2. Do you pay the $200,000 for the consultancy, do you hire a dedicated change agent, or do you try to marshal internal teams to spearhead a change effort? As you wipe your feet, you can’t help but notice how messy the carpet is. “Well, that’s what it’s for,” you think.

“This is a factory, not a bookstore.” But seeing all those metal chips in the rug makes you think about the plant fl oor.

You turn back around and survey the shop. Everywhere you look, parts are stacked in metal bins on wooden palettes, next to the palettes, on tables by machines, encroaching into the aisles—which are marked off with vibrant yellow striping to remind workers to keep them clear. It looks like there is much more work than the roughly $500,000 worth of parts that are actually in process.

Slowly, you begin to wend your way through the machines. Your plant uses fi ve basic types of machines to make hundreds of thousands of different parts for everything from motorcycles to hospital beds to nail guns to industrial water purifi ers. You make the mechanism that fi lls Downy bottles at Procter & Gamble and the tumblers that spit the movie tickets out from under the counter at theaters across the country. Machines are organized by type, so as a job moves through the plant, it will hit any number of machines in a particular order. A job with multiple operations might get moved around the plant from area to area up to seven times. Even though things are always moving, many areas of the plant seem crowded, as jobs line up waiting for their turn on the next machine.

Red tickets in pans scattered around the shop and in a designated area are a reminder that there’s still quite a bit of scrap (or bad) work being run. Twenty-fi ve percent of jobs going through the shop have to be fi xed or rerun because the parts are the wrong size, if only by 0.001 inch. When you make it to the scheduling area, colored Post-it notes show how many jobs are rush, how many are late, and how many haven’t even been started. The on-time delivery rate is only 70 percent. For a precision machine shop that can cut metal to measurements in the ten-thousandths of an inch, the overall operations aren’t so precise.