This is a fascinating tour of the 100,000 square foot Lucchese boot factory in El Paso, Texas. In a hurried 22 minutes we follow Marketing Director Fred King through the nearly 120 steps that go into a Lucchese boot. He stops at each major operation, where we see several people doing the same operation side by side – "machine farms," if you will. We also see hundreds of boots on racks awaiting the next process.
If this plant were to be rearranged into cells, where a number of operations were done in a small area, they could drastically reduce their inventory and, by Little's Law, reduce their lead time for each customer order by about the same amount, assuming constant output of boots produced per year.