Tag Archives: Lean implementation

May 16 2012

Two news stories highlight conflicting interpretations of Kaizen

Dateline 3/16/2012, Marion, Ill: Aisin recognized with top achiever award. This article recounts how “Aisin Manufacturing Illinois of Marion was recently recognized for their success among all Aisin operations in North America, as the top achiever in the 1-person/1-kaizen program. The 1-person/1-kaizen program is a national program that allows Aisin team members the opportunity to submit and implement ideas for improvement in the areas of safety, quality, cost, delivery or environmental.” In other words, it is an individual suggestion system.

Dateline 3/19/2012, Anoka County, MN: County taking Lean approach to government. The approach to improve the processing of paternity cases was designed by outside consultants, Innovation Process Design, LLC. Their were implemented “using the Kaizen process.” Since recommendations from outside consultants couldn’t possibly be implemented by individual employee suggestions, “Kaizen” obviously does not have the same meaning as in the Aisin story. Drilling through from the article, you reach a government website from the EPA, which defines Kaizens as “rapid improvement processes,” organized in the form of events.

That Kaizen should mean something so radically different in the Japan and the US would not be a problem if the success of the original, Japanese Kaizen were not used to promote the made-in-the-USA Kaizen events. One particularly unfortunate consequence is the quasi-total absence of Kaizen activity in the original senses in US factories that are not Japanese transplants.

Silos by Sheeler
Mar 22 2012

Improvement in a silo

In a discussion he recently started in the PEX Network discussion group on LinkedIn, Adi Gaskell asked whether process improvement worked in a silo. Most participants said no, but Steven Borris said yes, and I agree with him. Following is what I added:

I agree with Steven, and will even go further: your first pilot projects when you start Lean implementation have the best chance of success if they are contained within a department. The more departments, silos, or fiefdoms you involve, the more difficult you make it, and the less likely to succeed.

The scope does not have to include a complete process from raw materials to finished goods. It does not even have to be at the end or the beginning of the process. All his has to be is a process segment with a technical potential for improvement that is achievable with available skills, and enthusiastic local management.

There is a simple criterion to establish whether such a local project improves the plant as a whole: does it move its target operations in the direction of takt-driven production. If it does, and only if it does, the order-of-magnitude improvements you get locally translate to nibbling percentages globally. For example, the local WIP drops by 90% and that makes the global WIP drop by 4%.

Only once you have a few successful within-silo projects under your belt do you have the support in the organization and the skills base to take on cross-silo or silo-eliminating projects.

Mar 8 2012

What support infrastructures do you need for Lean?

Fourth in a series of questions  from the Spanish magazine APD (Asociación para el Progreso Directivo). My answer is as follows and, perhaps, your comments will help me make it better:

What kind of Steering Committee, Lean Office, Lean Champions, or Continuous Improvement group do you need to put in place?

Ideally, none. Lean is not supposed to be a career opportunity but instead part of everybody’s job. Over time, it becomes so much “the way we do things” that it no longer needs a name. In reality, all organizations find it necessary to provide some form of organized support. Even Toyota has an Operations Management Consulting Division (OMCD), of about 60 members, that mostly works with suppliers.

But there are many pitfalls to avoid in setting up this kind of support at the right time, and in properly defining its scope. For example, a Lean Office at the corporate level established at the start of Lean implementation is likely to be out of touch with factories and focused on standardization rather than effectiveness. Such an office can easily turn into a Lean inquisition, castigating heretics in factories for using “non-standard” approaches, and  stifling the very creativity the company needs to grow its own version of Lean.

Another risk, at the plant level, is to create a Lean Engineering Department responsible for carrying out all Lean projects. This is ineffective for two reasons:

  1. The people responsible for operating production lines have no ownership in what the Lean Engineering Department has designed. They don’t understand it and have no motivation to make it work.
  2. The Lean Engineering Department cannot be large enough to do all the work that needs to be done. It just cannot have the bandwidth. Involving the people from operations is not a luxury. They are the only resources available to get the job done.

A successful Lean program starts with a handful of pilot projects. These projects need support from the plant manager personally, and the leadership of an enthusiastic production supervisor, usually with coaching from an outside consultant. As you ramp up from, say, two pilot projects to fifteen projects conducted concurrently in different parts of the plant, you start to need a Steering Committee of the plant manager and his or her direct reports to select projects, set priorities, resolve resource conflicts, and provide a forum for project leaders.

Soon, the organization of Steering Committee meetings, the scheduling of consultant visits and training sessions, the documentation of projects and the promotion of the plant’s program to both internal and external audiences generates enough work for a full-time Lean Champion. As Kevin Hop points out, it can be the start of a group supporting projects,  into which engineers and managers rotate for for periods of 6 months to a year between assignments in operations.

At the corporate level, Lean specialists can help plants locate resources and exchange their experience through mutual visits, technical exchange meetings, and on-line collaboration. As Lean skills grow in the company, the corporate group can help spread the knowledge and allow standards to emerge for some activities.

Many manufacturing organizations have borrowed the Black Belt system from Six Sigma to implement Lean, in which 1% of employees receive special training and a certification to work full-time in implementation support. While I am not questioning the effectiveness of this approach for Six Sigma, I have never seen it work for Lean. Instead, I have seen Black Belts frustrated with a position in which they feel they have responsibility without authority.

Mar 8 2012

What are the key behaviors for Managers to ensure a consistent Lean implementation?

This is the third in a series of questions I have received from the Spanish magazine APD (Asociación para el Progreso Directivo). My answer is as follows and, perhaps, your comments will help me make it better:

The sequence of projects through which Lean is implemented must be chosen with care, but, once management commits to a project, there must be no turning back, as even maintaining the means of turning back sends a mixed message that puts the project in jeopardy.

The worst managers can do is revert to the old way of working at the first sign of trouble. Assume for example that you have worked with a customer to ship in returnable containers and that, one morning, you run out of returnable containers. The temptation is great to revert to disposable containers but, in order to do this, you would have to keep stocks of disposable containers, your customers would have to dispose of the empties, and you would be giving up the handling, quality and cost advantages of returnables. The proper response instead is (1) to notify your customer to arrange an emergency delivery of returnable containers and (2) identify and remove the cause of the shortage. A manager who reverts to the old ways is showing an absence of commitment that quickly propagates through his organization and causes the transformation to fail.

Commitment and consistency, however, does not mean having a one-size-fits-all solution to all problems. What is implemented must be carefully planned for the specific circumstances of the project, and adjusted as needed. Lean is incarnated in specific tools in car manufacturing, which may not be applicable in a different industry. The essence of Lean is not in these tools but in their underlying principles, and the implementation of Lean in a new industry usually consists in redeploying these principles with tools that may not be the same as in car manufacturing.

Occam chooses a razor
Feb 2 2012

Occam’s Razor, Value Added, and Waste

The manufacturing people I know are not fond of theories. They prefer to be on a shop floor with oil mist in the air and machines banging away, observing and acting on the actual situation, than in a conference room, drawing boxes and arrows on a white board, calling it a system and arguing about it. Theories, however, are not a luxury. We need them to structure, organize and focus our thinking about the reality we perceive. Pascal Dennis calls them mental models, and, as Georges Matheron used to say, nothing is as practical as a good theory. A good theory is sophisticated enough to solve real problems, yet simple enough for people  to understand and apply. This is a tall order. To fulfill it, you must not only be inclined to abstract thinking, but you must also have the time to do it, and the ability to communicate.

And there are theories on how to make theories, such as Occam’s Razor, which says that,  among competing theories, you should use the simplest until you have evidence to prove it false. Scientists, engineers, medical doctors, and cops do this all the time. If you make a theory more complicated than it needs to be for its purpose, you make it more difficult to confirm or refute, apply, and teach. About Lean, Occam’s Razor says that we should not have more hypotheses or concepts than strictly needed, as they would be unnecessary, or  muda. If we had a list of seven categories of waste for building theories, Occam’s Razor might provide the first: Unnecessary complexity.

When you read Jim Womack’s theory of Lean, as expressed in Lean Thinking and replicated in much of the American and European literature, you find that it is based on a concept of value-added (VA) that is more complex than the concept of waste (muda) used in the Japanese literature. Jim Womack’s VA is defined as what “the customer is willing to pay for.” I found no reference to this notion either in the works of pioneers like Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo, or academic observers like Yasuhiro Monden or Takahiro Fujimoto, whose works are available in English. Even a recent author like Mikiharu Aoki, whose 2009 book on the heart of introducing TPS is only available in Japanese, manages to explain the entire system without this notion. It is also absent from Jeffrey Liker’s Toyota Way. You do find occasional references to “value-adding work” in the Japanese literature, but always to designate activities that physically change materials, which is not the same as Womack’s VA. If they don’t need this concept, do we?  or is it a violation of Occam’s Razor?

The confusion about VA is reflected in the large amount of questions and requests for clarification that every mention of it generates in discussion groups. VA sounds deep, and everybody wants to make sure they understand what it is,  how to recognize it, and how to separate activities among “Value-added,”  “Non-value added but necessary” and “Unnecessary.” In particular, the distinction between “Value-added”  and “Non-value added but necessary” would be useful if there were differences in the actions taken about these two categories of activity. Let us take two examples:

  1. Fastening two parts with a screw is usually put in the “Value-added” column. About this kind of operation, first you make sure it is effective, meaning that you use the right screw on the right parts, thread it truly, and apply the right torque. Then you work on making it efficient, so that, for example, no operator has to walk six feet back and forth to pick one screw or fetch a screwdriver.
  2. Revision control on process specs usually goes into the “Non-value-added but necessary” category. A customer would not be thrilled to pay for it, but the plant could not operate without it. First, you want to make sure it is effective, so that the right instructions are posted at each workstations and the right programs downloaded to machine controllers. Then you want to make it efficient, so that engineering changes are either rejected or approved and implemented promptly, without using an army of people to do it.

The two F’s, Effectiveness and Efficiency, are what you pursue in both cases, in the same order. Several people have tried to explain to me how fundamentally different these cases were, but I still don’t see it. I really don’t care how different the activities may be from a philosophical standpoint. All I am interested in is what you do about them, and if the actions are the same, I see no point in having two categories. One argument I heard is that you do “non-value added but necessary” activities only because you have not yet found a way to eliminate them. But the same is true value-added activities. The fastening operation could be automated, the screw replaced by a rivet, or the parts could be welded together, or the entire assembly could become a single molded part… Just because the operation is “value-added” doesn’t mean you are not trying to eliminate it.

Using just two categories — what you need to do and what you don’t — is not only simpler but these two categories are also easier to tell apart. As we all know, customers’ willingness to pay is only proven by actually payments, and therefore cannot be clearly established for a fastening operation half way through an assembly line. On the other hand, an operation is unnecessary if and only if its elimination would not degrade performance in any way, and we have Ohno’s list of waste categories to help us locate them. If we eliminate any kind of waiting, for example, we know that we will improve quality, reduce costs,  accelerate delivery, without jeopardizing safety or hurting morale. We don’t need to look anywhere outside the workstation to establish this.

Womack’s VA/NVA analysis bestows the “value-added” label on a small number of activities while branding everything else as “non-value-added.” By contrast, Ohno’s list of waste categories is finite. and everything that is not explicitly identified as waste is accepted as necessary. Whenever this kind of classification is made, it is only valid under current conditions.

Jan 13 2012

5S First?

Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

I agree with the comments, but not with the heckler’s assumption that 5S is easy. It may look easy, but, if it really were, 5S efforts would be successful more often. The key reason it should almost never be done first is that it is so hard to make it stick. Companies that start with 5S usually have a big spring cleaning event followed by rapid backsliding that destroys the credibility of 5S with their work force.
A consultant who recommends 5S first is like a parent telling a kid to clean up his room because he has problems at school. It probably needs doing, but it won’t solve the school problems.

“Some time ago, while speaking at a conference in the land down under, I was taken to task by a participant for suggesting, “5S is usually the first improvement” in Lean implementation.”
Via oldleandude.com

Dec 23 2011

How to achieve a lean transformation

Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

The Manufacturing Digital ezine devotes an entire section to Lean, and this is the latest entry. It is more about what needs to be done than how to do it. In the featured picture, the executives look like the marines on Iwojima, but they also seem about  to jump off a cliff.
Via www.manufacturingdigital.com