Fourth in a series of questions  from the Spanish magazine APD (Asociación para el Progreso Directivo). My answer is as follows and, perhaps, your comments will help me make it better:

What kind of Steering Committee, Lean Office, Lean Champions, or Continuous Improvement group do you need to put in place?

Ideally, none. Lean is not supposed to be a career opportunity but instead part of everybody’s job. Over time, it becomes so much “the way we do things” that it no longer needs a name. In reality, all organizations find it necessary to provide some form of organized support. Even Toyota has an Operations Management Consulting Division (OMCD), of about 60 members, that mostly works with suppliers.

But there are many pitfalls to avoid in setting up this kind of support at the right time, and in properly defining its scope. For example, a Lean Office at the corporate level established at the start of Lean implementation is likely to be out of touch with factories and focused on standardization rather than effectiveness. Such an office can easily turn into a Lean inquisition, castigating heretics in factories for using “non-standard” approaches, and  stifling the very creativity the company needs to grow its own version of Lean.

Another risk, at the plant level, is to create a Lean Engineering Department responsible for carrying out all Lean projects. This is ineffective for two reasons:

1. The people responsible for operating production lines have no ownership in what the Lean Engineering Department has designed. They don’t understand it and have no motivation to make it work.
2. The Lean Engineering Department cannot be large enough to do all the work that needs to be done. It just cannot have the bandwidth. Involving the people from operations is not a luxury. They are the only resources available to get the job done.

A successful Lean program starts with a handful of pilot projects. These projects need support from the plant manager personally, and the leadership of an enthusiastic production supervisor, usually with coaching from an outside consultant. As you ramp up from, say, two pilot projects to fifteen projects conducted concurrently in different parts of the plant, you start to need a Steering Committee of the plant manager and his or her direct reports to select projects, set priorities, resolve resource conflicts, and provide a forum for project leaders.

Soon, the organization of Steering Committee meetings, the scheduling of consultant visits and training sessions, the documentation of projects and the promotion of the plant’s program to both internal and external audiences generates enough work for a full-time Lean Champion. As Kevin Hop points out, it can be the start of a group supporting projects,  into which engineers and managers rotate for for periods of 6 months to a year between assignments in operations.

At the corporate level, Lean specialists can help plants locate resources and exchange their experience through mutual visits, technical exchange meetings, and on-line collaboration. As Lean skills grow in the company, the corporate group can help spread the knowledge and allow standards to emerge for some activities.

Many manufacturing organizations have borrowed the Black Belt system from Six Sigma to implement Lean, in which 1% of employees receive special training and a certification to work full-time in implementation support. While I am not questioning the effectiveness of this approach for Six Sigma, I have never seen it work for Lean. Instead, I have seen Black Belts frustrated with a position in which they feel they have responsibility without authority.

This is the third in a series of questions I have received from the Spanish magazine APD (Asociación para el Progreso Directivo). My answer is as follows and, perhaps, your comments will help me make it better:

The sequence of projects through which Lean is implemented must be chosen with care, but, once management commits to a project, there must be no turning back, as even maintaining the means of turning back sends a mixed message that puts the project in jeopardy.

The worst managers can do is revert to the old way of working at the first sign of trouble. Assume for example that you have worked with a customer to ship in returnable containers and that, one morning, you run out of returnable containers. The temptation is great to revert to disposable containers but, in order to do this, you would have to keep stocks of disposable containers, your customers would have to dispose of the empties, and you would be giving up the handling, quality and cost advantages of returnables. The proper response instead is (1) to notify your customer to arrange an emergency delivery of returnable containers and (2) identify and remove the cause of the shortage. A manager who reverts to the old ways is showing an absence of commitment that quickly propagates through his organization and causes the transformation to fail.

Commitment and consistency, however, does not mean having a one-size-fits-all solution to all problems. What is implemented must be carefully planned for the specific circumstances of the project, and adjusted as needed. Lean is incarnated in specific tools in car manufacturing, which may not be applicable in a different industry. The essence of Lean is not in these tools but in their underlying principles, and the implementation of Lean in a new industry usually consists in redeploying these principles with tools that may not be the same as in car manufacturing.