Michel Baudin's Blog

Feb 4 2018

Methods Yes, Methodologies No

Michael Ballé opens his 1/29/2018 Gemba Coach column with “all methodologies are about making a better use of our minds.” Are they? Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister disagree. In Peopleware, they describe methodologies as follows:

“A Methodology is a general systems theory of how a whole class of thought-intensive work ought to be conducted. It comes in the form of a fat book that specifies in detail exactly what steps to take at any time, regardless of who is doing the work, regardless of where or when. The people who write the Methodology are smart. The people who carry is out can be dumb. They never have to turn their brains to the ON position. All they do is start on page one and follow the Yellow Brick Road, like happy little Munchkins, all the way from the start of the job to its successful completion. The Methodology makes all the decisions, the people make none.”

By Michel Baudin • Management • 6 • Tags: Lead time, Lean, Method, Methodology, Productivity, Quality

Jan 24 2018

Why It Makes Sense (Sometimes) to Start With Hoshin Kanri | Dan Markovitz | IndustryWeek

“Strategy deployment is a powerful way to get the leadership team involved in the lean journey.For a long time, I’ve been dismissive of organizations that want to start their lean journeys with hoshin kanri, (also known as strategy deployment). When you’ve got a company where people are not engaged (at best) or suspicious of management (at worst), it seems to me that getting people involved in everyday improvement to make their jobs easier is a better place to start.[…] Until now. Recently, my colleague and friend Katie Anderson pointed out something I’ve completely missed: that strategy deployment is a powerful way to get the leadership team involved in the lean journey.”

Sourced through IndustryWeek

Michel Baudin‘s comments: As I have great respect for both Dan Markovitz and Katie Anderson, I have to paraphrase Judge Haller from My Cousin Vinny, “That is a lucid, intelligent, well thought-out argument… Overruled.”

The flaw I see in Dan’s argument is that it only addresses employee engagement, which isn’t the only reason to start with local, tactical shop-floor projects with both technical and managerial content. In an organization that is just starting on its journey, the successful initial projects are most commonly setup time reduction or cell conversion of a process segment. Besides engaging employees, they also produce tangible improvements, develop technical and managerial skills, and let leaders emerge.

By Michel Baudin • Press clippings • 6 • Tags: Hoshin kanri, Hoshin planning, Strategy Deployment

Jan 3 2018

Innovation, Logistics, and Lean

Amonth ago, a reader asked Michael Ballé “If lean really is about innovation, why does so much of it seem to be about logistics, with truck preparation areas, leveling boxes, small trains, kanbans and so on?” His short answer “because logistics is the way into innovation” is a head scratcher and I fail to see any support for this assertion in the rest of his response.

While TPS and, more generally, the Toyota Way are innovative in the management and technology of operations, discussions of innovation are usually about products. Even in the car industry, which companies come to mind today about product innovation? Which ones would you want to learn from? Most likely not Toyota but Tesla for its electric cars and Alphabet/Google’s subsidiary Waymo for self-driving cars, both based in Silicon Valley.

By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 1 • Tags: innovation, Lean, Lean Logistics, Logistics

Jan 1 2018

What’s Going On In German Companies | Bodo Wiegand | Wiegand’s Watch

Bodo Wiegand heads Germany’s Lean Management Institute. In his latest newsletter, on Wiegand’s Watch, he explains his concerns about the future competitiveness of German companies. Here is my full translation of his article, followed by my comments:

Bodo Wiegand: “A huge potential is not realized and simply left fallow – can we really afford that?

I think we cannot afford it.

In China and India, more engineers are trained each year than we have in Germany in total, and then we fail to exploit the huge potential of the engineers we have. Why? Because we do not want to give up our fiefdoms, our functional thinking and our single-minded concern for our turf.

Continue reading…

By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 3 • Tags: Germany, Information technology, IT, Office Productivity

Dec 10 2017

Is SPC Obsolete? (Revisited)

Six years ago, one of the first posts in this blog — Is SPC Obsolete? — started a spirited discussion with 122 comments. Reflecting on it, however, I find that the participants, including myself, missed the mark in many ways:

My own post and comments were too long on what is wrong with SPC, as taught to this day, and too short on alternatives. Here, I am attempting to remedy this by presenting two techniques, induction trees and naive Bayes, that I think should be taught as part of anything reasonably called statistical process control. I conclude with what I think are the cultural reasons why they are ignored.
The discussions were too narrowly focused on control charts. While the Wikipedia article on SPC is only about control charts, other authors, like Douglas Montgomery or Jack B. Revelle, see it as including other tools, such scatterplots, Pareto charts, and histograms, topics that none of the discussion participants said anything about. Even among control charts, there was undue emphasis on just one kind, the XmR chart, that Don Wheeler thinks is all you need to understand variation.
Many of the contributors resorted to the argument of authority, saying that an approach must be right because of who said so, as opposed to what it says. With all due respect to Shewhart, Deming, and Juran, we are not going to solve today’s quality problems by parsing their words. If they were still around, perhaps they would chime in and exhort quality professionals to apply their own judgment instead.

By Michel Baudin • Data science • 3 • Tags: data science, Quality, SPC, Statistical Process Control

Nov 24 2017

Now It’s Humans Assisting Robots | Sheelah Kolhatkar | The New Yorker

“[…]As a zone leader, Stinson is responsible for about fifteen employees on a section of the production line that makes parts for Steelcase’s Ology series—height-adjustable tables built for the standing-desk craze. Until last year, the plant workers had to consult a long list of steps, taking pains to remove the correct parts out of a cart filled with variously sized bolts and screws and pins and to insert each one in the correct hole and in the correct order. Now computerized workstations, called ‘vision tables,’ dictate, step by step, how workers are to assemble a piece of furniture. The process is virtually mistake-proof: the system won’t let the workers proceed if a step isn’t completed correctly. We stood behind a young woman wearing a polo shirt and Lycra shorts, with a long blond ponytail. When a step was completed, a light turned on above the next required part, accompanied by a beep-beep-whoosh sound. A scanner overhead tracked everything as it was happening, beaming the data it collected to unseen engineers with iPads.[…] ”

Sourced through The New Yorker

Michel Baudin‘s comments: This is excerpted from a long article entitled Welcoming Our New Robot Overlords, from the 10/23/2017 issue of The New Yorker that caught my attention because it’s not about robots and it seems to be in the same spirit as Omron’s Digital Yatai back in 2002: using technology to eliminate hesitation and to mistake-proof operations that are too long or have too many variants to allow operators to go “on automatic” while performing them.

When repeating the same 60 seconds of work 400 times in a shift, operators quickly develop the ability to execute rapidly and accurately with their minds elsewhere. If on the other hand, the takt time is 20 minutes or the work is customized for every unit, the work requires the operators’ undivided, conscious attention and their productivity is increased by systems like the vision tables described in the article, that prompt them for every step and validate its completion.

By Michel Baudin • Press clippings • 0 • Tags: Automation, Autonomation, Digital Yatai, jidoka, robots

Methods Yes, Methodologies No

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Why It Makes Sense (Sometimes) to Start With Hoshin Kanri | Dan Markovitz | IndustryWeek

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Innovation, Logistics, and Lean

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What’s Going On In German Companies | Bodo Wiegand | Wiegand’s Watch

I think we cannot afford it.

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Is SPC Obsolete? (Revisited)

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Now It’s Humans Assisting Robots | Sheelah Kolhatkar | The New Yorker

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Methods Yes, Methodologies No

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Why It Makes Sense (Sometimes) to Start With Hoshin Kanri | Dan Markovitz | IndustryWeek

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Innovation, Logistics, and Lean

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What’s Going On In German Companies | Bodo Wiegand | Wiegand’s Watch

I think we cannot afford it.

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Is SPC Obsolete? (Revisited)

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Now It’s Humans Assisting Robots | Sheelah Kolhatkar | The New Yorker

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