The following is a sign I saw in a plane yesterday:
Unintended signage in airliner galley
I thought it was amusing, and told a flight attendant that it was unlikely any passenger would mistake that location for a lavatory. She explained that this sticker was all they could find to hold up the lid of the waste container. While it may not have conveyed the best image to passengers, functionally, it was harmless, but it reminded me of not-so-harmless cases of wrong, obsolete, or ignored signage on factory floors.
Many such signs are often posted hastily as part of a “5S event.” Three months later, you see shadow boards with tools permanently missing, full pallets in front of signs that reserve the space for empties, and junk encroaching on marked transportation aisles. While each instance is a minor issue, collectively, even a small number is sufficient to destroy the credibility of the signage plantwide.
Signage on factory floors must be posted with excruciating care for accuracy and clarity, and it must then be enforced rigorously and consistently. Otherwise, it is a waste of effort.
Chrysler’s Rod Engle and his ETTEE award for reducing costs
“WARREN, Mich., Dec. 13, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Lights! Glamour! Assembly lines? Chrysler Group’s WCM Academy Hosts First-Ever Awards Ceremony.
In true Hollywood style, Chrysler Group and the UAW rolled out the red carpet for the Company’s high achievers in manufacturing at the first-ever World Class Manufacturing (WCM) Academy Awards ceremony …”
Michel Baudin‘s comments:
Awards, and the rituals of presenting them to winners, are a tool of management communication. To give the desired message, you need to think through what you give the awards for, who you give them to, and the mix of tangible and symbolic rewards attached.
Chrysler awards categories are not all self-explanatory, and there some that I just don’t understand. The name of the awards, ETTEE, stands for “Excellence, Talent, Togetherness, Energy, Etc.”
There are no awards under the “Etc.” heading. All the “Talent” awards are given to individuals for “Highest Level of Project Savings.” In other words, the only form of talent recognized is that of individuals to reduce costs.
Under “Excellence,” you have more individual awards for “Trainer of the Year,” “Facilitator of the Year,” and “Most Projects Tracked by an Individual.”
Under “Togetherness,” you have awards for plants and teams: “HHH Best in Class,” “Highest Percentage of People Involved,” and “Excellence in Joint Leadership,”
Under “Energy,” you have plant awards for “”Highest Percentage of Projects Tracked by Plant, ” and “Most Hosted Plant.” and and individual awards for “Most Training Hours Completed.”
For the “person of the year” type of awards, the name gives no indication of the evaluation criteria, and perceptions of fairness may be as difficult to achieve as in Olympic figure skating.
On the other hand, awards given based on metrics — like cost savings, percentage of people involved, or number of hours of training taken — have objective criteria that individuals can understand and pursue. The key issue here is whether you really want your employees to do that.
In the TPS Principles and Practice group on LinkedIn, Aineth Torres Ruiz asked about what mass production is and is not. With the loose talk of “Henry Ford’s Lean vision” going around, the confusion is understandable. In fact, the term “mass production” was coined specifically to describe Ford’s production system in an Encyclopedia Britannica article in 1926, and defined as follows:
“Mass production is the focusing upon a manufacturing project of the principles of power, accuracy, economy, system, continuity and speed.”
The article insists that “Mass production is not merely quantity production, for this may be had with none of the requisites of mass production. Nor is it merely machine production, which may exist without any resemblance to mass production.”
The encyclopedia article does not imply that the system was inflexible, but Ford’s system of that era was designed to build Model Ts and nothing else. Even though the following picture is from 1937, a decade after the end of the Model T era, the dense packing of presses makes you wonder how you were supposed to change dies:
Modern automotive press shops have machines arranged in lines, with space on the side for dies. In this shop, a die change had to be a rare event.
In essence, the term “mass production” is to Ford as “lean manufacturing” is to Toyota, a generic term applied to give broader appeal and generalize an approach developed in a specific company. It is not a derogatory term, and many elements of mass production found their way into TPS, along with parts of the “Taktsystem” from the German aircraft industry of the 1930s. To these external inputs, the Toyota people have been adding their own twists since the 1930s.
William S. Knudsen in World War II
Ford’s system itself evolved as it was adopted by competitors. As Peter Winton pointed out in the LinkedIn discussion, the original mass production was the production of large quantities of the same thing. As early as the 1920s, all the high-speed machines and lines dedicated to making the aging Model T at the River Rouge plant were both the strength and the Achilles heel of the system, giving GM the opportunity to grab market share away from Ford by, as Alfred P. Sloan put it “introducing the laws of Paris dressmakers in the car industry.” Ford alumnus William Knudsen’s “Flexible Mass Production” at Chevrolet made it possible through yearly model changes that could be completed in a few weeks. When Ford finally had to change from the Model T to the Model A in 1927, it required a thorough retooling of the Rouge plant, which took 9 months.
Ford’s system itself changed over the decades, and, at least as Lee Iacocca described its practices, the financially minded leadership that emerged in the 1950s no longer focussed on improving production. In my review of Deming’s Point 5 of 14 on that topic, I had included the following pictures of the same operation performed the same way 30 years later:
In the 1988 paper in which he introduced the term “Lean production,” John Krafcik makes a distinction between “Pure Fordism” and “Recent Fordism,” the main difference being that “Recent Fordism” involves large inventories, buffers, and repair areas. This, of course, implies nothing about what the Ford people have done since 1988.
The concept of a dedicated production line — effective at making one product and incapable of making anything else — is in fact not obsolete. If you have a product with long-term, stable demand, it is a better solution than a flexible line whose flexibility you don’t need. This is why you do a runner/repeater/stranger analysis of the demand for your products, and then investigate trends and seasonal variations. In the Lean approach, you use a dedicated where it fits and other approaches where it doesn’t; most plants, instead, have a one-size-fits-all approach.
How to select and use consultants is awkward for consultants to discuss, but it came up in a discussion started by Rey Elbo in the TPS Principles and Practice group on LinkedIn. On this topic, we can always quote third parties and, some years ago, I found the following strip in the pages of the Japanese monthly Kojo Kanri (工場管理, or “Factory Management”):
I understand that some of these recommendations may be surprising, and here are a few explanations from the body of the article:
Do not hire cheap consultants, anymore than you would a cheap surgeon or a cheap lawyer.
Use consultants who talk drills and wrenches and drills rather than bar and pie charts. There is room in lean manufacturing for analysis resulting in charts, but mostly upfront, in setting a plan with top management, but 95% of the work involves the nitty-gritty details of shop floor life.
Treat the consultant like a god. Follow recommendations rigorously and without challenging them.Defensiveness is self-defeating. If you don’t trust a consultant, replace him or her.
The consultants should not do anything. For skills to take root in the organization, the work needs to be done by in-house personnel. This is the distinction between consulting and engineering services, and the idea is that Lean skills need to be permanently in the company.
Get everything you can from the consultant in terms of ideas and recommendations. Pick the consultant’s brain relentlessly. If it takes being on the shop floor during the night shift, so be it.
An online sparring partner of 15 years, Bill Waddell, concluded our latest exchange with the following:
“Lean is comprised of three elements: Culture, management processes and tools. While you obviously have a keen awareness of the culture and tools, you continually under-appreciate the management processes, Michael.”
It is a 3-step progression: first, Bill makes a general statement of what Lean is, then he points out a serious shortcoming in my thinking, and finally he misspells my name.
As I am not trying to go global cosmic with Lean but instead remain focused on Manufacturing, rather than Bill’s three elements, I see Lean as having the four dimensions identified by Crispin Vincenti-Brown. Whatever you do has some content in each of the following:
Engineering, in the design, implementation, and troubleshooting of production lines.
Logistics and Production Control, covering both physical distribution and the processing of all information related to types and quantities of materials and good.
Organization and People, covering the structure, sizing, responsibilities and modes of interaction of departments in production and support, to run daily operations, respond to emergencies, and improve.
Metrics and Accountability. How results are measured and how these measurements are used.
Attention must be appropriately balanced in all of these dimensions and, if one is under-appreciated in the US, it is Engineering, not Management. Metrics and organization issues hog the attention; what little is left over goes towards Logistics and Production Control, and Engineering is taken for granted. The tail is wagging the dog, and reality bites back in the form of implementation failures.
What is a management process, and how does it differ from a tool? The term sounds like standard management speak, but, if you google it, the only unqualified reference to it that comes up is in Wikipedia, where it is defined as “a process of planning and controlling the organizing and leading execution of any type of activity.”
Since Henri Fayol, however, we have all been taught that the job of all managers is to plan, organize, control, and lead. In those terms, there doesn’t seem to be any difference between a “management process” and just “management.” All other Google responses are for the processes of managing different functions, like the “Project Management Process,” “Performance Management Process,” “Change Management Process,” or the “A3 Management Process.” The corresponding images are a variety of box-and-arrow diagrams, pyramids, wheel charts, dish charts, and waterfalls/swim lanes, as in the following examples:
From the Open Learning World
From Agilitrix
From Cedric Saldanha’s Public Sector Management site
From C3 Project Risk Management
From Lee Merhofer Consulting
Harvard Business Review Management Process Dish
A manufacturing process is the network of tasks to make a product from materials — with routes that merge, branch, and sometimes even loop. A business process, likewise, is a network of tasks to turn inputs into outputs, like the order fulfillment process that turns customer orders into deliveries. A political process is also a network of tasks leading to a particular result, like the election of a president or the approval of a budget. So, what about a management process? And what is the level of appreciation that it deserves?
Bill is the one who should really explain it, but, if I were to use this term, at the most basic level it would be for what I have been calling protocols, by which I mean the part of management work that is done by applying sets of rules or procedures rather than making judgement calls. They are pre-planned responses to events that might occur but are not part of routine operations. It can be the arrival of a new member into a team, the failure of a truck to show up, or a quality emergency.
This is the spirit of Toyota’s Change Point Management (CPM), in which the pre-planned responses are prepared by the teams that are potentially affected by the events and posted in the team’s work place. When the event occurs. all you have to do is retrieve the plan and you know what to do. And it is usually a better plan than what you would have improvised in the heat of the moment.
At a higher level, I would call process a protocol used to organize the way you make judgment calls. You can’t set the strategy of a company by applying rules, but you can use Hoshin Planning to organize the way you do it. A process like Hoshin Planning is akin to the rules of a game; it doesn’t determine how well the managers play. If they just comply with a mandate and go through the motions, they will produce a certain result. If, on the other hand, they understand what they are doing, connect it to their own work, and see the value in it, then they will produce a different result.
A good process does not guarantee a good outcome, and great teams have been able to coax performance out of dysfunctional processes. What is the proper level of appreciation for these management processes? Clearly, there is more to management than processes, and the best managers are those who excel at endeavors for which there is no script.
I learned to appreciate the relationship between management and engineering in Manufacturing from working with my mentor, Kei Abe. When he took me on as a junior partner in 1987, one of the first things I learned from him was to approach problems in a holistic manner, simultaneously at the technical and the managerial levels. I saw him coach a shop floor team on the details of SMED in the morning, and the board of directors on company strategy in the afternoon. It’s not a common mix of skills, but I believe it is what a manufacturing consultant should have.
Mar 5 2014
Avoid Inaccurate Signage!
The following is a sign I saw in a plane yesterday:
I thought it was amusing, and told a flight attendant that it was unlikely any passenger would mistake that location for a lavatory. She explained that this sticker was all they could find to hold up the lid of the waste container. While it may not have conveyed the best image to passengers, functionally, it was harmless, but it reminded me of not-so-harmless cases of wrong, obsolete, or ignored signage on factory floors.
Many such signs are often posted hastily as part of a “5S event.” Three months later, you see shadow boards with tools permanently missing, full pallets in front of signs that reserve the space for empties, and junk encroaching on marked transportation aisles. While each instance is a minor issue, collectively, even a small number is sufficient to destroy the credibility of the signage plantwide.
Signage on factory floors must be posted with excruciating care for accuracy and clarity, and it must then be enforced rigorously and consistently. Otherwise, it is a waste of effort.
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By Michel Baudin • Management 1 • Tags: 5S, Visual management, Visual Systems