GA 639 | Putting the Customer First with Slaytor Baldwin

A suppressor manufacturer in Utah started its lean transformation about a year ago. Twelve months later, inventory turns had doubled, changeover time dropped from 3.5 hours to 9 minutes, and a rollout planned for a year got compressed to three months. Slaytor Baldwin, Director of Operations at SilencerCo, joined Ron Pereira to walk through exactly how that happened, including the five years of failed starts that preceded it and what finally changed.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• How a single cell pilot compressed a year-long rollout into three months (0:00)
• What starting a career inside a lean company teaches you without knowing it (3:17)
• Why measuring resource utilization instead of customer demand creates invisible dysfunction (6:04)
• How one leadership change unlocked five years of stalled momentum (10:08)
• What the first two moves of a real lean commitment look like in practice (12:46)
• Why starting with your hardest product family creates conviction no training can replicate (14:51)
• What happened to inventory turns when the entire factory went cellular (17:43)
• Why lean is not an operations game and what that costs you when you treat it like one (19:59)
• Why picking the right first project matters more than having the right toolkit (24:22)
• How failure functions as data when you build a learning culture around it (28:43)
• Why most transformation decisions are a two-way door and what changes when leaders believe that (29:17)

“Lean is not a template. It is a culture.” – Slaytor Baldwin

Keep Learning

If the shift from departmental batch production to cellular flow described in this episode has you thinking about your own factory layout, the School of Lean covers value stream design, SMED, and cellular manufacturing in depth.
Learn More About School of Lean at https://www.gembaacademy.com/school-of-lean

Podcast Resources

• Slaytor on LinkedIn

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What Do You Think?

When you look at your own organization, is the resistance to lean transformation coming from the shop floor or from the layer above it?

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