you're into that kind of thing." After he left I went onto the website and sure enough, there's Paul Akers, the book is free. I downloaded it.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Come on.
Norm O'Hara (06:04):
As I was walking back and forth to work every day, I would listen to this. About four or five days has passed and I was finished it and I was like, "This guy is talking about stuff that fits our business perfectly." Right around that time he was doing a trip to Japan. I didn't think he would ever say yes, but I just sent him a note and said, "If it's possible, I'd love to come." Within about two months I had been introduced to 2 Second Lean and then went to Japan. It was overwhelming.
Matt (06:36):
Wow.
Norm O'Hara (06:37):
You know what? We realized that we actually thought we were doing well. First you see what it's like in Japan, but then you started seeing these factories and this tour. Especially when you do it with Paul Akers, he's explaining things at a level. You start to see waste. That's what it really is.
(06:57):
We came back to the factory. You don't wear glasses, but when you get a new prescription all of a sudden everything's crisp and clear and you're like, "Oh my goodness, I can't believe how bad I could see before." The whole place, we were like, "We are really not doing very well at all." That kind of started it right there. We had our eyes opened to waste and how sloppy we were. So we just went full at it.
(07:25):
It's one thing that's really fortunate for us, at the Chinese factory, we have an awesome team, and we came back and we said, "We've seen something that could completely transform our business." If you walk by us on the street, you'd just think We're another average factory. You'd never know. But we could say inside we could actually create something. Maybe no one would know about it, but this could be a world-class business.
(07:53):
At first they're like, "What are you talking about? We're just a small little trampoline company." But we just set about doing it, and we just followed the book. We started morning meetings, we started making improvement videos, we started doing Gemba walks every day. We added in all these tools and just stuck with it.
(08:12):
It's completely transformed our business. It really has. I'll give you an example of one thing that we realized that we didn't even know how bad we were. One of the things, we came back and we started looking at the eight wastes. We picked transportation as our first one, and we wanted to understand how much of our labor force was actually doing transportation. We counted it up. At the time we had about 270 employees, and we found that like 35 to 40 people were just moving stuff around.
Matt (08:41):
Wow.
Norm O'Hara (08:41):
Which is embarrassing to say, but we were like, "What are we doing? How is it possible that our systems are so poorly designed that we have that?" And so now we're down to just four. We've just got four people who are our main water spiders that we call them that move product around. Before, it was 35. That was an example where we didn't even know that we were bad. And then you flip it over and you go, "What were we doing? What were we doing?"
Matt (09:10):
Really, really interesting.
Norm O'Hara (09:12):
It's transformed the business. It really has.
Matt (09:15):
You actually were speaking to me more than you could have thought. I wear contact lenses.
Norm O'Hara (09:18):
Okay, there you go.
Matt (09:20):
There are times where I'm going to really embarrass myself here. I could lie and say, "When I was a child..." but it's not true. There'll be times where I will clean my glasses, and I'm like, "Who turned 4K on?"
Norm O'Hara (09:33):
Yeah, no kidding. That's what it's like. Yeah.
Matt (09:34):
I feel like Lean, the first time you're exposed to whether it's a book or you see a video or whatever it is, it's like, oh my word, I didn't realize I needed prescription glasses.
Norm O'Hara (09:44):
That's what it is. That's what it is.
Matt (09:47):
You come back, and the 4K detail of your business, you're like, "Oh, does it really look like that?"
Norm O'Hara (09:52):
You know what? I think of it this way. I am just so grateful that I picked up that book because sometimes you get these opportunities and they just pass right beside you and you either take it or you don't take it. We could have missed it. How many times do people say, "Oh, you should read this book"? And we go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah" and just never get around to it.
Matt (10:08):
It's really interesting. Something I've heard Paul say before is something like every 30... what is it?
Norm O'Hara (10:13):
Every 30 days, it's just like the universe gives you these-
Matt (10:16):
A life-changing opportunity, but you can miss it.
Norm O'Hara (10:18):
You could just miss them. They just pass right by, and they're just right beside you. It's blessed our business. But you know what it is, the entire company as a whole, now we're down to 200 employees, and every one of them has a better experience at work. There's a lot more dignity in their work. We've taken out a lot of the waste. Instead of going to work every day and a couple hours are just a real pain where you're doing something that's uncomfortable or you're struggling with something, we've said, "All of those things, we want to pull as much of that out as we possibly can."
Matt (10:52):
Love it.
Norm O'Hara (10:54):
It's transformative.
Matt (10:55):
Yeah. If we were to kind of look through your improvement hall of fame, do you have a favorite, something that is a standout? This just made a huge difference. Our people love it. Every time I think about it, I get happy.
Norm O'Hara (11:10):
Yeah, I mean there's a bunch. We make quite a few improvements, but there's one that I really love. Just by the way our offices and our buildings are laid out, we've got three different buildings and then we've got an office. We used to, if you wanted to get out onto the factory floor where the action really happened, if you're an engineer or someone in the office, you had to kind of do this circuitous route around. It would be about 500 meters round trip, not a big deal but it's enough. And so it was far enough that people wouldn't go out on the factory floor if they could avoid it. If they needed to, it was just taking a lot of time.
(11:46):
We just had this idea, what if we just knocked down the walls and let's just put a bridge right through so that you could be from your office onto the factory floor in 15 seconds? It used to be about a two-minute thing. We did that, we busted it down, we put in a bridge, we tried to make it nice, covered it over in case it's raining or stuff like that.
(12:04):
What we found is that in that one change, we're saving something like 1,000... What'd we work it out to? It's like 1,000 minutes every day. That's just 1,000 minutes of our engineers, of supervisors. And then not only that, because we did it, it's so accessible now that people are on the floor much more. It's kind of broken down this barrier where the office is over here and the factory floor is over there. That's been one of our big wins, and we really celebrate that. Every time we crossed the bridge, we're like, "This is a nice one."
Matt (12:36):
That's the thing. We have a small thing in the studio, small improvement where everything can be turned on with a stream deck button. It's almost like, do you want press it this time? Do you know what I mean? Because you get so giddy about it. You're like, "Okay sure, it took us two hours to set up, but yet dis the satisfaction every time is powerful.
Norm O'Hara (12:53):
Oh, it pays off literally day after day after day. That's the thing, if we were spending a 1,000 minutes, I don't know how many hours that is, every single day of people walking around, that's today and then tomorrow and then a month from now and a year from now, it just extrapolates ahead.
Matt (13:10):
So exciting.
Norm O'Hara (13:11):
That's a big one, but it was a fun one for us.
Matt (13:15):
Cool. You start your Lean journey, you get really excited, it's kind of like a honeymoon period and you feel like Bruce Almighty. You're like, "Improvement, improvement, improvement. Whoa, this is awesome." And then inevitably like any journey, there's like you hit an obstacle or you hit a bump or you start having to push the wheelbarrow up the hill.
Norm O'Hara (13:30):
Yes, yes.
Matt (13:30):
What were some of those kind of early obstacles, things that slowed you down? Could you tell us a little bit about that?
Norm O'Hara (13:35):
Well, there's a line in Paul Akers' book that says that if you feel like you're pushing a locomotive, you're doing it wrong. There's been a lot of times where it's felt like that.
(13:46):
One of the challenges we had was actually cultural. The idea of fix what bugs you is that you're willing to raise your hand and say, "This bothers me." A lot of our workers, they would refuse to do that because it was sort of like, oh, I'm the complainer. The nail is sticking up, they're just going to hammer it down.
(14:04):
And so people wouldn't give us improvements early on because, not because they didn't see opportunity, but because they didn't want to complain. It was actually from a place of just we're trying to be respectful. I'm not going to create any problems. I don't want to create any ripples. We knew that there were things that could be improved and we could see them. And so when we'd see them we'd make an improvement. I say we as some of the engineers or whatever. The lady who's sewing or the guy who's welding, we couldn't get him or her to tell us something.
(14:34):
Finally, what changed it was that we would encourage them just we wanted them to be comfortable. Instead of saving time or saving even in some of the eight ways, we said, "Just want you to be comfortable. Take away the burden." You'd go right up to someone and stand beside them and you'd see them bending over or you'd see them twisting or getting up and going over to get something and coming back and getting up and coming back.
(14:58):
We'd say, "What can we do so you don't have to do that anymore?" Slowly as they began to feel that, you know what, I'm not getting in trouble for complaining, I'm actually making my work easier, there's less struggle, there's less burden. I'm actually working faster. So my pace starts to go up, my quality is going up, whatever, my comfort. At the end of the day, I'm not as stiff or sore. They start to see the wins. That's sort of unleashed just a tidal wave.
Matt (15:27):
Nice.
Norm O'Hara (15:27):
It was a real struggle to be honest at the beginning because we're thinking, are we going to have to come up with all these improvements? That would've been a complete failure, but once our team started to feel sort of empowered that you're not complaining, actually you're telling us a problem. It's our responsibility to try to help you get that burden out of there. I mean just from a position of dignity. It's not right that they have to suffer to build trampolines. I don't want our staff suffering on that.
Matt (15:56):
That's not fun.
Norm O'Hara (15:56):
It should be as simple and as easy as possible. It was a tidal wave to be honest. After that our improvements just shot through the roof. It was really exciting.
Matt (16:07):
It's really interesting, just had a picture of you needed to find a very unique key that was specific to your culture that would unlock permission for people.
Norm O'Hara (16:16):
That's what it was.
Matt (16:17):
You know what I mean?
Norm O'Hara (16:17):
Yeah.
Matt (16:17):
Really, really crazy. And then once they had that permission, then the flood gates open.
Norm O'Hara (16:21):
Yeah, it really did.
Matt (16:22):
Really cool.
Norm O'Hara (16:23):
Yeah.
Matt (16:24):
Final question, Norm, for someone listening or watching who maybe is at the start of their Lean journey or haven't started yet, or maybe they've kind of fallen off the bandwagon a little bit, what encouragement would you give them? Where would you signpost them? Give us a little bit of that.
Norm O'Hara (16:43):
Well, I'll tell you, there's been a lot of times where even with the ideas coming in, you kind of feel like this is running out of gas. The two things that have been really good for me is time on the floor. It's not really so much as if you're pushing Lean, then it's going to be a struggle. But if you're just helping those ideas flow, then you really hit the sweet spot.
(17:09):
What I found is that whenever things are going bad, I need to just spend more time on the factory floor. It's almost a trigger for me that, man, the ideas are coming a little slow. I need to get back out on there, not because I'm walking around saying, come on, give me ideas, give me ideas. It's actually I'm out there, I'm on the same team as the folks out on the factory floor.
(17:28):
Or even just give an example in accounting, you go over and how are things going? What's giving you grief? People always, they can always tell you something that's wrong, but they need that touch. I would say if you're struggling, out on the factory floor. That really stirs it up.
(17:47):
The other thing is just a good community around you. We're here at the conference. So many of the people here have on the days where you're down they're sharing a video of some awesome idea, and you go, "Man, that's a good idea." You can actually take some of those exact ideas back to our own factory. Or they're saying, "Hey, this just happened today or this is something I'm going through." You realize you're not alone, that this is a journey that just about everybody walks through.
(18:15):
The hard days will come because you know what it is? I'll give you an example. We shut down for the summer. This year's a bit of a slow year, so we shut down. No matter how good of a job we do cleaning up our windows, making sure that it doesn't leak, you come back and there's dust. Naturally it's gravity that things are going to start going down.
(18:37):
Every single day, you got to dust things. Every single day, you got to help people kind of keep pushing, keep pushing. It's just a steady, steady push, steady hand in the right direction. Just keep at it.
Matt (18:50):
I love that. Wow, Norm, that was awesome.
Norm O'Hara (18:52):
Well, thank you. Thank you.
Matt (18:53):
You did a great job.
Norm O'Hara (18:56):
Oh, I appreciate that.
Matt (18:56):
First podcast? Come on, man.
Norm O'Hara (18:56):
I appreciate that.
Matt (18:56):
That's like a world-class one right there.
Norm O'Hara (18:59):
Thank you.
Matt (18:59):
Awesome. Where can people find you if they want to connect or [inaudible 00:19:03]?
Norm O'Hara (19:03):
You can get me on WhatsApp or you can get me on Signal or on my YouTube channel. There's email address there. I can give you all those details.
Matt (19:11):
Awesome.
Norm O'Hara (19:12):
That'd be great. Anytime, any questions I'd be happy to answer.
Matt (19:14):
I love the generosity. I also love the leadership from the front. That is a big thing that I keep seeing in guys like Ryan and guys like you. I'm really inspired by that, and so appreciate everything that you shared.
Norm O'Hara (19:27):
Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate it.
Matt (19:27):
Thank you so much for listening or watching. If you'd like to find out more about Norm, like I said, there'll be links in the description of wherever you're watching.
(19:35):
There are now a steadily expanding back catalog of Lean Made Simple podcasts. If you'd like to find out more, check out some more of our interviews that we've done with people at the summit or dive into some of the Lean principles where Ryan unpacks over almost... I nearly lied there on tape. I nearly said a decade. Almost a decade of experience doing learn.
(19:55):
Thanks guys. Really, really appreciate it. See you soon. Think I said learn instead of Lean there. We'll roll with it.