Moonshine Shop

The moonshine shop is a team in Lean manufacturing environments that specializes in pushing the envelop of what the company is doing in continuous improvement. It focuses more on experimentation and conceptual work than addressing specific problems.

It is named for the similarity to old moonshiners who would set up shop in out of the way places and do their work away from observation. While moonshine shops are really not intended to be secret, they are intended to provide a place for the moonshiners to work relatively undisturbed.

The moonshine shop is an advanced tool for continuous improvement. It should not be established until the company is in the later stages of its continuous improvement development, and there is widespread CI talent across the company.

The original concept of the moonshine shop was imported to the US from Toyota.

The idea of the shop is to give bigger, general problems to the team and let them attack them undisturbed in order to come up with new ways of doing things.

For example, in a company with lots of welding stations, the moonshine shop may try to develop methods to automate some of that welding without investing in millions of dollars of machinery. They would experiment with different methods to do that, but it would not be done as part of a kaizen team with a fixed goal. The key objective of the moonshine shop is experimentation and learning.

After something is discovered, though, that new knowledge should be spread out across the company.

Setting Up a Moonshine Shop

Moonshine shops can be expensive. You need to staff them with some of your best CI minds, which means they will not be working on other, specific problems that are disrupting production. You also need to give them a decent sized budget to buy components and tools to experiment with. Big problems can be costly to attack.

The problem with a moonshine shop is that the return on investment is going to be sporadic. They may spend months working on a vexing problem and come up empty. But when the do come up with good ideas, they can be really impactful. Some high-level leaders struggle with that inconsistency.

Alternate Uses of Moonshine Shops

Now and again, it is OK to assign the moonshine shop a specific problem that others have tried and failed to solve. It fills a need, but also can help with justifying the moonshine shop’s existence to skeptics. Make sure that these problems are big ones, though, as the opportunity cost of a moonshine shop ceasing work on experiments can be high.

While the moonshine shop is primarily focused on tools and processes, it can also, on occasion, team up with the design team to try some innovation on new product development. This should be done with an eye to ways to make the product quickly and easily.

Moonshine shops are not common in continuous improvement-oriented companies. It can be hard to justify the budget of having 2 or 3 well-compensated engineers with a sizeable budget for tools and materials, without having a specific idea of what the return is.

And because not a lot of companies build up this piece of CI infrastructure, it is hard to find good local examples of moonshine shops in action.

Even if you don’t spend the money on a permanent team, though, you can still pull people together for moonshine sessions. They probably won’t be as effective, though, since the team will not have honed their moonshining skills and the work area won’t be optimized for it, but you can still harness some great brainpower. And you can outsource some of the specific skills that they team doesn’t have time to learn.

For example, a good moonshine shop will have some talent in how to program small motors for automation. Without that skill, they can still mock up what they need and then pay an outsider to do the tech work. Not perfect, but a way to prove out the value of moonshining in your company.

But even without that, try to ingrain the spirit of moonshining in people, if only for a few minutes during a kaizen project. Get them to just go off for a few minutes and play around experimenting with how to solve problems with some extra creativity.