May 8 2013

This “respect for people stuff”

The following two-minute dialogue between Jeffrey Liker and British consultant John Seddon has caused a stir in the US, primarily for Seddon’s saying “…all this respect for people stuff is horseshit…”

Note: For a video of the full 45-minute session from which it is excerpted, see Panel discussion – Lean Ísland 2012 (08). The third participant in the conversation, the woman sitting between Jeffrey Liker and John Seddon is Yr Gunnarsdottir.

While dramatically stated, Seddon’s point is actually not that controversial. If you listen closely, he says that respect for people is not a “point of intervention,” meaning not a subject for which you bring in consultants or start projects. Mark Graban pointed out that he had never seen a company have a respect-for-people project, and I never have either. In his comments on Graban’s post, Rob van Stekelenborg writes “Still, more and more often I notice, Lean is attempted primarily as a leadership and a formalized (thru methods), bottom-up continual improvement effort without much attention for the strong industrial engineering roots it also has.” While I agree with Rob, I am not sure this is what Seddon meant.

Digging deeper, the following paragraphs quote some of my preferred authors/bloggers on the subject, with my own comments added:

Jeffrey Liker on Taiichi Ohno’s people skills
Art Smalley on the meaning of respect for people
Mark Graban on Toyota, Respect for People, and Lean
Rob van Stekelenborg on teaching respect for people

Jeffrey Liker on Taiichi Ohno’s people skills

The video starts with Seddon asking Liker to rate Taiichi Ohno’s people skills in a short answer, and Liker answers “terrible.” I would not have answered that. By whatever means he accomplished it, Ohno got thousands of people to work with him to develop and deploy the Toyota Production System, and it makes him only one in a long line of effective business leaders, sports coaches, and military commanders who don’t ooze charm from every pore.

My understanding of people skills is as the art of working with, through, and for other people and that the degree to which a person possesses these skills is measured not by their manners but by their achievements. Some of Ohno’s statements on people issues are surprising. Ohno’s open bursts of anger were not due to lack of self-control but were on purpose, as he explains on p. 93 of Workplace Management:

“I never get angry at the workers. However, with supervisors and above I will get very angry. The gemba is a convenient place to get angry at people. There is a lot of noise so they can’t really hear what l am saying. When I scold the supervisors on the gemba, the workers see that their boss is being yelled at and they sympathize with their boss.

Then it becomes easier for that supervisor to correct the workers. lf you call the supervisor away to a dark corner somewhere to scold him, the message does not get through. The gemba is a noisy place anyway, so if l am yelling at them and the person being scolded doesn’t really know why they are being scolded, this is okay. However, when the workers see their boss being scolded and they think it is because they are not doing something right, then the next time the supervisor corrects them, they will listen.”

For a higher-level manager never to scold workers is consistent with standard management practice going back to Sun-Tsu. On the other hand, that you should publicly scold supervisors for no particular reason in front of their subordinates to generate sympathy and make it easier for supervisors to do their jobs is a strange idea. I have never done it, nor have I ever recommended it. In the plants I am familiar with, sympathy for supervisors among operators is in short supply, and a public scolding would do nothing more than undermine their limited authority.

Yet, I don’t think Ohno would write this unless it had worked for him as a manager at Toyota. As he explains, he was trained to praise in public and criticize in private, but he did the opposite on purpose. Had he failed, you could use this practice as evidence of terrible people skills, but he didn’t fail.

Art Smalley on the meaning of respect for people

Back in 2010, Art Smalley gave a detailed explanation of what respect for people means in the Toyota context, as he experienced it while working there. In a recent post on the ISPI conference in Reno, I wrote “Lean relies on people to improve operations, provides them with safe and secure jobs, and supports their professional development as a strategy for the company to gain market share, enhance profits, and grow.” While it was not my intention, I think it summarizes Art’s points.

Art also quoted the following excerpt from a TWI Job Relations training manual from World War II as evidence that it is not a new concern:

But we can dig further. In The Visible Hand, p. 69, Alfred Chandler quotes British textile expert James Montgomery writing in 1832, that “To assure good feeling and understanding, while guarding against too much lenity (modern: leniency) on the one hand, to be careful to avoid too much severity on the other, [...] be firm and decisive in all measures, but not overbearing and tyrannical – not too distant and haughty, but affable and easy of access, yet not too familiar.”

In other words, since the industrial revolution, advisers have been telling manufacturers that it was good business to show respect to their employees, but few have acted on this advice. Taylor’s “scientific management” went in the opposite direction, and so did Ford in its early assembly lines. It could be explained by the prevalence of immigrants from many different countries with limited education in the manufacturing work force of early 20th century America. But in California 100 years later, Injex was using TPS to make auto parts for Toyota with great success and a workforce with 19 different nationalities and varied levels of education and English proficiency.

Mark Graban on Toyota, Respect for People, and Lean

On 2/26, Mark Graban wrote an extensive rebuttal of Seddon, to which I had also added the following:

In concrete terms, I have found disrespect easier to explain than respect. For example, giving a person a job that requires doing nothing 50% of the time is saying “your time is worthless,” and therefore “you are worthless.” Many managers do not realize how disrespectful this attitude is, particularly where labor is cheap.

Ignoring complaints about minor safety issues, like sharp edges on a cart, is also showing disrespect. There are many such issues that must be addressed before asking people to participate in improvement and contribute ideas. The Frank Woollard quote in Bob Emiliani’s comment explains why you should pay respect to your people. It’s not about being nice. In the long run, you cannot compete unless your organization fires on all intellectual cylinders.

Frank Woollard was a British industrial engineer in the 1920s, and Bob Emiliani’s quoted him saying:

“This principle of ‘benefit for all’ is not based on altruistic ideals – much as these are to be admired – but upon the hard facts of business efficiency.”

In his article, Mark includes a photo of an exhibit at the Toyota museum, that contains the following text:

It is in English, Japanese, and Mandarin, but the titles have slightly different meanings. The Japanese title means “Respect for Humanity,” not “Respect for People,” and the Mandarin title means “People-oriented.” To be even more specific, in Japanese, ningensei (人間性) means humanity in the sense of human nature, not humankind, which would be jinrui (人類).

On the other hand, the English paragraph is an accurate translation from the Japanese and clarifies the difference in the titles. Saying “please” and “thank you” is showing respect for people, but it does not imply any consideration for their specifically human sensory, intellectual and cognitive abilities.

I don’t know what the paragraph in Mandarin says, but it is visibly shorter than the other two. Mandarin is concise, but not this concise.

Rob van Stekelenborg on teaching respect for people

Rob van Stekelenborg, blogging as Dumontis, also posted on this subject, introducing the new word “resp-act.” What Rob does here is go beyond general statements and give examples of how to show respect for people in situations involving suppliers, customers, or employees.

After all the theorizing on the true meaning of respect for people, it remains a vague and fuzzy guideline for anyone on a shop floor today and tomorrow, and what Rob does to bring it into focus reminds me of the Critical Incident Technique I heard about from Steven Villachica at the ISPI conference.

May 1 2013

Metrics in Lean – Chart junk in performance boards and presentations

Manufacturing professionals who read Edward Tufte‘s books on visualization may be stunned to discover that their 3D pie charts, stacked bar charts, and green safety crosses are chart junk. These charts are common, both on shop floor performance boards and in management presentations. But they are information-poor, and their decorative elements distract, confuse, and occasionally mislead. The purpose of plotting is not to dazzle, but to discover patterns, understand the underlying phenomena, and communicate with people whose livelihood is affected by these patterns.

For details, see:

Pabulum pies
Stacks astray
Safety crosses to bear
Recommendation on performance board design

Pabulum pies

Following is an example of what Microsoft Support considers to be a pie chart with a “spiffy, professional look,” and a few comments about it.

Microsoft’s idea of a pie chart with a “spiffy, professional look”

Deconstructing the Microsoft example

This chart not only uses buckets of ink to display five data points, it also violates other good design principles:

The legends are remote from their objects, forcing the reader to look in two places to understand each item.
The chart begs a question that it could answer but doesn’t: percentages of what total amount?
The shadow and the light reflection convey no information.
The 3D effect makes the 21% slice appear larger than it actually is.

If we put the legends on their objects, add the total amount as a subtitle, get rid of the vinyl-cushion look, and take a top view so that the wedge sizes are not distorted, we get the following:

One feature that now stands out is that the wedges are ordered by decreasing size, except for the last two: “Desserts” is larger than “Beverages” but comes after. It is the example Microsoft uses for training and they don’t explain the sequence. While this chart is an improvement over the previous version, but do we actually need it? A picture may be worth a 1,000 words but, if what you have to say fits in 10 words, a picture may be overkill. Compare the pie chart with the following table of the data in it:

If you compare a pie chart with a sorted table of the data in it, you see that the chart uses orders of magnitude more ink in multiple colors than the table, without telling you anything that isn’t already obvious from the table. In Edward Tufte’s book, it makes it the kind of chart junk that you should banish from your materials.

3D pie charts are actually worse, because they are not only useless but misleading in that the perspective distorts the apparent size of the wedges. This is an illustration of another of Tufte’s principles, that a graphic display should not have more dimensions than the data. In 3D pie charts, the height of the pie is meaningless. The only circumstance in which showing pie thicknesses would be useful if when showing several pie charts side by side, and both pie diameter and thickness would represent parameters of each pie.

Stacks astray

Vertical bar charts, also known as column charts, usually serve to show the evolution of a quantity for which data is available for a sequence of periods. It is used when there are few periods and interpolation between periods does not make sense. If you plot daily sales over a year in a vertical bar chart, the columns will be so densely packed that you will only see the line formed by their tops anyway, and you might as well just use a line plot.

Bar charts - Daily sales as bar versus line plot

On the other hand, if you are plotting monthly sales, you use vertical bars, because interpolation between two points does not give you meaningful intermediate numbers. If you plotted temperature readings taken at fixed intervals, for example on a hospital patient, you would interpolate to estimate the temperature between readings, and therefore you use a line plot rather than vertical bars.

Bar chart of monthly sales

There is nothing objectionable to the ordinary, vertical bar chart. It is simple to produce and easy to read, and provides information that is not obvious in a table of numbers. Stacked bar charts, however, are another matter. They attempt to show the evolution over multiple periods of both an aggregate quantity and its breakdown in multiple categories, and do a poor job of it, especially when a spurious 3rd dimension is added for decoration.

We can retun to the Microsoft support web site for a tutorial on stacked bar charts. The building-block look of the Microsoft example may be appropriate for an audience of preschoolers.

Building blocks available at WalMart

Microsoft stacked bar example

Another oddity of the Microsoft example is that it does not follow the convention by which vertical bars are used when the categories on the x-axis represent consecutive time buckets. When they are not ordered categories, you usually prefer horizontal bars, not only because we are used to the x-axis representing time in performance charts but also because this chart has horizontal category labels, readable without tilting your head.

Based on the preceding section, the first question we might ask is whether we need graphics at all, and the answer is yes. When we take a look at the data in table format, even though there are only 16 points, no pattern is immediately apparent:

If we forget the spurious 3rd dimension and the building-block look, and toggle the axes so that the x-axis represents time, we get the following:

From this chart, it is obvious that total sales collapsed from the 2nd to the 4th quarter; it was not obvious from either the table of number or the 3D chart Microsoft presented as a model. Even in this form, however, the stacked bar chart is ineffective at answering the immediate follow-up question of whether the decline in sales was more pronounced in some regions than others. For example, if we try to isolate the Northeast on this chart, we find bars floating at different heights. On the other hand, the answers become visible if you de-stack the bars, as in the following:

For example, you can see that sales actually grew from the 1st to the 2nd quarter in both Eastern regions, while declining throughout the year everywhere else. Yes, it takes up more space than the stacked bar, but is that really a concern when, even in a simple example like this one, it lets you see better?

Safety crosses to bear

The safety performance of a plant matters, and not only to the potential victims of accidents. Injuries must be rare events, occur with ever decreasing frequency, and have both immediate countermeasures and permanent solutions to prevent recurrence. In light of this, what kind of graphic summaries would be appropriate to represent the safety performance of a whole plant, or of a shop within it?

A common metric is the number of consecutive days without a lost-time accident. It is a relevant measure, but imperfect in that its use has been known to lead thoughtless managers to blame victims for hurting their department’s performance and pressure them not to report injuries. It is also necessary to show detailed information about each accident, and to categorize injuries, for example, in terms of whether they affected hands, shoulders, feet, etc. and where exactly they occurred.

In light of these considerations, what is industry using? In the US, the National Safety Council uses a green cross in its logo and awards a Green Cross for Safety Medal to one company each year. That makes the green cross a symbol of safety, and it has motivated some to make it the basis of a safety performance tracking chart. You start with a cross shape subdivided into rectangles numbered 1 through 31 and, on each day of the month, you place a magnet on the corresponding spot, which is green if nothing happened, yellow if a minor incident happened, and red for a lost time accident.

Blank green cross

Green cross being filled out

It is difficult to think of the use of a chart in the form of a symbol of safety as anything but a gimmick. The green cross has no connection with any requirements we can think of for a chart of safety performance. It does not make it particularly easy to count consecutive days without incident, nor does it bear any information about the nature or location of the accidents. The green cross shape evokes safety but has nothing to do with the key questions about employee safety.

To visualize a sequence of rare events, a technique that comes to mind is the timeline. You arrange events around a centerline that shows the passage of time, as in the following example that summarizes 10 years of the history of the iPhone.

Safety-related events in a factory do not need a 10-year timeline, but possibly a six-month timeline along the following model:

Note that the time between events is immediately visible, and that each event has some explanation and photographic documentation. For location information, you can pin injury locations on an outline of a human body and a map of the shop floor. While these may not be pleasant charts to consider, they are a means of starting a conversation in the team on what the safety issues are and the means of preventing injuries.

Silhouette with injury locations

Floor map with injury locations

There are, of course, other safety issues, like repetitive stress, that are not associated with discrete events and do not appear on these charts, but they do not appear on the green crosses either.

Recommendation on performance board design

Performance boards come in all sorts of shapes, as in the following examples:

As a performance board for a shop floor team, I recommend the following template:

Performance board template

This template has one column per dimension of performance and one row for each type of information, as follows:

The top row is for the latest news, what happened this shift or last.
The second row is for historical trends in aggregate performance.
The third row is for a breakdown of the aggregate into its constituent parts, such as the most common injuries, defect categories, most frequently made products, or the employee skills matrix.
The bottom is about actions or projects in progress in each of these areas.

Apr 26 2013

Lean implementers: don’t forget engineering!

Just about everybody says that the involvement and personal engagement of top management is the main challenge in Lean implementation. “Key to the success of lean manufacturing,” said the keynote speaker at an industry association meeting in Santa Clara, CA, “is that the leadership team needs to fully buy into the method and remove workplace obstacles so that employees can achieve results.” While he didn’t say it, I am sure his audience heard that management doing as he says is all it takes to implement Lean successfully.

In an informal survey taken recently by blogger Vivek Naik among his readers, no one mentioned insufficient mastery of the engineering and management tools of Lean as a cause of failure. The existence of tools is generally recognized, but most consultants and implementers take them for granted. They are assumed to be simple, widely known and not new. Some, like Bill Kluck, even call the tools “trick shots.”

When you read that the details of Lean tools are widely known, you wonder where and by whom. How many manufacturing managers or engineers do you know who understand heijunka, cell design, work-combination charts, SMED, the proper use of andons, mistake-proofing, or jidoka? Considering that these tools are the results of 75 years of development at Toyota, and that most of the Japanese literature on Lean is about technical content, I find this dismissal cavalier, to say the least.

It does not happen in other human endeavors, like building a world class soccer team. Top management commitment is obviously required, but no one would claim that it is sufficient. You don’t hear of dribbling, passing, shooting, receiving or throw-ins as low-level skills that everybody has anyway and that you don’t need to focus on. Soccer teams actually train relentlessly to develop and maintain these skills, and everybody involved, even the fans, fully realize their importance and admire the star players for their mastery.

To understand the issues, and remedy this situation, I would like to dive deeper into the following topics:

The engineering dimension of Lean, and the other dimensions
What is special about engineering on a factory floor?
Engineers in Lean implementation
Correcting the imbalance in the US Lean movement

The engineering dimension of Lean, and the other dimensions

So why is it different in the competitive game of manufacturing? For one, it is more complex than soccer, and few people have a holistic view of it. One who does is my colleague Crispin Vincenti-Brown, and he has identified four dimensions to this game, and you must pay attention to all if you want to win. They are as follows:

The engineering of production lines.
Logistics and production control.
Organization and people.
Metrics and accountability.

In the US, the Lean movement has ignored the engineering dimension. Logistics receives some attention, but Lean programs are overwhelmingly focused on the last two: organization and people issues, and metrics. It is out of balance, and I believe this is a key reason for Lean programs to fail.

Lean implementers, whether employees or consultants, come from a variety of backgrounds. In the US, few are engineers. You see MBAs, psychologists, marketing people, and the occasional cognitive sociologist and defrocked priest. There is nothing wrong with having all these different perspectives, as long as they don’t blind you to the whole picture. The psychologist takes engineering for granted while the engineer does the same for people issues and the production control manager thinks that everything revolves around planning and scheduling….

On the one hand, you cannot have a successful implementation unless you address all these dimensions in the right sequence. On the other hand, you cannot expect any individual to master all of them, but you need a team that does, in which every member understands that his or her perspective is not the whole picture, and leadership that can pull all the strings into a coherent approach.

What is special about engineering on a factory floor?

This still does not explain why it is Engineering of production lines that is given short shrift, even in a country like the US, that has contributed so much to this field, and that still has a vibrant engineering community in other technical specialties. What is it about the engineering of production that sets it apart?

The heat of the forge, the sparks from welding, or the din of the assembly line, and interactions with the people who work in these environments,… are not for everybody. Most universities do not know how to teach this kind of engineering. Its subject matter straddles what they call Industrial Engineering and Manufacturing Engineering.

Industrial Engineering (IE), as taught in American universities, is generically about how people work, and gives you no process-specific knowledge. Manufacturing Engineering (ME), on the other hand, is heavily focused on metal working operations, as if these were the only processes worthy of the name “manufacturing.” In principle, you should be able to become a Manufacturing Engineer specialized in all sorts of other fabrication or assembly processes, but the label is in fact used only in metal working.

We could expect, however, those who pursue degrees in IE or ME to be comfortable on a production shop floor, but most aren’t. Some years ago, my colleague Hormoz Mogarei and I gave a seminar to PhD candidates in Industrial Engineering at Stanford University. We wanted to tell them what we did to get them interested in working with us. Their response, however, was that it was beneath them, and that they had not gone this far in school to do such low-level work.

For factory work, Shigeo Shingo had identified two types of engineers to avoid: the catalog engineer, whose solution to every problem is buying new equipment, and the “no” engineer, who always has a reason why it can’t be done, has been tried before, or won’t work. One more category that did not exist in Shingo’s day but does today is the PowerPoint engineer, whose focus is animating slides.

Historically, with the exception of Lillian Gilbreth who had a PhD, the key innovators in this field, from Frederick Taylor, Frank Gilbreth and Alexei Gastev to Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo were all self-taught and had no advanced degrees. To this day, the engineers who are most comfortable and effective on a production shop floor started working there as operators in their youth and later went back to school or learned through continuing education or apprenticeship programs that alternate extended internships with classroom training. These engineers combine the requisite technical knowledge with an understanding of the operator experience and the ability to work with operators on improvements.

Engineers in Lean implementation

And having practical, shop-floor minded engineers in your plant is still not sufficient. You also need to use them effectively. In manufacturing, if you provide an “engineering sandbox,” organize for people to tinker in it, and provide some form of recognition, you will get results. The engineering sandbox is a space set aside and outfitted with the resources needed for tinkering, experimentation, and prototyping. It is used both by individuals and teams.

Engineering Sandbox

In Wikipedia, the space you can use to draft an article or an edit before publishing it is called your “sandbox,” and it is similar in concept to the engineering sandboxes you find in factories, that are often called “Kaizen areas” even though the experimentation that takes place can exceed the scope of what is commonly designated as Kaizen. This space is best located in a secluded area, away from heavy traffic and prying eyes and, as it is shared by multiple individuals and teams, access to it must be managed accordingly and often takes place outside of regular working hours. Chihiro Nakao calls this activity “moonshine.”

The implementation of Lean involves engineering projects at multiple scales, from continuous improvement to new plant design. Which no engineering group can be large enough to execute on its own. While many companies set up a “Lean Engineering” group and task it with transforming the entire plant, it cannot work. The engineering group does not have the bandwidth to do no matter how hard its members apply themselves and, even if they did, the production organization would not own their output and would reject it.

Lean engineering group forging ahead

The only way it can practically be done is by the production organization, under the leadership of its management at the appropriate level, with the engineers in a supporting role. The concepts emanate from the production organization. The engineers help with calculations, research available resources, generate technical drawings, and coordinate the use of contractors if needed. And they apply the lessons learned through improvement to new plant and new line designs where they play a central role.

Retrofit to a multicavity injection molding machine

At the start of setup time reduction projects, the focus is on organizing to prepare better before stopping the machine, which achieves initial results, mostly through the work of production operators. But to reduce setup times from 1 hour to less than 10 minutes, you need to go further and modify the machine, which requires engineering. And it’s not all about hardware. More and more machines are computer-controlled, and also require changes to their process programs. The picture to the left shows a device conceived and built by plant engineers, and retrofitted to an injection molding machine to separate the parts by cavity and better trace quality problems.

Correcting the imbalance in the US Lean movement

I am not the only one who has been working to lack of attention to engineering in the US Lean movement. J.T. Black, a professor of IE at Auburn University in Alabama, now in his seventies, was possibly the first American academic to recognize the significance of Lean and make it central to his teachings. Art Smalley, a consultant who is a Toyota alumnus, has also been vocal. But it is an uphill battle. Two of my books, Lean Assembly and Working with Machines, are on this subject, and both are outsold by Lean Logistics, which isn’t.

Apr 26 2013

Improving operations: How far can you go with common sense?

In the Lean Six Sigma discussion group on LinkedIn, Brian P. Sheets argues that “ the alphabet soup of acronyms describing the multitude of process improvement & management methodologies that have come and gone over the last 50 years [...] is just plain, old, common sense.” The list he targets in this statement is Six Sigma, TQM, BPR, BPM, TOC, MBO, Kaizen, and Gemba Kaizen, and overlap the one I discussed earlier in this blog. To support his argument, he invokes not only the great work done in US manufacturing during World War II without these acronyms, but goes back all the way to Egypt’s pyramids.

I see things differently. The old days were not so great and we have learned a few new tricks in the 68 years since the end of World War II, as a result of which we are not only able to make better products, but we also use fewer people to make them, at a higher quality. There definitely is something to some of the ideas that have been packaged under various brands in that time, and it is definitely more than common sense.

What is common sense anyway? The common sense approach to a problem is the solution that would be chosen by an intelligent person without any specialized knowledge. It is what you resort to when faced with a new situation you are unprepared for, like the businessman played by Anthony Hopkins in The Edge, who is stranded in the Alaskan wilderness by a plane crash and has to kill a grizzly.

Once you have been working on something for a few years, however, you are supposed to have acquired specialized knowledge of it, and apply solutions that are beyond common sense. And these solutions are counter-intuitive to anyone without this experience. Lean manufacturing concepts like one-piece flow or heijunka are bewildering to beginners, because they have nothing to go by beyond their common sense.

“Common sense,” Descartes said, “is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have.” After that, he proceeds to explain a method “to seek truth in science” and presents three applications of this method, the best known being analytic geometry. All of this is far beyond common sense.

For all these reasons, I am not too fond of invoking common sense in support of any new concept. What you really need is a rationale, and experimental proof through a small scale implementation.

Apr 4 2013

The Purpose of Standard Work in Manufacturing

The articles by Art Smalley‘s and Mike Rother about Standards in The Lean Edge puzzle me, because it seems we all mean different things by “standard.” On a manufacturing shop floor, in particular, I don’t see Standard Work as a basis for comparison, the best way known to perform a task, or a target condition. Instead, it is a set of rules published for the purpose of ensuring that different people perform the same tasks in the same way. This is consistent with the Wikipedia definition of a technical standard.

A process can only produce a consistent output at a consistent pace on different shifts in the same plant, as well as in different plants, if it is performed on the same materials, with the same equipment, and by the same methods. That is what standard work is supposed to accomplish, and it is, for both human and technical reasons, more difficult than meets the eye.

So here are a few thoughts I would like to share on this subject:

Standard Work versus Craft Control
Use of A3 instruction sheets
Avoiding “Lean Wallpaper”

Standard Work versus Craft Control

When operators on a manufacturing shop floor remain on the same job for years, they come up with their private tricks on how to perform it. They attach “cheater bars” to wrenches, rearrange parts around their stations, and develop the ability to detect anomalies by sight, sound, touch, or smell. By default, as operators perceive this knowledge to be the key to job security, they make sure it remains hidden away in their heads.

19th-century craftsman

It leads to a situation that economist William Lazonick called Craft Control, in which management leaves the organization of work on the shop floor to the operators. The focus of Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” was to replace craft control with managerial control, and it entailed the detailed specification of all operations by specialists. For decades after Taylor’s death in 1915, the management of American manufacturing companies engaged in a tug-of-war with labor to put an end to craft control, and ultimately failed, resulting in shelves of binders full of specs that nobody pays attention to, except external auditors.

Human resource policies that involved laying off whenever business slows down were an incentive to retain rather than share information. And leaving operators on the same job for years made the specs unnecessary except to train new operators but, when you tried to use them for this purpose, more often than not you found them to be obsolete.

TPS/Lean pursues managerial control too, but in ways that differ as follows:

Operators are hired for a career in the company and retained through downturns.
They are frequently rotated between jobs and become multi-skilled, which requires them to share what they know.
They participate in continuous improvement, leading to the integration of their private tricks into the shared specs.
Instead of Victorian novels in binders, the specs are concise memory joggers on A3 sheets of paper posted above work stations.

See last July’s post on What are standards for? for examples and details. These differences do not make it easy to implement, but they remove the key obstacles that account for the earlier failure.

Use of A3 instruction sheets

A3 instruction sheets above work stations help supervisors notice discrepancies between the standard and the practice of the operators. When there is such a discrepancy, however, the supervisors must investigate it rather than always “retrain” the operator to conform to the standard. The operator may in fact have improved the process; this improvement needs to be documented and the standard updated so as to propagate this improvement to all other operators doing the same process. When walking through a shop floor that has such posted instructions, one should check the signature block to see when it was last updated. If it was five years ago, the sheet is useless. In fact, It should have been updated in the last six months.

In The Birth of Lean (p. 9), are Taiichi Ohno’s own words on the subject:

”…the standard work display panels [...] let the foremen and supervisors see easily if the operators were adhering to the standard work procedures. [...] I told everyone that they weren’t earning their pay if they left the standard work unchanged for a whole month.”

Changing specs once a month for every operation seems a hectic pace, leaving operators barely enough time to master the new method before changing it. Perhaps it was justified in Toyota’s single machine shop, that Ohno was running in the early 1950s. Managing revisions in a networks with dozens of factories worldwide that is Toyota today is a different kind of challenge.

Avoiding Lean Wallpaper

Posting too many instructions, maps, charts, forms, before-and-after pictures, etc., is counterproductive. The result is visual clutter rather than visual management. Producing, posting, and maintaining displays is work, and it should be done selectively, when it has a clear purpose and is worth the effort.

In daily life, we use complex products like computers, cars, or kitchen appliances without posted instruction sheets. We can, because these products have been engineered for usability and mistake-proofed. Usability engineering is the art of designing human-machine interfaces so that users find the right actions to take without prompting or instruction; it is widely applied to household appliances, based on techniques described in Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. In Taming HAL, Asaf Degani expands on these techniques for application to airliner cockpits and ship control rooms, and Chapters 1 and 2 of Working with Machines summarizes them as they apply to production equipment. Usability engineering is about making mistakes unlikely, but not impossible; this is why, whenever possible, it is supplemented by mistake-proofing. The following pictures illustrate one of the usability engineering principles. In Pixar’s “Lifted,” the young alien taking a test cannot tell which switch to press; Don Norman shows an example of a control room in a nuclear power plant where technicians have replaced identical joysticks with different beer keg handles to make them easier to tell apart.

The alien in Pixar’s “Lifted” needs a manual

Don Norman’s example of beer handles to tell controls apart in nuclear power plant

Toyota in recent years has been pursuing a reduction in the amount of information posted on the shop floor. They simplified the tasks to eliminate the need for posted instructions, which also made it easier to train new people. This has been going on in several plants worldwide for several years, resulting in continuing improvements in quality and productivity. Instruction materials are kept off line and brought out as needed, like a car’s owner manual.

Mar 1 2013

Stop the Music! | Bill Waddell

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

Harley-Davidson has announced a no music in the factory rule – period – no exceptions – no ifs, ands or buts.

“Hundreds of Harley-Davidson employees learned through a memo last week that their radios and music being piped onto the factory floor would be kaput by Wednesday — part of a continuous effort to improve safety.”

“‘It’s a distraction,’ said Maripat Blankenheim, director of external communications for Harley. ‘It’s really important for people – no matter what they do – to be focused on what they do.’”[...]

Behavior policies for working adults & the lean principle of treating people with respect are polar opposites: http://t.co/jqAk0y8cdQ

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

Bill Waddell takes exception to a policy recently issued by Harley Davidson to stop piping music onto the factory floor. According to him, such policies are demeaning. I can’t follow him there, for the following reasons:

In my book, respect for people includes allowing each person to work without being bothered by somebody else’s music. If you love Country, working all day to Wagner operas would be torture, and vice versa. If you recall Mars Attacks, humankind is saved by the discovery that yodeling makes Martians’ heads explode.
Sound, on a manufacturing shop floor is used for communications. In some factories, specific tunes are used to mark the start and end of shifts and breaks, and to signal alarms coming from different areas. Piping music for entertainment through the public address system interferes with these messages.
If you allow distractions at work, where does it stop? I once visited a car assembly plant in the US, where I saw an operator watch Oprah on TV while screwing on a dome light, and immediately resolved never to buy a car made in that plant. Does music diminish performance? Software engineering guru Tom DeMarco described an experiment where multiple computer programmers were given the same assignment in two rooms, one with music and the other one without. The assignment was to write a program to execute a given series of calculations, which ended up always coming out to zero. Half the programmers in the quiet room noticed it and wrote a program that just printed “0.” None of the programmers in the music room did, and all of them implemented the given series of instructions to calculate 0.
Music plays different roles in different circumstances. When you are driving 100 miles alone on Highway 35 from Minneapolis to Albert Lea, the radio can save your life by keeping you awake. If you need music to stay awake on a production shop floor, it means that your job has been badly designed.

See on www.idatix.com

Feb 22 2013

Why doesn’t Lean work? | A discussion started by Norman Bodek

Norman Bodek asked this provocative question on the TPS Principles and Practice discussion group on LinkedIn, and elaborated as follows:

“Lean is a total system of continuous improvement with everyone involved.

A few years back, I visited Toyota’s plant in Georgetown, Kentucky with the group of executives from various construction corporations. One member of our team asked Gary Convis, then president of Toyota, ” What do you expect from your workers?” Gary answered, “Only two things: come to work and pull the cord.”

Simple, but how many of you attempting to do Lean allow your employees to pull the cord, stop the line, and have everybody, literally everybody in the plant, wait until that one person resolves the problem. I would guess only 1% or less of you that are attempting to implement lean allow your workers to stop the line. Why?

Lean is a very powerful process that has allowed Toyota to grow from a company that made junk in 1952 to one of the largest most successful corporations in the world producing some of the highest quality automobiles available. And the essence of Lean is to empower every employee to become a problem solver, to make every employee self-reliant. But how do you do this? How can you begin to trust your employees that they will make the right decision for the company? I say “simple”, because if Toyota can do it so can you.

Yes, you are running your kaizen blitzes and they are wonderful. Yes, you are doing Six-Sigma and that is wonderful. Yes, you are doing value stream mapping and it is wonderful. Yes, you are doing 5S, setting up cellular manufacturing, doing TPM, Hoshin Kanri, and using many of the wonderful Toyota tools, but you are, for some strange reason, not empowering your employees to be self-reliant.

Toyota probably fearful to build plants in America, suggested to General Motors to set up a joint venture and Toyota would teach them how to use the Toyota production system and be able to transfer it to all General Motors plants. GM, laughingly, selected their worse plant in Fremont, California, NUMMI, and gave it to Toyota to run. One year later, NUMMI became the best plant in the GM system but GM never really learned how to implement properly in their other plants and GM went bankrupt.

I recently came back from Japan, my 81st trip, and was told that Toyota is still the best model to follow. I strongly recommend that you learn how to emulate them and get every single employee involved in continuous improvement. Find a way to let everyone in your company walk on two feet. But, I ask you, ‘How are you going to do it? How are you going to make lean work?’”

There have been 70 comments, as of today, from Sid Joynson, William Botha, Thomas Ligocki, Philip Marris, Anthony Mangione, Peter Winton, Carlos Hernández, and others. My own response was as follows:

Norman’s diagnosis that Lean isn’t working is correct if you are discussing what passes for Lean in the US, and it’s not just an impression. A few years ago, I did my own analysis, the results of which were published as a Viewpoint in Manufacturing Engineering in 2006 . I chose 40 winners of the Shingo Prize and searched Hoovers Online, for comparative performance data with their 400 top competitors. On the average, the data did not show that the Shingo Prize predicted any advantage in profitability, market share or employment growth.

Fundamentally, most Lean programs today are to serious implementations as cheap imitation shoes are to the training of Usain Bolt.

Norman, however, goes one level deeper when he says “Lean is a total system of continuous improvement with everyone involved,” which implies that the key to making Lean successful is to get everyone involved in continuous improvement, and I don’t think that is the case. Don’t get me wrong. It is no doubt a wonderful and useful thing. I just don’t see it as the key.

I find it always enlightening to compare the literature on Lean published in the US with what you find in Japan, which Norman is certainly familiar with, from having organized the translation of several classics in the 1980s. I have in my hands a newer book that I picked up on my last visit to Japan, that has not been translated yet. It is from 2009, by Mikiharu Aoki, a 25-year Toyota alumnus who became a consultant in 2004. The title means “The heart of introducing the Toyota Production System” (トヨタ生産方式導入の奥義), and it is heavily technical.

By contrast, the bulk of the American literature is shockingly light on technical content, which is dismissed as a tactical toolbox you shouldn’t worry about too much. Instead, the literature you should focus strategic issues like change management, motivating people, and calculating metrics.

Crispin Vincenti-Brown identified four dimensions to manufacturing:

The engineering of production lines.

Logistics and production control.

Organization and people.

Metrics and accountability.

In the US, the engineering dimension is ignored. Logistics receives some attention, but Lean programs are overwhelmingly focused on the last two: organization and metrics. It is out of balance, and I believe this is the reason these programs fail.

Feb 12 2013

Lean and nurturing inventors

In the latest issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine make the case against patents. They argue that the current system in the US creates more litigation than innovation and has its primary effect is to “encourage large but stagnant incumbent firms to block innovation and inhibit competition.” They are, however, a short on proposing alternatives, and those who have worked in economies where ideas are instantly stolen are wary of abolishing the most powerful form of intellectual property protection we know. Official recognition and law are public policy and legal issues that I don’t want to get into here. What I would like to discuss here is what companies can do on their own to take advantage of the inventors in their midst in the current context.

I remember seeing a clever semi-automatic device to staple fabric onto a board in a car door panel assembly line. Hormoz Mogarei, who ran this line, told me that he had simply asked a technician to “invent something,” and this was what he had come up with. It was an invention. It was the brainchild of an individual, not a team, and it was of a broader scope than a suggestion that would fit on a one-page form. It required weeks of work, that the technician had to do in addition to his normal duties, and experimentation, which required some tooling and equipment.

To facilitate this activity, we need to give some thought to what constitutes an invention and who inventors are. In this post, we consider the following:

Sakichi Toyoda versus Philo T. Farnsworth
Other international inventors
Recognizing inventors
Facilitating invention
Next topic: Managing the inventions

Sakichi Toyoda versus Philo T. Farnsworth

…The crowning acheivement.

The starting point…

Sakichi Toyoda spent 30 years improving the loom, one of the oldest machines known to humans. Step by step, he went from the wooden, manual loom his mother operated in the 1890s to a powered loom with automatic shuttle change that stopped whenever the yarn broke in 1926. In the official history of Toyota, the sale of the license of the Toyoda Type G loom to the UK’s Platt Brothers provided the seed money for Kiichiro Toyoda to start Toyota and build cars, and Sakichi Toyoda’s approach became the basis for Toyota’s approach to automation, known as jidoka (自働化). Today, Sakichi Toyoda is honored in Japan as a great inventor.

Philo Farnsworth with 1935 TV set.

Philo T. Farnsworth, in a few short years as a young man, invented television, successfully demonstrating it in San Francisco in 1928, two years after Sakichi Toyoda had perfected his Type G loom. Farnsworth’s invention, however, was not the result of a sequence of small improvements on an existing device; instead, it was a breathtaking technical breakthrough. Television had been imagined in science fiction, but no one prior to Farnsworth had a clue on how to make it happen with electronics. Farnsworth’s key idea was a way to transform 2-dimensional images into a 1-dimensional stream of electronic signals and back. As a farm boy growing up in Utah, he covered his father’s 2-dimensional fields by plowing 1-dimensional furrows, and this pattern gave him the idea of scanning a screen line by line with a beam of electrons.

Other international inventors

John Harrison

Sakichi Toyoda and Philo T. Farnsworth were both creative individuals, who worked in different ways. One was Japanese and the other one American, but it does not mean that people like Sakichi Toyoda are unique to Japan nor people like Farnsworth to the US or Europe. John Harrison, for example, was an 18th-century Englishman who spent decades refining clocks until his fifth version was precise enough to stay within one second of London time while circumnavigating the globe with James Cook in 1772-75, thereby making it possible for the first time to measure longitude accurately at sea. Today, James Dyson in the UK seems cut from the same cloth, taking mature products like vacuum cleaners or fans and improving them. Conversely, Fujio Masuoka’s flash memories and Kokichi Mikimoto’s cultured pearls are Japanese inventions that qualify as breakthroughs.

: H1 Clock

: H2 Clock

: H3 Clock

: H4 Clock used by James Cook

John Harrison’s generations of clocks

Toyoda and Farnsworth are two extreme types of inventors, and there are many in-between, in many countries. The nature of inventions was systematically investigated from patents by Genrich Altshuller in Russia, who abstracted from them the set of 42 guiding principles that he called TRIZ. But, if inventiveness is randomly spread among individuals across the globe, there are cultural differences between countries on the way inventors are treated and which kinds of inventions are most valued. Japanese school children are told about Sakichi Toyoda; American schoolchildren, about Thomas Edison and Eli Whitney. It is difficult to imagine that it does not influence the choices adults make and what they most value in others.

Washlet

Toto is a Japanese maker of toilets, a stable, 300-year-old technology, but when I visited the Toto factory in Kitakyushu, I was surprised by the number of improvements they had made. In the 1980s, they introduced the washlet, a toilet with a built-in water jet. It now accounts for half the installed base of toilets in Japan and a recent version was featured in the Hollywood movie The Joneses. Other Toto inventions include a more slippery coating for toilet ceramics, a tankless toilet for cramped living spaces, and a silent flush system for hotels. It is not the mouse, graphic user interfaces or the worldwide web, but these incremental innovations make life just a little bit easier for consumers, enough in any case to make a supplier competitive.

It is not an either/or proposition. We don’t have to give up breakthroughs in order to get incremental inventions or vice versa. We can have both because they don’t come from the same people, and it does not take much, because inventors cannot help themselves. Examples like Rostislav Alexeyev with his hydrofoils or Alexander Kemurdzhian with the Lunakhod rovers show that their spirit cannot be crushed, even in an environment as hostile as the Soviet Union, and that inventors will invent even in the absence of any reward. The Soviet Union even produced meta-inventor Genrich Altshuller, who was rewarded for TRIZ by six years in a labor camp. Still, few people are as valuable as inventors, both to companies they may work for and to society as a whole, and we should do what we can to recognize and encourage them.

: Alexeyev’s Raketa hydrofoil

: Kemurdzhian’s Lunakhod-2 moon rover

Thimonnier’s 1829 sewing machine

Some inventors, like Thomas Edison or Sakichi Toyoda, were savvy business people who were not only recognized but profited from their inventions. Others, like Nikola Tesla or Philo Farnsworth, did not do as well. One whose spirit was crushed by the society he lived in was Barthélémy Thimonnier, who invented the sewing machine in France in 1829. He used his own machines in a factory to make military uniforms, but the tailors who used to do this work manually rioted and burned his factory, following which he died in poverty.

As an industry, sewing machines did not take off until the 1850s in the US, where they played a key role in the refinement of interchangeable parts technology and the development of machine-tools.

Recognizing inventors

The most obvious form of recognition is a patent. Inventions made by employees on the job are owned by the company and therefore royalties flow to the company rather than to the inventors, but the patents are still coveted badges of honor and resume enhancers. The Caterpillar transmission plant in Peoria, IL, has a wall several hundred feet long that is covered with plaques commemorating patents for new features on earthmover transmissions. Each plaque is an engraving of the top page of the patent, and bears the names of the inventors. It both impresses visitors and shows inventors that their contributions are valued.

While new products or features, and sometimes new processes, are patented, improvements to work methods or production line designs usually are not, but recognition can still be given in both symbolic and tangible form. Symbolic recognition can be awards given in ceremonies, plaques, special marks on employee badges, articles in the local press, etc. The key is that they should be tailored to the local culture and the individual. What is valued in a culture may offend in another, and some enjoy being singled out among their peers while others are uncomfortable in the public eye. The tangible rewards are usually bonuses, but they must be sized just right to convey appreciation without cutting off the recipients from peers or turning all employees into bounty hunters.

Management must also be careful to recognize the actual inventors. In any group, there are many more who are ready to claim credit for inventions than actual inventors. An invention is fundamentally an individual rather than a team process. A team is often necessary to implement an invention, but its seminal idea is from a single human brain, and you must be careful not to mistake whose it is. Instead of actual inventors, many patents bear the name of a supervisor whose only contribution may have been to discourage the real inventor’s efforts. In terms of effect, recognizing the wrong people is worse than not recognizing anybody. Avoiding that mistake requires management attention, but the inventions are worth it.

Facilitating invention

Is there something that can be done beyond creating a favorable environment for inventors, by giving them resources and recognizing their achievements? Altshuller thought so. He believed that knowing and applying the rules of TRIZ could make inventors more productive and turn more engineers into inventors. Altshuller died in 1988, but his work is being continued by others, like Nikolai Shpakovsky in Russia, Japan and Korea, with his concept of product evolutionary trees , and Roni Horowitz’s ASIT. To my knowledge, these methods are not massively used, and, where they are used, it is in product design and development, not manufacturing.

Engineering Sandbox

In manufacturing, if you provide an “engineering sandbox,” organize for people to tinker in it, and provide some form of recognition, you will get results like the automatic door panel stapler. The engineering sandbox is a space set aside and outfitted with the resources needed for tinkering, experimentation, and prototyping. It is used both by individuals and teams. In Wikipedia, the space you can use to draft an article or an edit before publishing it is called your “sandbox,” and it is similar in concept to the engineering sandboxes you find in factories, that are often called “Kaizen areas” even though the experimentation that takes place can exceed the scope of what is commonly designated as Kaizen. This space is best located in a secluded area, away from heavy traffic and prying eyes and, as it is shared by multiple individuals and teams, access to it must be managed accordingly and often takes place outside of regular working hours. Chihiro Nakao calls this activity “moonshine.”

Next topic: Managing the inventions

Once your employees have made inventions, you need to decide how best to use them. You can patent an invention to make accessible to others for a royalty for a time, you can keep it a trade secret with the goal of making sure you are the only one to use it, you can give it to a third party to exploit commercially, or you can publish for anyone to use free of charge. And, while you are trying to decide what to do, others may steal it and get away with it.

This is a whole other topic, and the best course for a company to follow is often counter-intuitive.

Jan 23 2013

Using project charters: not as easy as it seems

In a comment on a previous post, the Virginia MEP’s Bill Donohue listed several tools that he feels are particularly useful, among which were Project Charters, and I would like to share my experience with them. The concept is self-explanatory, and you can see a variety of examples by just googling “project charter.” It is simply a form intended to provide a one-page summary of a project.

I have been involved with two multi-year projects with clients who wanted to use this tool, and it seemed such a simple, common-sense approach that I embraced it with gusto. To my great surprise, the project teams didn’t. It just required them to fill in such data as the name of the project, the list of team members and roles, short descriptions of current, ideal and future states, the main implementation milestones, and estimates of what good it would do. It would be a great summary on an A3 sheet of paper, and a perfect tool to communicate with peers and management, while keeping the team focused on the goals.

But it didn’t turn out that way. Working with teams to generate charters took much longer than anticipated. These documents were perceived as a hurdle to clear before implementation could start. Once generated, they were never referenced in the inner workings of the team but only trotted out for management meetings. They were generated on Excel worksheets based on templates supplied by management and primarily used in PowerPoint slides, in which the font was too small to read on screen. Since most teams did not have access to a large format printer, whenever they were printed, it was on A4/letter-size paper rather than A3.

I wondered why the teams were not embracing this tool. They had a feed-the-bears attitude to it. Managers were the bears that periodically had to be fed, and the charters were offerings to keep them at bay. I thought the charter should instead be a project management tool used primarily used by the team itself, and only secondarily for management communications.

I had previously used a more informal approach, where we would write a one-page memo explaining in plain text the who-what-where-when-why-how of the project. With the signature of the manager in charge of the target area, this memo would then be posted on the shop floor for every affected person to know what was going on and the extent to which their cooperation was needed. It was generally well accepted by project teams as “Communications 101.” One reason management wanted formal charters was standardization. They wanted all projects in the program to have descriptions in a common format to make them easier to review.

Lean implementation was starting in these companies, with management keen to engage employees at all levels and tap into their creativity, but filling out a form is not an activity that we usually associate with creativity. Possibly, management’s demand for charters was sending a mixed message: be creative but follow these standards. It was saying “think out of the box but stay within this box!”

Perhaps the form itself was a problem. In both cases, it had been designed by a committee of managers who were as new to Lean as the rest of the organization, and I thought the following features were mistakes:

There were too many different roles identified for team members. The relevant distinction in practice is between core members, who are committed to the project, and the others, who are only involved. In a line redesign project, for example, the production supervisor in charge and the manufacturing engineer are both core members, but the plant safety expert who needs to approve the design is only involved. In the form, members could be assigned one of four different roles. Some were accountable for the outcome, others executed the project, others yet were consulted on it, and finally, there were those who were just kept informed. It sounded great, but, in fact, created unnecessary complexity and wasted time in discussions of which category each member should be in.
The form confused PDCA with a project plan. The main phases of any project were identified as Plan, Do, Check and Adjust. It really didn’t fit any non-trivial project, which you would break down into smaller tasks each defined by deliverables. PDCA is a discipline you would apply to each of the tasks, as well as to the project as a whole, but Plan, Do, Check, or Adjust would not appear as bars in a Gantt chart or entries in an action item list. In a setup time reduction project, for example, one task is to shoot a video of the current method, but you cannot fit it under Plan, Do, Check, or Adjust.
The form had boxes for information that the teams could not possess until the project was completed. If you are a carpenter building your 50th staircase, you should be able to summarize current and future states, how long you will need, what good it will do, etc. But if you are a team undertaking setup time reduction on a machine for the first time, you are entering what is for you uncharted territory. Upfront, you don’t even know the details of the existing state, let alone the future. At this point, all your setup time reduction team knows is that its goal is to achieve changeovers under 10 minutes on a specific machine in daily practice. When JFK said “this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” this one sentence was enough of a charter to focus the work of tens of thousands of people for the following eight years. There would have been no way, at that point, for fill out an A3 form with more details, because they were unknown.
Project teams are also ill equipped to estimate the economic benefits of their project, and wary of writing down amounts they may be held accountable for. In fact, the first few projects that mark the beginning of Lean implementation are never grassroots initiatives. They are selected by management, for their combination of economic value and skill development potential. The setup time reduction team in our example does not need to estimate the benefits of quick setups; they just need to achieve them, promptly and within budget.
The committee that designed the charter form had also come up with a “smart” naming scheme for projects. It had codes for site, department, project category, and start date. It was a conditioned reflex for people who had grown up with such naming systems, but it served no useful purpose while adding complexity.

After a long struggle, the teams managed to produce at least partial charters. The managers were not happy, but they had to make do and let the projects proceed. As they did, however, the charters rapidly became obsolete. The teams did not pay much attention, but the charters had to be updated for management presentations, which revealed another problem: there had been no plan for revision management on the charters. The charters had been generated as worksheets in Excel books, that had been emailed around, copied on memory sticks, and printed. There are technical solutions to manage documents so that revisions are made by authorized editors, reviewed properly, and stored in such a way that you can trace back the history of revisions, but this was not one of them.

What lessons have I learned from this experience? Not wanting to throw out the baby with the bath water, I still think of project charters as a useful tool, but it has to be introduced in phases, initially giving project teams the freedom to experiment with both content and format to come up with documents that are useful to them. The handful of pilot projects at the start of Lean implementation requires management attention, but not much administrative paperwork. Never mind standardization at this stage. Soon afterwards, you have tens of projects running in parallel, orchestrated by a steering committee, and, at that point, project charter A3s can be helpful.

Rather than being defined upfront by a committee of managers, charter formats should be allowed to emerge from the organization’s project experience, with current and past project leaders in charge. There may also be different templates by category of project, considering that different contents may be appropriate for setup time reduction, assembly cells, machining cells, milk runs, supermarkets, kanban, etc. The need for revision control on these documents should also be considered when selecting tools to generate them, which requires more IT expertise than either the project leaders, the managers, and even most Lean consultants have. Their first choice is almost always Excel, and it does not meet the needs. Alternatives to be considered include, for example, Infopath for form generation and Sharepoint for storage, retrieval and revision control on charters.

Jan 9 2013

MIT article comparing Lean, TQM, Six Sigma, “and related enterprise process improvement methods”

Last week, my Suggested Content on Scoop.It! contained a link to a May, 2010 working paper from MIT’s Engineering Systems Division (ESD) by Kirkor Bozdogan, entitled Towards an integration of the Lean enterprise system, total quality management, six sigma, and related enterprise process improvement methods . For a scoop, it is a bit stale but it nonetheless caught my attention and I would like to supplement Bozdogan’s academic perspective with my implementation experience.

Describing these approaches as “complementary,” as Bozdogan does, avoids controversy, but I don’t believe it is accurate. They really are competitive brands put out by consultants vying for clients in overlapping markets. And they are so different is scope and track record that they do not belong together in a list. The topical literature is a cacophony of claims of effectiveness, originality, and universality, as well as bandwagon jumping. It befits a marketplace, and competitors should be expected to pitch aggressively. As Hillary Clinton said about running for office, “you cannot be above the fray, it is a fray.” It behooves the clients to sort the wheat from the chaff and make their choices.

Exposure to the Toyota Production System (TPS) sparked my interest in manufacturing, in Japan in 1980, but then I immediately went to work in the semiconductor industry, where TPS is not much of a fit. Over the years, I have been exposed to all of the approaches surveyed in the article, and formed opinions about them, that I am sharing here. In particular, I would like to explain why I chose to work under the Lean flag and none of the others.

The sequence of topics is as follows:

Brands versus Science
Market share
Different approaches for different enterprises
Change programs in corporations
The “Methods” and their descriptions
Conclusions on the consulting profession

Brands versus Science

As academics are prone to do, Bozdogan treats Lean, TQM, Six Sigma, etc., as if they were scientific theories, when in fact they are marketing brands, developed by consultants for commercial purposes. It is not quantum versus Newtonian mechanics, but Coke versus Pepsi. An engineer or a manager conducts a successful project within a company, and, in doing so, develops a unique approach to a problem. The next step may be to leave the company, go into consulting, and market this approach as a more general solution, but it needs a name to distinguish it from competing offerings. If successful, it is then diluted for application to ever broader classes of problems. Five years on, PhD students are writing dissertations about its theoretical foundations; ten years on, articles appear in business magazines bemoaning its failure to deliver the expected results.

MIT article comparing Lean, TQM, Six Sigma, "and related enterprise process improvement methods"

Product developed to match its name

Sometimes, the name is coined before the content is developed. A well-known marketing story is that the name Hershey’s Hugs was an entry by a Hershey employee in a naming contest. The product, a Hershey’s Kiss with a twist of white chocolate and milk chocolate, was then developed to match the name. This pattern was followed in manufacturing consulting in at least two cases. When Roger Nagel at Lehigh University created Agile Manufacturing in the early1990s, he defined it as the “next step after Lean,” whatever that might be. Likewise, I have heard a rumor that TPM was a label concocted at JMA in the late 1960s by a group of consultants who wanted to offer services in the Maintenance area, and that the content was developed afterwards.

This is not a criticism of consultants. They have to package their ideas in a way that attracts clients and inspires confidence, or else these ideas remain unheard and unimplemented. And it may take several attempts to get it right. The Toyota Production System was marketed in the 1980s as Just-In-Time, Demand-based and World-Class Manufacturing before John Krafcik came up with the Lean label. For Six Sigma, the title of “Black Belt” for engineers given basic training in statistical design of experiments was marketing genius, as it had none of the wussiness of “Staff Statistician” and implied a non-existent link to Japanese martial arts.

Market share

How successful are these brands in the market? One easy way to answer this question is to check LinkedIn discussion groups. LinkedIn is the largest professional social network, with >135M members worldwide, and the amount of chatter each approach generates among them strikes me as a valid measure of its influence as of 12/31/2012. I found the following:

If you search LinkedIn groups for Lean, you find 2642 groups with the largest ones having tens of thousands of members. The memberships overlap, and therefore their counts do not add up, but largest group, Lean Six Sigma, has 160,000 members and, if you check the content of the discussions, you find that it all about Lean, not Six Sigma.
Searching for TQM, you find 87 groups, with the largest having 942 members.
For Six Sigma, you find 1411 groups, but nearly all are about Lean Six Sigma, which, contrary to what the name would lead you to believe, has next to no strictly Six Sigma content.
The “related” methods also reviewed in the article are the Theory of constraints (TOC), Agile manufacturing, Business process reengineering (BPR).
- For TOC, you find 177 groups, topping out at 1307 members.
- For Agile manufacturing, 10 groups topping out at 2,700 members, but, for just Agile, you find 1481 groups with the largest having 37,572 members, reflecting that, even though the Agile brand is dead in manufacturing, it lives on in software development and project management.
- Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has 16 groups, topping out at 4,500 members, but these groups are not dedicated to this topic. They are about business processes, with reengineering listed among the topics of interest.

These numbers make a statement about the relative popularity of brands, not the technical effectiveness of approaches. It is possible for the best products to fail in a market for all sorts of reasons. But these are ideas and, in the market of ideas on management and technology, time has a way of filtering the bad ones. The newest of the approaches discussed in the MIT article, BPR, has been around since the early 1990s; all others, since the 1980s. If they have not made their mark by now, when will they? The inescapable conclusion is that Lean is the only one that is thriving. As a consequence, the bulk of the article should be about Lean and the reasons it crushed its competition.

Different approaches for different enterprises

The article treats “the enterprise” as a generic entity. The introduction refers to different types of enterprises, but the body of the article does not. Even within just Manufacturing, companies that make products through machining, fabrication and assembly have been under the influence of car makers for 100 years, first Ford, then GM, and now Toyota, as a result of which their management responds to the Lean message. By contrast, companies that primarily run a chemical process and package its output, like detergents makers, are much more focused on the maintenance of their facilities. They have been more receptive to TPM, and have then lumped under the TPM label all sorts of improvement activities that are not related to maintenance. In high-technology fabrication, as in the semiconductor industry, if your processes are mature, your products are obsolete, and you must therefore constantly face the challenge of producing in high volume with immature processes. This makes you receptive to the promise of Six Sigma and its techniques for enhancing process capability. “Services” covers an even broader range of activities, from engineering development to car rental, with different needs, both actual and perceived.

Change programs in a corporation

When the top management of a corporation embarks on a change program, it does not only impact the content of the work, but its organization and power structure as well. There are evolutionary paths to promotion in a corporation. Excel in sales and you rise in the sales hierarchy; get involved with a successful new product and it will make your career; exceed your goals as a production supervisor and you will on your way to become plant manager… This is the normal operation of the organization; it does not alter its structure. By contrast, successful change programs are revolutionary, in that not only are their supporters rapidly promoted but their opponents are brutally pushed aside, sometimes demoted, often fired. Change programs can degenerate in many ways, for example by attracting zealots who turn its original clever methods into a dogma that is used to exclude not only non-believers but heretics as well. This manifests itself in a variety of ways, from mandating the use of VSMs and Kaizen events in Lean, to making a Six Sigma black belt a requirement for promotion.

The politics make it difficult to even have a rational discussion on the merits, or even the relevance of a tool in a particular circumstance. And the presence of camps with interests in the success or failure of the program prevents the collection of objective metrics.

The “Methods” and their descriptions

Bozdogan labels all the approaches as “enterprise process improvement methods,” which, at least in the case of Lean, strikes me as overly restrictive. First, it is not a method, in the sense that it does not have a sequence of 12 steps you can follow without thinking and expect to succeed. Instead, the implementation of Lean, particularly outside of car making, requires you to abstract the principles behind the Toyota tools and select, adapt or develop new tools to apply these principles in a different context. Second, the term process improvement implies an exclusive focus on how things are done, or tactics, as opposed to what things are done, or strategy. And Lean is a business strategy, requiring leadership and participation from top management, not just a tactical tool. It isn’t just about fixing details of operations, but also about make-versus-buy decisions, new plant and new line designs, human resources and compensation policies, etc.

Lean Enterprise system

The description of the Lean enterprise system in the paper (section 2.1.1.) is actually accurate, if too brief. While it is broader is scope and depth than any of the other “methods” covered, it received the shortest explanation. As explained in my author’s page, my involvement with it dates back to 1980. Lean is based on the Toyota Production System, and therefore has the following, unique characteristics:

At least in Manufacturing, it encompasses all facets of the business. Toyota designs, develops, makes, and markets products and therefore has an approach to all these activities, as well as management and support functions like Maintenance, Quality Assurance, Accounting, or Human Resources.
As Takahiro Fujimoto puts it, it is system that emerged over decades, as Toyota engineers and managers developed solutions to overcome crises as the company grew from nothing to the largest car company in the world. There is no theory of which it is an application. Instead, it is a living and evolving system, from which we have to reverse-engineer underlying principles in order to deploy them in other contexts.

Of course, we shouldn’t be blinded by enthusiasm. While learning from Toyota, we should not assume that it is perfect. We should not forget that it is a business, run by fallible human beings, and with a commercial interest in its image. We should not assume that its system applies everywhere to everything, and we should keep our eyes and minds open to equally good ideas from other outstanding companies, like Ikea, Apple, or Michelin, or from management and technology thinkers. And we should never blindly apply recipes but instead use what we learned to work through the specific issues of every factory.

TQM

Today, as an object of consulting, TQM is dead and little more than a historical footnote. Bozdogan’s description of TQM make no reference to TQC, and in particular the Japanese version of TQC, on which it is based. By 1975, all the major manufacturing companies in Japan had received the Deming prize for implementing TQC, and all that could be gained from it was incorporated in their practices. It was a successful approach that had run its course. TQM, as a watered-down version of the Japanese TQC, became the object of the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award in the US in 1988, and soon lost credibility as a result of being given to organizations that were notorious for bad quality. The spirit of TQM, however, lives on in the ISO-900x series of standards, for which certification has been a cost of doing business for many companies.

Six Sigma

In his recollections of implementing Six Sigma at Allied Signal, Six Sigma creator Mikel Harry proudly recalls getting an executive fired for speaking up in a meeting in favor of the previous improvement program, Total Quality Leadership (TQL), the company’s version of TQM. So much for these programs being complementary!

If you peel away all that has been piled onto the original Six Sigma from Motorola in the 1980s in order to make it a universal approach to the enhancement of enterprise performance, what you find is a modernization of the SPC of the 1930s for the purpose of addressing the process capability issues of high-technology manufacturing. In the semiconductor industry, you first develop a process to make chips, and then design products to make by this process, which is not the way most other industries work. Then competitive pressure forces you to start producing chips in high volume at yields as low as 10%, and start a battle for yield enhancement that is key to market share and profitability. This battle ends two years later, to be rejoined immediately on the next generation of technology.

In the old SPC, a state of statistical control for a process variable of mean μ and standard deviation σ was arbitrarily defined as having its tolerance interval contain the [μ-3σ, μ+3σ]. It is was a normal variable, then 99.7% of its values would be within the tolerance interval. The problem that became critical with electronics in the 1980s was that, if a product had 100 such independent process variables, they would all be within their tolerance intervals .997¹⁰⁰ = 74% of the time, meaning that the product would be 26% defective. Raise the requirement for each variable from ±3σ to ±6σ, and the ratio of values out of the tolerance interval drops from .3% to 3.4 ppm. Then, with 100 independent, normal process variables as before, the ratio of defect-free products goes to (1 – 3.4╳10^-6)¹⁰⁰= 99.97%.

For non-normal variable, or for attributes, the meaning of Six Sigma extends to the achievement of <3.4 defects per million opportunities (dpmo). As we have seen, with as few as 100 defect opportunities in a product, it works out to .03% = 300ppm of defectives, a level of quality that the auto parts industry, among others, have long exceeded, by non-statistical methods. I know of one case of a Toyota supplier that had produced more than 1 million units without a single defective by using Toyota’s Jikotei Kanketsu (JKK) and Change Point Management (CPM).

In the most successful semiconductor companies, yield enhancement involves the combination of the following:

Knowledge of process physics and chemistry.
The ability to mine test data on finished circuits.
Statistical design of experiments.

These skills are almost never found in the same individuals. I believe that Six Sigma Black Belts were intended as a solution to this problem. The idea was to give solid statistical training to 1% of the work force and let them be a resource for the remaining 99%. The Black Belts were not expected to be PhD-level statisticians, but process engineers with just enough knowledge of modern statistics to be effective.

As a metaphor, Black Belt also made sense because there is a parallel between the Six Sigma and martial arts training. Traditional masters in the martial arts of China trained one or two disciples at the Bruce Lee level in a lifetime, just as universities train only a handful of experts in statistical design of experiments who could be effective in electronics manufacturing. One Karate instructor, on the other hand, can train hundreds of Black Belts, just as a Six Sigma program can teach a focused subset of statistical design of experiments to hundreds of engineers.

The effectiveness of Six Sigma is unquestioned in the high technology niche for which it was developed, but the inventors of Six Sigma would not be content with just this application. To market it to other industries with different needs, they removed the technical content and retained only the management parts, with Black Belts and the DMAIC problem-solving model. It was an initial commercial success, with massive adoption by companies like GE and Raytheon. This success, however, did not endure and even GE has now abandoned it. For technical content, some companies are now using the old SPC and calling it Six Sigma, but the most successful repackaging attempt is “Lean Six Sigma,” in which the technical content is entirely from Lean, with only the title of Black Belt remaining for implementers.

Lean Six Sigma as Lark Pate

The combination of Lean and Six Sigma in “Lean Six Sigma” reminds me of the French recipe for Lark Pâté, which calls for horses and larks in equal numbers: 1 horse to 1 lark. These migrations have caused confusion and an identity crisis among black belts, as reflected, for example, in a long discussion in the Lean Six Sigma Worldwide discussion group on LinkedIn about the meaning of Six Sigma.

Theory of Constraints (TOC)

I first heard of this approach from an article in Fortune magazine in the early 1980s, describing a secret algorithm called OPT (Optimized Production Technology) developed by an Israeli physicist named Eli Goldratt who did not claim any manufacturing background but did claim to have achieved spectacular results. It was disturbing on multiple levels:

As I was already aware of at the time, there is more to production technology than just scheduling. To this date, production control remains the focus of TOC, and it is predicated on the fallacy that the physical arrangement of machines and work stations on the production floor does not matter. This is diametrically opposed to the Lean/TPS approach.
I was developing software for production planning and scheduling in the semiconductor industry. As part of this project, I was studying what the theory of scheduling had to offer, and did not find the notion of a secret algorithm attractive or credible. What I found was that the key challenge was generating schedules that could be executed. Advanced algorithms didn’t work without data at a level of detail and accuracy that was unavailable.

OPT sounded like snake oil, yet Eli Goldratt had managed to get it covered in Fortune! Soon afterwards, I saw a video of a presentation by Goldratt on how accounting was the number one enemy of productivity. His points made sense, and much work has been done since then to improve management accounting. The video was amateurish. Partway through his presentation, you saw a magnet fall off a white board and the speaker himself bend over to pick it up. And he made repeated references to “Murphy’s Law” as if it were more than a joke. The rhetorical style was also unlike any business presentation I had ever heard. While Goldratt was proud of his academic credentials, he spoke like a preacher or a televangelist, which was undoubtedly a marketing decision. Academics who specialized in Operations Research (OR) did not know how to speak to plant managers, but Eli Goldratt did, and many listened. As for televangelists, the real question was whether he was leading them in the right direction. Like many at the time, after reading The Goal, I was willing to suspend disbelief, and, in early 1986, received training as an OPT implementer. My first assignments after that were to participate in implementation projects in two high-volume/low-mix factories for which the approach did not fit.

The first plant made eight models of roller bearings and was laid out as a giant job shop, with rows of identical machines so long that the end vanished in a haze of oil mist, with the corresponding mountains of WIP between operations. The second one was an aluminum foundry centered around 50 diecasting machines working in parallel with multiple machines making the same product. Scheduling was not the key issue in either, but the company had made a corporate decision to deploy OPT in all of its tens of factories, whether it made sense or not. For these reasons, I stepped away from OPT and Goldratt.

Shortly thereafter, his organization stopped marketing OPT, which was not professionally engineered software anyway, to focus on what he called the “thoughtware” behind it, what later became the “Theory of Constraints” (TOC). If phrased as the need for organizations to focus on what is preventing or limiting their ability to reach goals, it is obvious and, at this level of generality, not markedly different from eliminating waste or focusing on “value adding” activities. When you consider specifics, such as production operations, it reduces to an execution methodology called drum-buffer-rope, which still ignores the elephants in the manufacturing room, including how to design factories, lay out production lines, engineer work stations, and apply human resources.

Agile Manufacturing

The MIT article is largely dismissive of Agile Manufacturing as “as a patchwork of plausible concepts and methods,” an assessment I agree with. In manufacturing, it is dead, as reflected, for example, by the absence of substantial LinkedIn groups on the subject. Two points, however, still need to be made about Agile:

The term is still used in software development and project management, with LinkedIn groups on these topics that are of comparable size to those about Lean.
Roger Nagel’s team at Lehigh borrowed the registered service mark “Agile Enterprise” without attribution from Crispin Vincenti-Brown and Ingersoll Engineers. Their Agile Enterprise was a manufacturing company with production organized in their version of cells, grouped in focused factories, as defined by Wickham Skinner.

Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is also dead, after a burst of popularity in the 1990s. Its concepts and philosophy, however, live on in a kindler, gentler version called “Business Process Management” (BPM). The differences between the two are explained in a blog post by Sweeta Anand. BPR failed in the market because the employees of companies that tried to implement it perceived it as a threat, before its technical shortcomings ever had a chance to appear.

BPR is not about manufacturing but about business in general, and is predicated on the assumption that any business can be structured as a family of processes, characterized entirely by the outputs they generate and the inputs they use. In the BPR perspective, R&D is a process with product designs as output. Manufacturing, on the other hand, is not a process but is instead subsumed under order fulfillment. BPR takes Wickham Skinner’s focused factory or Womack and Jones’s value stream and expands it to all business activities. Each process has its own technical and human resources, and only interact when the output of one process is the input to another. BPR is intended to break down the functional silos that make bureaucracies slow and unresponsive and replace them with process-aligned structures that are focused on their useful outputs.

According to the founding fathers of BPR, Michael Hammer and James Champy, part of the definition of a process is that its output must be “of value to the customer,” but what is meant by customer is ambiguous. Manufacturing is not a process because its completion does not place a product in a customer’s hands but Product Development is, even though it does not do it either. The output of Product Development is used internally, by other processes, like Order Fulfillment, that are only metaphorical customers. One of the principles of TQC is “the next process is the customer,” which means that you should treat the users of your output inside the company as if they were customers who paid for it and had the choice of shopping elsewhere. It is a useful metaphor, but blurs a vital distinction, and, in the case of BPR, creates ambiguity. We could easily argue that Sales is the customer of Manufacturing, and that Manufacturing is therefore a process.

The process model is also not an obvious fit for all the activities of a company. A production line processes input materials into products; an office may likewise process applications into accepted and rejected applications. In these cases, the input-process-output model applies naturally. On the other hand, any activity that can be described as maintenance is usually thought of in terms of its objects rather than input-process-output. It takes work orders as input, processes them by dispatching technicians to the machines, and produces completed work orders as output, but this is an administrative view of the activity. The technicians perceive their job as keeping the equipment up and available, not processing work orders. Likewise, a Master Data Management department executes transactions, but only as a means to the end of keeping a database of specs up to date, and this database is the object around which their work is organized.

In terms of processes, there should not be a Shipping & Receiving department. This function should be distributed among the order fulfillment processes of the different product families. It doesn’t happen because the focus of Shipping & Receiving is the external entities it interacts with, the truckers. If it were distributed, an incoming truck might have to deliver the same item to multiple docks in the same plant. Shipping & Receiving remains centralized because it is a point of contact with world outside the plant.

Technically, BPR is simplistic, but it’s not the reason it failed. What is absent from the BPR literature is any consideration of the people doing the work and what happens to them as a result of reengineering. In manufacturing, Lean improves performance, the company grows, and the people freed up by productivity increases are used to support the growth, and it is essential to the success of the approach that operators not be putting their jobs in jeopardy by participating. BPR, on the other hand, simply reengineered people’s jobs away, which, predictably, resulted in mutinies.

Considering that BPR is essentially equivalent for business in general to converting job-shops to flow-lines in manufacturing, why is it that it can be done without firing people in manufacturing but not necessarily elsewhere? A machinist who knows only one milling machine can practically be cross-trained on lathes, broaching, drilling or grinding machines, or more modern milling machines; an assembler, on different stages of assembly, or on subassembly. But it doesn’t generalize to every business activity. It is a tall order to turn an accountant into a design engineer, or vice versa.

The ineffectiveness of isolated functional “silos” is the object of the 9th of Deming’s 14 points. As we have seen, however, Deming does not prescribe reorganizing along process lines, and it is not always feasible or advisable.

Conclusions on the consulting profession

Over lunch at a Lean Forum in Cheboksary, Russia, I was seated with consultants from Russia, Japan, and the US, including Mark Warren. One of the Russians asked me about Lean, and I confesses that, while I was using this label, what I was helping clients with would more aptly be called Baudin Production System, just as Mark’s should be called the Warren Production System, and the same would apply around the table. Indeed, it would be abnormal if, after a couple of decades of doing this kind of work, we didn’t have our own twists on it. The key issue is what clients expect from consultants.

Most of the people who call themselves consultants are really contractors, hired to produce outputs that are needed occasionally, but not often enough to justify hiring employees. The contractors are a temporary extension of the work force, and their knowledge and skills leave with them at the end of their engagements. Then, there is a second category of consultants who are really trainers, hired to help an organization comply with external mandates, such as regulations from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), ISO-9001 certification, or certification as a Lean supplier. These consultants coach clients in the art of passing a particular kind of audit, and are needed as a cost of doing business. Their emphasis is not on improving performance but on providing auditors with what they need to see in order to check-mark the items on their lists. This is the realm of named, formal processes where no deviation from a standard is tolerated. They transfer knowledge, but this knowledge is procedural, and usually has no value beyond ensuring certification.

The last category are consultants who are brought in to help clients improve performance. There, what matters is less the ideas they already have than their ability to come up with new ones, as well as ways to implement them that are feasible in the existing organization. It is similar to solving a Harvard Business School case, with the differences that it is a real situation and that the issues are technical as well as managerial. Top management has identified shortcomings in the company’s operations, feels they must be remedied to remain competitive, but has not found the ability to do it with internal resources. The external consultant brings in a fresh pair of trained eyes, the experience of similar situations, and a kit of tools, either mastered personally or made available through colleagues. The consultant’s generic abilities must then be melded with the specific business and technical knowledge available internally to come up with innovative, ad-hoc solutions. This kind of work requires direct observation of the operations, communication with people at all levels in the client organization, and analysis of the company data. It cannot be done dogmatically. The solutions will vary, as will the means of implementing them.

This is what my colleagues and I do. It cannot be done rigidly or dogmatically. It requires us to be open-minded and evaluate ideas on their own merits from wherever they may come. We operate under a flag or label but, whatever its orthodoxy is, we are always heretics.