Management

Nov 27 2011

Assembly Mag’s John Sprovieri responds to Kevin Meyer about Lean at Whirlpool

Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

John Sprovieri’s article opens with the following :

“Austin Weber’s article on lean manufacturing at Whirlpool was part of a series of articles written to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the company. As such, it was not the appropriate venue to dwell on the negative aspects of the company’s history, but rather to celebrate the accomplishments of one of this country’s great manufacturers.”

I could see “celebrating accomplishments” as a role for the company’s Public Relations department in an ad page. But is a reporter supposed to be a cheer leader for the companies he covers?
Via www.assemblymag.com

By • Management, Press clippings • 0 • Tags: ,

Sushi-whats-in-a-name

Nov 24 2011

Sushi versus Raw Fish: Use foreign words only when you can’t help it

Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
James Hereford, COO of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, prefers to use the original Japanese terms when deploying Lean, arguing that it doesn’t really matter whether words are Japanese or English, and that many Lean terms have no exact translation. While it is true for Kaizen or Kanban, it is not for Gemba, which he gives as an example. Gemba just means “actual place,” nothing more. As a general term, in English, it is not very telling but, in context, it can be replaced with shop floor, lab, operating room, race track, or back office, and there are more urgent things to do to implement Lean than burdening your audience with new, unnecessary words. My main concern in the field is to communicate as effectively and as precisely as possible, and I have found it easier with words my audience already knows, used literally when possible, and metaphorically when not.

People choose words for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with conveying a meaning, such as the following:

  1. Avoiding the emotional or historical baggage of a familiar word. Recycling the vocabulary of a past, failed program makes the new one less likely to succeed.
  2. Establishing their credentials as members of a group. Using the right jargon  is more “professional” than using plain, everyday words. The audience  then understands much better the speaker’s position than the meaning of the words.
  3. Leveraging ambiguity. New words are more likely to be taken to mean different things to different people, making the appearance of agreement easier to establish. This is a common practice of sales people.

Foreign words can serve all of these purposes, which I don’t pursue.

I still think foreign words are OK when:

  1. They have no local equivalent
  2. They are short.
  3. They are easy to pronounce. 

Takt is German for musical bar or stroke, as in a four-stroke engine, and I have never seen a reasonable English equivalent to it in takt time. On the other hand, Kevin Hop and I struggled with the Japanese zentenatamadashi, which even Google knows nothing about. Literally, it means “all items sticking out their heads,”  and Honda engineer Ray Sanders translated it as “Single-Piece Presentation.”  We adopted it because it is accurate, descriptive, easy to remember, and no longer than the original.

Via fisher.osu.edu

By • Management, Press clippings • 14 • Tags: , ,

Traffic light

Nov 21 2011

Communication challenges in multilingual organizations

This was a post in the discussion  in the AME discussion group on LinkedIn that Karen Wilhelm prompted with the following question:

Karen Wilhelm: What languages are spoken at your facility? How do you manage the communication challenge? No matter where a factory, or even an office, is situated, there are likely to be several languages spoken by employees. In your experience, how does that affect employee involvement, company culture, daily performance, and safety? What are your strategies for bridging language differences?

Written communication can be addressed more easily than oral communication, by using photographs, drawings, cartoons, pictograms, ideograms and color codes as much as possible. It works, but only as a short term solution: these symbols amount to a new language that the participants need to learn, so you don’t want to overdo it. In the long run, the work force should be proficient and literate in the local language, and you should do what it takes to get it to this point. If you don’t want to make language proficiency a prerequisite in hiring, then you must provide in-house language training.

A good example of a system understood across multiple languages is traffic signals in Europe that contain no words and are understandable to a Lithuanian truck driver on the road in Portugal. This system is easily learned as part of basic driver’s ed. The Chinese writing system is another example that, for over 2,000 years, has allowed written communication among people who speak dialects like Mandarin and Cantonese that are as different from each other as German and French. But it takes 10 years to learn.

Spoken communication in the work place is more problematic because it is more difficult to control. You can’t prevent two operators from using a common native tongue when talking to each other, but it has the effect of excluding third parties, which, immediately causes interpersonal problems and may impact quality, productivity, and even safety. In factories that are foreign transplants, expatriate managers often have discussions in their own language, which accidentally or deliberately keeps locals out of the loop.

While it is reasonable to expect shop floor operators to master English if the plant is in the US, or Spanish if it is in Mexico, you cannot expect them to also learn Swedish because it is owned by a company based in Stockholm. At the management level, multinational companies usually have an official language in which everyone is supposed to be professionally functional. And managers make a point of never using any other language in a mixed group. For example, two Swedes in the privacy of an office may converse in Swedish, but switch immediately to English if an Italian joins them.

By • Management • 6 • Tags:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Nov 20 2011

Russian award for manufacturing excellence named after A. K. Gastev

In any country, if you can present Lean as the continuation of the work of local pioneers, it is easier to implement than as a wholly alien concept. Lean’s debt to Ford, Taylor, Gilbreth, the TWI program, and others is acknowledged in Japan, which makes the connection easy to make in the US. In Russia, it was more of a challenge.

At OrgProm in 2008, Mikel Wader first told me about Gastev, who was by then so obscure that his books had not been reprinted in 40 years and it took months for OrgProm’s Julia Klimova to locate copies for me. A quick look at Gastev’s works then convinced me that he was indeed someone Russians could look up to as a precursor to Lean. Alexey Kapitonovitch Gastev (1882-1939) was the father of industrial engineering in Russia, creator of the Central Institute of Labor in Moscow in 1920, author of How Work Must be Done (Как надо работать) and Worker Training (Трудовые установки).  Through an example,  Figure 1 illustrates his thinking. His career was cut short when the government shot him as a “counter-revolutionary” in 1939.

Figure 1. Gastev’s sketch of multiple phases of improvement on a tube piercing operation

In 2008, OrgProm was already making efforts to naturalize Lean for Russia, for example by using the graphic style of soviet-era posters in illustrations of 5S. In the same spirit, I thought that establishing a “Gastev Prize” for manufacturing excellence would also make sense and suggested it. OrgProm followed up, and I was pleased this morning to receive the following notice from Omsk University’s Konstantin Novikov:

PROJECT OF THE YEAR: CUP, AK Gastev.
Gasteva Cup – a public initiative, Interregional Public Movement “Lin-Forum. Professionals lean manufacturing. “It lies in the organization and conduct of national competition efficiency of production systems among the leading companies. Companies may be nominated for the award and the Cup as Gasteva program effectiveness and individual projects. Results evaluates expert group, consisting of the most respected and experienced expert consultants on operational efficiency and top managers of successful companies. The award ceremony will be held Gasteva Cup on November 15-18 at the VI Forum “Development of production systems” (up to 2011 – Russian Lin forum “Lean Russia”).

By • History, Management • 4 • Tags: , ,

Nov 19 2011

Is it true that you get what you measure?

Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

The article Lean Manufacturing: Measuring To Get Results by lists a number of useful metrics. It also opens with the saying, or cliche, that “you get what you measure.”

The implications are (1) that people will always do whatever it takes to maximize their metrics, and (2) that, if you put the right metrics in place, improvement will take care of itself.   While I agree that we need good metrics, we should not overestimate their impact. Peer pressure and personal ethics, among other factors, drive most people more than their performance metrics. And even when employees do their utmost to maximize their scores, they often do not have the necessary skills, and performance targets will have no effect unless backed up by some form of training, coaching and support.
Via ezinearticles.com

By • Metrics, Press clippings • 35 • Tags: , ,

Nov 17 2011

Why people don’t learn Lean management

Nicolas Stampf, from BNP Paribas, posted the following question on LinkedIn: “How come that despite being showed and coached into doing continuous improvement the Lean way, people don’t learn. I mean that when you stop coaching them and come back some months later, although they’re doing performance management and problem solving, improvements are absent? When you re-show them, they say they forgot having done that previously.”

Following is my response:

  1. You might as well ask why people keep behaving in self-destructive ways when they know better, for example overeating and not exercising. The rewards of changing behavior are obvious and they know them, yet they don’t do it until a significant event happens. Getting seriously ill will do it, but so will running for president.
  2. In  your question, you also treat the adoption of Lean as an personal choice. It’s not. Organizations choose to implement Lean, not individuals. It is a decision made by top managers, and they must communicate to all levels why they are doing it and that they are dead serious, which means that participation in the effort is a condition for continued membership in the organization.
  3. Also, as Tom Berghan put it “Lean isn’t Feng Shui on the business, it is the business.” In other words, if you want to be successful in implementing Lean, you cannot cherry-pick elements of it. Your question is centered on continuous improvement, performance management, and problem-solving, , which won’t make much of a difference if they are all you do. In manufacturing, the core of Lean includes specific approaches to production line design, operator job design, production control and logistics, quality assurance, maintenance, human resources, accounting, strategy deployment, etc.  I understand your work in Banking, where many of these approaches are not directly relevant, which means that you have to invent their equivalent for banking operations.

By • Management • 1 • Tags: , , , ,

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