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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Apr 25 2014

A Company Without Job Titles Will Still Have Hierarchies | Harrison Monarth | HBR Blog

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

“Radically flat. That’s the management goal that Tony Hseih, founder of e-commerce giant Zappos, aims to achieve by the end of 2014. To get there, Hsieh plans to toss out the traditional corporate hierarchy by eliminating titles among his 1,500 employees that can lead to bottlenecks in decision-making. The end result: a holacracy centered around self-organizing teams who actively push the entire business forward.”

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

In this strange article, organization, hierarchy, and status is treated exclusively as a psychological issue. There is not a word about the need to get the organization’s work done, and its implications in terms of responsibility and authority.

For example, you need a process to resolve differences of opinion on what needs to be done. Particularly when the choice is not obvious, you need one person mandated to make a decision and take responsibility for the consequences. It’s called a manager.

As an employee, at any level, you need someone who speaks for the company and can tell you its expectations. It’s called a boss.

It may be psychological uncomfortable to follow procedures and report to another human being, but it is generally recognized as a price you have to pay to get 10 people — or 300,000 — to work effectively towards a common goal.

Remove all these structures and procedures, and what do you get? Self-organized teams doing great work? Or indecision, frustration, bullying, and chaos?

See on blogs.hbr.org

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Apr 24 2014

Learning and Experience Curves in Manufacturing | Quarterman Lee

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“Learning Curves have traditionally been used for cost estimating and training purposes. However, they have a much wider applications, including Manufacturing and Marketing strategy. They underly the concept of Continuous Improvement. Like compound interest, they generate large benefits from seemingly small, incremental change.

The learning curve came into prominence during World War II when Army Air Force scientists noticed that the cost for a given aircraft model declined with increased production in accordance with a fairly predictable formula. Each time the cumulative production doubled, cost declined by a fixed percentage. In the aircraft industry, at that time, this reduction was about 20%. Learning curves underpin the concept of Continuous Improvement.”

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

It’s good to see a well-documented, informative article by Quarterman Lee on a topic that is often ignored in the Lean literature but that I think if fundamental to the economics of improvement.

The title mentions both Learning and Experience Curves, but the body of the article is only about Learning Curves. The difference between the two is that Learning Curves are only about labor, and were developed first, in World War II, as Quarterman points out. The Experience Curve is a generalization due to Bruce Henderson of the Boston Consulting Group in the 1960s, which applies the logic not just to labor but to all costs.

The Experience Curve theory is predicated on the notion that there is such a thing as a meaningful cost per piece, and asserts that it decreases with cumulative volume along an inverse power curve, the evidence for which is in the evolution of market prices with cumulative volume in a variety of industries.

The effect of this curve on pricing in an industry depends on its clockspeed. In electronics, with product lives of four years, it is dominant. In cars, where the experience accumulated for over a century is still relevant today, we are so far on the curve that it is not a major factor.

The justification for an inverse power law is in fact simple. It stands to reason that, the more you have already made of a product, the easier it is to make the next unit, and therefore that costs should decrease as a function of cumulative volume. Since we are talking about a broad trend, it should also be a smooth decline.

Could it be linear? No. It would mean a straight line in cartesian coordinates.and that would lead to negative costs, which makes no sense. If you toggled the y-axis to “logarithmic,” a straight line would represent an exponential decline. But it would not make sense either, because it would mean that you could produce an infinite volume for a finite cost. If, as in the above picture, you make both axes logarithmic, a straight line means an inverse power law. Costs never go negative, and it still takes an infinite amount of money to produce an infinite quantity. This is why, among the simple possible decline patterns, it is the only one that cannot be excluded based on its logic.

See on www.strategosinc.com

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Apr 22 2014

When “Lean” is Watered Down to “The Customer is King”

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

Making your business lean might be a surefire way to lose customers | Quartz.com |Stephen MacIntyre

“Recently, I lost my wallet and had to replace a couple of bank cards (a situation millions of people face yearly). The first bank I called required me to slowly navigate through an automated system with an endless succession of prompts, while I grew increasingly frustrated and weary. Finally—after almost an hour!—a robotic voice told me that I would receive a new card in about a week.”

http://qz.com/190968/making-your-business-lean-might-be-a-surefire-way-to-lose-customers/

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

The Toyota Production System (TPS) is the best performing way we know to build cars, and it has a rich technical and managerial content. From the 1970s on, Toyota promoted among its suppliers. They were joined in the 1980s by Toyota’s competitors and a few non-automotive pioneers, who didn’t fully understand it.

Rebranded “Lean” in the 1990s, it was sold first in many manufacturing sectors and then outside of manufacturing. As a consequence, however, the “Lean Body of Knowledge” offered by most consultants and training organizations became more and more generic, and gradually drained of substance.

In this article, Lean boils down to “maximizing customer value using fewer resources.” If that is what Lean is,  then I don’t know any businessperson — from my local dry-cleaner to the CEO of a major manufacturing company — who would not claim to doing it. They might express it in simpler words, like “taking care of customers without wasting money,” but the meaning is the same.

“The customer is king” is Business 101, not the defining characteristic of TPS or Lean as I see it, which addresses the needs of all stakeholders, not just customers. A “relentless customer focus” may be what you want to tell customers about, but it is not the basis for providing supplier support or career planning for production operators.

See on qz.com

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