May 5 2014

Drop the “Sensei” nonsense!

In the US, many use the Japanese word “Sensei” for the people who help companies implement Lean; in Japan, they use the English word “Consultant.” On both sides, words borrowed from the other’s language have snob appeal, and give the jobs a mystique it doesn’t need or deserve.

See What to Expect from Lean Manufacturing Consultants for  a Japanese perspective on this profession. As I also pointed out earlier, “sensei” (先生) is the Japanese word for school teacher. As a title, it is used through High School but not in Universities. You might use it to say that a person teaches at a university, but there is another word for “Professor” (Kyoju).

In Karate, there are six levels of instructors, from Deshi to Soke, and Sensei is the second lowest. The word is also attached to people’s names as a form of address, instead of “San,” either to make them feel respected for their expertise or sarcastically. It is nothing special.

In Lean, there is nothing a “Sensei” does that is different from what a good consultant would do. There is no need for new vocabulary. Consulting involves a business relationship that is different from employment, but the same kind of agreement also covers contractors as well as consultants.

What is the difference?  Most people don’t see any, and many contractors call themselves “consultants.” The key distinction is that a contractor works like a temporary employee, while consultants advise, train, and coach employees. The contractor’s output is more tangible, but the ability to produce it walks out with the contractor, whereas the consultant transfers know-how that remains after the end of the engagement.

You hire a contractor to write control software for your production equipment, because you don’t have engineers who can do it, and you don’t think you have a need for this skill on an on-going basis. If, however, you think it should be available in your organization, you may bring in a consultant to help your managers set strategies and policies on equipment control programs, select tools, and learn how to use them.

There are as many ways to work as a consultant as there are fields in which they are needed. Often, the know-how they transfer is procedural. They tell companies how to comply with regulations, pass audits, get ISO certified, or win the Shingo Prize.

Less often, it is about thinking through business strategy and finding the right moves in management and technology to be competitive. It is much more challenging, and there is no 12-step methodology for it. Lean consulting is in the latter category, because Lean implementation cannot be reduced to a procedure to be rolled out without thinking in every organization, whether it makes sausages or airplanes.

It is challenging, but it is what high-level consultants have been doing ever since Frederick Taylor invented the profession 125 years ago. It does not need a new name.

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May 1 2014

Formula 1 Pit Stop 1950 to 2013

William Botha posted the following Youtube video in the TPS Principles and Practice discussion group on LinkedIn:

It contrasts a Formula 1 racing pit stop at the Indianapolis 500 in 1950 with one in 2013 in Melbourne, Australia. The time the car was stopped went from 67 to 3 seconds.

The 1950 pit stop used 4 people for 67 seconds, which works out to 4 minutes and 28 seconds of labor. If we include the external setup — before the car arrives — and the cleanup afterwards, the 2013 pit stop used 17 people for 44 seconds, or 12 minutes and 28 seconds of labor. In terms of labor costs, the 2013 pit stop was therefore less “efficient.” In a race, however, cutting the car stoppage time by a factor of 22 is priceless.

Car racing is often used as a metaphor for manufacturing, with machine changeovers as pit stops. In fact, many of the pit stop tricks are used in SMED, from prepositioning everything you need to using quick attach and release tools.

More generally, we can see the production operators as the drivers working to make the product cross the finish line, and everybody else in logistics, maintenance, QA, etc. in the role of the pit crew. This casts the time of operators and materials handlers, for example, in a different light. The operators on a line work in sequence, so that, if you delay one, you delay the entire line. The materials handlers, on the other hand, work in parallel and, if one waits, it does not affect the others.

The pit crew must be ready and waiting when the car arrives, so that it can spring into action, and the car should never be waiting for the crew. Likewise, an operator on an assembly line should never wait for parts, and cutting down on materials handlers to save money is counterproductive. A key point of Lean Logistics is to focus on effectiveness first. You pursue efficiency later, but never at the expense of effectiveness, because it doesn’t pay for the organization as a whole.

 

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May 1 2014

13 pillars of the Toyota Production System |Toyota UK corporate blog

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“Underpinned by thirteen core processes and philosophies, The Toyota Production System pioneered modern manufacturing as we know it. Here’s what each one is and how each one works. The Toyota Production System is the blueprint for modern manufacturing, and is employed in Britain to build the Toyota Auris and Avensis models. Here, we take a look at the thirteen philosophies that underpin it.”

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Thanks to Mark Graban for drawing my attention to this blog from Toyota UK and this article in particular. It is always useful to know Toyota’s official line about its own system. Corporate blogs are perversions of the concept of a blog, which is intended to be a conversation between an individual human and the rest of the world. When you read a post, you know who stands behind it and who will respond to your comments. Corporate blogs lack this authorial voice, and are a public relations exercise.

The first “pillar” in this article is the Konnyaku stone. I had never heard of it The only kind of Konnyaku I am familiar with is gelatinous slabs found in Japanese dishes. I didn’t know the name was used in polishing sheet metal, and I am still not sure what kind of a pillar of a production system it may be.

The picture illustrating the Andon paragraph does not appear related to the subject. An Andon board, on the other hand, is shown as an illustration of Kanban.

The picture on Jidoka shows automatic welding by robots, but the text only describes equipment “designed to detect problems and stop automatically when required,” without saying that it happens to be automatic. The paragraph also describes operators stopping production “the moment they spy something untoward,” which, while important, is not jidoka per se.

“Kaizen” is described as “a mantra for continuous improvement.” I thought it was just continuous improvement, not a mantra for it. The paragraph also states that it achieves “efficiency optimization.” If it did, however, you would be at an optimum, and continuous improvement would no longer be possible.

See on blog.toyota.co.uk

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Apr 29 2014

The Putin Production System

In an earlier post we saw a message from Stalin to a factory manager that showed his way of motivating employees. Now Youtube has the following video illustrating Vladimir Putin’s approach to manufacturing:

The video was first posted on Youtube on 2/17/2012, when Putin was Prime Minister and running for President in the election that took place on 3/4/2012. The event took place three years earlier, and was reported in the New York Times on June 4, 2009. It happened at the Baselcement factory, which makes alumina, in Pikalevo, 150 miles East of Saint-Petersburg. The video was obviously not taken with a hidden camera; it was a deliberately staged event.

Putin comes to this cement factory, berates the managers for being unprepared, and “running around like cockroaches when I said I was coming.” He tells the owners that they are “unprofessional and greedy,” and then that this factory, which we didn’t know was closed, would be restarted “one way or another,” and without the owners if they didn’t cooperate.

One of the owners in the room is Oleg Deripaska, a rich businessman and political ally of Putin. Putin has an agreement in hand, that is apparently missing Deripaska’s signature, which he demands. The last touch, after Deripaska signs is Putin demanding his pen back, which seems intended as a counterpoint to the White House signing ceremonies where the US President gives away pens.

Seeing the confidence with which Putin passed judgement on manufacturing issues, I assumed it was based on his own extensive experience. The wikipedia article on him, however, only mentions 16 years in the KGB prior to entering politics.

BeripaskaIn the video, we see what appears to be a cheap nerd watch on billionaire Deripaska’s wrist. The same watch is prominent on his home page, and has to be there on purpose. If Deripaska has a Rolex, he keeps it out of the public eye.

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Apr 28 2014

Freddy Ballé’s Four Points | Richard Kaminski

The following is the translation of an excerpt from from Richard Kaminski’s latest ILF newsletter:

“As Dan Jones wrote in the preface to Lean Management, the leading global Lean Production System in Europe he saw was Valeo’s, developed by Freddy Ballé with coaching Toyota. […] Less known are the methodological battles that led Freddy Ballé to try to correct the failings of the machine he had put in place, battles that have always fascinated Dan and he has encouraged me to describe several items […]:

    1. Quality improvement is the key to innovation. The main industrial problem Freddy has always been improving product quality in production and the implications of these improvements on products under development. Kaizen events help “clean the window” ( and generate immediate savings ) but have meaning only to he extent that eliminating variations reveals quality and process control issues. Quality is much more difficult to achieve than efficiency because it quickly boils down to knowledge — and the need to develop deep skills, which is also one of the true keys to success in Lean.
    2. No improvement without involvement. The first topic for Freddy has always been operator safety. His image is that it takes two feet to move : improvement and involvement go hand in hand. Hop on one foot, and you fall. In the factory, one of his first questions is “How are you organized? ” It’s not about the organization chart but how are the operators are organized. Are the teams stable? With a team leader ? How many operators for one supervisor? How the are the operators’ problems handled?
    3. The pull system is essential not avoid cherry-picking problems. Another common battle is the constant temptation to set priorities for problems. The pull system requires the discipline of solving problems as and when they arise and block the flow. Often the problems faced by operators in the creation of value are very different from the fads that obsess their managers. There are no major or minor problems . There are problems that can be treated quickly and easily and more difficult problems that are a struggle to solve. But the key is to acquire the discipline not to choose problems, but to deal with the reality of flow reveals,  in the order in which it happens (as you produce to Kanbans in the order in which they arrive and not in the order you prefer) .
    4. Hypothesis testing is at the heart of problem solving. Deep learning in problem solving takes place when you test hypotheses . On the one hand , you open minds by asking for several hypotheses beyond the obvious solutions; on the other hand, you learn by testing these hypotheses one by one by practical experimentation rather than rush to a conclusion. Hypothesis test is demanding. However, pursuing ” process improvement ” without individual learning reduces Lean to a mechanical approach that can pick low-hanging fruits but not fundamentally develop the skills of the work force.”
Michel Baudin‘s comments:

What attracted me to this list is (1) that it is short enough to be remembered, and (2) that it is specific enough to be worth discussing.

For example, is it always true that quality improvement is the key to innovation? If your innovation is next year’s new model of a shock absorber, then it stands to reason that the lessons learned from improving quality on the current model can be applied to the design of the new one, so that it can be introduced into production faster and with fewer defects. If “innovation” refers to radically new products like the iPad or Google Glass, however, it is a stretch to link success with quality in production. The skills of the contract manufacturers obviously matter, but they are not the ones who come up with the innovative products, at least until they decide to compete with their customer, as Samsung did with Apple.

Regarding pull systems, I am used to thinking of them as tools for rapid problem detection. Machine breakdowns command immediate attention because they stop production. Defects are detected promptly as parts move swiftly from one operation to the next rather that sit in a WIP warehouse. Using a pull system does force you to address the problems in the order they occur, but only at the level of the immediate countermeasure, not the root cause. At that level, I see no alternative to setting priorities. If you find that the root cause of your forging problems is that your 300 dies don’t have standard dimensions, you have to decide whether and when to address it and it may take a year of sustained effort to fix it. If you simultaneously have a problem with microstoppages caused by parts getting stuck in chutes, you may have to make a choice. Operator involvement broadens the range of problems that can be worked on concurrently, but only to the extent that you can put together teams with the requisite technical knowledge.

Valeo is a well-known success story for Lean, now referred to as “Operational Excellence” and the “Valeo Production System” (VPS).  I couldn’t find any information on line that is not published by Valeo itself. The page on the company web site has quality data from 2013, but the copy is identical to a Reference Document from 2003.  I have had personal communications about VPS from consultants who are Valeo alumni, and I hope to see their comments here.

 

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Apr 27 2014

Comment on Nike: People are people no matter where they work | Bill Waddell

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

“How […] can we understand […] Nike’s institutional commitment to systemic exploitation of folks working in factories? […]

The ‘manufacturing’ people at Nike are merely the internal champions of seeking out and making maximum use – abuse – of cheap labor.  If they were actually manufacturing people they would be ashamed of and outraged over factories such as the one they championed in Bangladesh – the one in which they “slogged up a dirty staircase to the top floors of an eight-story building” and had “rolls of fabric were strewn across the production floor and some windows were bolted shut.”

No serious manufacturing person with even the least measure of pride would have urged the company to perform production in such a pig sty of a factory.  Only some sort of mercenary focused solely on grubbing for pennies wants to be associated with such a plant.”

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Not that long ago, the awful conditions Bill Waddell is describing in Bangladesh factories were common in the US, UK, Germany, France, Japan,… Right or wrong, today’s advanced economies did sacrifice generations of factory workers on the altar of development, including my grandparents, and perhaps Bill’s. It was a decade-long struggle to get past this but, by and large, we have.

What attitude should we have towards countries where workers are treated today the way they were here 100 years ago? Bill is suggesting a boycott, but how would this play out? Specifically:

  • Would the factories be improved?
  • Would the adult workers find other employment under conditions that meet our standards?
  • Would the child workers go back to school?

Unless we are in a position to make these outcomes happen, how sincere is our concern?

See on www.idatix.com

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