Charlotte: Was this where you originally started the company, out here, wherever we are, at the manufacturing facility?
Shane: No so we were in West Salt Lake, which turned into Orem and then a number of places. When I started, my family always had a shop so I had a space to work in. Then I rented storage space in Murray and I expanded a bunch of storage units together, I think it was maybe like 5,000 square feet.
We started out in one space here in North Salt Lake and now I think we have 8 spaces or so. This has been fine out here, it's been convenient and weíve been able to grow into additional space. It hasn't been the most ideal, how it's all set up, you'll see but we've moved things around enough time that it's nearly the most ideal. It's still close to our new office, but it's out of the way so the rent is competitive.
Kim: Have you talked about Lean Manufacturing yet?
Shane: It is a manufacturing philosophy on how to make things in an efficient manner. The current thinking in the Toyota manufacturing technique has revolutionized American manufacturing. Toyota, Japan had known of it for years and the manufacturing techniques that Toyota developed is the primary reason that they were able to destroy the US market competitively. They can produce a better product for a cheaper price, consistently, and fast. It's all based around this really philosophical method to the point you can now follow it. There's an instruction booklet.
It's all about identifying waste in a process and eliminating it so you're only doing pure process stuff. In this philosophy you have to identify what is value add time, value add time is what customers are willing to pay for. A customer wants their planter welded together, right? You have to maximize the amount of welding that you do in a day. The customer is not willing to pay for the fabricator walking over and picking the piece off the cart or looking at the blue print or moving it around, that's all waste.
It's literally about looking in a microscope at each and every process and figuring out how you can eliminate the unnecessary stuff so that the welder is squeezing the trigger on the welder as long as possible.
And when you can do that the results are extraordinary. Locally - OC Tanner has gone through the Lean transformation and has actually won awards in it. OC Tanner - they're not just the jewelry store - actually make little trinket things for award stuff and they have a many different variations. One of their products used to take 26 days from the time the phone rang to the time it went out the door. Now it happens in an hour. They tripled their throughput with the same number of people just by getting the unnecessary stuff out of the way. Herman Miller too, an Aeron chair comes off of their line every thirty seconds.
Yet, there is resistance in general to the whole concept, because it's so counter to the traditional American method of manufacturing in an assembly line.
Charlotte: Do you miss the hands on experience? Because I could imagine that would be kind of be therapeutic.
Shane: I do a little bit actually.
Nathan: It's zen for me to physically make things sometimes. As architects, we are often in the world of the screen, both finite but infinitely large, and it's fun to break from that reality, get dirty, use the body, to work around the house or something where I'm actually picking up a piece of wood and figuring out how it goes together and seeing that coming together of things. I think it's good for my brain too, to exercise different parts, think at a different pace. Same for good old hand drawing.
Shane: Yeah, you're plugged in a different way. I was at the shop just the other day, and there were some things that weren't quite right, so I grabbed the sander and I was working on the finish and I thought God, I miss fine-tuning a finish.... you know, this is pretty good. Some of the guys have worked down there long enough that they've seen me put the welding helmet on and show them how to do it.
Kim: Like that time that you were testing that patina, there was literally an audience of 15 people by the end of it because Shane had put on his wellies and we were like What's happening?
Nathan: That's awesome, though.
Shane: It is good. Everybody's had the boss that doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about and telling everybody what to do, but I actually know what the fuck I'm talking about, can speak shop speak, and I would rather operate from that level. I get to use all the language that I grew up with around job sites, and one of my favorites that everybody at our shop knows is, stop at perfect. Perfect is good enough.