Lean

Jan 26 2014

880 Saskatchewan health care leaders study Lean at Virginia Mason | The StarPhoenix

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“Close to 900 health workers will make the pilgrimage to Seattle in search of factory efficiency for hospitals. Take a look inside at the origins of the world’s biggest health quality experiment. […] With Virginia Mason as their model, the treks are part of a sweeping overhaul of how the provincial health system is managed. […]More than a decade into a journey that’s never really finished, Virginia Mason now makes it its business to teach health care leaders from all over the world about the Virginia Mason Production System.”

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

This Canadian newspaper article is the most detailed account I have seen of the “Virginia Mason Production System.” Virginia Mason Medical Center is a Seattle hospital that has been converting to Lean since 2001and now has a business unit teaching others what it has done.

100 years ago, industrial engineer Frank Gilbreth developed the operating room procedures that are standard today, so it’s not the first time hospitals learn from manufacturing.

What this article gives is examples of the changes that were made at Virginia Mason, in particular the application of 3P (“Production Preparation Process”), involving patients in the design of new care units, and simulating with full scale mockups.

Other specifics include building design features to support maintenance and upgrades without disrupting care, the use of the two-bin system to manage medication supplies, and visual management.

And the article also touts the results that Virginia Mason achieved through this effort, in terms of both improved care and economic performance.

The StartPhoenix is a Saskatchewan newspaper, and the article also tells readers about the cost to taxpayers of the effort to emulate Virginia Mason in the entire health system of the province.

Most striking is the $39M contract over four years given to the Seattle consulting firm that helped Virginia Mason. As this translates to tens of people working full time on the project, it looks more like engineering than consulting.

See on www.thestarphoenix.com

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Jan 23 2014

The NUMMI Story (Minus the Ending) | Matthew May

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“At the risk of being repetitive, allow me to retell one of my favorite stories. First, imagine the worst place you’ve ever worked. The darkest, most depressing, soul-sucking work environment you’ve ever had the misfortune to inhabit.

Got it in your mind’s eye? Now, multiply it by oh, say, 100. That’s how bad the place I’m about to describe was. I know, because I spoke to people who were there.

The year was 1982. It was the year of Jordaache Jeans. The year of Wendy’s “Where The Beef?” commercial. And the It was 1982, the first full year of Reaganomics.

The place was the General Motors Fremont, California plant…”

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

The NUMMI joint venture between GM and Toyota is a great story of thorough transformation. It is how a car plant from worst to best. Unfortunately, it ended in 2010, when GM when bankrupt and Toyota declined to take over the entire venture.

Now Toyota is part owner of Tesla,  the facility is the Tesla plant, and it has been getting renewed attention as such. This is a new lease on life but Tesla’s 10,000 cars/year do not compare with the 250,000 NUMMI used to make.

See on matthewemay.com

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Jan 22 2014

Shortage of skills, not yet – but very soon – a wake up call (part 1) | Wiegand’s Watch

This is a translation of the bulk of Bodo Wiegand’s latest newsletter, followed by my comments:

“As long as our support professionals and staff spend less than 50% of their time on their core activities, we have no shortage of skilled workers . But it’s coming — mercilessly, and we are not doing anything about it!

Whenever I ‘m in a company and we discuss about efficiency in the indirect area , the first reaction is disbelief and astonishment, with statements like “Mr. Wiegand, certainly not with us.” When, in the 10/2007 issue of Focus, I wrote “the labor productivity in administration is about 50%” [of what it should be], no one wanted to believe it , or admit it … and it was and is dismissed by most with a ” not with us.”

In fact is it is below 50 % , today as well as yesterday, and if we do not start worrying about it soon and finally wake up from our slumber , we will run into real problems that will jeopardize the existence of our German business model.

Now my dear  “not with us” unbelievers and  friends – wake up : The facts are coming. According to a study by the AKAD University in Leipzig, each week, office workers spend a whole day in meetings and one whole day processing email. You don’t think so? The proof: Based on a Varonis survey from 2012:

  • 4.8% receive 300-500 emails a day ,
  • 17.6 %,  100-300 emails a day ,
  • 44.8 %,  50-100 emails a day and
  • 32.8 %,  1-50 emails a day .

According to a survey conducted by Mimecast and Microsoft Exchange from 2012, from the recipients’ perspective, 61 % of the emails are unnecessary, 25 % are at least useful, and only 14% are “really important.”
Once again in plain text: Nearly 70 % of employees working in offices receive more than 50 messages/day.

Assume only 50 emails/day. The processing time per email is about 1-2 minutes, Here is some additional information for the smart alecks who think they only 10 seconds per email: they are among  the 70 % who get more than 50 emails/day and don’t read them. The additional mental setup time in normal office activity for one mail is 64 seconds, as calculated by Loughborough University psychologist Thomas Jackson.

It follows that,  in the best case , the processing of the assumed 50 mails / day takes at least 2 hours, which works out to 10 hours a week or 55 working days/year. It devours 1 day per week (see also the study by Leipzig’s AKAD University) .

Considering that the processing of 61 % of the mail is a waste of time . This corresponds to 6 hours a week or 38 days per year or 17 % more time for the employee.

Studies have shown that when engineers and developers work constructively or on complex problems , the mental setup time is up to 12 minutes. This group of people needs 250 minutes/day for just 25 mails/day and 10 minutes of mental setup times. It is already makes 50 % of their time. With an average salary of €100,000/year,  makes € 50,000/employee for email processing !

So, if we eliminate for this group the 61% of unnecessarily emails , they would receive only 10 mails/day and would thus have 120 minutes more time for their actual work. Then we focus on processing the email in the morning and afternoon , and save another 100 minutes.

Now, how doe we fight this email flood?

  1. Introduce email etiquette to reduce the number of messages and raise their quality .
  2. Analyze the structure of the information enhance the quality of information and communication , and stop the sending of unnecessary emails.

Moreover, we should take heed of a more serious study and begin to protect our employees . 63.6 % of all managers believe that is expected of them that they should be accessible in their free time. An survey of German executives in 2013 asked what measures were taken to put limits on their accessibility?

81 % of the executives responded : “None.”

Which is at least one reason for the rise in the burn-out syndrome. If 81 % of the companies do not take this problem seriously , it’s actually only a matter of time before the executives burn out.

It is the duty of the companies to care about this.

Next, let us discuss meetings. How often has each of you experienced meetings

  • That have no agenda ,
  • Where there no clear tasks have been defined,
  • Where there is no clear outcome or agreement on actions and responsibilities,
  • Without any follow-up on actions from the last meeting,
  • Where the allotted  time was exceeded,
  • That did not start on time,
  • Where someone came too late ,
  • In which one or more persons ( Mr. or Mrs. Important) left to make a call ,
  • Where computers with emails were answered during the meeting ,
  • Where there was little conversation,
  • Where documents were issued at the meeting for “fast” decisions,
  • Where all agreed at the meeting on a decision and afterwards said “Maybe,”
  • Where everything was discussed except the real issues ,
  • …

All waste – pure waste .

What can you do so in order to curb the meeting madness and to cut one day meeting per week to four hours ? Change the meeting culture , and take actions to reduce the number of meetings and radically shorten them, such as:

  • Put out a guide for improving a culture of dialogue .
  • Analyze the structure of discussions to establish which types of meetings are needed. For example, keep routine meetings to up to 30 minutes, standing in front of a whiteboard, and discuss only anomalies. Time savings immediately 50 % guaranteed!

Summing up the potential for meetings and email processing together , can get a relief of more than 15 to 20 % of the time for each .

Hello my dear ” Not with us” friends, if you stick your head quietly in the sand, you do not have to even deal with these issues.

A manager of a large automotive supplier once said to me : ” Mr. Wiegand, in production, we are chasing cents and leaving euro notes on the floor in administration. “So what in the world is holding back our managers from raising their efficiency and thus to relieving much-needed management resources from this senseless workload. They just look and pointlessly waste our most important resouce : our employees , our specialists and managers , our engineers and developers.

Relieve this group from distractions like secretarial work , travel planning and other non-core activities , and you generate further potential , and that without even tackling interface problems , optimizing the processes or breaking down silos.

For this you do not need a consultant , you only need to invest in training your employees.

[…]

In my 15 years of experience with administrative Lean projects, I can see that there a total of at least 20 to 30 % increase in efficiency is  possible.

In Part 2 of this topic , we deal with the other 15 to 20% of improvement and how to realize them.”

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Bodo Wiegand paints the abuse of email and poor meeting organization as an existential threat to the German business model. According to him, German managers and professionals are only operating at 50% of their capacity because of the time they spend processing unnecessary emails and sitting through meetings that belie the worldwide perception of German promptness and rigor. In fact, as much as I enjoy myth busting, from my personal experience of meetings in Germany, I would not put this issue high on the list of needed improvements. I have seen worse elsewhere.

As for email, even though Wiegand only proposes to improve its use, he seems to be attacking the medium, which he used himself to send out his newsletter. And the countermeasures he proposes address, at best, internal email abuse. If all employees of a company stopped sending each other unnecessary emails, it wouldn’t stem the flow from outside. You can filter it with firewalls but, if you do it too aggressively, you can interfere with necessary communications.

Let’s face it: email is the greatest medium ever invented for one-to-one or one-to-many informal communication in writing. It is informal in the sense that, unlike a form with fields and check boxes, it imposes no structure on the content. It replaces the business letter, but not the purchase order.

It is not perfect. Email over the internet has proven reliable, but it offers no guarantee of delivery, and the fact that you sent a message is no legal proof that any other party received it. And the informality of the medium has led many to let loose and write things that they came to regret when they discovered that email communication is not as private as they assumed it to be, and that completely deleting an email is next to impossible. In essence, all the emails you send become part of your permanent record.

Technically, email does not work well for the many-to-many communication required, for example, in a project team. The members of a team need to post information in one place for the team, and nothing but the team, with tools to collaboratively edit it. This is not accomplished by sending messages to each other, that are stored redundantly in each recipient’s mailbox.

This being said, email today is the primary way business is done, and there is nothing wrong, per se, in having office professionals spend time processing emails. It is only wrong if they do too much of it, but there is no universal rule on the amount they need to do their jobs; it depends on what their jobs are. It won’t be the same in marketing and in product development.

I agree with Wiegand on the need for training in the effective use of email, but management should also know, for example, that it is a bad idea to standardize email addresses. If you give all employees addresses like “[email protected],” you make them easy to spam.

If I were to point out waste in German office organization, I would mention the following:

  1. Nomenclature. I have seen “smart” numbering systems used not only for manufacturing parts but for projects and even employee IDs. In the age of databases, it is archaic and counterproductive. It makes employees take longer to fill out forms in computer transactions, and it makes reports more difficult to understand. I have never met anyone in Germany who was even aware that it is a problem.
  2. German office with Leitz bindersOversorting. Not every paper document needs to be filed under the proper tab, in chronological order, in a two-ring binder. This should only apply to documents that are frequently retrieved. But the neat rows of Leitz binders on the shelves of German offices are a source of pride…

I also find Wiegand’s advocacy of relying on secretaries for tasks like travel planning odd, considering that explaining your travel needs to another person takes longer than booking on-line directly. It didn’t use to be that way, but it is that way now. Human intermediaries in travel booking still have a role for groups but, for individuals, they are as extinct as typists. “Admin” isn’t just a fancy title for a secretary; admins are far fewer than secretaries used to be, and do different work, such as screening calls and maintaining calendars for executives.

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Jan 15 2014

The “Making Things in Japan Tour” — April 20-26, 2014

You may have noticed a new widget on our sidebar, which links to a site about this tour and registration through Eventbrite. Brad Schmidt and I are organizing this together, and I am thrilled to be working with him again.

Why go to Japan to visit plants in 2014? Until the 1970s, Japanese manufacturing got no respect. When I headed there as an engineering graduate in 1977, a classmate of mine called this move “career suicide.” Whatever competitive success Japanese companies had achieved by then was chalked up to long hours and low wages, much the way China is perceived today.

Then came the 1980s and the discovery that there was more to it — that should be looked into and studied — coupled with fear that “Japan, Inc.” was going to take over the world. The two-decade recession that hit Japan in the early 1990s put a quick end to the paranoia and, more slowly, dampened the enthusiasm for so-called “Japanese methods” in manufacturing and management.

The renewed neglect of Japan today, however, is no more rational than was the exuberance of the 1980s. Japan today has a highly trained but aging and expensive work force, and is facing the same challenges as other advanced economies. And it still has the most advanced, most productive, manufacturing plants in the world, with the best quality. It is still the go-to place for manufacturing excellence, where the art of making things (Monozukuri, 物作り) is valued and honored both in companies and in society at large. 

For those who don’t know him, Brad Schmidt is a South African raised in Japan, a graduate of Japanese schools,  and perfectly bilingual. With 128 tours in 15 years under his belt and counting, he is a pro. Few people have seen the inside of more Japanese factories than him, and he has the logistics of tours worked out, from airport pickups to  interpreters, transportation and lodging. That leaves me with the easy part: promoting this tour in tour in the US and then going on it to help answer participants’ questions  and facilitate site reviews.

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Dec 28 2013

Manufacturing is Making Things — Service isn’t

With services being the dominant source of employment in advanced economies, more and more consultants are turning to this area as the next frontier for Lean, and engaging in debates as to which of Manufacturing or Service has the greatest variability. The level of variability, however, does not strike me as the fundamental difference between the two.

It is more obvious: Manufacturing is about making things, while Service is not. In manufacturing, a physical object is the output. In service, if there is a physical output, it is only an information support, a licence, a boarding pass, a stamped form, a prescription, or a report.

High volume/Low mix and Low volume/High mix activities exist on both sides. In manufacturing, you have plants making 1 million identical electricity meters per year while others make 200 custom-designed machines and fixtures. In service, you have organizations that issue drivers’ licences all day, every day, and others that provide advice on interior design that is custom for each home and occupant.

Manufacturing needs the appropriate technology and management to make things, including expensive facilities, often with large, noisy, dirty, and even dangerous machines, and a  support structure for logistics, maintenance, quality, etc.  It attracts some people and not others, and the experience of working together in production creates a level of camaraderie that is rarely found in service… I could go on and on.

The consequence is that improving Service is a different challenge from improving Manufacturing. I never bought the notion that a system like TPS, developed to make cars, could be a panacea for all business activities, and this is why I remained focused on Manufacturing.

Whether Lean is an expanded or watered down version of TPS, I consider that it has to prove itself in every new domain, even in Manufacturing. In Service, it seems to help in hospital operations, and the crossover value of industrial engineering in this field has been established since Frank Gilbreth redesigned  operating room procedures 100 years ago.

Would it help in the organization of distribution centers for eCommerce? Perhaps, but it is not a foregone conclusion. Does Amazon use Lean? The closest I could find to a positive answer is one sentence by Jeff Bezos in an Harvard Business Review interview quoted by Pete Abilla on Shmula:

“I literally learned a bunch of techniques, like Six Sigma and lean manufacturing and other incredibly useful approaches.”

Amazon fulfillment center shown on Shmula
Amazon fulfillment center shown on Shmula

Unlike other Shmula readers, I can’t jump from this to the conclusion that Amazon are based on Six Sigma or Lean. Instead, what I hear Bezos saying is “We studied what’s out there, and went our own way.” And that way is a game changer in retail worldwide, worthy of study in its own right.

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Dec 26 2013

What’s eating John Seddon?

I want you to cheatBack in 1992, Seddon published “I want you to cheat,” as a distillation of then seven years of consulting experience with service organizations in Britain. It contains some general principles, supported by examples. It is quite readable, and contains no personal attacks on anyone. While “I want you to cheat” does not reference any giant on whose shoulder the author sits, more recent publications from Seddon repeatedly acknowledge Deming and Ohno.

It was his comment that “This respect for people stuff is horseshit” at a conference in Iceland in 2012 that drew my attention to his work. While certainly aggressive, it was not a personal attack. The latest kerfuffle is about the following statements in his 11/2013 newsletter:

“Every time I have been to the jamboree they have had an American lean guru spouting nonsense and this is no exception. This time it’s the guru who claims lean fails because it is what he calls ‘fake lean’ and his lean is the way to go! His ‘real lean’ starts with ‘respect for people’. I can imagine ‘respect for people’ events and tee-shirts (he sells tee shirts) while there is no change to the system conditions that drive misery and other forms of sub-optimisation. Only in America; the home of the terrible diseases.

What would you call a profound idea in this guru’s head? A tourist!”

bob emiliani
Bob Emiliani

The target of this attack, although unnamed, recognized himself. It’s Bob Emiliani, and he posted a response on his blog, entitled Kudos to John Seddon.  Bill Waddell then chimed in with John Seddon – Where Ignorance and Arrogance Collide. To Bob, Seddon is like a student who did not understand the concept of “respect for people,” while Bill dismisses Seddon as a blowhard from a backward little country who has failed to understand the depth and the subtlety of the US version of Lean.

Bill Waddelll
Bill Waddell

There is a good reason while the etiquette of on-line discussion groups forbids personal attacks: they cause discussions to degenerate into trash talk and name calling. It may be briefly entertaining, but quickly turns off readers who don’t have a dog in these fights and just want to information. Besides insulting Bob Emiliani, Seddon has steamed up patriot Bill Waddell with derogatory comments about America. You reap what you sow.

I have, however, heard comments that were as strident as Seddon’s from other consultants, from Japan. They were equally dismissive of US Lean, of American management in general, and even the country as a whole. This was usually, but not always, in private communications rather than in publications. These “insultants,” however, often got away with it, with audiences looking past the invective for useful ideas, and I think it is the appropriate response. Ignore the rant and engage on substance. If some is offered, you will be better off for it.

It is also worth pondering why people feel compelled to act this way. For John Seddon, I don’t know; I am not privy to his thoughts, but I can guess. We should remember that, in the market of ideas, we in the US have a worldwide home court advantage. Ideas command more attention and are more credible simply because of the “Made in America” label.

Lean is the most ironic example. The Toyota Production System did not come out of the US, yet the worldwide internet chatter and consulting business about it is dominated by a US version known as “Lean,” which is as faithful to the original as Disney’s Aladdin and The Hunchback of Notre Dame are to Arabian Nights and Victor Hugo’s novel. Borrowing, metabolizing and even distorting ideas from other cultures is done everywhere, and is to be expected; what is special about the US is that the American version radiates back to the world and overwhelms the original.

Last year, the Olympics opening ceremony in London reminded the world where the industrial revolution began. For more than a century, the world looked to Britain as a model for politics, economics, and manufacturing, but these days are gone, and for an idea to come from Britain is now a handicap rather than a credibility enhancer.

John Seddon happens to be British. For 28 years, he has been making a living as a consultant to service organizations in the public and private sector and, as anyone with this kind of experience would, he has developed an approach to doing it. We may or may not agree with it, but it deserves a respectful hearing. What I read into Seddon’s current stridency is that he has not been getting it. I think he is turning up the volume to prevent his voice being drowned out in the Lean tsunami coming out of the US.

Seddon dismisses Lean consultants as “tool heads.” I like tools. I use tools all the time, both in private and professional life. But I don’t use them indiscriminately. Following are three questions about a tool, that I would not ask about a hammer or a phone, but would about, say, Kanban or SMED:

1.    Who invented this tool?
2.    What problem was he/she trying to solve?
3.    Do I have that problem?

They strike me as a reasonable way to decide whether to apply it or not. And where did I find these questions? On John Seddon’s website. I think I will use them with clients.

 

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