Deming’s complete statement of Point 9 is as follows:
“Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems in production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.”
Within a large organization, it is common for departments to work at cross purposes. Each department is a functional silo, working towards goals that may be inconsistent with the interests of the whole. Deming gives many examples of disasters that occur as a consequence, and exhorts his readers to break down the barriers to keep them from happening. As with his other points, he makes no recommendation on how to accomplish this.
Let us examine several approaches that have been tried, and the issues that organizations encountered when they did:
This is not a problem for small companies. As long as the entire management team fits within a small conference room, there are few opportunities to erect barriers. In a large company where it is a problem, the most obvious solution is to organize by what is variously called business teams, business processes, value streams, or focused factories.
You dissolve the functional departments and organize multifunction teams that bring all the required talent to bear on the core activities. In a manufacturing company, for example, all the resources needed to make a family of products from start to finish — including engineers, maintenance and quality technicians, schedulers, etc. — report to one “value stream manager,” and there cannot be barriers between silos because there are no silos.
It’s like the Mission Impossible TV series, with the disguise specialist and the explosives expert working together towards a common goal, as opposed to being in separate facilities and exchanging service requests in triplicate. This is a popular picture in the US and the approach is often used in a variety of contexts, such as emergency response, as in Apollo 13, or product development, for Data General’s MV-8000 computer in 1980 in Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, or the 1996 Taurus at Ford in Mary Walton’s Car.
The movie Apollo 13 shows a seemingly too-good-to-be-true team that is thrown together to find a way to fit the square connector of the command module air scrubber to the round hole used on the lunar module, using nothing but the odds and ends available to the astronauts on the crippled spacecraft. But the story is true, and we have a picture of the actual device the astronauts built.
This was the philosophy of Business Process Reengineering (BPR). Each business was to be broken down into processes turning some input into an externally visible output. Manufacturing, in BPR, did not qualify as a process. Instead, it was subsumed into the order-fulfillment process.
Making functional departments work
But it is not a panacea. The development of the 1996 Taurus took 30 months, and it was a major improvement over previous products at Ford, but still not down to the 24 months used at Toyota for the Rav4, and Toyota uses a traditional structure with functional departments communicating through memos.
In addition, according to Mary Walton, Ford’s integrated, collocated team made design decisions that made manufacturing more difficult. She explains in particular that the sculptured shape of the side panels made them more difficult to stamp, and this happened even though manufacturing was represented in the team. As a work of art, the 1996 Taurus was stunning. As a commercial product, however, it was lackluster, losing the previous versions’ bestseller status in the US market to the more “boring” Honda Accord and Toyota Camry in 1997.
The reality is that organization structure does not determine outcomes. The caliber of the individuals, their motivations for the roles they are playing, and their interaction protocols are at least as important. In their July, 1998 Harvard Business Review article , D.K.Sobek, J. Liker, and A.C. Ward listed the following practices as key to Toyota’s performance in product development:
Written communication with single-sheet A3 reports in standard formats.
Engineering supervision by practicing, hands-on engineers.
A chief engineer (shusa, or 主査) for each project who is an experienced designer with a proven ability to integrate different technologies into a product. The shusa has a team of 5 to 15 members coordinating the work of hundreds who remain in functional departments.
Engineers who develop their skills through on-the-job training, mentoring, and rotation within their functional department, with senior managers rotating between departments.
High-level project plans with a small number of milestones, giving each department flexibility on detailed tasks.
Checklists of design standards embodying the lessons learned in previous projects.
Obstacles to organization by process or value stream
The Toyota example is about product development. But what about other activities like operations? When you attempt to organize everything by business process, or by value stream, in most cases you encounter some functional departments that you technically cannot or should not break up.
Most machine shops have a central heat treatment facility. Induction hardening can, for some work, distribute heat treatment among different production lines and break down the “heat treat silo,” but a given shop may make products to which it is not applicable, its customers may not approve the process, or it may not have the skills or resources to implement it. Electroplating and painting commonly are similar challenges. As a result, the plant ends up with a few common services organized as functional departments along with lines that take a family of products through a sequence of operations.
Among support functions, the picture is also mixed. Production scheduling at the detailed level, for example, works better when the schedulers work directly for the manager of a production line than in a central department, because local scheduling is a simpler problem and the relevant specifics of machine behaviors are more accessible. On the other hand, breaking down a maintenance department and making the technicians report to production managers may not enhance their responsiveness when, for example, the group assigned to a line is short of the critical mass needed to have at least one technician standing by for the next emergency.
Other departments remain organized centrally because of the information they have access to, like Human Resources, Accounting, or Technical Data Management; others, because of external entities they deal with, like Shipping and Receiving.
Skills maintenance, continuing education and career planning
When breaking down a functional department and reassigning its members to teams organized around processes, we also need to consider how it affects the people to whom we do it. Professionals like medical doctors or lawyers work for clients who have little or no knowledge of their specialties, but it is then up to them to decide how much of their revenue to spend or maintaining their skills. They choose which magazines tp subscribe to and which conferences to attend, without asking anybody’s permission.
An engineer reporting to a production manager also works for one “client” who does not have the same expertise, but as an employee. If this engineer wants to attend a conference, the first step is to get approval for the time and money it will consume, from a manager with no knowledge of whether it is a good idea.
In the long term, what career does this engineer have to look forward to? The manager needs the engineer’s skills here and now but is ill equipped to provide guidance, compared to an engineering manager whose background and experience are in the same field.
For this reason, some companies have adopted matrix organizations, in which specialists report “solid-line” to a process owner who needs their skills in operations or on projects, and “dotted-line” to a functional manager for skills maintenance and career development. In a diagram, as follows, this structure looks simple and attractive:In reality, of course, it is a more complex form of organization than a simple hierarchy, and conducive to all sorts of tensions regarding authority and responsibility.
Project transitions
Project work — like product development, new product introduction, or new plant setup — differs from operations in that it ends when a goal is reached, which may be a working prototype, a target takt time in production for the new product, or for the new plant. At that point, the teams are disbanded and their members move on.
This is a particularly sensitive transition to manage when you collocate a multifunction project team in one big room, because its members bond both with the project and with each other, and receive the ending like a psychological blow on the scale of the loss of a family member. This is another reason why they need to retain a connection with their functional peers.
Conclusions
Breaking down barriers between departments for the greater good of the organization as a whole is a worthy goal, that high-level managers have been pursuing since, at least, the Roman empire. There is no simple recipe. The approaches followed by successful organizations have been subtle, nuanced, and fitted to their purposes.
Lean is from Japan, and even more specifically from one Japanese company. Outside of Japan, however, the foreign origin of the concepts impedes their acceptance. In every country where I’ve been active, I have found the ability to link Lean to local founders a critical advantage. The people whose support you need would like to think that Lean was essentially “invented here,” and that foreigners at best added minor details. Identifying local ancestors in a country’s intellectual tradition takes some research, and then you may need to err on the side of giving more credit than is due.
Feeder line at Ford
In the US, using the word “Lean” rather than TPS is already a means of making it less foreign, and it is not difficult to paint Lean as a continuation of US developments from the 19th and 20th century, ranging from interchangeable parts technology to TWI. Ford’s system is a direct ancestor to Lean, as acknowledged by Toyota. On this basis, the American literature on Lean has gradually been drifting towards attributing Lean to Henry Ford. Fact checkers disagree, but it makes many Americans feel better.
Elsewhere, it is not as obvious to find a filiation. Following are a few examples of what I found:
Russia has Alexei Gastev, who started an industrial engineering institute in Moscow in 1920, was shot by Stalin in 1939 and largely forgotten afterwards, but our OrgProm colleagues have now named a prize after him, that is given to Russian companies for excellence in manufacturing. It was awarded for the first time in 2011. Here are, from 1924, Gastev’s 9 steps to automate a riveting operation:
Gastev’s 9 steps to automated riveting
Poland has Karol Adamiecki, whose “harmonogram” is the same as a Gantt chart, and was invented independently and a few years earlier. If you google “harmonogram,” you get pictures of Gantt charts. I am sure there must be some differences between the two, however minor, but I can’t tell what they are.
Italians can connect Lean to the shipyard in which Venetians assembled galleys in the Renaissance. Jim Womack identified it as a early flow line. As he wrote in Walking Through Lean History:
“… Dan Jones visited the Arsenal in Venice, established in 1104 to build war ships for the Venetian Navy. Over time the Venetians adopted a standardized design for the hundreds of galleys built each year to campaign in the Mediterranean and also pioneered the use of interchangeable parts. This made it possible to assemble galleys along a narrow channel running through the Arsenal. The hull was completed first and then flowed past the assembly point for each item needed to complete the ship. By 1574 the Arsenal’s practices were so advanced that King Henry III of France was invited to watch the construction of a complete galley in continuous flow, going from start to finish in less than an hour.”
Galley assembly hall in Venice
Britain, as the Olympic opening ceremonies reminded us, was home to the industrial revolution. In terms of worldwide share of market for manufactured goods, however, Britain peaked about 1870, and the thinkers that come to mind about British manufacturing are economists like Adam Smith or David Ricardo, whose theories were based on observations of early manufacturing practices, but whose contributions were not on the specifics of plant design or operations. They are too remote to be linked in any way to Lean.
For France, I have asked everybody I know there for nominations but have yet to receive any. The French have invented many products and processes, but I have not been able to identify French pioneers in production systems who could provide a link to Lean. And there are many other countries where the search may be fruitless.
Even though people in China and India have been making things for thousands of years,I don’t know any names of local forerunners of Lean in these countries. China has only emerged as a world-class manufacturing power in the last few decades and I have, unfortunately, never been to India. There are many other countries on which I don’t have this kind of information, and nominations are welcome.
In a Lean plant, we expect to see a tidy, uncluttered shop floor with high visibility as a result of 5S, and skills matrices on performance boards that track the cross training of the operators in the different tasks performed in that shop. 5S and multiskilled operators are both features of Lean that we do not, a priori, consider as linked. But in fact they are, and the feasibility of implementing certain aspects of 5S is in fact contingent on having multiskilled operators.
For example, assume you are running a traditional machining job-shop. You have a turning center, a milling center, a drilling center, a grinding center, etc. In each of these centers, you have a farm of machines performing only one type of operation and working in parallel. Each job follows its own path from center to center, with a document called traveler showing the list of operations with check marks for the operations done to date. And each center has single-skilled operators, usually able to operate just one machine, or a bank of identical machines, as seen in Figure 1, with the orange areas showing WIP locations.
Figure 1. Machining job-shop
If you try to implement 5S in this context, you will be telling a machinist with 15 years on the same machine to put hand tools on a shadow board and label every location. But the machinist knows where everything is, and sees no value in this exercise. The only clear point is that 5S would make it easier for somebody else to take over the job. And since this machinist doesn’t know how to do anything else in the plant, it is not an attractive proposition.
On the other hand, assume you first set up cells in which each job makes a machinist operate several machines, and the cell operators rotate between jobs, as shown in Figures 2 and 3.
Figure 2. Machine shop with cellular layoutFigure 3. Operator jobs in a cell
Then the shadow boards and labels come in handy and are well received. The tooling is shared among several operators, none of whom “owns” any of the machines (See Figure 4).
Figure 4. Labeled tooling positions in a cell
In other words, if you try to have assigned and labeled locations for tooling in a traditional job-shop, you will get nowhere with the machinists. On the other hand, it is indispensable when you operate with multiskilled operators, and they will cooperate in making it happen.
The American literature on Lean gives the impression that all it takes to implement it is Value-Stream Mapping (VSM) and Kaizen Blitzes. Mention these to Toyota people, however, and you may be surprised that they have never heard of them, and certainly not as part of the Toyota Production System (TPS) that Lean is based on. Likewise, General Tso’s Chicken, the most popular Chinese dish in the US, is unknown in China and was traced by Jennifer 8 Lee to a chef in New York City in 1976.
In the Lean CEO discussion group on LinkedIn, Paul Renoir started a discussion on why 5S implementations are not sustained. As one of the participants, Sammy Obara, pointed out, if it’s not sustained, by definition it’s not 5S. The discussion is really about why 5S fails, and failing it does, massively and systematically. Among the 22 contributions to this discussion to date, there isn’t a single one contradicting its basic premise, and asserting what a great success 5S has been in specific facilities.
What I have written on 5S in this blog before may make me sound as if I thought of it as worthless. It’s not the case. 5S is a valuable tool, and it is implemented with success in many factories in Japan. The failures that can be seen in the US and Europe are due to misunderstandings, translation errors, and wrong decisions as to when and why it should be implemented. My previous posts on the subjects are as follows:
Consultants often recommend that a company start with 5S for the wrong reasons. One quick look at a plant and you know that it would be better with 5S, but that doesn’t mean that 5S would solve its problems or that the organization is capable of implementing it.
It’s like a kid with problems at school who has a messy room. It’s easy to tell the kid to tidy up the room, but it won’t solve the problems at school, and it won’t be sustained. Whether with a plant or a kid, figuring out what the problems are takes more time and effort, but it is necessary if you want to identify projects (1) that put the organization on track to a solution, (2) that it has the skills and the will to conduct successfully, and (3) that entail changes that will be sustained.
Initial projects that work
Art Byrne, among others, recommend giving stretch goals to projects. The point of stretch goals is that they cannot be reached just by putting in extra effort temporarily. Instead, stretch goals require you to make substantial, physical changes to the work, including modifications of machines or fixtures. Once you have made such changes, not only do you achieve your stretch goals, but you don’t easily revert to the old way. In the initial stages of Lean implementation, the only way you get any 5S to stick is by making it the “finishing touches” on other projects, like cells or SMED. If, instead, 5S is the project, it won’t be sustainable.
5S and involvement by everyone
One aspect of 5S that is lacking in just about every discussion of it that I have seen in English is that, when you make 5S a project on its own, it must involve everyone. Participation is not on a voluntary basis. Everyone from the CEO to the janitor must participate, and it fails unless this actually happens. Most employees consider this cleaning up to be beneath them, and top managers’ direct participation is essential to prevent them from feeling this way and acting accordingly.
This is why 5S is so difficult to implement, especially as your first step towards Lean. On the other hand, if you have taken the content of 5S and, as I suggested before, made it part of such other projects as cells or SMED, you may have, after a year or two, about 20% of your work force unknowingly practicing 5S. At that point, you may choose to make 5S your next project and leverage this 20% to achieve 100% involvement. Then you a have a chance to make it stick.
There are other features of Lean that require participation by everyone, particularly autonomous maintenance, which is the only aspect of TPM that you see widely implemented. Somewhere along your Lean journey, you have to learn how to implement practices that require participation by everyone, which is what, in Japan, is meant by “Total.”
5S is a good choice for your first “Total” program and, in particular, works as a stepping stone to TPM. Once you have your 5S daily routine in place, it is a natural transition to enhance it to include checks on the vital signs of your equipment.
Translation errors about 5S
If 5S efforts were broadly successful, there would be no point in raising an issue. Since, however, they are almost universal failures, it might help to communicate accurately on what 5S actually means.
I first learned about “4S” in Japan in the 1980s, from my mentor Kei Abe, and studied it in the Japanese literature. As the time, it was translated into English as R.I.C.K., for Remove, Identify, Clean, and Keep clean, and I thought it was a reasonable approximation. A few years later, my colleague Crispin Vincenti-Brown introduced me to a major American corporation with plants that bore the traces of a failed 5S implementations, from fading banners on the walls to obsolete markings and dirty work stations. Three years before, the top management had been on a tour of Japan, had seen 5S in action there, and had committed to implement it, going as far as putting a Vice President in charge of it. And this was the result. The operators’ version of the meaning of 5S was “Some Stupid Supervisor Said So.”
By then, it was no longer 4S but 5S, and someone had seen fit to translate the five Japanese words with English words that also started with S. While it was undoubtedly clever, the meaning of these five words just didn’t match the original, and these mistranslations, frequently repeated, now have become some sort of standard.
Following are explanations of the original five S’s, to the best of my ability:
Seiri （整理) does not mean Sort. In everyday Japanese, it means sort out, as in resolving administrative problems. In 5S, it means removing from the shop floor the items you don’t use routinely.
Seiton （整頓） does not mean Set in order. In everyday Japanese, it means arranging neatly. In 5S, it refers to having assigned locations and labels for everything you retain on the shop floor.
Seiso (清掃) means Clean, not Shine. The idea is to have production operators clean their own workplaces at shift end, so that they notice details like spills, frayed cables, or broken lamps. It is not about making them pretty.
Seiketsu （清潔) does not mean Standardize. In everyday Japanese, it is a noun meaning cleanliness. In 5S, it is the reduction of the first three S’s to daily practice by management enforcement, through things like checklists, assignment of responsibility for daily housekeeping activities, and routine audits.
Shitsuke （躾) does not mean Sustain. In everyday Japanese, it is a noun, meaning upbringing. It is not an action but the condition you reach when the performance of the first three S’s has become second-nature to the organization. As long as you tell your kid to brush his teeth every day, you are practicing Seiketsu; once he does it without prompting, you have achieved Shitsuke.
Deming’s complete statement of Point 8 is as follows:
“Drive out fear.”
This is a prescription that Doug Hiatt, a quality assurance manager at Boeing, found bewildering. First, he couldn’t see how fear could be “driven out,” and, second, where dangers are real, he didn’t feel that fear was something to be avoided. Deming is not arguing, however, that external threats, like competitors, should be hidden from employees to make them feel secure. In the 1980s, I worked for a software company whose managers were invariably friendly and courteous to subordinates, and where management communication was mostly “happy talk” that made especially the younger employees feel comfortable. Then, overnight, one third of them were laid off. Their sense of security was false.
Deming is advocating giving employees a genuine sense of security, which is both difficult to create and easy to shatter. Nothing can create such as sense quickly, but we can think of all sorts of human resource policies that can have this effect if carried out consistently over many years. Deming does not give us any pointer, but, in the US in 2012, few companies even try, particularly in environments like Silicon Valley.
Deming feels that fear always leads to “impaired performance and padded figures.” While the fictional Darth Vader can scare a crew into building a fully operational death star faster, the record in the real world is mixed. There, the ultimate manager by fear was probably Joseph Stalin, as shown in his January, 1940 telegram to a plant manager telling him that, unless results were produced within a tight deadline, his management team would be shot. The performance of Soviet industry supports both of Deming’s assertions.
But even in the US, managers like Jack Welch, who introduced Rank-and-Yank at GE, clearly feel that there is nothing wrong with making employees fear losing their jobs. Others like to quote Machiavelli’s “It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.” But Machiavelli’s world in 15th century Italy was more like the Game of Thrones than a contemporary manufacturing company. His prince is concerned exclusively with stabilizing his power, fending off rivals, and conquering more territory. Machiavelli’s advice is of limited value in areas like product development, marketing, manufacturing, or customer relationship management.
Intel’s Andy Grove was so famous for saying “Only the paranoid survive” that he wrote a book by this title, but the book is about business strategy, not about the way you treat employees. I had an extended project with Intel when Grove was its CEO; the Intel employees I worked with spoke of him with awe and respect, but never with fear. They trusted his steady hand steering the company and were not worried about being treated unfairly. Outside Intel, the company was perceived as secretive and aggressive, bordering on ruthless.
Does fear always impair performance? Stage fright can paralyze public speakers, stage actors or singers, but its complete absence is a sign of indifference to the audience that it doesn’t miss. The best performers are those who feel stage fright but are galvanized by it. Conversely, does the absence of fear always enhance performance? Academic tenure is the ultimate in job security. But do professors perform better once they are tenured than when they are on a tenure track pursuing it? Non-academics may be too quick to assume that they don’t. There is no valid general answer to that question. Some do and some don’t.
Deming sees a “widespread resistance to knowledge.” From the details he gives, what he means for individual contributors is that they are afraid new methods or new technology will make their hard-earned skills obsolete and threaten their positions; for managers, it is the worry that the investment in acquiring knowledge will never be recouped. These are two separate concerns.
The first fear is readily observed in organizations that hire people based on the immediate need for skills, as opposed to recruiting them for a career. If you know you are employed because you are the only one to know how to run a milling machine of a particular model, or navigate the user interface of a legacy information system, then you are naturally less than enthusiastic about the introduction of a way of working that requires you to train others to do your current job, or of new machines or systems that do not need your current skills. If company behavior over decades has built a foundation for this fear, you will not drive it out easily. It will require the establishment of new human resource policies, their communication to the work force, and their sustained practice over a long-enough period to build credibility with the work force
In operations, the managers’ primary responsibility is the output to customers, and employees do learn in the process of producing it, particularly if they rotate between stations. But even this form of knowledge acquisition is not free. It takes management attention to organize and monitor, each job an operator rotates into requires a learning period during which performance degrades, and there is always the risk that your most knowledgeable employees will leave. Other forms of knowledge acquisition include participation in improvement projects and experiments, technology watch, and formal training, in house and at public venues. All are investments in money and time, with uncertain outcomes. Let us look at each in more detail:
Improvement projects. They should always have the dual purpose of improving performance in their target area and learning by the work force. Participation in successful improvement projects develops both technical and managerial skills, in a way that pays for itself through the performance enhancements.
Experiments. While experimentation is a normal part of product development, most managers do not make room for it in operations. A Lean Manufacturing plant, on the other hand, sets aside space for it and encourage engineers or technicians to experiment with concepts, tools, machines, or systems that are not immediately applied in production. This is how they learn to be savvy buyers of technology, customize off-the-shelf equipment, or build from scratch machines that are not commercially available. You cannot write a discounted cash flow analysis to justify such an engineering sandbox, but you can see its impact in the proliferation of clever devices that enhance production performance on the shop floor.
Technology watch. This is keeping up with new developments in one’s current specialty, by reading the trade press, attending conferences, visiting trade shows, and going on plant tours. These are activities that a manager may find difficult to justify, on the grounds that they are not anything a customer would be willing to pay for. Yet, not doing them is a sure path to technical obsolescence.
Training. We discussed training issues in the review of Deming’s Point 6.
How do you “drive out” the fear of making the wrong decisions in this area? This is particularly challenging when you break down functional silos and distribute technical specialists among the processes they serve, whose management owners rarely appreciate the need for them to stay current. If you are an extrusion engineer working for the production manager in a shop that makes extruded rubber parts for cars, you may be dedicated to making the lines perform well, but you will be isolated from professional peers. That is why some organizations either retain the functional silo structure while trying to make it work better using tools like A3 reports for better communication, or they adopt a matrix organization, in which the specialists maintain a “dotted line” reporting relationship to a technical manager whose job is to manage the maintenance and development of their skills. A common strategy for IT in manufacturing companies is to outsource the technical work to a system integrator who is responsible for the technical skills of the contractors he sends.
Deming also describes as a loss from fear the inability to serve the best interest of the company because of rules or production quotas. It conjures up the image of Captain Queeg telling his officers how every rule in the book is there for a reason and has to be followed to the letter. Deming gives the example of a supervisor afraid to stop a machine for needed repairs because he might not fulfill his production quota. Of course, the machine breaks down and he can’t fulfill his quota anyway. But it is a dilemma. On the one hand, you want employees to use their judgement and break rules that are counterproductive. But, on the other hand, you don’t want them to think that shop operating standards and production plans are only guidelines. Finding the right balance is not easy between blind obedience to imperfect rules and absolute control by each individual of what to do and how much to produce. Here are a few pointers on how to do it:
The rules have to be few in number and clearly stated. The following signs show the rules governing the use of a public park in Paris and a swimming pool in Palo Alto, CA. Every visitor to the Luxembourg gardens is expected to know nine articles of small print; the Palo Alto swimmers, seven bullet points.
The purpose of the rules must be communicated, whether it is regulatory compliance, safety, quality, etc. If no one can explain the purpose a rule serves, then it is a candidate for elimination.
A process must exist to modify or cancel rules that are obsolete, ineffective, or counterproductive. The Accidental Office Lady is a memoir of Laura Kriska’s years at Honda in Japan. As a young American college grad, one rule she found particularly objectionable was the discriminatory requirement for women to wear a uniform at work. She recounts how she used Honda’s NH Circle system to organize a group of co-workers and make a case for the elimination of uniforms as an improvement in office work, and got it approved by Honda management.
How do you recognize the presence of fear in an organization? Deming lists 14 different types of statements that he has heard from employees and considers to be expressions of fear. Following is a summary of his list:
The company may go out of business.
Supportive superior may leave.
Putting forth an idea may be perceived as treason.
May not have a raise at next review.
Long-term benefit may require short-term performance drop on daily report.
May not be able to answer boss’s question.
Credit for contribution may go to someone else.
Admitting a mistake may have adverse consequences.
Boss believes in fear; management is punitive.
System will not allow expansion of abilities.
Company procedures are not understood; employees don’t dare ask questions.
Management is mistrusted, and perceived to have a hidden agenda.
Inability to fulfill production quota (Operator or Plant Manager).
No time to take a careful look at the work (Engineer)
Nov 28 2012
Deming’s Point 9 of 14 – Break down barriers between departments
(Featured image from the Bureaucracy game, by Douglas Adams)
Deming’s complete statement of Point 9 is as follows:
Within a large organization, it is common for departments to work at cross purposes. Each department is a functional silo, working towards goals that may be inconsistent with the interests of the whole. Deming gives many examples of disasters that occur as a consequence, and exhorts his readers to break down the barriers to keep them from happening. As with his other points, he makes no recommendation on how to accomplish this.
Let us examine several approaches that have been tried, and the issues that organizations encountered when they did:
Eliminating silos in the organization
This is not a problem for small companies. As long as the entire management team fits within a small conference room, there are few opportunities to erect barriers. In a large company where it is a problem, the most obvious solution is to organize by what is variously called business teams, business processes, value streams, or focused factories.
You dissolve the functional departments and organize multifunction teams that bring all the required talent to bear on the core activities. In a manufacturing company, for example, all the resources needed to make a family of products from start to finish — including engineers, maintenance and quality technicians, schedulers, etc. — report to one “value stream manager,” and there cannot be barriers between silos because there are no silos.
It’s like the Mission Impossible TV series, with the disguise specialist and the explosives expert working together towards a common goal, as opposed to being in separate facilities and exchanging service requests in triplicate. This is a popular picture in the US and the approach is often used in a variety of contexts, such as emergency response, as in Apollo 13, or product development, for Data General’s MV-8000 computer in 1980 in Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, or the 1996 Taurus at Ford in Mary Walton’s Car.
The movie Apollo 13 shows a seemingly too-good-to-be-true team that is thrown together to find a way to fit the square connector of the command module air scrubber to the round hole used on the lunar module, using nothing but the odds and ends available to the astronauts on the crippled spacecraft. But the story is true, and we have a picture of the actual device the astronauts built.
Making functional departments work
But it is not a panacea. The development of the 1996 Taurus took 30 months, and it was a major improvement over previous products at Ford, but still not down to the 24 months used at Toyota for the Rav4, and Toyota uses a traditional structure with functional departments communicating through memos.
The reality is that organization structure does not determine outcomes. The caliber of the individuals, their motivations for the roles they are playing, and their interaction protocols are at least as important. In their July, 1998 Harvard Business Review article , D.K.Sobek, J. Liker, and A.C. Ward listed the following practices as key to Toyota’s performance in product development:
Obstacles to organization by process or value stream
The Toyota example is about product development. But what about other activities like operations? When you attempt to organize everything by business process, or by value stream, in most cases you encounter some functional departments that you technically cannot or should not break up.
Most machine shops have a central heat treatment facility. Induction hardening can, for some work, distribute heat treatment among different production lines and break down the “heat treat silo,” but a given shop may make products to which it is not applicable, its customers may not approve the process, or it may not have the skills or resources to implement it. Electroplating and painting commonly are similar challenges. As a result, the plant ends up with a few common services organized as functional departments along with lines that take a family of products through a sequence of operations.
Among support functions, the picture is also mixed. Production scheduling at the detailed level, for example, works better when the schedulers work directly for the manager of a production line than in a central department, because local scheduling is a simpler problem and the relevant specifics of machine behaviors are more accessible. On the other hand, breaking down a maintenance department and making the technicians report to production managers may not enhance their responsiveness when, for example, the group assigned to a line is short of the critical mass needed to have at least one technician standing by for the next emergency.
Other departments remain organized centrally because of the information they have access to, like Human Resources, Accounting, or Technical Data Management; others, because of external entities they deal with, like Shipping and Receiving.
Skills maintenance, continuing education and career planning
When breaking down a functional department and reassigning its members to teams organized around processes, we also need to consider how it affects the people to whom we do it. Professionals like medical doctors or lawyers work for clients who have little or no knowledge of their specialties, but it is then up to them to decide how much of their revenue to spend or maintaining their skills. They choose which magazines tp subscribe to and which conferences to attend, without asking anybody’s permission.
An engineer reporting to a production manager also works for one “client” who does not have the same expertise, but as an employee. If this engineer wants to attend a conference, the first step is to get approval for the time and money it will consume, from a manager with no knowledge of whether it is a good idea.
In the long term, what career does this engineer have to look forward to? The manager needs the engineer’s skills here and now but is ill equipped to provide guidance, compared to an engineering manager whose background and experience are in the same field.
For this reason, some companies have adopted matrix organizations, in which specialists report “solid-line” to a process owner who needs their skills in operations or on projects, and “dotted-line” to a functional manager for skills maintenance and career development. In a diagram, as follows, this structure looks simple and attractive:
In reality, of course, it is a more complex form of organization than a simple hierarchy, and conducive to all sorts of tensions regarding authority and responsibility.
Project transitions
Project work — like product development, new product introduction, or new plant setup — differs from operations in that it ends when a goal is reached, which may be a working prototype, a target takt time in production for the new product, or for the new plant. At that point, the teams are disbanded and their members move on.
This is a particularly sensitive transition to manage when you collocate a multifunction project team in one big room, because its members bond both with the project and with each other, and receive the ending like a psychological blow on the scale of the loss of a family member. This is another reason why they need to retain a connection with their functional peers.
Conclusions
Breaking down barriers between departments for the greater good of the organization as a whole is a worthy goal, that high-level managers have been pursuing since, at least, the Roman empire. There is no simple recipe. The approaches followed by successful organizations have been subtle, nuanced, and fitted to their purposes.
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By Michel Baudin • Asenta selection, Deming 2 • Tags: A3, Deming, Focused factory, Functional department, Job rotation, Silo, Value Stream