Guest Post: Defining a Lean Organization is a Matter of Character

Today and tomorrow I will be doing a two part guest post on Christian Paulsen's Lean Leadership Blog. I attempted to define a Lean enterprise by the characteristics that embody a Lean organization. A Lean enterprise simplistically is a company that spreads Lean thinking across its entire organization. Those who find success embody a set of distinct characteristics that can help us understand what it means to be on this Lean journey. The first seven characteristics focus on elements of strategy, alignment, and continuous learning. The next of set characteristics focus on execution and continuous improvement.

Here is an excerpt from this post:

Lean is all about respecting people while eliminating Muri (overburdening), Mura (unevenness), and Muda (non value added activity) in all business processes. It is a philosophy which embodies a manufacturing culture of continuous improvement based on setting standards aimed at eliminating waste through participation of all employees.

While Lean can be beneficially applied to any process within an organization, its greatest benefit comes when it is applied across the enterprise. In The Machine That Changed the World in 1990, Jim Womack, et al., emphasized “that Lean thinking can be applied by any company anywhere in the world but that the full power of the system is only realized when it is applied to all elements of the enterprise.”

Lean focuses on creating and implementing processes throughout the entire organization that are highly responsive and flexible to customer demand. Lean paves the way for delivery high quality products and services, at the right location, at the right time, all in a cost effective and profitable manner.

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A Lean Enterprise is not created quickly. To be successful, Lean manufacturing requires building a culture of operational excellence. It’s easy to say (or define), but harder to instill throughout an organization, which is why a lean implementation takes time. But the benefits of lean are undeniable, and those companies who make the journey stand to gain significantly. When a business applies lean thinking, culture, and methods throughout the entire organization and beyond its four walls to customers and suppliers a Lean Enterprise is formed.

To read the full article continue here.

Lean Quote: Dreams Can Come True With Courage

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them." — Walt Disney

When things are difficult, unknown, and perhaps unattainable we may turn the other direction. We must find the inner strength to overcome these perceived barriers. History has proven time after time that the power of a thought is the beginning for actions that will alter the future positively. Understanding this, and having the courage to keep going even in the face of all obstacles, allows us to accomplish anything we want.

Recognizing these truths about courage will assist you in overcoming any challenge that you face:

1. Courage Begins with an Inward Battle - Courage isn't an absense of fear. It's doing what you are afraid to do. It's having the power to let go of the familiar and forge ahead into new terrritory.

2. Courage Is Making Things Right, Not Just Smoothing Them Over - Courage deals with principle, not perception. It's knowing when to stand up and having the conviction to do so.

3. Courage in a Leader Inspires Commitment from Followers - A show of courage by any person encourages others. But a show of courage by a leader ispires. It makes people want to follow them.

4. Your Life Expands in Proportion to Your Courage - Fear limits a leader. But courage has the opposite effect. Courage not only gives you a good beginnig, but it also provides a better future.

Courage means trusting yourself to overcome your fears and doing what you are afraid to do. Courage increases conviction and inspires others to confront their fears.

Walt Disney embodied his quote by dreaming big and being courageous despite the challenges and skeptics. Without his courage to dream and execute we would not have the institution that has become Disney. 

It takes courage to begin the journey towards our dreams and courage to see them through.

What You Need To Know About OSHA Floor Marking Standards

Today, I would like to introduce a guest post by Mike Wilson from Creative Safety Supply. Mike enjoys blogging and reading about the lean manufacturing niche. He is invested in Creative Safety Supply, known for its safety products to help manufacturers with their 5S and Lean Projects. Mike is going to talk about the importance of 5S, specifically set-in order with floor marking to improve safety for employees.
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Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is the government agency that is responsible in developing the rules and regulations to promote the safety of the employees working in various industrial facilities in the United States. One of their tasks is to ensure that these facilities are in compliance with the existing rules and regulations when it comes to marking floors and setting boundaries benefiting the workers.

About OSHA Floor Marking Standards
The major concerns of OSHA are the safety and welfare of the employees. These can be achieved by following osha floor marking standards that deal with the appropriate usage of floor marking tape and other materials when it comes to safety markings and setting boundaries. The organization also ensures that the aisles, hallways and other passages are built according to the standards.

In order to give you an idea, here are some of the guidelines being imposed by OSHA regarding floor safety markings:

• Broken lines should not be used as markings
• Icons, symbols dots, graphics and other elements can be used when necessary
• Line markings should be at least 2-6 inches long and 2 inches wider
• The markings should occupy the recommended space in the aisles and other areas
• The passages and aisles should not be less than four feet
• The passages and aisles should be at least three feet larger than the biggest equipment in the area

Materials to Use for Markings
The importance of having safety floor markings in the workplace is incontestable so you need to comply with the rules set by OSHA. Along with this, you also have to make sure that you are using the best material for markings. Essentially, there are various materials to use for floor markings but the most common are tapes and paints.

Paints for safety floor markings are incredible as they are long lasting, tough and resistant to moisture, water and other environmental elements. These can be used if you are looking for floor marking materials that can withstand heavy environment traffics.

Paints are available in many colors so you can have plenty to choose from. There are also glow in the dark marking paints and those that have anti-slip features making it a great tool to use in floor markings. However, using this can be time consuming and involves more hassle than using the other kinds of material like floor marking tape.

Floor marking tapes are growing in popularity when it comes to marking floors for safety due to a great number of reasons. Primarily, floor marking tapes are fast and easy to use. There is no hassle involved in using this product because you can just cut and stick and you are done. There is no need to set period for drying line when using paints.

Also, it comes in various forms like the vinyl tape which is the most common type. It can be purchased in different colors as well and glow in the dark. Lastly, they can also last for long if most especially if you choose the best kind.

Meet-up: Lean Reflection's Karen Wilhelm

I am proud to welcome Karen Wilhelm, who blogs at Lean Reflections, to our Meet-up.  She has been a dear friend for several years.  We met online through LinkedIn but have worked together for a couple years in promoting AME's mission online. Karen is a frequent contributor to AME's Target magazine.  She is a wonderful lady with a passion for helping others.

Who are you and what do you do?
I am Karen Wilhelm, a freelance writer, thinker, and blogger. I write articles and web content for business audiences, particularly in the realm of lean.

How and when did you learn Lean?
In the mid-80s, my husband was a contract programmer at a tier one auto supplier. They were rewriting some of their MRP application because the customer wanted to do something called JIT. Interesting. Maybe there was hope for our Detroit automakers to finally learn how to make better cars and measure up to the new Japanese companies in the market. Living in Detroit, a lot of my future rode on what happened at the Big Three. When cars are selling, life's good in the Motor City.

Just about then, I joined the publishing staff of Society of Manufacturing Engineers and found that we were reselling some of the earliest books of Shingo and Ohno in English, thanks to Norman Bodek and Productivity Press. Talk about just in time! My curiosity was aroused then and I have not stopped learning since.

How and why did you start blogging or writing about Lean?
Most organizations, like the one I worked for at the time, do not understand what it means to bring lean into what they do. I had been talking about lean for many years and people were tired of hearing about it. Then I heard about Blogger. It was a perfect match. I could put all my musings and rantings about lean on the blog and if anyone actually wanted to hear them, they could. My title "Lean Reflections" shows that I take what I learn, think about it, and then share it.

What does Lean mean to you?
There are lots of definitions out there, all true, but most falling short of what 25 years of absorbing lean ideas has defined for me. It is all-encompassing, a feeling that anything can and should be better than it is, and that there are ways for people to make that happen.

The closest I come is the idea of "kaizen mind," which hit me like a ton of bricks when I first read it. The author -- darn it, I can't remember his name -- wrote that a kaizen is fine, but the improvement is not the important outcome. The result is the thinking that is subtly changed every time someone engages in improving something, so it becomes a habit of thought and action. That only really happens in an organizations where leaders have the kaizen mind, and foster it in all the other people who work for the organization's purpose. It's not the tools, it's the thinking.

What is the biggest myth or misconception of Lean?
The biggest myth, and barrier to its real value, is that lean is a way to save money. Saving money is a byproduct of a strategic development (more than an "implementation") of lean in an organization. Profit is a goal, but it will come from better processes and flow, not from random cuts and "efficiencies."

What is your current Lean passion, project, or initiative?
I am intrigued and excited about lean entering the supply chain management community. To see businesses -- and not just manufacturers -- as networks, adding value cumulatively, pulled by customer needs and wants, evolves from seeing lean confined by the four walls of a single plant or workplace. Within each node, and between each node, is improvement waiting to happen. The network view touches every function in every extended value stream and finds better ways to connect.

Curiosity, learning, and knowledge are my favorite things, and I am grateful for all I have gained from all my lean friends over the years. They are people who do lean, who get in the middle of real processes and activities and help people make them better. I often wish I could do what they do. But my journey has made me an observer and an interpreter, so I hope that I spark ideas -- and even dreams -- by writing about lean.

Guest Post: Lean Tools Exercises

About the author: Andy Trainer works for Silicon Beach Training, leading providers of resources and courses in business skills including Six Sigma, Lean and project management techniques like PRINCE2.
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Here at Silicon Beach Training we regularly run Six Sigma courses for all levels as well as a range of Lean courses. Over the years we have noticed that certain tools are more popular than others, and that our delegates enjoy using our custom diagrams and examples!

In this post I’m going to share 3 of my favourite Lean tools and provide you with exercises to try them yourself.

1. SIPOC Diagram
We ask our Black Belt delegates to bring their own SIPOC diagram to the course so they can work on an example appropriate to their role.

SIPOC stands for “Supplier – Input – Process – Output – Customer” and is a tool used towards the beginning of a Six Sigma project for examining existing processes.

SIPOC diagrams are useful for clearly defining the elements and requirements of a process.

The SIPOC diagram is relatively straightforward and can be used by anybody to break down a process. It is best compiled in a group, filling the box under each heading as much as possible.

Here is an example SIPOC diagram for making coffee:

Exercise: Choose a business process and run through the steps to create your own SIPOC diagram.

To create a SIPOC diagram you must first define the process in a sub-diagram (as above). This should be kept simple with no more than 5 steps and a simple description for each.

The next step is to fill out the inputs and then work out who supplies those inputs.

Inputs can be anything from physical items to data and tools, and you should have a supplier for every input.

After establishing the inputs, define the outputs of the process, along with the customers who will receive the outputs.

2. Customer Requirements Tree
The Customer Requirements Tree (also known as the Critical to Quality Tree) is a Lean tool that allows you to break down hard to measure customer needs into easy to measure requirements.

The final stage of the tree involves defining upper and lower limits for requirements, which are easier to measure and maintain.

As with the SIPOC diagram we are using coffee as an example for our customer requirements tree:

Exercise: Choose an important customer requirements and run it through the Customer Requirements Tree.

Begin with a very basic customer requirement such as “I want a coffee that is good”. As a business you must define what the customer means by “good”. A customer requirements tree is a good way to do this.

Start by establishing the drivers – what the customer might use to decide on what makes a good coffee. Then define an upper and lower limit for each driver – these are your critical to quality requirements.

Once completed you will have a better idea of what your customer wants, and will be able to measure your product or service so that it meets the customer requirements.

3. The 7 Wastes
When thinking Lean, you should always be thinking about waste.

The tools above are for defining your processes and customer requirements. This tool will help you actively decide on your business wastes so that you can reduce them.

Each business potentially has 7 Deadly Wastes according to Lean thinking.

The 7 wastes are:
• Defects
• Overproduction
• Transportation of product
• Waiting
• Inventory
• Motion of people
• Processing

These can be applied to specific processes or to the business as a whole (more likely if you are an SME).

Exercise: Pick a business process and run through the 7 wastes. Fill in as much information next to each waste.

Once you have completed the table, you can run through your wastes and work out which are the priorities to reduce or eliminate.

Guest Post: Lean Software Development Priniciples

Today, I am proud to present a guest post by Jimena Calfa. Jimena is a System Engineer with Software Quality Assurance background and the founder of On Quality blog, an information source dedicated to sharing knowledge, lessons, experiences, opinions and actuality about the interesting world of Quality.

Jimena is one of the contributors of the ASQ Influential Voices – group of quality professionals from around the world who discuss about key quality issues with the main objective to raise the voice of quality and spread the word.

Jimena was born and raised in Argentina. She writes in both English and Spanish on her blog. Jimena came to the Unites States with her husband in 2006. Living in America has fueled her passion for Quality. She is ASQ certified in Quality Process Analyst (CQPA) and Lean Enterprise certified by the University of California - San Diego.

Jimena's motto: "Quality is everyone's responsibility. We never have to stop getting better."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Lean Software Development (LSD) is a term originated from a popular book by the same name, written by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. In such book, they presented the first translation of Lean principles to software development, plus 22 thinking tools to help translate those principles into agile practices. Having its roots in the well-known Toyota Production System, LSD focuses on helping software development companies to optimize their process, solving problems that old methodologies like waterfall have, and delivering software with better quality, reduced cost, and faster delivery.

Let’s do a review of the 7 LSD principles:

1. Eliminate Waste: take out all activities that do not add value from the perspective of the customer; in other words eliminate any material/resource beyond what the customer requires and is willing to pay for. The 7 Sins of LSD are: Partially done work, Extra features, Relearning, Handoffs, Task switching, Delay and Defects.

2. Build Quality In: Mistake-proof your code from the beginning to prevent appearance of defects late at the end of the process. One tool used to do that is test-driven-development where developers write unit and acceptance tests before they write the associated code. Coding and testing the system as often as possible working with short iterations, helps to reduce the appearance of defects late in the process. You can consider your development process defective if you assume that verification process is the only time when you could find defects, queue them (partially done work, waste#1) and then perform almost endless test-and-fix cycles.

3. Create Knowledge (aka Learn constantly or Amplify learning): “Planning is useful. Learning is essential”. Software development is a knowledge-creating process; recording the team's knowledge is an efficient way to reduce waste of relearning and make the tacit knowledge more explicit and available for everyone. Also, software development is unpredictable so we shouldn’t base our development process on a plan considering it as a fact (can we predict the future?); we should take it as a forecast and work with short cycles, change-tolerant codes, and iterations with refactoring - improving the design as the system develops- so we can generate knowledge, have quickly feedback, and prevent of making early-irreversible decisions. In that way, you will have a development process that encourages systematic learning throughout the development cycle, so we can respond quickly and correctly to events as they occurred, delivering more predictable outcomes.

4. Defer Commitment (aka Decide as late as possible): the more information you have, the better decisions you make. Developing a robust, change-tolerant design and schedule irreversible decisions for the last moment until uncertainty is reduced and before it is too late, is the best option to not being locked in a critical design decision made in the incorrect time. A software system doesn’t need complete flexibility, but it does need to maintain options at the points where change is likely to occur.

5. Deliver Fast: it refers to companies can deliver faster than customers can change their minds. To achieve that you should focus on 2 main practices:
- develop your product driving down cycle time (short iterations), with small batches of requirements and fewer things-in-process, so at the end of each iteration, you can have a rapidly feedback from your customers and decide how to continue;
- have a fast-moving self-directed development team with excellent reflexes and a disciplined, stop-the-line culture.
You can’t sustain high speed, unless you build quality in.

6. Respect People (aka Engage Everyone or Empower the team): Respect means that instead of telling people what to do and how to do it, teams are given general plans and reasonable goals, and are trusted to self-organize to meet the goals (semi-autonomous teams). Engaged, motivated, thinking people with proper training, coaching and assistance, are the basis of competitive advantage in today’s economy.

7. Improve the System (aka See/Optimize the whole): it refers to improve and control your entire value stream - from customer request to deployed software - instead of just optimize part of it (sub-optimization). One commonly practice used to optimize your system is the use of metrics, but the same concept applies: when a measurement system has too many metrics the real goal of the effort gets lost. The solution is to “Measure UP” - find a higher-level measurement that will drive the right results for the lower level metrics and establish a basis for making trade-offs.

These principles are universal guiding ideas, the application of them into a software development company requires analysis, interpretation, and an exhaustive work to translate them into appropriate practices that can be apply to a particular environment.

The more you learn about Lean, the more you will realize how much value it has when applying to software development projects. And always remember these: rapid delivery, high quality, and low cost are fully compatible; learn from experiences and never stop getting better!

REFERENCES
- Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit by Mary and Tom Poppendieck – 2003
 - Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash by Mary and Tom Poppendieck – 2006

Lean Quote: Coordinating Talent Toward Achieving Success Is Vital

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"Of all the things I've done, the most vital is coordinating the talents of those who work for us and pointing them toward a certain goal." — Walt Disney

Today, marks the first day of vacation and I am taking the family to a place where dreams come true, Disney World. So with this in mind I wanted to look at a quote from Walt Disney on leadership. This one in particular highlights the important role of leaders.

Every leader has two jobs. Your job is to help the team succeed by accomplishing your mission. That's the job that gets the most attention, but your other job is just as important. Your job is to help your team members succeed, too. "Succeed" means doing a good job, developing skills, earning autonomy, growing, and much more. Neither job is "the most important." They're equally important, and often support each other if done well.

Developing people means challenging people. But just issuing challenges isn’t enough. It would be disrespectful to not also teach a systematic, common means of developing solutions and meeting those challenges. Leaders facilitate the solution of problems by pinpointing responsibility and developing employees. Leaders do not solve other people’s problems.

Good leadership is not reflected in the leader’s actions, it is reflected in the impact and effect of those actions on the team. A leader should adapt to the environment and what the team needs today without losing sight of what will be needed tomorrow and always preparing for that moment when he or she will no longer be there. Guaranteeing the growth and sustainability of the team and the individuals that comprise it beyond the leader’s time is the ultimate trait of a great leader. In fact, the true success of a leader can not be measured without considering the results of the succession plan.