Management

Jun 4 2015

Human Resources at Toyota

With Respect for Humanity, bowdlerized as “Respect for People,” made into a pillar of The Toyota Way, you might expect Toyota’s Human Resources (HR) policies to be studied, scrutinized, discusses extensively in the Lean literature, and argued over in numerous forums. But it’s not the case.

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May 4 2015

Beyond A3s: Options for Shopfloor and Management Communication

A3s are still being touted as nothing short of a management revolution, but few organizations actually use them for operator work instructions, problem-solving, or hoshin planning. This raises the question of whether the objectives pursued with a paper format may not be easier to achieve with more recent technology. In this post, we consider options for operator work instructions. The other applications of A3s deserve separate treatment.

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Apr 24 2015

What Is The Metric For People Development? There Isn’t One

Contrary to popular opinion, it is not true that only what gets measured gets done. If it were, business, government, and society at large would come to a halt due to the damage done by metrics gamers, and for the lack of the contributions made by people who do not care whether they are measured. Deming is often quoted on this subject, as saying:

  • “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth.” (Deming, The New Economics. p.35)
  • “People with targets and jobs dependent upon meeting them will probably meet the targets – even if they have to destroy the enterprise to do it.” It is cited on Brainy Quotes, but without a source, and it may be apocryphal.

As he showed in his “red bead experiments,” his primary concern was about people being rewarded or punished based on random fluctuations in metrics that have nothing to do with their talents or efforts, but there are even more fundamental challenges in an area like people development.

You can measure how much dirt you have shoveled by weighing it, but developing people is different. There is not even a single direction. Some individuals are “hedgehogs,” who know one big thing like heat treatment, while others are “foxes,” who know many things like all the technical and human moving parts of a production line.

There is no metric– or even set of metrics — that can reasonably summarize people development, but it is nonetheless tangible and observable.

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Apr 2 2015

Organize for learning to make kaizen stick | Michael Ballé

“[…]the Quality Director would ask the nursing supervisor to track the time of first incision in each theater every day and share the results with surgeons. This simple measure increased OR usage by 20% in the first month. It also led to heated discussions among surgeons (why were some late and others on time?) and paved the way for further kaizen. But then one of the crises hospitals are so accustomed to came, and the practice was abandoned. Theater usage went back to what it was before.[…]”

Source: planet-lean.com

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

The author is missing an essential point: changes that add labor are unsustainable. They will be reversed at the first emergency and rarely if ever reinstated once the emergency is over. Asking a nursing supervisor to track the time of first incision in each operating room meant adding to his or her work, without reducing anybody else’s. It was a change all right, but not a Kaizen.

Surgeons in front of Gilbreth's grid
Surgeons with grid used  by Gilbreth to track motion on film

100 years ago, Frank Gilbreth improved the performance of operating rooms by, among other things, having nurses supply tools and instruments to surgeons rather than having the surgeons leave the patient to fetch them. Work previously done by the surgeon was offloaded to nurses for the benefit of the patient, without any net addition of labor. It was a genuine improvement and became standard practice.

The author quotes Ohno as  saying  “Why not make the work easier and more interesting so that people do not have to sweat?” Adding record-keeping tasks does not fit that bill.

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

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Mar 28 2015

Toyota Unveils Revamped Manufacturing Process | Yoko Kubota | Wall Street Journal

“Toyota broke a two-year silence on a revamped manufacturing process—built on sharing components among vehicles—that it says will produce half its vehicles by 2020 and slash costs. But its unveiling follows a path blazed in recent years by German rival Volkswagen AG—a reversal for the Japanese pioneer, whose production system was for decades seen as the gold standard, giving the world such manufacturing concepts as ‘just-in-time inventory’ and ‘continuous improvement.'”

Source: www.wsj.com

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Other than that Toyota has a plan, the article does not directly reveal specifics. As several readers pointed out in their comments, sharing components across models is not a new idea and is not risk-free, even if executed perfectly, as it reduces the differences between your standard and luxury models in ways that customers may notice.

The most revealing parts of the article, to me, are (1) the reference to VW, and (2) the keyword “modular assembly.” I don’t believe that Toyota has borrowed much from VW since the look of the 1947 Toyota SA, a dead-ringer for the already dated but yet to be successful beetle.

Modular assembly sounds self-explanatory but it isn’t. It is a specific approach to assembling cars brought to VW by former GM purchasing executive Jose Ignacio Lopez in the 1990s, in which up to 90% of the work traditionally done in a car assembly plant is done by suppliers and all that remains is the final assembly of large subsystems.

The Porsche plant in Leipzig, for example, does not stamp, weld, or paint car bodies. It receives them ready to assemble, in a spotlessly clean facility that customers are encouraged to visit.

Porsche-Leipzig
The Porsche plant in Leipzig

The whole site is in fact dominated by its visitor center, complete with a fine-dining restaurant overlooking the plant and where new buyers can receive an hour’s worth of training on their new cars on the test track. In the same spirit, VW has set up an assembly plant in downtown Dresden, with glass walls to enable passers by to watch cars being assembled.

Modular assembly was used by GM in Lordstown, OH, in 1999, and then by VW in Spain, and by DaimlerBenz for the Smart in Hambach, France . At the time, Toyota evaluated the concept and passed on it. Apparently, Toyota’s production leaders changed their minds.

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

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Mar 9 2015

Six Differences that Distinguish Cost Cutting from Cost Reduction | Chris Hohmann

  1. Arbitrary vs. Rational
  2. Reaction vs. analysis
  3. Blanket vs. focused
  4. One shot vs. sustainable
  5. Limited vs. infinite
  6. Quick vs. slow

Source: hohmannchris.wordpress.com

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