Apr 22 2010
Lean is about simultaneously improving all dimensions of performance, including quality
Originally posted on The Lean Edge on 4/22/2010
Quality not central to Lean? Says who? Lean is about simultaneously improving all dimensions of performance, including quality.
Quality professionals frequently miss this, because what they learned primarily addresses process capability issues that are central only in high technology, where, if your process is mature, your product is obsolete. This is the context where statistical approaches like Six Sigma make a difference.
Modern machine tools, on the other hand, can easily hold required tolerances, and most quality problems are not due to lack of process capability. They are instead due to discrete failure of the equipment or human error.
The main issue with discrete equipment failures is to detect them quickly so that they affect few parts and can be diagnosed before their trail is cold. With one-piece flow, defects are detected immediately instead of being buried in WIP, and this is why conversion from batch production to one-piece flow typically yields large improvements in quality.
The next step is having machines stop as soon as they start producing defectives, but this still leaves human error, and that is addressed by mistake-proofing.
Beyond these approaches, there is also management to prevent the deterioration over time, and planned responses to potential new problems.
This is a hierarchy of approaches. Actual numbers vary, but, in orders of magnitude, statistical tools will get you from 30% defectives to 3%, one-piece flow to 0.3%, mistake-proofing to 15ppm, and I know of one case of a Toyota supplier achieving <1ppm on some parts.
Apr 24 2011
Recruiting and Lean Human Resource Management
Some companies subject job applicants to hands-on tests of the skills required for a position. This says that they appear more interested in filling a capacity gap for a skill set than in recruiting people for careers. The most extreme cases are the “coding interviews” given at Silicon Valley software companies, during which candidates are asked to solve programming problems. This has spawned a whole sub-industry of coaches and books to help cram for such interviews. The problems are typically the kind of textbook exercises given in college that experienced programmers have long forgotten and are irrelevant to their actual work. College students, for example, learn various ways of sorting records, while professional application programmers just use built-in Sort functions. Software developers with, say, 20 years of experience with databases perceive these interviews as silly and demeaning, raising the question of whether they are intended to bias the hiring process in favor of recent college graduates.
This is the opposite of the Lean approach. During a career at a company, a person would have to acquire many technical and managerial skills. With that in mind, the willingness and ability to learn are more important than what the person knows walking in. When Honda set up its Marysville facility, they deliberately hired people with no prior experience in car manufacturing, to train them from scratch in the Honda way. As an employee, the background knowledge you need is supposed to have been provided at school. Whether in the US or Japan, however, schools never work perfectly, and companies end up providing remedial training they feel they shouldn’t have to. However, if all you need today is a technical skill set, you are probably better off hiring a contractor than an employee.
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By Michel Baudin • Management • 1 • Tags: Human Resources, Lean, Management