Effective Information Visualization

With today's technology we are swimming in data.  But this data can be useless if we are not able to react to it.  Information needs to be displayed in an easy to interpret manner.  In a previous post I talked about the visualization techniques of Matthias Shapiro in terms of current events.  Now he walks us through the visualization techniques that can be used to figure out what a data set is trying to tell us.



When you are in the Gemba look at your visual information boards and consider the techniques in this video to see if your visualization is effective.  Ask the employees in the area what story the information tells.  If you get the answer you are looking for then it is effective.  If not change the way the inormation is displayed.

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Lean Quote: The Impossible is Untried

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 impossible is often the untried." ~Jim Goodwin

Here is a short inspirational video to illustrate the point of this quote:

My Simple Advice:
Nothing is impossible.  If you never tried it then you would never know if it worked.  Every failure teaches you something if you are willing to learn from your mistakes. Those saying it can not be done should not interrupt those trying it.  Artificial roadblocks are wasteful and counterproductive. Keep trying.  Keep learning.

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Book Review: Clinical 5S for Healthcare

I recently had the opportunity to review the latest publication by ENNA called “Clinical 5S for Healthcare.” This book is authored by Akio Takahara, a leading expert on Lean Healthcare and 5S for the medical field.

The book opens by explaining one of the critical challenges that face hospitals is the chronic occurrence of accidents. Medical accidents are strongly related to the overall workplace environment of the hospital and misunderstandings by humans. The author defines “human error” as follows:

“Human error is essentially a human malfunction that occurs in the process of understanding, decision-making, and carrying out an action. Humans continue to suffer from such failures no matter how much attention is given to trying to not make any mistakes.”

Clinical 5S is the foundation for promoting medical safety and improving operational effectiveness. Implementing 5S allows you to:

Reduce human errors
Prevent patient accidents
Eliminate the waste of searching
Better utilize available work space
Increase patient and colleague satisfaction

The first half of the book explains the true meaning of, and practical methodologies for, 5S implementation. There are several chapters on the procedures and key points to implement 5S in a healthcare setting. Visual management is highlighted in the section on standardize as an effective way to maintain the previous S’s. I certainly agree with this assessment. Four important aspects of visual management are:

“Visualization” allows you to see the condition of work
“Clarification” helps us draw appropriate judgments
“Marking” allows us to identify items
“Sharing Rules” creates a sharing environment

The author claims that the rationale for failing to sustain can be classified by these four causes:

No rules to follow – Manager’s responsibility
Rules not understood – Frontline leader’s responsibility
Unreasonable rules – Manager’s responsibility
Unwillingness to follow rules – Your responsibility

I believe there is more to sustaining than rules but the author is right by saying sustaining is everyone’s responsibility. In my experience people will commit themselves when the reward to do it is greater than that of departing from it.

The second half of the book illustrates a series of case studies of actual 5S implementations that have taken place at Takeda General Hospital under Mr. Takahara’s direction. The best part of this section is the lessons learned from the experience of implementing 5S.

The book has nearly 100 illustrations and photos to help you understand Clinical 5S. However I found a number of the photographs to be hard to see in the black and white format. There are also a several templates in the back of the book used at Takeda General Hospital.

Clinical 5S provides a great introduction and overview of implementing 5S. Unfortunately, it misses the opportunity to present a comprehensive system of maintaining 5S after the initial year. Commitment doesn’t happen on its own. You must create the conditions to make sustaining possible. This generally includes: awareness, enough time, structured activities, management support, rewards and recognition, and employee excitement and satisfaction.

The element of continuously improvement seems to be lost in sustaining 5S. The process of sustaining is in part a review of the ideal state and the current state. This gap in the two states provides for more improvement. It is from this improvement that we convert from reactionary thinking to preventative thinking. Given the premise of the book is to use 5S as a philosophy to reduce errors it would have been beneficial to make this link.

Ultimately, I enjoyed this book and found it to be a practical guide to implementing 5S. Clinical 5S is obviously written for healthcare but certainly could apply to similar institutions. This book is a good place to start for healthcare professionals looking to reduce errors by making their workplace less susceptible to causing mistakes and confusion.

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.

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.

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.