Management

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

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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.

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Software development Kanban

Nov 11 2011

From scancards to “personal kanbans” and Ybry charts

Professionals know that their productivity drops when they take on too many concurrent projects. An engineer whose attention is split across 15 projects doesn’t contribute effectively to any. But it happens because supervisors keep piling on assignments without regard to this phenomenon. Over the years, cures have been proposed under different names, all aiming to cap work in process.

About 1982, a colleague showed me the system he used to manage what he was working on. It was called the Scancard System, and it used the hardware  in Figure 1. The cards were square, with 3 1/4-in sides and borders of different colors. They came with letter-size card pocket plastic boards that you could insert into 3-ring binders, keep on your desk or pin to a wall.

Figure 1. The Scancard System

He used it with one column for his backlog of things to do, one column for work in process, and one column for completed items. It was a paper-based system but, at the time, so was almost everything we did. It gave you visibility, it capped the number of items you were working on at one time, and moving cards from one column to the next was an effective metaphor for the flow of your work. The ads showed smartly dressed managers using their scancard systems in meetings. I went for it and used it for years, until I had a project with a company that used another system and switched to fit in.

Fast forward to 2011. Scancard Systems is out of business, and I hear of a system called “Personal Kanban,” that is focused on providing visibility and limiting work in process, using a white board and Post-Its as in Figure 2:

Figure 2. “Personal Kanban”

I put quotes around the name because I find it to be little more than a feat of vocabulary engineering, leveraging the buzz around a feature of Toyota’s production control system to repackage ideas that have little to do with it, are very simple and have been around for a long time. A software developer visiting a factory may see a similarity with Toyota’s Kanbans, but it escapes me.

Of course, if, as in Figure 2,  it is on a white board, you can’t carry it with you to a meeting or share it in your network. The Personal Kanban website advertizes an iPhone app called iKan, that I can’t find on Apple’s App Store. On the other hand, Leankit Kanban offers a web-based application with an iPhone version that looks very much like a team to-do list management system. It looks most useful if your work can be perceived as a collection of independent activities, which happens if each Post-It is for a whole project or for a prospect in a sales cycle. But it would not fit if each Post-It were for a task within a project, with precedence constraints or iterations between tasks.

Another limitation of such a status board is that is only shows current status, as compared, for example, with the Ybry chart of Figure 3, which shows the complete history of each project by using a line for each project rather than a card. Like the status board, it assumes that all project go through the same sequence of phases.

Figure 3. Ybry chart for projects going through the same sequence of phases

Ybry charts were invented by Charles Ybry in 1846 for railroad scheduling, and are still used for that purpose. See Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information, pp. 107-110. The work-combination charts used in Lean operator job design are a variation on this method, as explained in Working with Machines, pp. 133-154.

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Lean implementation survey

Nov 9 2011

More Flak on Lean Based on the Same Survey

Managing Automation published another response to the same study that claims to show that Lean does not work: Lean Manufacturing and Operation Excellence: Not Worth Their Weight? 

As described in the press and their own press release, the AlixPartners study commingles Lean with “Six Sigma and other productivity programs,” which raises the following issues:

  1. Lean Manufacturing is based on the Toyota Production System, which includes neither Six Sigma nor Operation Excellence nor  “other productivity programs,” whatever those may be.
  2. Lean Manufacturing is not a “productivity program,” but the pursuit of concurrent improvement in quality, productivity, delivery, safety, and morale. I  know I am repeating myself, but it needs to be said until the leaders of manufacturing companies hear it.

If these press accounts are correct, the survey confuses Lean with other approaches in an open-ended list, misstates its purpose, and considers exclusively metrics of cost reduction.

The effectiveness of Lean is not an easy subject to study. Should we survey all the companies that claim to be Lean, have a Lean program in place, have been certified Lean by some external authority, or are top performers in their industry? Once we agree on this, we still need yardsticks to quantify both  the effort they put into Lean and the rewards from it.

I took a stab at it a few years ago, and 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. The AlixPartner press release says roughly the same thing, but I see it as reflecting on the Shingo Prize itself, not Lean.

The Shingo Prize is supposed to be the “Nobel Prize for Manufacturing,” but what are the criteria used to award it? You can download the Shingo Prize Guidelines and see for yourself. A team of Shingo Prize auditors visits the plants and awards points  to measure “the degree to which the behaviors in an organization are aligned with the principles of operational excellence.” In other words, the plants are measured on process compliance. They score points for practices they have in place. It is like measuring chess players on the number of pawns they move, and is correlated to victory like the Shingo Prize to business performance.

Toyota did not grow based on a compliance checklist. When I visit a plant, based on what I see and what people tell me, I can form an opinion as to whether they are among the few that have the spirit of Lean or the many that are going through the motions. But I don’t know how to generate a checklist that could be systematically applied to arrive at such a conclusion, and, desirable though it may be, I don’t believe a real survey is feasible.

Jamie Flinchbaugh doesn’t like sports metaphors, but I can’t resist one here. Usain Bolt  is the fastest man alive. Let us assume somebody publishes a book entitled “The Running Secrets of Usain Bolt.” How Usain Bolt actually trains is probably not trivial and certainly involves sustained effort and ferocious discipline. The author of the book, however, is concerned that a stern, eat-your-vegetables message would hurt sales, and focuses instead on easier topics, like shoes. As a result, kids flock to shoe stores thinking that wearing these shoes will make them fast, but the real ones are too expensive, so they buy cheap imitations instead. Six months later, based on their responses, a survey concludes that Usain Bolt’s methods don’t work.

Most Lean programs today are to serious implementations as cheap imitation shoes are to the training of Usain Bolt. Where they may succeed is in ruining the reputation of Lean. It is bound to happen sooner or later. As a brand, Lean has had a 22-year run so far, already longer than I expected.

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River Rouge Coke Ovens 1946-1976

Nov 8 2011

Factory life with and without Kaizen

In Kaizen, Masaaki Imai describes Japanese executives returning in the 1970s to American plants they had visited thirty years before and being struck by the absence of change: they saw the same production lines with the same equipment operated the same way. This started me looking for photographic evidence. Overall, pickings were slim, but I did find the above pictures of the same coke oven at the Ford River Rouge plant shot in 1946 and 1976.

If there is Kaizen activity in a factory, how does it change the work life of employees at all levels? The following chart compares the breakdowns of their use of time, with and without Kaizen:


In a plant without Kaizen, operators and supervisors are fully occupied with routine daily tasks: production for the operators, expediting parts, enforcing discipline, and record keeping for supervisors. Only middle managers and executives spend a fraction of their time on projects involving capacity changes, new production lines or new technology. Nobody works on incremental improvements to the way the work is done today.

By contrast, Kaizen involves employees at all levels  in such improvement activities to different degrees. Between improvement and daily routine, the boundary is sharp;  between improvement and innovation, fuzzy. Over time, the cumulative effect of incremental improvement is radical change by itself. In addition, the skills acquired and the lessons learned from incremental improvements are incorporated into new line or plant design projects. In some Japanese auto parts plants, I remember seeing automatic lines side-by-side, where one used old machines that had been gradually retrofitted with devices that reduced the need for human intervention, while the other one had been built from scratch with new machines to be automatic. The Kaizen work done to implement the former was essential to the success of the latter.

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Orgchart - end of lean program

Nov 4 2011

Should a lean transformation program ever end?

On LinkedIn, Patrick Courtney asked the following question: “In your experience, with a Lean transformation program when can the program become a waste? Is there a tipping point? Please share your experiences and wins.”

Let us assume we are talking about a successful Lean transformation with a program office, headed by a lean champion and including a small group of project facilitators. The question then is whether there is a point beyond which this organization is unnecessary.

That a Lean transformation is successful means that practices from daily operations on  the shop floor to strategic planning in the board room are more effective and efficient as a result of Lean, as evidence in business performance. At that point, people in the organization no longer refer to “Lean tools,” but simply to “the way we do things.” What was a change requiring adaptation is the new normal.

In principle, once Lean practices are assimilated into the company’s standard mode of operations, a program office is no longer necessary. In reality, there are some functions for which continued, organized support is necessary, such as the following:

  1. Continuous improvement. If continuous improvement is carried out through a system of circles or individual suggestions, then a structure will be needed to manage it and organize periodic conferences and award ceremonies.
  2. External certification. If the company is a part supplier, it may need to maintain its status as a “certified Lean” with some OEMs, and resources are needed to host audits and make sure that actions are taken as needed to ensure compliance.
  3. Supplier support. Companies that are successful at Lean commonly endeavor to pass their skills on to suppliers in exchange for price breaks, which requires a team of engineers.

Some people will remain involved with Lean, but in other roles than during the initial implementation, and often elsewhere on the organization chart. More generally, a successful change program should eventually fade away. For example, the pursuit of Total Quality Control (TQC) was a program in major Japanese manufacturing companies until the mid 1970’s, when all of them had received a Deming Prize. Then it  gradually lost visibility, as everything they had learned from this program was integrated in normal operations and its principles had become part of the culture.

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