You Don’t Need Quality Police, Focus on Quality Prevention

In some organizations, we might as well give the quality folks a uniform, a badge and a gun. They act like they are the Quality Police. Progressive companies realize you cannot inspect quality into a product.  By the time product is inspected, its level of quality has already been established. The primary means of ensuring a quality product is delivered is not by waiting until the product is assembled to test it. Great companies build quality in from the start and maintain that quality throughout the manufacturing process. To improve quality, you have to improve the process that produced it.

Generally the most effective way to achieve quality is to avoid having defects in the first place. It is much less costly to prevent a problem from ever happening than it is to find and correct the problem after it has occurred. Focusing on prevention activities whose purpose is to reduce the number of defects is better. Companies employ many techniques to prevent defects for example statistical process control, quality engineering, training, and a variety of tools from the Lean and Six Sigma tool kit.

Start with the idea of preventing defects, not waiting until they are identified and correcting them. Many companies have an active Zero Defects policy where defect prevention is paramount and quality inspection is almost just a verification of what they already know – that the product is defect free. If we can start with quality and maintain that quality throughout the process we will have a quality product.

Quality must go beyond our product specification or contracted service. We cannot add it at the end of the line or inspect it into the product. At best that is only a false sense of security. If we want a quality product it must be made with quality processes by quality minded people. A focus on quality must be intrinsic to the company culture and practices for the customer to take notice.

Quality is about prevention—you cannot "inspect" quality into a product. It has to happen before the inspection process.

Lean Quote: Courage is the Key to Great 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.

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." — Winston Churchill

Leadership takes making bold and often unpopular decisions. Effective leadership requires courage - to stand up for what is right, for what we believe in, and to take the necessary risks to be innovative and creative.

The courage of a leader will inspire commitment from their followers. Billy Graham said, "Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are stiffened." When a leader demonstrates courage, it encourages others to want to follow. Seeing the courage of a leader will inspire courage in the followers. A courageous leader is inspirational!

An important lesson I have learned is that the entire workforce wins when everyone shows up to work each day with more courage.  With less fear and more courage, workers take on harder projects, deal better with change and speak up more willingly about important issues. In short, courageous workers try more, trust more and tell more. As a business leader and entrepreneur, your job is to put courage inside of people— to encourage them.

It takes courage to be a change agent, to rise up and lead the way when others are filled with fear. It takes courage to walk in a different direction when others walk along a contrasting path. Most important, it takes courage to drive persistence to overcome resistance…to find comfort outside your comfort zone when the promise of reward is ambiguous.

The courage of true leadership is revealed while still standing in the midst of controversy and challenging circumstances. It is relatively easy and requires little effort to stay in your comfort zone or to do what is convenient. Courage is not required to stay comfortable. Leaders need essential people skills to get people to work together smoothly even if some compromise may be needed. However, it also takes courage to make a stand on what you believe to be right.

 

When it Comes to Improvement Sweat the Small Stuff

You’ve probably heard both of these sayings before.

“Don’t sweat the small stuff.” and “The devil is in the details.”

That first statement would suggest that worrying about small things is a waste of time and resources, while the second statement suggests quite the opposite, telling us to pay very close attention to each detail.

Big breakthroughs at work are really rare. But small wins are something people can experience pretty regularly if the work is chunked down to manageable pieces. This suggests that you really have to sweat the small stuff.

When it comes to attaining success in Lean you have to, “sweat the small stuff;” more often than not the small stuff makes or breaks successful improvement. Even the small things make a huge difference to what your employees think and the way they act.

A key component of continuous improvement is to show progress. It’s not about miracles or heroic solutions or solving massive problems overnight. It’s about building momentum. It’s showing your employees that you’re headed in the right direction. It’s making visible changes, even slight ones, that show you’re doing something. You’re demonstrating that you support them. You’re giving them a reason to trust you. You’re building faith.

Many in today's workforce ignore the “small stuff,” claiming to have an eye on the bigger picture. People with a passion for improvement do sweat the small stuff. They know that it's the small stuff that can make a big difference––possibly the difference between success and failure. If you have any interest in lasting change than start sweating the small stuff because every little thing does count.

Rework Hampers Root Cause Analysis and Improvement

As a customer, you know how you feel when a supplier lets you down by giving you poor service or by failing to deliver the right quantity and quality product at the right time. When the shoe is on the other foot and you are the supplier we see it different.  These situations usually mean that your system has broken down and you need to initiate some form of corrective action, rework, to try to recover the situation.

Nearly every business has some level of ongoing rework. Most product-based businesses have some form of rework when they don’t satisfy the customer with their first effort. It may be that you can’t supply the complete order in one lot, or the quality of the product does not meet the customers’ needs. In service businesses, rework can occur when the customer is not happy with the service and some form of corrective work or follow up is required by the management team. 

Scrap and rework costs are a manufacturing reality impacting organizations across all industries and product lines. No matter why scrap and rework occurs, its impact on an organization is always the same—wasted time and money. Activities that reduce the quality or efficiency of a manufacturing operation or business process, but are not initially known to managers or others seeking to improve the process are referred to as “The Hidden Factory.” Most organizations have some form of a Hidden Factory.

Often, the corrective work occurs so frequently that the management team accepts rework as a normal part of business. This is a very dangerous interpretation of rework as it can hide many problems that should be made to stand out. A close examination of each and every cause for rework can provide improvement opportunities that can really lift business performance.

Instead of trying to fix the rework process (which is Muda), determine the root causes of needing rework/repair and fix those. If priority is given to evaluating and improving your manufacturing processes, it becomes much easier to reduce the amount of scrap and rework in your organization. Remember, Lean is about zero defects.

The first step to understand the size of your rework problem is to set up a monitoring system that will capture the data, including what happened and the reasons why. Building a system to record each individual rework event will establish baseline data that will enable you to assess future progress as your team works to eliminate rework.  This data is also valuable as you can use it to start to understand just how much money is being consumed by the rework process.  It is often surprising to realize the total cost of the hidden factory, but this can provide the strong motivation to attack the causes of rework.

To maintain a competitive edge, manufacturers must constantly find ways to cut costs and improve efficiency. One way companies can save time and money is by preventing scrap and rework. Correcting your systems by finding and eliminating the root causes of rework will result in a much smoother workflow where good days become normal.

Management by the Numbers Makes You Blind, Go Beyond the Numbers

Businesses love numbers and every good business manager loves metrics. After all, the old adage, “You can't manage what you don't measure” still holds true in most management circles.  However, a singular focus on metrics and worse, concentration on wrong metrics, keeps getting executives in trouble.

But here’s the key thing about numbers: they tell a story. They represent the culmination of the work you are doing. The story is a business need. And this is where managing the business and managing by numbers starts to get very important for those of us working in cubes.

People need to measure all types of work so as to be able to tell when things are working right and when things need to be corrected. We need to be able to measure our work for review and update as necessary. Meeting those numbers is critically important.

When managers use numbers to run the business, they are all involved in the story behind the numbers. They want to understand what the numbers are telling them about the state of the business. They want to know so they can change what is being done with the business to make it better.

But when a manager runs the business according to numbers, the world changes. No longer does the story matter. No longer does your input count as to what can make the business better. No longer, even, do logical and rational reasoning make a difference. No longer do innovative ideas on improving the business matter. No, what matters is the number. Not the story.

But there is measuring performance and then there is managing to a number to the exclusion of good business sense. There is a world of difference.

The effort to go “beyond the numbers” by using direct observation has the potential to help manage business efficiently and effectively. If we invest more in understanding people and less in understanding numbers, we’ll start to see the root causes behind performance problems.

Today’s lean management favor more holistic, less quantitative, and presumably more “dynamic” approaches. Know what to measure, and manage the numbers; don’t let the numbers do the managing for you, or of you. Organizations should be flexible, Lean, and focused on people and processes, not numbers.

Lean Quote: Small Improvements Are Believable And Therefore Achievable

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.

"Small improvements are believable and therefore achievable." — Anthony Robbins

In the spirit of doing better, the smallest ideas are likely to be the easiest to adopt and implement. These improvements are sometimes called Point or Mini Kaizen. Making one small change is both rewarding to the person making the change and if communicated to others can lead to a widespread adoption of the improvement and the possibility that someone will improve on what has already been improved. There's no telling what might occur if this were the everyday habit of all team members.

One of the most counter intuitive facts about small ideas is that they can actually provide a business with more sustainable competitive advantages than big ideas. The bigger the ideas, the more likely competitors will copy or counter them. If new ideas affect the company's products or services, they're directly visible and often widely advertised. And even if they involve behind-the-scenes improvements--say, to a major system or process--they're often copied just as quickly. That's because big, internal initiatives typically require outside sources, such as suppliers, contractors, and consultants, who sell their products and services to other companies, too. Small ideas, on the other hand, are much less likely to migrate to competitors--and even if they do, they're often too specific to be useful. Because most small ideas remain proprietary, large numbers of them can accumulate into a big, competitive advantage that is sustainable. That edge often means the difference between success and failure.

In a Lean enterprise a strategy of making small, incremental improvements every day, rather than trying to find a monumental improvement once or twice a year equates to a colossal competitive advantage over time and competitors cannot copy these compounded small improvements.


 

Deploying Lean in a Product Development Process

On The Lean Edge Blog this week a reader asked how to take Lean into product development:

A consumer-products company has recently begun its Lean journey by focusing on Lean fundamentals starting on the shop floor (standard work, 1-piece flow, pull, work to Takt). The company is simultaneously refreshing its product portfolio.  Although the cross-functional New Product Development (“NPD”) team members may have little experience working in a Lean environment, the team nevertheless desires to (1) deploy rapid NPD processes and (2) prioritize its product pipeline to take full advantage of its budding Lean capabilities.  For example, the team believes it should put higher weight on products most relevant to customers who will benefit from (and pay for) its improved service and quality levels.  If you were coaching this NPD team, what advice would you provide?  What Lean tools / resources / would you recommend?

I wanted to share some of my thoughts on the question, so here it goes:

Lean thinking is an enterprise strategy to grow your business profitably. 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.

A Lean Product Development Process comprises 3 basic elements: (1) driving waste out of the product development process, (2) improving the way projects are executed with stage-gate A3 management process, and (3) visualizing the product development process.

The first step in eliminating waste from New Product Development (NPD), and thus improving the process, is to learn to identify the eight wastes.  By closely examining the entire NPD process from a Lean perspective, the opportunities to drive out waste and increase value will become obvious.

Improving the execution of individual activities with the use of Lean tools is the next step.  A stage-gate review process helps to define the process utilized in development while reducing the risk of development.  The A3 management process is used to solve problems, gain agreement, mentor, and lead projects.

The last step is to bring visual factory techniques to your product development process.  Visual boards displaying necessary information provides the status at a glance.  Stand-up meetings in combination with the visual boards allow for optimized communication and with a bias for action.

A couple of years ago I gave a presentation on Lean Product Development at a local conference where I expanded on the items I listed above.

Lean Product Development

View more presentations from Tim McMahon.

Lean is implemented in product development the same way it is in manufacturing or service processes. Predominantly the tools are the same. Sometimes we want it to be more complicated but the thinking is all the same. Start growing your business by deploying Lean thinking in your innovation process.