Jan 30 2014
The Limits of Imitating Toyota | Bill Waddell
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“I recently received an email from a guy challenging the legitimacy of organizing into value streams and lean accounting. The linchpin of his argument: ‘I can’t find anything saying Toyota has done any of that.’
[…] Seems to me if we want to get all Toyota-y about things we have to take Shingo’s words to heart when he wrote, ‘We have to grasp not only the Know-How but also Know-Why.’
[…]Using Toyota as the acid test for whether something is lean or not is rather naive and intellectually lazy. In most companies and most plants, asking ‘what would Toyota do?’ is the appropriate question – not ‘what did Toyota do?’”
Learning by imitation
Imitation is effective for learning. We condemn outright plagiarism, despise imitation, and value creativity. Yet even an original and unique artist like Pablo Picasso learned as a child by copying paintings. In Karate, you learn a new kata by following others. As you memorize the sequence of moves, you learn to perform them with speed and power. Then, as Jim Mather teaches, you learn the underlying self-defense principles embedded in the kata.
Until the 1970s, many Americans and Europeans dismissed “the Japanese” as imitators who copied what they saw and then competed with the original creators through low wages. But I have not heard this in decades. A principle behind the way Japanese traditional arts are taught is that know-how precedes and leads to know-why. Once you have assimilated techniques to the point that they are second-nature to you, your mind suddenly understands how they fit together as a whole and why they are necessary.
While this approach works not just for Karate, but also for sumi-e, sushi, flower arrangement, and even machining, it can be abused. I would not recommend it, for example, to teach math. Sometimes, what you ultimately achieve as a result of going through motions is only an illusion of understanding that rationalizes the years you have invested in training.
For Lean or TPS, there is no alternative to learning by doing. There is no way to gain an understanding of cells or the Kanban system without living through implementation on an actual shop floor. As a consequence, the first time you do it, you are following along and imitating. Once you understand what you are doing, however, it behooves you to add your own twist and adapt the concepts to your needs.
When brute force imitation works
On the scale of an entire company, we should also not forget that brute-force imitation sometimes works. Once I had in one of my Lean classes a student who was a former plant manager in a large, European auto parts company known for its successful implementation of Lean. “Everything you taught,” he told me,”I used in the plant, but I never knew why, until today.” As he explained to me, the company’s top management issued “guidelines” to plant managers that were specific on which tools to use, regularly audited the plants, and routinely fired the managers who did not comply, regardless of results.
It sounds wrong, but how do you argue with success? In retrospect, it worked for that company because it was in the industry for which TPS had been developed and, at least initially, creativity was not necessary to improve on the existing system. Where brute force imitation fails is in new and different industries.
How do you know “what Toyota would do”?
Either you are steeped in Toyota’s ways as a result of being an employee of the company for 10 years, and you have an idea of what its management might do outside of its core business — including the ways it might misunderstand it — or you have studied Toyota’s system from the outside, and you don’t really know what it would do.
On the other hand, you may have a deeper understanding of the challenge at hand than any Toyota manager. Rather than trying to figure out what Toyota would do, I would rather follow Soichiro Honda’s advice to his engineers: “Solve your own problems.” Learn everything relevant that you can, then use your own judgement. You will be responsible for the outcome anyway.
Divergence and accurate representation
The whole Lean movement started from people learning about the Toyota Production System (TPS). That Lean should diverge from TPS was inevitable, but the Toyota connection remains the key reason business professionals pay any attention to Lean. Given that the vocabulary itself has changed, making the connection on specifics is not always obvious. “Value Stream” or “Lean Accounting,” for example, are not Toyota terms, which does not make it easy to gauge the extent to which Toyota uses the concepts.
There is nothing wrong with Lean professionals inventing approaches beyond TPS, but it must be clear and the tools must stand on their own merits. Business executives assume that what they are being sold as “Lean” is what Toyota does. Where it is not the case, they must be told upfront.
See on www.idatix.com
Jan 31 2014
TPM and Part Replacement Schedules
On the Lean Enterprise Institute website, a reader asked the following question:
Over the years, “TPM” has become an umbrella term for all improvement activities in process industries, and not just maintenance. In this question, however, it is used in its original sense of “Total Productive Maintenance,” meaning involvement of all employees in the maintenance of facilities and equipment to support production. There is a body of knowledge associated with it, in which I don’t recall seeing anything about deciding when equipment parts should be replaced. Generally, TPM tells you how maintenance work should be done, not what it consists of.
TPM’s first step is Autonomous Maintenance, which delegates routine checks and small maintenance activities to production operators. There are many other, higher levels, but Autonomous Maintenance is the only one I have ever seen implemented, to the point that TPM is often equated with Autonomous Maintenance. Besides the scheduling of part replacements, there are many other aspects of Maintenance that I don’t believe TPM addresses, but that you have to in a Lean implementation, such as the role, structure, and size of the Maintenance department.
On these issues, I have found that you are more likely to find answers from industries where maintenance plays a more central role than in Manufacturing, such as commercial or military aviation, or nuclear power. On part replacement in particular, seminal work was conducted 45 years ago at United Airlines when the Boeing 747 was first released. United’s maintenance experts realized that the replacement schedules they had previously used on the 707 could not be economically carried over to the much larger 747, and they undertook a systematic analysis of the plane’s components that led to the development of a theory now known as “Reliability Centered Maintenance,” or RCM.
What the United people found was the parts exhibited instead a variety of patterns and that some, in particular, never had a wear-out phase. As a consequence, there was no point in systematically replacing them after a fixed interval or use count.
The consequences of a component failure on an aircraft in flight also varied greatly depending on whether it is a passenger reading light, an avionic system, or the rudder. You don’t need the reading light to stay in the air and you can’t replace the rudder in flight, but you can have a standby avionic system take over. This Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA) served as the basis for targeted redundancies.
The FMEA concept is known in manufacturing, but I have never seen it applied to production equipment. Targeted redundancies are used, for example, in machining centers by placing the same frequently used cutting tools in two pockets, with the second tool automatically taking over when the first is worn out.
The equipment supplier can provide generic recommendations, but they may not match your specific application. If you want to improve your equipment part replacement policies, you will need to collect and analyze technical data on the behavior of your machines, on your shop floor. With today’s sensors, data acquisition and control systems, it is technically feasible. If United Airlines could do it in 1969, you can in 2014. What is most missing is analytical capability. Today’s Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) are still focused work order administration, not the technical analysis of equipment behavior.
Once you have worked out appropriate part replacement policies, you need to work out the logistics of making spare parts available when needed, which is a whole other topic.
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By Michel Baudin • Technology 1 • Tags: Boeing 747, RCM, Reliability Centered Maintenance, Total Productive Maintenance, TPM, United Airlines