r/LeanManufacturing

I am proud to announce that I was able to pass the AISSC BB exam on my first attempt. I know there is a lot of confusion about what Six Sigma certification is valued and I wanted to give my perspective on things.

ASQ is the best SS certification I feel because it includes actual project knowledge. However, there are many of us that don’t work for companies where our six sigma projects were valued or promoted enough that the company would want to foot the bill or even managers supporting the validation process. I opted for IASSC because it is the next best thing. It does cover significant theoretical knowledge if you compare it to cssc and is widely known to be better. I realized that re-certification for them is a drag as cssc doesn’t require that but I figured if my goal is to not have just a paper, I might as well learn the rigorous material so I can apply this knowledge and help others.

The resource that genuinely helped me the most is IASSC The Blackbelt standard on Amazon. It explained the concepts in the most logical way and the question difficulty was very close to the actual exam.

Let me know if you have any questions or need more details. I’ll try to help.

Title: Would an AI-based “Lean thinking assistant” be useful in manufacturing, or just another gimmick?

Hi everyone,
I’m thinking about building a small AI-based Lean / continuous improvement assistant for a manufacturing company.
The main idea is not just to create a chatbot that explains Lean terms. The goal would be to help every employee “put on Lean glasses” and better understand how to look at daily work through a Lean mindset.
For example, an employee could describe a normal workplace problem like:
“We often lose time because tools or testing equipment are not in the right place.”
The assistant would then help the employee understand the situation from a Lean perspective:
What kind of waste might be involved?
Is this related to 5S, standardization, waiting time, unnecessary motion, defects, or poor flow?
What questions should the employee ask to understand the real cause?
What small improvement could be tested?
How could the improvement be measured?
What would be a reasonable next step?
At the same time, the tool could turn the input into a structured KVP / continuous improvement entry for the

Lean team:
Problem
Area / workplace
Observation
Possible cause
Type of waste
Lean category
Improvement idea
Effort vs. benefit
Suggested next step
KPI or measurement idea

So the tool would have two purposes:
Help employees learn and apply Lean thinking in their daily work.
Help the Lean team collect, structure, and analyze improvement ideas.

My questions:
Do you think such a tool could create real value in a manufacturing / Lean environment?
Would employees actually use something like this?
Would it be better as a chatbot, a simple form, a dashboard, or a combination?
Have you seen similar tools in real companies?

I’m especially interested in honest opinions from people working in Lean, manufacturing, operations, continuous improvement, or production management.

Thanks a lot!

I’ve been reading a lot of incident postmortems lately, and one thing that stands out is how different every team’s investigation process is.

Some people jump straight into logs, others start with dashboards or traces, while some rely heavily on service dependencies.

In your experience, what’s the biggest bottleneck during the first 20–30 minutes of an incident? Is it finding the right signal, correlating information across systems, or something completely different?

what has actually improved your team’s workflow.

Something I see a lot with people (usually newer plant managers or founders) who are excited about lean and want to do it "right" ... they try to build the master plan first. Full current-state map, future-state map, multi-year roadmap, phase gates.... the works. Then six weeks later nothing has actually changed on the floor because they are still planning!

I made this mistake myself early on. Thought I needed a complete, defensible plan before I could touch anything. Turns out that's backwards, at least for how you start.

Here's the thing about problems on your floor (or in your process, if you're not literally manufacturing something): they are not evenly distributed. Picture a pyramid. Big wide base of simple, obvious problems: a tool that's never in the same place twice, a form that gets filled out three different ways, a handoff nobody owns. Small tip of genuinely hard, cross-functional, needs-real-analysis problems.

Most people start planning for the tip of the pyramid. You should start by clearing the base. It's not glamorous. It won't get you a case study. But it does two things a fancy roadmap doesn't: it gets you a fast, visible win, and it gets your people used to the idea that they're allowed to change how things work. That second part matters more than people think: a workforce that's never been asked to fix anything doesn't magically start solving problems just because you handed them a roadmap. They start because you let them fix something small and it stuck.

You don't need experts to start this way either. Lean, at the start, is closer to systematic common sense applied consistently than it is to a body of certified knowledge. Certifications and designations rarely matter... the deep tools matter later. At the start, they are often just an excuse to delay.

One caveat that I think matters and doesn't get said enough: this "start small, don't overplan" advice is for getting moving. It is not permission to stay tactical forever. At some point you do need the bigger picture. Otherwise you get a pile of disconnected local improvements that don't add up to anything at the system level. But that's a problem for month six, not week one.

For anyone who tried to build the full roadmap before doing anything, how'd that go? Did it ever actually launch, or did it die in the planning phase?

Long time lurker, first time actually writing one of these out instead of just reading answering to other people's war stories.

About twenty years ago I was running ops for a small manufacturer... a family business, second-generation owner, the kind of place where growth happened by throwing bodies at problems until it stopped working. One day the owner comes to me and says a major customer is going to walk if we don't get their orders out in three days. We had over 90 orders overdue, some by 20+ days. Average lead time from order to ship was 24 days! adding people had gotten us this far and it wasn't getting us any further.

That's when it actually hit me. we weren't too busy to fix the process. We were too busy because we'd never fixed the process. Two different things and I'd been treating them as the same thing for years.

Walked the floor properly for probably the first time with fresh eyes. One line was semi-organized. Everything else was chaos. No standard way to do anything. Nobody could tell you on any given day how many units we'd made, what got scrapped, what was actually open and due. We were going by whoever yelled loudest on the phone that week.

Here's the part that surprised me: we didn't need a black belt or a consultant to start. We started 5S in the one area that was already down for a broken machine, because we didn't have the luxury of stopping a healthy line to go "do lean" at it. Just cleaned it, organized it, gave everything a place. It looked almost embarrassingly simple compared to what I thought "lean transformation" was supposed to look like.

That embarrassingly simple thing is what got us moving. Within about aprox. 7 months we went from 24-day lead times to 97%+ on-time in 3 days or less... because a clean, standardized starting point is the only thing that makes the next problem visible. You can't see a deviation from a standard that doesn't exist yet.

The thing nobody tells you when you're starting out: you don't need the whole transformation mapped before you touch anything. You need one honest look at the floor and the willingness to start where you are, not where the textbook says you should be.

Curious what actually got other people's transformations moving

was it a crisis like mine, or did someone deliberately choose to start before things got that bad? And if it was a crisis, what was the first thing you touched?

I’m trying to compare pneumatic valves for a small manufacturing setup, and I’m realizing that “top-rated” does not always tell the full story. Some brands are mentioned everywhere, but when you look closer, the right choice seems to depend on air pressure, cycle frequency, connection type, spare parts, and how easy the valve is to replace when something fails.

I’m not trying to build anything overly complex, but downtime is still a concern. A cheap pneumatic valve that sticks or leaks after a short time can create more problems than it saves. On the other hand, going for the most expensive brand may not make sense if a mid-range option performs well enough for normal production use.

I checked local distributors and also looked on Alibaba because there are many suppliers listing pneumatic valves and other valves for manufacturing applications. The selection is wide, but it can be difficult to judge quality from photos and short product descriptions. Some suppliers provide decent specs, while others do not explain much beyond voltage, port size, and pressure range.

For people who work with pneumatic systems, which brands or supplier types have been dependable in real use? Do you usually stick with well-known names, test samples from multiple suppliers, or choose based on certifications and replacement part availability? I’m especially interested in what actually holds up after months of regular factory use, not just what looks good in a listing.

Automation is changing manufacturing faster than ever.

But many factories, especially smaller manufacturers, still rely heavily on traditional systems.

Do you think factories that ignore automation will struggle to compete in the next decade?

Or do you believe skilled human labor will always remain more valuable than full automation?

Curious to hear different perspectives from people working directly in manufacturing and industrial engineering.

I've spent months collecting the most common consulting failure complaints from ops leaders, CI professionals, and manufacturing executives. Six Sigma practitioners, BPM practitioners, Lean practitioners, people who had been through it and felt the sting.

The complaints weren't about incompetent consultants. They were about a system that's structurally misaligned. Specifically: most consulting models are paid by activity, not outcomes.

Here are the five patterns that kept appearing:

1. Expertise was rented, not transferred
2. "Cultural resistance" was actually design feedback
3. Sustainability was treated as a nice-to-have
4. The Control phase was always skipped
5. The savings rarely exceeded the fees

What's been your experience? Genuinely curious, particularly from people who've been on the client side of a failed engagement.

I've worked on systems where the logic was extremely modular, using reusable function blocks, AOIs, and standardized structures.
I've also seen projects where everything was kept as simple and direct as possible, making it easier for technicians to troubleshoot on the plant floor.
Which approach do you prefer in real-world environments?

Do you optimize for maintainability and scalability, or for making sure the next person can understand the logic at 2 AM during a breakdown?

Curious where people draw the line between good engineering and overengineering.

Hey everyone, I spend a lot of time looking at the CI, Lean, and Six Sigma job market across the UK/Europe, and the landscape is shifting pretty quickly. I have a full write up you can check out at the bottom, a few things I’m seeing consistently:

1. The 'Green Belt' bottleneck:
   Roles requiring a Green Belt are staying open way longer than average. Companies are desperate for people who can actually *run* a project independently, and basic White/Yellow belt awareness just isn't cutting it for hiring managers anymore.

2. The fastest growing sector isn't manufacturing:
   Financial services seems to be aggressively hunting for Lean Six Sigma practitioners right now.

3. The AI + CI hybrid premium:
   The highest-paying roles are starting to specifically ask for practitioners who know how to integrate AI tools into the DMAIC cycle (especially for data crunching during the Analyse phase).

Has anyone else noticed this shift in their own industries? Would love to hear what you're seeing out there.

PS: I put together a broader write-up on where I see the CI industry heading this year on my site here:

https://www.simplicityhub.co.uk/reports/lss-uk-report-2026.html

I've seen systems that work great when they're first commissioned, but after years of upgrades and quick fixes they become difficult to troubleshoot.

What's usually responsible for that?

Poor documentation, inconsistent programming, lack of standards, multiple vendors, or something else?

I’ve been exploring Lean tools like 5 Whys, waste reduction, and process mapping.

They made more sense when I saw real-world use instead of theory.

How did you learn Lean effectively? Any practical tips or experiences?

Hey everyone. I recently got into a higher position in Cannabis Manufacturing, and my boss asked me if I'd be willing to go through the whole facility for a "clean up" which I loved because I'm very focused on cleanliness. He then asked if I heard if 5s which I hadn't. He told me to look into it, and acquiring a certificate is optional. Upon reviewing 5s, it just...kind of seems like common sense? Lol, it's how I keep my own house clean (throw away things you don't use, keep frequently accessed items easy to maneuver, and make sure everything is tidy in its home). So I guess I'm confused on what the certification is for, or if it's necessary for me to get one?