Reducing Wasted Motion Really Pays Off

Eliminating wasted motion is an essential element of Lean manufacturing.  Wasted motion is one of the seven (or eight, depending your school of thought) dealy wastes.  It refers to any unnecessary time and effort required to assemble a product.  Excessive twists or turns, uncomfortable reaches or pickups, and unnecessary walking all contribute to wasted motion and may put error inducing stress upon the operator.

In manufacturing processes small amounts of wasted motion can add up quickly over the course of an entire production run. This video from Assembly Services and Packaging illustrates how optimizing your production line can affect the bottom line.

The Characteristics of a Lean Enterprise

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." 

Over time, it can be said that an organization that implements Lean becomes a Lean Enterprise.  While there is no precise definition of a Lean Enterprise, I believe those organizations share common characteristics.  A Lean Enterprise can be defined by these 15 characteristics:

1. Customer Focus - The external customer is both the starting point and ending point.  Maximize value to the customer.  Optimize not around internal operations, but around the customer.  Seek to understand not only the customer's requirements but also their expectations of quality, delivery, and price.
2. Purpose - The purpose of an organization encompasses your vision (where you want to go), your mission (what you do), and your strategies (how you do it).  Focus on purpose, not tools.
3. Organizational Alignment - You want people to understand their purpose, not just their job description or the tasks that are assigned to them.  All the people involved need to have a common understanding of the organization's purpose, and practical understanding of the consequences of failure and the benefits of success.
4. Knowledge – People are the engine of the company, so it is vital to build knowledge and share it.  This includes explicit knowledge (like that from books) as well as tacit knowledge, involving soft skills.  Knowledge is built through the scientific method of PDCA.
5. Questioning - Encourage a questioning culture.  Ask why several times to try to get to the root cause.  Encourage everyone to question.  "Seek first to understand, then to be understood," said Stephen Covey.
6. Humility - The more you strive for Lean, the more you realize how little you know, and how much there is yet to learn.  Learning begins with humility
7. Trust – Build confidence in your promises and commitments.  Building trust takes time.
8. Empowered employees - Give frontline employees the first opportunity to solve problems.  All employees should share in the responsibility for success and failure. 
   
9. Flexible workforce - As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said "The only constant is change."   Flexibility is the ability to react to changes in customer demand.  The key to success is to maintain redundancy and hence flexibility within the core competency.
10. Partnership - Use teams, not individuals, internally between functions and externally with suppliers.  Employees are partners too.  As Covey says, "You must find a win-win, never win-loose, solution and if you can't you should walk away."
11. Simplicity - Lean is not simple, but simplicity pervades.  Simplicity is best achieved through the avoidance of complexity, than by 'rationalization' exercises.
12. Process - Organize and think by end-to-end process.  Think horizontal, not vertical.  Concentrate on the way the product moves, not on the way the machines, people, or customers move.
13. Improvement - Continuous improvement is everyone's concern.  Improvement should go beyond incremental waste reduction to include innovation breakthrough.
14. Prevention - Seek to prevent problems and waste, rather than to inspect and fix.  Shift the emphasis from failure and appraisal to prevention.  Inspecting the process, not the product, is prevention.  Use poka yoke to mistake proof process errors.
15. Visualization – Visuals translate performance of every process into expected versus actual, throughout the management systems.  It is regular, frequent, and factual data driven.  Visuals provide the opportunity to quickly spot and take action at the earliest point that performance has not met what was expected.

A Lean Enterprise is not created quickly.  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.

How do you define a Lean Enterprise and what characteristics embody that concept?

Lean Quote; July 23, 2010; Change: Isn't It Obvious

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.

Feel free to share some of your favorites here as well.

"The greatest force FOR improvement is resistance to change." ~Eli Goldratt

Do people really resist change?  Or must we show people why this change is necessary.  Make the change effortless and riskless and they will see the positive in it.  Here is a video explaining that written by Eliyahu M Goldratt, author of The Goal to promote his NEW edition of his still relatively new book, Isn't It Obvious.

Now get working on your video to share your experience with overcoming the resistance to change.  The most popular video will get a cash prize.

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Organize with A Thing A Day Challenge

When it comes to organizing, starting can be the most difficult.  For most of us looking at a cluttered area can be a daunting task from the shear magnitude of the effort.

Over at the organization blog Unclutterer an ambitious reader is challenging people to get rid of one item a day.  In less than two months, there are more than 400 posts in the discussion with 59 people already participating in the ATAD Challenge.

The rules are simple and provide immediate rewards.  An explanation about the challenge from the creater:

The challenge is about getting rid of one object a day, for … a month? A year? It’s up to you how long you want your challenge to last.

Whether you give away, trash or donate the object is immaterial, but it must be gone from your life and space. Putting it into storage doesn’t count; though you are allowed to, say, collect the things in a box to donate them at the end of the month.

Oh, and you’re also allowed to cheat and fill your quota ahead of time, like throwing out 7 things on Monday, making that a week’s worth of ATAD.

By telling us on here what you got rid of today will not only help with the accountability issues, you’ll also help others rethink their possessions (He got rid of his xyz? Come to think of it, do I really need mine?)

There are several Lean Lessons to be learned here.  First, when confronted with a large task you should look for ways to break the tasks down into smaller more managable activities.  Second, change is difficult and requires a new habit.  Doing activities frequently (like daily) supports establishing a new habit and routine.  Overtime this becomes the new norm and part of daily life. Lastly, friendly competition can be effective in motivating individuals and teams to change their mindset.

Learning is doing so how can you use this approach in your organization or at home to make a change that you have been putting off.

Common Myths of Bottlenecks

The complexity of operations has increased tremendously since the days of Henry Ford and therefore requiress more thinking.

The identification of the bottleneck becomes much more difficult as we move from the high volume low variety repetitive manufacturing scenario towards low volume high variety job shops and finally to the project environment.

In a recent post I talked about how to identify a bottleneck and leverage a constraint to your advantage.  However, there are several misconceptions or myths about bottlenecks that we need to debunk.

Consider a 6 step process for which the market demand is 13 pieces/hr.  Process "A" can produce 17 pieces/hr, "B" 14 pieces/hr, etc.

 A    à    B   à   C   à   D   à   E   à   F

(17)      (14)      (13)      (12)      (10)      (12)

Myth 1: Any resource whose capacity is less than the demand placed on it is necessarily a bottleneck.

Reality: A resource can be a non-bottleneck even if its capacity is less than the demand placed on it.  In the above example consider operation "B" which can produce only14 pieces/hr, 3 pieces/hr short of the demand from "A".  This is a non-bottleneck operation since it has higher capacity than the market demand.

Myth 2: The resource having highest workload is necessarily the bottleneck.

Reality: A resource can be a non-bottleneck even if its workload is highest.  Process "A" has the highest workload in the sequence.  It is a non-bottleneck operation since the next operation "B" has a lower capacity than "A".

Myth 3: Any resource with a queue before it is necessarily a bottleneck.

Reality: A resource can be a non-bottleneck even if an infinite queue forms before it.  Process "C" will have a queue before it since process "B" has a larger production rate.  However "C" is not a bottleneck since it produces at the market demand of 13 pieces/hr.

Myth 4: The resource having the biggest queue before it is necessarily the bottleneck.

Reality: A resource can be a non-bottleneck even if the queue before it is bigger than all other queues.  Operation "B" will have the largest queue in front of it but again operation "B" produces at a rate more than the demand.

Myth 5: A bottleneck resource is necessarily a critical resource.

Reality: A resource can be a bottleneck even if it is non-critical.  Process "D" is a bottleneck operation since it is lower than the market demand.  This does not mean "D" is critical or not.

The constraint in this system is the bottleneck operation "E".  Increasing the capacity at any operation other than "E" will not change the output of the system.  Understanding reality will help you define a bottleneck so that it can be easily identified in your processes.  Then you can use the 10 principles to manage a constraint to improve your system.

If you enjoy this post you may want to connect with me on Linkedin or follow me on Twitter.  You can also subscribe to this feed or email to stay updated on all posts.  For those Facebook fans join A Lean Journey on our facebook fan page.

Book Review: Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream

I just finished reading the latest publication from the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream by Robert Martichenko and Kevin von Grabe.

The authors define the critical principles of a lean fulfillment stream and the total cost of fulfillment. A fulfillment stream is:

all of the activities that move materials and information from suppliers to end customers: planning, sourcing, transporting, manufacturing, inspecting, sorting, packing, and consuming, as well as managing the entire process.

The total cost of fulfillment is all of the costs of moving material from one end of the fulfillment stream to the other.

These go far beyond the transportation costs most firms calculate to include the carrying and storage costs of inventory, the cost of material handling equipment and labor, and the management time devoted to gathering all of the information needed to constantly monitor performance. These costs also include all of the transport, inventory, handling, and management costs incurred by customers and suppliers along the fulfillment stream.

The authors list eight guiding principles for creating lean fulfillment streams:

1. Eliminate all the waste in the fulfillment stream so that only value remains.
2. Make customer consumption visible to all members of the fulfillment stream.
3. Reduce lead time.
4. Create level flow.
5. Use pull systems.
6. Increase velocity and reduce variation.
7. Collaborate and use process discipline.
8. Focus on total cost of fulfillment.

The process of understanding and improving the fulfillment stream follows the same process of value stream mapping. The current state data includes total lead time, inventory (average days on hand), inventory carrying costs, and perfect-order execution. The execution of a perfect order is characterized by “8 Rights”:

Right quantity
Right product
Right place
Right time
Right quality
Right source
Right price
Right service

The future state vision must include a plan for these 6 areas of the fulfillment stream:

Customer collaboration
Outbound logistics
Shipping, receiving, and trailer-year management
Material ordering
Inbound logistics
Supplier collaboration

The authors stress collaboration across all functions and firms as the way to minimize the total cost of fulfillment. They use about half the book to describe actions that can be taken in the 6 areas to minimize waste in the fulfillment stream. There is a stronger emphasis on total cost of the fulfillment stream rather than customer value. While they list the steps for improvement there is very little discussion about how to engage those parties in the fulfillment stream for such a successful collaboration.

This book is not written for a beginner and can’t stand on it’s own. Knowledge of VSM, takt time, flow, pull, kanban, supermarkets, leveling, PFEP, and PDCA are a pre-requisite for this book. I would recommend combining this workbook with Learning to See, Creating Continuous Flow, and Making Materials Flow LEI Workbooks.



Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream is a much needed and very complementary addition to the LEI workbook series. The workbook is easy to read with lots of illustrations and examples. It highlights a number of supply chain strategies that Lean organizations will want to understand. This is a good place to start for those lean leaders getting ready to tackle improvements in their supply chain. I recommend adding this book to your Lean library today.

Note: Jon Miller, Karen Wilhelm, and Brian Buck have also written about Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream.

 

Lean Quote, July 16, 2010: Leadership

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.

Feel free to share some of your favorites here as well.

"The leader of the past… is a doer; of the present, a planner; of the future, a teacher. Her job is to develop capabilities; not to plan the company's actions but to increase its capacity to act, its responsiveness, and its repertoire…. This kind of leader doesn't need to know everything; on the contrary, she'll want to be surrounded by people who know a whole lot more but trust her to weigh their competing claims." - Thomas A. Stewart.

Leadership has been well studied and written about throughout history.  Fundamentally, leadership is about the capacity or ability to lead so others will follow.  I believe that leadership could be further defined by these characteristics that make-up the word leadership.

LEADERSHIP:

Lead by Example
Encourage the Heart
Appreciate Diversity
Develop People's Potential
Enable and Empower
Realist
Serve
Help/Coach Where Necessary
Inspire a Shared Vision
Process Challenger

UK management thinker and writer, John Adair, has proposes a short course for leadership. Managers wanting to be leaders would do well to consider:

The 6 most important words... "I admit I made a mistake."

The 5 most important words... "I am proud of you."

The 4 most important words... "What is your opinion?"

The 3 most important words... "If you please."

The 2 most important words... "Thank you."

The 1 most important word... "We."

The least important word..."I."

How do you define leadership?  What advice would you give to others?

If you enjoy this post you may want to connect with me on Linkedin or follow me on Twitter.  You can also subscribe to this feed or email to stay updated on all posts.  For those Facebook fans join A Lean Journey on our facebook fan page.