Modern Machine Shop Online & the Most Valuable Lean Resource for Success

Modern Machine Shop is a metalworking professionals’ publication that aims to improve and expand manufacturing by connecting the buyers and sellers of metalworking technology. They recently launched a Lean Manufacturing Zone.

MMS Online’s newly expanded Lean Manufacturing Zone includes both articles and video profiles about machining facilities that are succeeding at lean.

Other resources in this zone include articles on lean-manufacturing concepts such as 5S, setup reduction, value-stream mapping, cells and chaku-chaku—as well as a variety of articles specifically focused on lean in the job shop.

A recent article of interest highlights the lean journey at KLH Industries. Their journey is one where lean fizzled after some initial success.

Company president Ken Heins knew he needed to find a way to make lean stick. He had studied lean, and understood the potential that a commitment to lean manufacturing would have for improving the focus, responsiveness and efficiency of his machining business. The problem was that he couldn’t do it himself. He couldn’t even do it with a group of lean champions around him. For a culture of lean to take hold at KLH, more of the employees would have to look at the workflow as he had come to see it, and integrate an understanding of lean into the way they go about their work.

However, they found the secret to succeeding in changing a company’s culture which is so necessary to sustain lean transformations.

The solution that KLH found is this: Get everyone involved. Instruct everyone so that every set of eyes is trained to look for waste. The parts do not repeat, but the processes do. And who better to see how to improve these processes than the people who interact with them every single day?

KLH also made a number of other important changes to prevent them from fizzling out in the future:
1) pay attention to the little things to sustain commitment
2) create custom shadow boards for machine tools for consistency
3) implement kanban to prevent running out of materials
4) incentivize improvement suggestion and implementation
5) create an environment where failure is acceptable and valuable

I particularly like this last line in the article about the importance of failure and success as a necessary part of the lean process.

The lean journey progresses this way—through both successes and failures. The point of lean is eliminating waste, and no time is wasted that is spent on trying a promising idea.

Some companies and management miss this key point. Lean is about the journey, not the destination. Results will come if you keep your focus on the process to get to the results and not the results themselves.

Good Urgency vs Bad Urgency

The challenge for many leaders of continuous improvement is two fold. First, you must inspire the desire or enthusiasm necessary to change. Second, you must harness this energy in the right direction. To make this change real and combat complacency, the death of many an organization, leaders seek to create a sense of urgency. John P. Kotter, a Harvard Business School Professor and author of A Sense of Urgency, was recently interviewed by Inc.com about leading during a recession.

Kotter believes there are two kinds of urgency -- and, like cholesterol, one is good and one is bad. The good kind is characterized by constant scrutiny of external promise and peril. It involves relentless focus on doing only those things that move the business forward in the marketplace and on doing them right now, if not sooner. The bad kind -- to which many companies have recently succumbed -- is panic driven and characterized by breathless activity that winds up producing nothing demonstrably new.

Kotter advocates using crises like this economic downturn to your advantage when creating a true urgency. He warns that if you use a crisis for urgency it must be managed with clear plans and actions, significant in size, visible, and unambiguous to real business problems.

If you want to tell whether you have bad urgency, Kotter recommends trying the white space calendar test.

There are lots of signs of false urgency. Frenetic activity. Everyone is exhausted, working 14-hour days. One red flag is how difficult it is to schedule a meeting. With true urgency, people leave lots of white space on their calendars, because they recognize that the important stuff -- the stuff they need to deal with immediately -- is going to happen. If you're overbooked, you can't manage pressing problems or even recognize they're pressing until too late.
People think that in urgent situations, they're expected to take on more and more. They're worried about keeping their jobs, so they try to demonstrate their value by being incredibly busy. But the leader should be telling them to do just the opposite. He should say, "I want everyone to look at your calendars. What's on there that doesn't clearly move us forward? Get rid of it!"

In Lean environments change is expected through a constant Plan-Do-Check-Act process of reflection and problem solving. You can always do better and you must strive for True North. To do this you need everyone to make improvements toward your Ideal State.

True urgency is the most important precursor of real change. Seventy percent of change efforts fail or never launch at all, and one reason is that company leaders don't create a sense of urgency around what they're doing.

Kotter was asked about how much attention you should pay to internal issues versus the outside world. His answer in Lean terms is what we call adding value from the voice of the customer.

There should be no meetings that are only about internal matters, without any connection to the outside world. In some way, the outside world always provides the "why" we are doing something.

Many organizations struggle to create the change necessary and many more of them can not sustain the gains of their change. Furthermore, there are many examples of companies picking the wrong sense of urgency and failing. Do you have a true sense of urgency? Does it come from the customer? What does the calendar at your organization look like?

The Eight Wastes of NPD

I am one of those people who believe that there is truly only one reason companies should implement Lean teachings and that is to grow your business. Many may think that there are other reasons but as Eliyahu Goldratt wrote in “The Goal”, the objective is to “make money now and in the future”. There are probably some that believe the goal of business is about customer satisfaction or employee satisfaction but those can not be achieved with out “making money now and in the future”.

For a business to grow profitably there are essentially two elements that are needed: Lean and Innovation. You need innovative products, technologies, and services that people really want. And this all needs to be done with operational excellence to compete in a global consumer driven market.

Many companies refer to the innovative arm of the business as New Product Development (NPD). The application of Lean principles and concepts to efficiently deliver high quality products to market timely with minimal investment is relatively new and therefore limited.

I recently read an article about the Eight Wastes in Lean NPD and thought it was worth sharing. The author debunks the common myths of it won’t work here syndrome and goes on to illustrate how to identify the eight wastes in the NPD process. According to the author the generic definitions of these wastes apply:

1. Motion – frequently going in search of information
2. Transportation – numerous electronic handoffs of information
3. Over Production – poor management drives inefficiencies and overruns of schedule and cost
4. Over Processing – unnecessary design steps, over-engineered products, over-designed, and overly complex processes
5. Waiting – time wasted from a network of dependent tasks along critical path
6. Inventory – build up of unprocessed information
7. Defects – never right the first time, scrap and rework expected
8. Behavioral Waste – underutilized intelligence and intellect

While we are always pursuing continuous improvement by eliminating waste from our processes, Lean is really about learning to “see”. Maybe this will help to illustrate the wastes within the process of innovation which is so important to the goal of growing a profitable enterprise for customers.

Draw a Pig to Learn the Importance of Standard Work

So you might ask what does standard work and drawing a pig have in common. Well, the activity of drawing a pig can be used to teach the importance of standardized work. I learned of this activity a number of years ago during a standard work seminar. It was described in the AME Target Magazine in fall of 2005 in an article called “Wabash National’s Lean Turnaround Experience..

This activity is simple, no cost, and great for everyone. I often use this activity as a teambuilding exercise to kick-off teaching elements of standard work. Paul Levy, President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston put a simple explanation of this exercise on his blog. Round 1 starts with the audience drawing the side profile of a pig. In round 2 you give standard work instructions to the audience to draw the pig. The final round has the audience draws the pig with standard work instructions with visual template for comparison. Everyone will find it easier to draw the pig in the final round. You’ll also find that all the pigs in the audience look that same at the end.

This training is unique in proving a picture is worth a thousand words and the importance of standard work in the elimination of variability from unit to unit. It can be a great ice breaker or team building exercise even if you aren’t specifically teaching standard work.

Resources at the Lean Learning Center

Let’s take an opportunity to look at the resources over at the Lean Learning Center. The Lean Learning Center was founded in 2001 by Andy Carlino, Jamie Flinchbaugh and Dennis Pawley to address the gaps and barriers that are holding back companies from successful and sustainable lean transformation. The biggest failure mode of lean transformation is a general misunderstanding of the importance of a holistic lean approach. Implementation often looks like a collection of lean tools, as opposed to a complete solution where all of the mechanisms work together to evoke change. The Lean Learning Center is committed to developing leaders and learners for lean transformation, and delivering the resources and curriculum to help you learn and gain valuable new skills.

At their on-line Knowledge Center you can find a collection of useful materials including:
Primer on Lean Lingo
Collection of articles and industry publications
Lean Progress Newsletter

The primer is meant to give people new to lean a brief introduction to lean language. Jamie Flinchbaugh writes a column monthly in Assembly Magazine called Leading Lean. You can review those articles dating back to 2006 on their website. The associates at the Lean Learning Center continually engage in research in development and you can learn more about this from their collection of published articles. They also publish a newsletter several times a year where they discuss various lean topics from their experience and perspective.


These reading materials are a convenient source for self learning and for sharing within your organization. The Lean Learning Center is a good place to start research on those new tools you want to implement in your organization.

Visual Task Board Part 1

In a previous post I discussed a formula for success that prioritizes tasks by the Urgency and Importance of the task. I am typically one that uses a list type of priority system arranging my tasks in order of highest priority to lowest. Occasionally, I will hand write a “To-Do” list but it is often electronic in the computer and on my handheld device. Recent posts on various visual boards like Jon Miller’s agile board or Xavier Quesada Allue’s kanban board have inspired me to try my own visual board.

I modified the Important and Urgent axis of the Covey matrix so that the highest priority and most urgent tasks would be closest to me. Below is a pictorial of this modified board.

I work from the lower left quadrant to the low right quadrant tackling the most timely and most important tasks. Then I can move to less important but urgent tasks.

With my old priority system of listing my tasks some of the lower priority items may stay on the list for awhile never really moving. This new system makes you realize those items fit into the upper right quadrant and that these are tasks that should be avoided.

This is the first version of this board. Like everything in Lean this to will be improved.

So far this does help to manage tasks in a visual manner. Next, I will have to create a standard method to review and update this board. Tasks may change in importance and urgency with time. Right now I am reviewing tasks on Mondays to prepare my week for the most success.

What ways do you manage your activities for success?

Six Strategies for Change Leaders

Lean leaders and those who manage change realize well that change is the only constant. In times of recession like today or times of great performance organizations can still learn a great deal from W. Edwards Deming.

Deming tells us, "Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business and to provide jobs."

Have you ever wondered what is inside the heads of lean "change masters"? Well Adam Zak, a lean executive talent recruiter, outlines six strategies that lean leaders should use to create a constancy of purpose and a constancy of change.

1. Embrace change, It’s inevitable. Be first, demonstrate personal commitment to serve.
2. Assume nothing and question everything. Challenge status quo, take action, and drive for results.
3. Get down in the trenches. Go to the Gemba, use teamwork, and learn see the whole situation.
4. Show integrity, always. Do the right things and be courageous in the face of challenge
5. Be transparent. Communicate well and get involved.
6. Inspire and recognize leadership in others. Great leaders know their primary role is to develop and motivate people.

Successful organizations require customer-centric purpose and continuous improvement around safety, quality, and innovation. And the catalysts for this are great leaders who understand the mechanism of change well.