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.
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing Our plant tour showed a stunning transformation as Fiat’s “World Class Manufacturing” (WCM) system is implemented. For students visiting for the first time, a modern manufacturing facility is bewilderingly complex.
In the Seattle Times article Boeing Dreamliner on track, but rework may stretch to 2015, aerospace executives reported to Wall Street analysts the company’s historic scientific milestone of bending the fabric of time and space, as Dreamliner production achieved a state of being both on track and notably behind at once.
Are you Lean, becoming Lean, doing Lean or thinking Lean? Almost the entire province of Saskatchewan has gone Lean. On the surface Lean offers everything front line workers should want. …
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.
The Japanese word Mura (ムラor斑） is the third member of the Muri, Muda, Mura axis of manufacturing evils. It means unevenness. In terms of volume of activity, if Muri refers to overburdening resources, Mura then really is the conjunction of overburdening some resources while others wait, or of alternating over time between overburdening and underutilizing the same resources.
Unevenness, however, is not only about volumes, but about quality as well. Unevenness in products is even synonymous with bad quality. From production managers facing “unpredictable” environments to academics promoting genetic algorithms or other cures, everyone bemoans how variable, or uneven, manufacturing is. The litany of causes is endless. Following are a few points that I think may clarify the issues:
Mura in space, Mura in time, and Mura in space and time
Mura in space is imbalance in the work loads or utilization among resources at the same time; Mura in time, variability in the work load of a resource over time. The two can be present in the same factory. You may notice a kitting team working feverishly while the next one is waiting but, two hours later, you find the roles reversed.
Mura is often symbolized by two trucks arriving in sequence with different loads. I tend to think of working with Mura as moving around a city built on hills. A city built on a plain is even and easy to cross, and is often planned with a grid of numbered streets, like Manhattan in New York, or Kyoto. A city built on hills is uneven and offers many obstacles. San Francisco is built on hills, but its planners have chosen to ignore the terrain and slap on it a grid of straight streets. It makes for great views and dramatic car chases, but its steep slopes challenge your engine, your suspension, and your parking skills. Most hilly cities, like Nagasaki, Japan, for example, instead have streets that follow contour lines and therefore meander. The path by car from point A to point B may be longer than a straight line, but it is a smooth ride.
Navigating the peaks and valleys of product demand is like driving in a hilly city. If you just go straight, you keep alternating between pressing the accelerator and the brake, but by hugging contour lines, you can reach to your destination while going at a steady pace. This is what fighting Mura is about.
Degrees of severity: Deterministic, random, and uncertain environments
Some businesses are deterministic. They are “boring” and predictable. They have no variability. A manager once explained to me the electricity meter business in the market his plant was serving, as follows: “There are 20 million households with electricity meters in the country. Each meter lasts 20 years. Every year, I have to make 1 million.” The same products are made for many years, in stable quantities, and with mature processes that have no problem meeting tolerances. Of course, it only lasts until the advent of a disruptive technology, like smart meters.
This kind of environment is not common but it does exist. If your are in one, you should focus your improvement efforts on the opportunities it offers, and avoid tools that are overkill for it. For example, large, diversified companies that make a corporate decision to deploy the same planning and scheduling system in all their plants burden their simplest and most stable business units with unnecessary complexity.
Other business have variations that can be best be described as fluctuations around a smooth trend. If you make consumer goods, the demand every day is the result of decisions from a large number independent agents and will vary in both aggregate volume and mix, but within ranges that can be predicted. In terms of quality characteristics, if you fire ceramics, they shrink, by factors that still vary, even though we have been using this process for thousands of years. This level of variability is very common. The best term to describe it is randomness, and there is a rich body of knowledge on ways to work with it, including the Kanban system to regulate fluctuating flows and techniques to adjust processes in order to obtain consistent results from materials that are not. In ceramics, for example, you make your parts from a slurry that is a moving average of batches of powders received from the supplier, in order to even out their characteristics.
Contrast this with a toy manufacturer who cannot tell ahead of time which one or two products will be hits at Christmas, when most of the year’s sales occur. In process technology, there are similar differences in variability between mature, stable industries and high technology suffering from events like “yield crashes” during which a manufacturing organization “loses the recipe” for a product. Various terms are used to describe such situations, which, following Matheron, I call uncertainty. In such circumstances, the best you can expect from the techniques used to deal with randomness is to let you know that they no longer work. For example, dealerships can shield your plants from fluctuations in consumer purchases, where direct selling would let you find out sooner when demand drops for good or when consumer tastes change.
Calling our environment deterministic, random, or uncertain is always a judgment call. The deterministic electricity meter business turns uncertain with the advent of smart meters. If you view your environment as random, you expect fluctuations with a predictable range, and the signal of a shift into uncertainty manifests itself in changes beyond this range. You can use a variety of tests to detect that such as shift has occurred. Furthermore, with the possible exception of quantum physics, randomness is always in the eye of the beholder, and not intrinsic to a phenomenon.
What is special about Manufacturing?
Manufacturing is not the only kind of business to have high overhead; others include aviation or hospitals. In all such cases, companies must invest upfront in resources that pay off over time, and this is easiest to achieve with activities that place a balanced load on all resources and don’t vary over time — that is, without Mura.
Internal versus external causes of unevenness
Some unevenness comes from outside the organization, in many forms:
Fickle customers.
Seasonal variations in demand as in the toy industry.
Seasonal variations in supply, such as crop seasons in the food industry.
Changes in the macro-economy, such as a financial crisis.
Natural disasters, like earthquakes, tsunamis, and floods.
Raw materials with uneven characteristics, like ores or electronic waste for recycling.
Epidemics, as when 10% of your work force has the flu.
Unreliable suppliers.
…
You do not have the power to eliminate this kind of unevenness, but you can use countermeasures to mitigate its effects. On the other hand, you can and should eliminate unevenness that is self-inflicted. If you have not paid attention to balancing the work load of the various stations on your production lines, you are likely to have both overburdened and underutilized operators. Because of the different roles machines play, the workload can rarely be balanced across machines in a line, but the workloads of operators can be.
If you order materials from suppliers, for example by relying on an ERP system to issue orders by an algorithm for timing and quantities that you don’t undertand, you may well cause alternations of feast and famine in your suppliers’ order books for materials that you, in fact, consume at a steady pace. This creates unevenness not only in your suppliers’ operations, but also in your internal logistics. In The Lean Turnaround, Art Byrne explains that, at Wiremold, he eliminated volume discounts and incentives for Sales to book the largest possible orders. Instead, he preferred a steady flow of small orders, that smoothed the aggregate demand.
Not all resources need to be treated the same way. You want resources that can be described as producers to be generating useful output all the time. Other resources, which we may call responders, must be available when needed, and this is a radically different objective. Unevenness is an enemy for producers, but, unless responders’ work loads provide enough slack, they are unable to respond. Firefighters fighting fires 100% of the time would be unavailable when a new fire breaks out, and the same logic applies to maintenance technicians and operators who work as floaters on a production line. And it applies to machines as well as people. In a machine shop, for example, machines that carry out the primary processes, like hobbing a gear or milling pockets in a slab, are producers, while devices used for secondary processes, like deburring or cleaning, are responders. This is often, but not always, related to the cost of the machines, with expensive machines as producers and cheap ones as responders. However, some of the most expensive equipment, like machining centers, may be bought for its flexibility more than for its capacity, in which case its primary role is to respond to orders for short runs or prototypes.
Most useful skills in dealing with Mura
Permanently uneven workloads among operators can be addressed by balancing, using Yamazumi charts for manual operations and work-combination charts for operations involving people and machines. If the unevenness pattern shifts or oscillates over time, then the workload itself needs to be smoothed, with is done by the various techniques known as heijunka.
Many organizations are not aware of Mura as a problem, and, when aware, are oblivious to patterns in the unevenness that can be used to mitigate or eliminate it. Management, for example, may be struggling to cope with occasional large orders and fail to notice that they arrive like clockwork every other Wednesday from the same customer. A modicum of data mining skills is needed to recognize such patterns in the records of plant activity.
In the Seattle Times article Boeing Dreamliner on track, but rework may stretch to 2015, aerospace executives reported to Wall Street analysts the company’s historic scientific milestone of bending the fabric of time and space, as Dreamliner production achieved a state of being both on track and notably behind at once.
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