Fox River Lean Book the day

Green Bay, Wisconsin

One day on your floor. One map of where the time goes.

Fox River Lean runs one-day on-site plant assessments for small manufacturers. We walk the floor with your team, follow a job from receiving to shipping, and hand you a written map of the delay, the distance and the rework.

Book the assessment See the walk
Two plant workers walking a marked aisle between workstations on a shop floor
  • Value-stream mapping
  • 5S
  • Standard work
  • Kaizen events
Book the day

The walk

We follow one job from receiving to shipping.

No conference room, no slide deck. The day is spent where the work happens, with the people who do it. Every stop answers the same question: where does the time actually go?

Loaded pallets and a forklift at the shipping dock of a small manufacturing plant
The route starts at the dock door and ends where the truck pulls out.
  1. 01

    Value-stream mapping — receiving

    We start where material enters and follow one order through every step it touches until it ships. The waiting, the moves and the handoffs become a single picture.

  2. 02

    5S — the work cell

    We look at a cell the way an operator does: what is in reach, what is in the way, what nobody can find. Sort, set in order, shine, standardize, sustain, started on the floor rather than in a slide.

  3. 03

    Standard work — the workstation

    We watch the job, write down the current method, and find the places where two people doing the same task do it two different ways.

  4. 04

    Kaizen events — the bottleneck

    We pick the problem costing you the most and scope a focused improvement event your own team can run without us in the room.

  5. 05

    Supervisor coaching — shift change

    We sit with your supervisors on how they open a shift, assign work and follow up. The habits of the floor lead become the habits of the floor.

  6. 06

    Throughput analysis — shipping

    We count what actually leaves the door, compare it with what the plant is capable of, and rank the constraints in the order it pays to work on them.

After the day

You leave with the map, not a proposal.

The assessment is one day on site. What you keep is a written record of what we saw, in the order it matters, addressed to the people who have to act on it.

Written for your supervisors, not for a boardroom

Plain language, plant vocabulary, no consulting apparatus. One page tells you where to start, and the rest explains how we got there.

A supervisor writing notes on a clipboard beside a production machine

What lands in your inbox

  • A current-state value-stream map of one product family, drawn on your floor.
  • The delays and distances we measured, in the sequence the job meets them.
  • A ranked short list of where to start, with the reasoning behind the order.
  • Standard work sheets for the two or three jobs we watched.
  • A 5S plan for one area your team can run without help.
  • A read on throughput: what the plant can do now and what is holding it.

Two numbers we always measure

How long a job takes to move through the plant, and how long anyone actually works on it. The gap between the two bars is where the waiting lives, and waiting is the thing we can see, count and take apart on the day.

LEAD TIME THROUGH THE PLANT TIME THE PART IS ACTUALLY WORKED ON ILLUSTRATIVE — RELATIVE PROPORTION, NOT A MEASURED PLANT
Drawn at the same scale, on the same wall, on day one.

Is this you

Built for small manufacturers.

Fox River Lean works with plants where the owner still walks the floor and most supervisors came up from the machines. That is the whole practice.

A good fit

  • You run a small plant: one to three shifts, real machinery, a small front office.
  • Jobs sit between departments longer than they sit on a machine.
  • Your supervisors were promoted for their hands and have never been taught to coach.
  • You have improvement ideas and nobody with the time to run them.
  • You want someone on the floor, not in a conference room.

Not a fit

  • You want a deck and a multi-year roadmap before anyone touches the floor.
  • The first move you have in mind is cutting headcount.
  • Improvement is already a staffed department with its own budget.

Book the assessment

Pick a week. We will be on the floor by seven.

One day, on site, with the people who run the work. Send the plant address and a week that suits you, and we will come back with two dates.

Email Fox River Lean What the day looks like

Green Bay, Wisconsin — on-site assessments across northeast Wisconsin

You are here

Day one starts on your floor

Fox River Lean — Green Bay, WI

  1. Step 01

    You send the address

    The plant, the week, and roughly how many people are on the floor.

  2. Step 02

    We spend the day walking it

    Dock to dock, with your team, following one job the whole way through.

  3. Step 03

    You get the map and the first fix

    A written record of what we saw, ranked, with the place to start at the top.