One-Piece Flow | Lean Principles | Ryan Tierney

Written By Ryan Tierney

Welcome to Lean Made Simple, a podcast about transforming your business — and life — one step at a time.

In this episode, Ryan Tierney from Seating Matters discusses the powerful lean principle: "One-Piece Flow!"

Along the way, he and Producer Matt talk about:

  • Why batching is killing your business

  • Escalators vs elevators

  • How to introduce flow into your personal and professional life

  • A better alternative to “annual team-building exercises”

  • Why you should create a “river of production”

  • The risks involved (and why they’re worth it)

  • And how one-piece flow could change the world.

Check it out!

Links:

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 1: One-Piece Flow Party Bags

Magic Moment 2: Escalators vs Elevators

Magic Moment 3: Don't Batch Team Building!

Full Transcription of Episode

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Intro

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Ryan: Welcome to Lean Made Simple, a podcast for people who want to transform their business and their lives one step at a time. My name is Ryan Tierney from a company called Seating Matters in Limavady. I came across Lean eight years ago and since then it's totally transformed my life and the way I think about everything.

And this podcast is designed to translate that message across to as many people as possible.

Matt: My name is Matthew, podcast producer, bringing lean into a digital business and learning a lot through the process as well.

Today we're talking about a concept that has radically transformed our business, the podcast business, and that is One-Piece Flow.

What is One-Piece Flow?

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Matt: So Ryan, I thought maybe to help explain what One-Piece Flow actually is, could you explain what the opposite of it is?

Ryan: Yeah, it's a good, uh, it's a good starting point. The opposite of One-Piece Flow is batching.

And this is kind of like a bad word in the lean world. Batching versus One-Piece Flow. And it took me a long time to get my head around this. I'd read it in all the books, but I never really got it at the start.

We just inherently want to batch everything, we want to make everything in huge numbers, make loads off it, you know when I'm making one I might as well just make 10 or 20 and put them in the shelf for later.

But, by producing things in large quantities is actually a really wasteful way of operating and there's loads of examples of batching versus One-Piece Flow, which will get into, but basically... "the smallest batch practicable" is the way we should be thinking. How can we make one or two as opposed to this big huge batch of inventory?

Party Bags Example

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Matt: Can you actually give the example of the party bags?

Ryan: Party bags, yeah. So, uh, just back in May it was one of our kids birthday party. And, you know, at the end of the party, you know, we give out party bags to all the children that came to the party.

And typically the way we would have done that was to lay out all 20 bags, put you know, a certain type of sweet and all 20, then go back to the start and put like a small toy in each one and keep repeating that process. So you had none finished, but then all of a sudden you'd 20 finished all at the same time.

But then what happens is, ah, I forgot to put such-and-such in the party bag and you have to go back and redo them all. Which is a defect and which is over processing. So the way that we make up the party bags and it seems silly talking about party bags, but this thinking translates into everything.

You make up one and it's finished, make up the next one and it's finished, make up the third one and it's finished. But if we translate that to a production environment, we're finishing a product and sending it to the customer, a lot quicker than you would if you were making in a large batch.

Matt: Let's actually, let's stay on this because this is really working for me.

I'm enjoying this. So I'm picturing your living room, right? I don't know if you did it in your living room. And there was, the first way, the batch way, you would have 20 bags set out everywhere. Yeah. So think about how much space that's taken up. Like, you know, you're trying not to fall over the party bags if someone's moving through.

No, no, don't walk through there. Don't do that. Whereas if you're just doing one at a time. You keep all the stuff in one small space and you're just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom finished. Yeah. If you want to take a break for whatever reason, oh, you know, we're tired, puffed out, making ten party bags really tired you guys out.

You go get a cup of tea and you can just come straight back without this massive mess being in the living room as well.

Ryan: Exactly, and, the key to the whole thing is that the quality is better because you're only focusing on one. One chair, one party bag, one whatever you're making, all your attention is on that one, so you're more focused on the quality is much, much better in a One-Piece Flow scenario, whereas with making a huge batch, chances are there's a mistake, but the mistake could be in all 10 of those, right?

And you don't know until they're passed to the next stage.

Matt: You only realize at the very last step when you try to put it a tube of bubbles into the party bag. These don't even fit in the bag! And then you've wasted all 20 bags and you have to figure out a different solution.

Ryan: Yep, exactly. And we done this before Lean at Seating Matters, we batched all our manufacturing.

So we had this huge 20 foot long table and we laid out all the base frames for the chairs and fitted all the casters. You know, fit all the casters. One, two, three, four, five. A big line of... Maybe 12 chairs. Then we put all the seat frames on 12 chairs. Then we put the arms and the upholstery on 12 chairs.

Then maybe the cushion and 12 chairs. So we had no chairs finished, but then we had a batch finished. All at the one time. But think of the amount of space, as you say, huge workbenches, huge factory space, huge, areas for inventory and the factory was actually getting to the point where we thought we needed to extend the factory.

We needed a bigger factory, but thankfully we didn't. And we found out about One-Piece Flow just in time.

Level One: Personal

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Matt: Okay. So like we always do on the podcast with these principles, these lean principles, we're going to go through and talk about three different levels and how the principle applies to the three different levels of our life.

So the first one is our personal life. The second one is our professional life on an organizational level. And the third one is like global and societal. So, really good personal example with the party bags. Any more that you've got?

Ryan: Yeah, a really good example is if you've ever been to an airport, which most people have, you'll see an escalator and you'll see an elevator.

So an escalator, people move towards escalator. They go on to it. They're off the other side. It's total flow. That's One-Piece Flow. As you're being presented to escalator to go up the stairs, you're getting off the other end. As opposed to an elevator, you'll see a large batch. Remember batching?

Matt: That's right, yeah.

Ryan: Ten people standing at the elevator, the doors open, ten people get in. It goes upstairs and ten get off. While that's moving and getting off, there's another batch of ten waiting at the bottom. So that's batch production. So it's the elevator versus the escalator. Wow. And that's the way we've changed our business.

We used to be the elevator. And now we're the escalator where we're making chairs every 22 minutes we're making a chair. We're not waiting until a Thursday evening or a Friday morning to finish 50 chairs. We're making them as the customer orders them.

Matt: Crazy.

Another example I heard you say one time was Uh, the difference between, or like an annual spring clean is a form of batching.

Tell me more about that.

Ryan: It is. It is, aye. So like spring cleaning, you, you, even the councils, you know, the local council goes around with a big truck and gathers up everybody's, uh, waste from that, from that spring clean. And it's really a batch. It's a batch scenario. You're waiting until one point in the year to clean your house or to get rid of stuff.

One-Piece Flow thinking is that you keep your house in order all the time. Every day, you're every week, you're 3Sing and you're cleaning, you're tidying. If there's anything you don't need, you're getting it away there. And then, as opposed to this batch scenario, we just inherent inherently think that batch is better than it's really not.

Level Two: Organizational

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Matt: Yeah. Okay. So moving into level two then in that, organizational life. If we think about like individual workers, how can individual workers kind of start to incorporate One-Piece Flow into their role, into their responsibility?

Ryan: I can take one example from Seating Matters from our company.

In the sewing department we used to sew ten chairs at a time. Thinking that when I'm sewing the arm, I might as well just sew 10. I'll just keep sewing, you know, I'm set up to do arms. Let's sew all the arms. But when we find out about the One-Piece Flow, concept, we said, okay, let's sew one chair, get it onto the next station and then I'll start to another one.

Keep it moving. So it's to create flow. Throughout the organization. So ideally, the order comes on to your office. It flows through production through the factory onto a truck and off the other end. The goal is total flow throughout production. But what batch tends to do batching, make stuff stop and stuff moves around really slowly in batches.

But the other downfall of one of the main downfalls of batching is that more times than enough, there's a hidden defect in the middle of that batch, which causes loads of rework, which is all waste.

Matt: Yeah. Okay. So from a podcast perspective, we were batching. And so, this would be interesting from a digital perspective, we would record, say, maybe 10 episodes in the week and then we would have 10 episodes that are sitting, quote unquote, on the shelf in cold storage on a hard drive that we then had, we would then batch edit... when we did it that way, let's say, for example, your microphone wasn't working that blue microphone you have right in front of you wasn't working.

We would have 10 episodes where there's a weird noise on the blue mic. And that's 10 episodes that have defects in them that would then need to be fixed or even worse re-recorded.

So now when we record an episode. We don't edit or work on another episode until the first one's finished until not even the first one's finished until the first one is uploaded scheduled - everything's done.

We always had the misconception that One-Piece Flow was a production kind of thing. But we've taken that same thinking into the office with order-processing, with marketing, with design. So in the past, we would have designed all our The new product brochures for every chair.

Ryan: Then two weeks later, we got them all approved and we preferred them. Then another two weeks later, we might've made the changes. Then we sent them to the printers and then we've got a huge delivery of all these product brochures, pallets and pallets of stuff. But now what we do, if we have a new operation manual or a new brochure or a new bit of marketing material, we design it, we proof it, we check it, we print it.

Then we do the next one. Design, proof, check, print. So we're getting the changes made really quickly and there's no buffers in between.

Matt: Interesting. So beyond kind of One-Piece Flow for the individual, you mentioned the sewing department.

Ryan: Yeah.

Matt: How do you start to bring One-Piece Flow out to the entire organizational level?

Ryan: Yeah. So it's all about creating flow throughout the entire organization. You can be doing One-Piece Flow individually in your work cell. But there could be buffers between there and the next cell. So the goal is to reduce the buffer, reduce that safety net. It is risky. It sounds risky. But reduce the safety net between the first operation and the second and the third.

Because if we reduce those buffers, we create One-Piece Flow throughout the entire organization. So ideally, the order for the product comes in, it flows through the entire operation, and it is delivered without stopping.

I think I learned a long time ago that if you imagine a process like a, like a river flowing. The water should be running, it should be flowing all the time. The minute that stops, there's waste.

The minute you see a process stopping, that's where waste occurs. So, when I get invited to go and see factories that want help with lean, I just walk in the door and anything that I see that is stationary is waste. So if I see a huge batch of inventory sitting, I'm like, there's a problem, there's waste.

That's sitting, that shouldn't be sitting. If it is sitting, it should be moving, like in the next few hours that should be moving towards the customer all the time. The value should be flowing towards the customer all the time because we are here to serve the customer. That's all we're here to do. Add value to the customer.

So when a customer places an order for a specific thing. And it waits for two weeks before anybody looks at it. And then it goes to station one and it waits again for maybe three or four days. That's one of the wastes, it's waiting. The product should be flowing to the customer. And not only through production, even for meetings.

Like we have a morning meeting every day. Why do we do that? Because of flow. It's all because of flow. We're catching problems every morning that happened the day before. You know, in most companies, they might have a quarterly production meeting, a monthly production meeting. We're not going to wait a month to talk about stuff that happened three weeks ago.

You know, that isn't flow. We're catching problems. One-Piece Flow. So it's One-Piece Flow with meetings. It's One-Piece Flow with production. It's One-Piece Flow with ideas. If a customer has an idea or if somebody internally has an idea for an improvement we action straight away. We talk about it that day.

We don't put it on a list and review it at the end of the quarter. So our whole thinking is One-Piece Flow and it creates flow throughout the entire organization. It's

Matt: really, really interesting.

I remember watching a tour video of Brad Cairns's factory and he talks about wanting... his desire to create a river of wood.

So he makes doors. Most of his raw material is wood. And he talks about, you know, he is looking to see if the river of wood is flowing through his factory. River of wood. As you say. If it stops, then it's a problem. And everyone needs to jump on and figure out why that river has stopped flowing. Whereas if you're in a batch system, you can't see that.

It's not visual. And as you said, it's more risky. Yeah. You obviously think it's worth the risk?

Ryan: A thousand percent worth the risk. It has totally transformed the way we serve our customer. It has totally transformed the way we think. Quality is better. Lead time is better. Efficiency is better. Engagement is better.

Because people, if somebody has an idea to change or make a tweak to that product. We can change the next one because it's not started yet, you know, so ideas are implemented quicker, product changes are implemented quicker and, it actually empowers people to come up with ideas, and it's actually more exciting.

Imagine sitting, making 100 of anything. How bored would you be? But the way we manufacture is we're making as the customer demands. So we have a mixed line that's making all different variations of product in different types of chairs and it makes it more interesting for the person. They're doing this chair one minute, the next thing they're doing a totally different model and a different color and a different spec.

So it keeps the work more interesting.

Matt: Mark and Daniel, what do you guys think about this One-Piece Flow thing?

How have you guys applied this to, you can go professional, you can go personal, any way you want.

Producer Insights

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Producer Daniel: I mean, personally for myself, uh, I feel it's made a big difference for me because I'm just coming out of school and school had this kind of thing with homework in a way where you have to be doing homework for scheduled dates along the week.

Basically it wouldn't, all the work's not done in that one day. It's, like, done over multiple days, especially of coursework sometimes. What I love about this the most is that we come in, we get the work done before we leave. We don't have anything that means we can spend time with our families. We can do some of our own business work, like I can work on my own projects at home.

I can come in here, get all the work done, and that's it sorted for the rest of the day. Like, I don't have to worry about anything else until tomorrow comes. So it's just the best feeling ever.

Matt: And I have to say, this is the power of like bringing One-Piece Flow to podcast production is when the day is finished, you finished that episode.

You don't get halfway through an episode. You don't get a tenth of the way through an episode. When we sit down, you know, we'll block out a serious amount of time. We'll say our one purpose here is to One-Piece Flow this episode all the way through until it's finished and then we never have to think about it again.

Awesome example, Daniel. Thank you. Mark, anything from you?

Producer Mark: Very similar, but, um, one thing, one thing I do outside of the podcast is I have a small online business that I run as kind of a side project. And that's kind of producing sheet music for mostly musical theater companies now, actually. And so I'm getting the orders through and the One-Piece Flow. I think the thing that that really makes a difference to is my feeling of how much I've accomplished in a day. So if I've got, say, in a week, if I've got four orders to complete, if I do little bits on each one, then I get a hit. On, okay, on Friday, I've finished them all, and that's a really big hit. It's like, oh yeah, everything's done.

But I haven't got that once for the whole week. So my motivation for the whole week is just kind of, it's trundling along, trundling along, and then we get to Friday, and it's a big hit of, yeah, we've achieved something. Whereas when I'm doing them one at a time, it's every single day. Every, let's say I set just one order a day.

Every day I'm getting that hit of, I've achieved, I've achieved, I've achieved. And it's that kind of mental, that mental thought that just feels so much better that way.

Matt: Mark, that's one of the craziest things I've ever heard in my life. You're saying that you're batching your dopamine hits versus getting them daily.

Ryan: Which is kind of way too second lean, and lean is so... powerful. We're doing these small improvements all the time and we're getting these dopamine hits every time we do an improvement. I never realized that before.

Matt: And another thing that you said that I thought was really cool. The morning meeting is a form of One-Piece Flow, and we were actually talking about this.

I think yesterday as a team, we were saying that the penny's drop for us with the morning meeting where it's it's daily, team development.

Ryan: Yeah.

Matt: So instead of like us all going on like a one week course somewhere, and batching all of our quote unquote development. It's like we're taking 10 minutes every single day to invest in our learning or it's not, you know, we're going to set aside a whole afternoon to read three chapters of a book.

It's like no, we're going to read a page every single day. Yeah. And that's powerful.

Ryan: That is similar to our, We used to do like a yearly team building thing at Seating Matters where all 60 or 70 of us get on a big bus and went away somewhere for a team building activity, but we realized that that's actually a batch.

It is a batch as well. You know, when more One-Piece Flow is a monthly smaller team building activity where we get a barbecue or we get pizza or we do like a do an internal thing or go off site, but smaller, more incremental, uh, changes and improvements are always bigger than this large batch, even for example, if a new employee starts the week after the yearly team building activity, you know, they've missed it until the next year.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ryan: With smaller batches, we're catching that every month.

Level Three: Societal/Global

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Matt: Very cool. So moving on to third and final level, then going big philosophical, how can the lean principle of One-Piece Flow change society as we know it, change the world, change everything?

Ryan: One of the reasons Toyota is so successful is because all of these lean principles are how we should be living.

They've almost aligned, uh, you can maybe help me with the wording of this, but they've aligned business with how we should be living our lives. Yeah. So all the lean principles translate 100 percent to the way we should be living.

Matt: That's the thing, because we're both reading the Toyota way at the minute.

Maybe we'll do an episode on that. I don't know. But one of the my big takeaways is that Toyota is their mission is to make society better and that those values filter into everything that they do inside and outside of the business.

Ryan: Exactly. Yeah. So One-Piece Flow on the production line, yes, but how can we apply One-Piece Flow to our lives?

Well, one thing that comes to mind straight away is if you get inspired by a podcast like this and you want to go and make a change, make one change at a time, don't go and change the whole place and make all these improvements, make one change, then make another change. Because if you make too many changes at the one time, you're not sure which change made the difference.

So if you want to start going to the gym, just go to the gym and get that routine built up. Then in a month's time, if you want to get better at reading, start reading a page a day off a book along with going to the gym, then you want to drink more water, start, keep going to the gym, start reading a page a day and then introduce drinking water.

So slow, incremental improvements, One-Piece Flow.

Matt: I was thinking when you were talking earlier, especially here in Ireland, we kind of batch our love and compliments to people.

So you'll see, you'll see like a cliche example might be like an Irish dad at a wedding who never says anything nice about anybody crying during a speech because he's batching all of the compliments in that moment or, you know, like telling your significant other, like how much you love them or doing something nice for them daily instead of waiting for Valentine's day or waiting for birthdays or something like that.

There's kind of something in there like what you gave the example earlier for annual performance review. Imagine this like giving feedback to your team in the shortest space of time as possible.

Ryan: That's right. We were me and my wife were chatting last night about One-Piece Flow on the lead up to this podcast.

And she was like school reports are a batch. Yeah. You know, you wait to the end of the year to see how your child has performed at school. That's mad when you think about it. You know, they should be getting feedback, I'm not saying every day or every week, even every month.

Matt: Yeah.

Ryan: A smaller batch, a small mini report on how your child is performing instead of waiting to the end of the year to find out that, you know, there's there's something that could have been fixed because that feedback loop is so, so long that there's no opportunity to improve or make it better during the year.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. Like another example, kind of like on the broader scale, I feel like I always come back to this for the level threes is I always think about government, health care and councils and like a wee health care example. Like, as you know, like we had a baby two months ago, and so before then we were doing all sorts of maternity appointments in the hospitals, and it's so interesting that you would walk in and you would talk to like, a receptionist and then you would sit down and then the receptionist would see five more people and then everyone would wait and then one nurse would come and take five people's bloods and then everyone would wait and then take five people's urine samples and then sit down and wait and then you'd have five sit down meetings with, you know, one on one behind a closed door.

Do you have any questions? And then you'd all sit down and wait again and then five more would go and do the scans. And you're like, mate, we all could have been out. If this was one piece flow like we could have been out of here in a fifth of the time and probably Could the healthcare system, the hospital we were in, they probably could have had half the staff and run even a better product for us as the customers as well.

Ryan: Yeah, exactly. I even see it, you know, with somebody who wins, the lottery. You know, they've got no money, then they've got a huge batch of money and it's such a huge amount that they're not in harmony with the money. They don't know what to do with it. And a lot of the times it has a lot of negative effects because it's a huge batch.

You know, a better system going forward would potentially be smaller drips of money. Over a longer period, this a huge batch of anything creates so much waste and over processing and defects and confusion on burden, you know, whether it's money, whether it's over producing in a factory, if it's too much information, you know, on a service based company, a huge batch of anything is just so wasteful.

Matt: It's really interesting why you were talking there is thinking about the natural world. And if you look at how the natural world operates, whether it's a tree growing or a flower, it's like small incremental, it's not like boom, all of a sudden the tree just pops up overnight. Do you know what I mean? It takes time to strengthen itself and move forward, move forward, move forward.

So yeah, I really like that. Ryan, for people listening or people watching, how can they start to implement One-Piece Flow into their lives? One practical thing that you suggest them do and after listening to this podcast?

How to start One-Piece Flow?

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Ryan: There's so many practical, small things that you can do right away. Even one thing that I do personally is WhatsApp.

I use WhatsApp a lot. I don't wait until the end of the day or the end of the week and sit down and do all my emails. If I have an idea, I lift out my phone, I do a voice message, I WhatsApp somebody with an idea, you know, a voice message is like a hundred times faster than sitting down and opening up your laptop to type an email and you can hear the emotion you can get, you can express more in a 20 second voice message than you can in a, you know, a five paragraph email.

Yeah, so that's One-Piece Flow that's acting now. Small incremental changes, small improvements. If you have an idea, share it straight away. Don't wait until a batch. That's a simple thing that could be applied like straight away after listening to this podcast.

Outro

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Matt: Ryan, thank you so much. This has been a pleasure as always. Thank you. It's been brilliant. And thank you so much for listening or watching. If you would like to visually have an example of what One-Piece Flow looks like, there's no better place to do it than Seating Matters.

Would highly recommend you coming for a Lean Made Simple tour. It is probably the best example. Not probably. It is the best example that I've ever seen of these lean principles in action. And so if you want to kickstart your lean journey, if you want to pour rocket fuel on your existing journey, I'd recommend going for a tour with yourself and your team members.

And I know Ryan and the team would be delighted to host you guys and see you there. So yeah, other than that, Mark, Ryan, thank you for today.

Thank you and we'll see you again next time. Cheers.

Ryan Tierney
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