Management

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.

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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

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.

British 19th-century craftsman
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:

  1. Operators are hired for a career in the company and retained through downturns.
  2. They are frequently rotated between jobs and become multi-skilled, which requires them to share what they know.
  3. They participate in continuous improvement, leading to the integration of their private tricks into the shared specs.
  4. 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 network 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.

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.

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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

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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.

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Professeur Tournesol

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, 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

...The crowning acheivement.
…The crowning acheivement.
The starting point...
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 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
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.

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
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.

Thimonnier's 1829 sewing machine
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
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.

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