We arrived at Viwinco with the confidence that experienced lean coaches usually bring. The problem looked straightforward: they were laminating two pieces of glass with a polyvinyl butyral (PVB) interlayer, and they were getting bubbles.
In the traditional lean playbook, the answer is almost always "standardized work." Watch the operator. Find the variation. Lock it down.
But the glass didn't care about our standard work.
Viwinco operates in a high-mix, make-to-order niche. To improve flow, they had invested in a vacuum-seal machine to replace the industry-standard autoclave process. Instead of relying on long cycles of pressurized heat, this new equipment used a combination of vacuum pressure and heated irons to evacuate air while compressing the glass.
It sounds simple. But as we listened to the veterans who had wrestled with this machine since installation, we found scar tissue. Months of fighting an unpredictable process had created a reluctance to experiment. They had finally clawed their way to some level of stability — getting defects under 3% — and they were nervous to touch it. Deep into the first day, the reality set in: We weren't dealing with an operator standard work problem. We were dealing with a materials science problem. Moisture absorption. Vacuum timing. Thermal conductivity. Building understanding around the science felt like a missing component.
I had a realization. I only have three days. How can I help add value, improve capability, and autonomy in a meaningful way that will genuinely help?
Even if I had a solid grasp of the chemistry and process (which I didn't), I couldn't teach the team years of polymer chemistry knowledge, special cause vs. common cause variation, critical control points validation, and statistical process control in 72 hours. Even the machine manufacturer and materials supplier who were there with us acknowledged the limitations of the new technology and materials. If I leave Andy (the glass value-stream manager) with just a "mindset," some standardization tips, some experiments, and sticky notes, I am failing him.
This is where short-term lean coaching narrowly focused on operator standardized work and 5S breaks down. We can tell leaders to "go see," "problem solve," and "experiment," but you can't problem solve a materials science issue if you can't grasp the science.
The gap wasn't motivation. The gap was technical capability.
AI isn't about replacing the expert. It's about lowering the threshold where expertise becomes irreplaceable.
To bridge this gap, I turned to the tools at hand. I fired up Claude and activated "Deep Research" mode, asking it to scour the web for technical articles on vacuum lamination processes. Ninety minutes later, it had curated a robust list of technical journals, supplier manuals, and independent testing results.
I sorted through the resources, pulling the most applicable files into a custom "Project" to serve as a knowledge base. I spent the evening interrogating this new digital expert, trying to grasp the physics myself. It confirmed my suspicion: the variables were far more complex than our experiments were accounting for.
But walking in the next morning and saying, "I have the answers because AI told me," would have been a mistake. That creates dependency, not capability. Instead, I needed to show a willing learner how to build this "Third Coach" for himself — a resource that could bridge the gap long after I was gone. The Third Coach or "critical friend" is technology that accelerates capability development and supplements the First Coach (a learner's direct manager or leader) and the Second Coach (in this case me, the mentor who provides feedback to the First Coach).
I couldn't just hand Andy a login. Claude permissions and setup meant I couldn't simply transfer ownership of my workspace. If this was going to work, Andy had to want it enough to build it himself.
So, over the next 48 hours, I didn't lecture. I experimented in the open. I treated Claude as a "shadow consultant" — spinning up concepts on my laptop and pulling Andy over to the screen to see the results. "Hey, check this out. Look what happens when I feed the manual into this project."
I modeled three specific roles for him, hoping he'd see the potential to hire this "Third Coach" for himself.
I showed him how I wasn't just asking generic questions. I showed him the "Deep Research" logs where the AI had scraped technical papers on vacuum-only adhesion, filtering out the autoclave data that would have led us astray.
The team had a tendency to react out of emotion when defects occurred — tweaking the machine and bracing for the result. I wanted to show him how to differentiate signal from noise without making him read a statistics textbook.
Before I left, I nudged him on where this could go next. It wasn't just about him solving problems; it was about scaling that capability to the floor.
I left Viwinco with no guarantees. We hadn't downloaded or signed up for the software; I had only planted an idea. The friction was high — Andy would have to go home, set up an account, and tinker, play, and rebuild these structures himself. It wasn't my contract; I was only a visitor and had to move on.
So I forgot about it.
But weeks later, I got a text from Karen, our onsite coach.
"Hi Tyson, Andy from Viwinco wanted me to thank you for turning him on to Claude. He is a changed man and a kid in the candy shop. You have inspired him in a tremendous way. Thank you!"
I've since heard from Andy, and he wrote, "You created a monster in a variety of different ways, and now parts of my team are buying into Claude or AI."
We didn't replace a team member, diminish the veterans on-site, or haul in an expert to tell them all the ways they were wrong. Instead, Andy is experimenting, playing, and building a technical resource that enables his team to have an on-demand tutor, a living reference manual, and a co-conspirator for their experiments.
There is a process in your facility right now that is a "black box." It is the machine or process everyone is afraid to touch because the tribal knowledge associated with it retired years ago.
Don't wait for an expert to bring the magic. Don't wait for a PhD in chemistry. Build the library. Build the simulator. Install the Third Coach.
You can chase efficiency all you want, but true transformation comes from depth. By making expertise accessible to an entire team, we enable the precision that simple productivity hacks miss. In lean, the true purpose of standardized work is to surface the complexity that robs you of depth, allowing you to focus intently on problem solving. The Third Coach acts as the lever for this focus. It doesn't just help a manager survive the shift; it democratizes capability, lifting the performance of the entire floor.
Viwinco's Jeff Prince, Lamination Senior Supervisor; Andrew Buczewski, NGS Manager; and Greg Niles, Quality Engineer, are joined by "Coach #3" on the laptop.
[1] Donald J. Wheeler, Understanding Variation (SPS Press Inc., 1993).
Tyson Heaton leads Lean Tech at LEI, exploring the intersection of lean thinking and technology transformation. Previously VP of Manufacturing at O.C. Tanner.
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