15 Tell-Tale Signs of Eventual Quality Failure Looming in Your Business

The 2010 BP Deepwater Rig Explosion

Product quality problems don’t happen overnight, nor are they the result of a crippled procedure or one poorly conceived policy. The problems have brewed over time, sending out signals that risks to product quality are growing.

A breakdown of quality is not an event. It is a process. Long before a quality failure explodes on the front page of the paper, a company’s quality system has been in trouble because of corporate decisions, policies and programs.

The following are 15 tell-tale signs of eventual quality failure looming in your business:

1. Quality management efforts not connected to competitive strategy or business results.
2. Focus solely on cleaning up messes rather than delivering superior products and customer service.
3. Failure to spread responsibility across the entire organization.
4. Focusing on the external results rather than the internal processes that produce them.
5. Fragmented, partial approaches yielding to "empowerment, without a clear strategy is chaos."
6. Defining quality based on minimum standards.
7. Repetitive and recurring crisis situations. 
8. The external quality message doesn’t match internal practices.
9. Failing to use a corrective action process effectively to eliminate defects.
10. An internal focus that is not aimed at the customer.
11. Performance measures that reinforce quantity over quality.
12. Assuming everyone knows what “nonconforming” looks like.
13. Thinking a common cause to problems is operator error and relying on retraining as a corrective action.
14. Focus on speeding up the customer response to issues instead of reducing the occurrence of issues.
15. Quality management effort not aligned within the company resulting in silos of execution.

Although quality management practices have been implemented by many organizations all over the world, such implementations have often failed. This failure rate is largely attributed to the lack of integration between quality management practices and business strategy.

In a world of increased competitiveness and demanding customers who expect to have the highest quality products at the lowest possible prices, quality is widely recognized as a source of competitive advantage and is increasingly elevated to strategic importance as an essential determinant of success. Hence, the relationship between quality management and strategy is of great interest to practitioners.

Lean Quote: Eliminate Rework and Scrap to Save Time and Money

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.

"If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?" — John Wooden

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.

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.

To maintain a competitive edge, manufacturers must constantly find ways to cut costs and improve efficiency. As this quote from John Wooden embodies 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.

 

10 Signs of a Non-Lean Manager Who Disengages the Workforce

Companies with poor management practices typically have employees who are disengaged. While a disengaged workforce is a symptom of substandard leadership, just what constitutes bad management? Here are a few problematic practices and signs I believe should be axed:

1. Bad Communication

Few things cause employees to tune out faster than a management team that keeps the company's future direction to itself. Successful Lean leaders see the larger picture and will share the vision.

2. Team-Building that Isn't

Fostering a connected team is an important practice, but before implementing group events and activities, be sure members of your team won't feel left out. Getting to know your team members is generally an effective way to build collaboration and a sense of joint purpose.

3. Little or No Training

According to a 2011 report from Accenture, 55% of workers in the U.S. say they are under pressure to develop new skills, but only 21% say their companies have provided training to learn those new skills within the last five years. Training is a lever that changes the rate of improvement you can achieve.

4. Preventing Follow-Through

Most employees like to feel their work has meaning. If they don't get this kind of satisfaction, they lose motivation, according to a number of research studies. One sure way to demean an employee's work is to move them off a project before it's completed. Lean leaders must follow-up on employee ideas.

5. Ruling by Fear

Managers who rule through rigid control, negativity, and a climate of anxiety and fear don’t trust that they can get things done any other way. Of course, it backfires in the end because fearful employees won’t bring up new ideas for fear of being attacked and won’t be honest about problems. Moreover, very few great people with options are going to want to work for a fear-based manager.

6. A Failure to Develop Others

Leaders who are not concerned about helping their direct reports develop and are not seen as coaches or mentors are highly likely to fail. Primarily focused on themselves, they are not concerned about the longer-term success of their employees or their department.

7. Failure to Improve and Learn from Mistakes

Arrogance and complacency combine in the poorest leaders as they rise, causing them to come to the dangerous conclusion that they’ve reached a stage in their careers where development is no longer required. Closely connected to this failing is an inability to learn from mistakes, leaving these unfortunates to repeat the same ones over and over.

8. Failure to Walk the Talk

Saying one thing and doing another is the fastest way to lose the trust of all your colleagues. The worst offenders here also pose a wider threat as dangerous role models — creating the risk that their organizations will degenerate if others behave as they do.

9. Lack of Data

Many managers rely on gut instinct to make important decisions, which often leads to poor results. On the contrary, when managers insist on incorporating facts and evidence, gathered from direct observation at the source they make better choices and their companies benefit. Lean companies however strive to empower their employees to make decisions at all levels through access to data, knowledge of evaluation methods, and defined standard processes.

10. You Always Have Emergencies

Business is sometimes unpredictable. But the fact that things are unpredictable is, well, predictable. As a Lean manager, it's your job to assess the situation and plan in advance. Occasional emergencies are understandable, but constant ones mean that you're not doing what you need to do. Sometimes that involves pushing back against your superiors and protecting your people. It means scheduling according to actual needs, and if you don't have the budget for that it often means changing the definition of need.

Hopefully, your manager or company executives do not exhibit these faults. Perhaps understanding the signs on non-lean leaders can better help us recognize those of Lean leaders. Those managers who truly know Lean understand the benefit comes from developing people to think and improve their own process the more they define the role as influencing or coaching. A Lean leader must be relentless in teaching and expecting learning through actual practice.

Book Review: The Laws of Subtraction

Less is indeed more in our age of excess in everything. Our lives have become complicated, overwhelming, and more demanding.  Award winning author Matthew E. May has an answer for this in his book The Laws of Subtraction. Subtraction is defined simply as the art of removing anything excessive, confusing, wasteful, unnatural, hazardous, hard to use, or ugly … or the discipline to refrain from adding it in the first place.

The Laws of Subtraction provide insights and lessons towards removing the clutter and honing in on the essence in order to awaken the creativity and innovation that generally gets buried under a deluge of non-essential information. Through a series of excellent stories that serve as examples for his laws in action, May highlights the unique features of these laws and their applicability to everyday life, both professional and personal.

May has distilled years of research on achieving maximum effect through minimum means into six simple rules:

Law #1: What Isn't There Can Often Trump What Is

"When you reduce the number of doors that someone can walk through, more people walk through the one that you want them to walk through." – Scott Belsky, founder and CEO of Behance and author of Making Ideas Happen

Law #2: The Simplest Rules Create the Most Effective Experience

“Keeping it simple isn't easy. By exploiting subtraction in innovation, we've been able to create an environment of freedom and creativity that allows us to thrive." – Brad Smith, CEO, Intuit

Law #3: Limiting Information Engages the Imagination

"Subtraction can mean the difference between a highly persuasive presentation and a long, convoluted, and confusing one. Why say more when you can say less?" – Carmine Gallo, author of The Apple Experience: Secrets to Building Insanely Great Customer Loyalty

Law #4: Creativity Thrives Under Intelligent Constraints

“Here’s the key to the conundrum for managers who want to stoke the innovation fire: That close cousin of scarcity, constraint, can indeed foster creativity.” – Teresa Amabile, author of The Progress Principle

Law #5: Break Is the Important Part of Breakthrough

“If you kill the butterflies in your stomach, you’ll kill the dream. Embrace the feeling. Save the butterflies.” – Jonathan Fields, author of Uncertainty

Law #6: Doing Something Isn’t Always Better Than Doing Nothing

“When we’re faced with the greatest odds against us, often we need to edit rather than add.” – Chip Conley, cofounder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality and author of Emotional Equations

In each chapter, May introduces you to a few illustrative examples of how a particular law was applied in a powerful way. He uses philosophy and science to explain why a certain law is so effective. One of the many reasons that reading this book is a pure pleasure is that his writing style, storytelling and illustrations reinforce his core message that less can be more... and more meaningful.

While writing this book, Matthew May invited some 50 people to be guest contributors, sharing their thoughts, feelings, and experiences about subtraction. At the end of each chapter is a series of one page articles written by these "guest authors" giving their view of the topic. I found these to be some of the best part of the book. Each author has their own gems of wisdom. By distilling them to one page, we get the best from each author.

May both challenges you and helps you think a bit differently by using subtraction to better with less. The art of subtraction: when you remove just the right thing in just the right way, something good usually happens. So if you wanted to be informed and inspired about doing better with less than The Laws of Subtraction is your guide.

I highly recommend Matthew E. May’s The Laws of Subtraction for anyone who wants to simplify and improve the quality of work and life.

Disclosure: The publisher provided me a copy of The Laws of Subtraction for review.

Top 10 Reason Why Lean Transformation Fails

I believe when Lean principles are properly understood and applied, the upside for productivity improvements is nearly infinite. I have personally witnessed numerous Lean thinking initiatives that have improved productivity by large amounts (like 40-60%) in short periods of time with minimal expenditures.  The Lean track record is well documented by numerous authors.

Despite the enormous popularity of Lean, the track record for successful implementation of the methodology is spotty at best. Some recent studies say that failure rates for Lean programs range between 50 percent and 95 percent. The basic reason why the implementation of Lean fails at most companies boils down to the culture.

In my experience these are ten reasons why Lean implementation fails:

1. No Strategy

Companies must determine ahead of time what the vision and direction will be. A proper strategy must assign clear responsibilities and show what resources are to be committed. Metrics and timelines must be defined. Management must decide what core elements are to be deployed and the order of deployment. They also must determine where to start and how Lean will expand throughout the operation. Finally, the strategy should anticipate problem and recovery scenarios. This is critical. Companies can fail by attempting too much. They also can fail by attempting too little and assigning the initiative to a "backburner" status.

2. No Leadership Involvement

Lean requires top-to-bottom leadership of a special kind. Lean leaders are firm and inspiring, relentless and resilient, demanding and forgiving, focused and flexible. Above all, they have to be smart and highly respected in the organization. Every successful company has at least one of these leaders. These people must be a passionate part of the Lean leadership team.

3. Relying on Lean Sensei/Champion

Expertise obviously is necessary. So is critical mass. There must be a sufficient amount of knowledge among a sufficient number of people for lean to work initially and spread. Further, the expertise must reside with line people as well as staff. Everyday support must come from important, respected line managers who have the most to gain or lose and have the power and authority to make things happen. Reliance on an outnumbered staff expert who has no line authority to implement lean simply is not realistic. Deployment and implementation can fail before it starts without a strong implementation team

4. Copying Others

Some enterprises think they will get desirable effects by applying Lean tools that others have gotten great achievements. Successful implementation of any Lean tool must be closely related to the management philosophy  So we can’t succeed by imitating and copying practices of others indiscriminately, it must be combined with local culture.

5. Thinking Lean Is A Tool

Lean implementation can not be treated as a delegated "project." Lean manufacturing is not a project. It is a fundamental change in the value delivery system. Top management must be in front of this.

6. Lack of Customer Focus

Many companies do Lean for internal cost reasons rather than external and customer-focused reasons. The focus of Lean is on providing the customer with more value sooner. Without customer focus, Lean management techniques are difficult to employ.

7. Not Engaging Employees

Employee participation in project decision making is a main principle affecting innovation, productivity, and work satisfaction. Workers typically have more complete knowledge of their work than does management; hence, if workers participate in decision making, decisions will be made with better pools of information.

8. Not Educating Employees

Lean training is crucial, obviously. But the content, level, and depth vary by the company and its needs, activity, and function. It goes back to the business case. Training needs to be appropriate for the Lean elements to be deployed.

9. Lack of Understanding

Most management teams don’t understand Lean. When we don’t understand something it is next to impossible to support it. This lack of understanding of Lean by management allows even the most subtle of things to derail Lean efforts.

10. Conflicting Metrics

Lean requires metrics that focus on the processes of value creation and their associated costs. Traditional cost accounting techniques such as absorption, as well as individual machine and employee performance, can cause a lot of non-Lean behavior. Lean accounting ties directly to financial measures but focuses on performance of the entire value delivery system.

Lean implementation is not simple or easy. However, results show that, when done properly, Lean lives up to its promises. Lean and its elements work. All of the failure modes presented here can be avoided or overcome.

If you want Lean to succeed in your organization, management has to become a student of Lean in order to be a successful sponsor. In other words, you have to apply Lean to your management process first in order to understand how to apply it to others.

Lean Quote: Success Requires Passion in the Face of Failure

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 stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm." — Winston Churchill

To err is completely human, so you should not be afraid of the mistakes you may make and of course, you should never hide them. Nobody likes to make mistakes. However, the simple reality of life is that at some point, all of us are going to be wrong. That’s just life. We are going to make mistakes.

Treat every mistake as an opportunity to learn and grow. Don’t feel stupid or doomed forever just because you failed at something. You can always find other opportunities.

A colleague of mine always said, “Learn to fail quickly.” Essentially, if you are going to fail you need to learn to do it quickly in order to get the data (results) that you can use to gradually improve. The faster you get at learning from unforeseen circumstances and outcomes, the faster you can find a solution that truly adds value.

If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not improving. Henry Ford said, “Failure is merely an opportunity to begin again knowledgeably.” Failure can be an inevitable stepping-stone to great achievement.

Fear of failure is a genuinely scary thing for many people, and often the reason that individuals do not attempt the things they would like to accomplish. But the only true failure is failure to make the attempt. If you don't try, you gain nothing, and life is too short a thing to waste.

But to have success, management must create an environment where it is safe to fail. Failure is an expected part of the process of finding solutions. If workers feel that they have to “hit one out of the park” every time they come up with an improvement idea, they will be reluctant to provide their ideas. In a Lean environment, failure and success should be met with the same level of enthusiasm and support.

The ability to go through failures without losing enthusiasm starts from a passion, or some form of inner fire. If that’s missing, then every failure is going to be a huge blow able to stop you. If you have passion, than it’s going to be a huge bang able to make you stronger.

Passion is literally the fuel that propels you toward success. Passion allows you to think, feel, focus, act, attract and create the events conditions and circumstances that you most desire to see you through difficult times. Passion is what propels you to begin taking the necessary action steps that will allow you to begin changing your current situation.

Results don’t happen based on what you want, but rather what you desire and a passion for achieving them.

 

Small Teams vs Keeping Everyone Informed

In response to the post “Collaboration Techniques for Moving Ideas & Decisions Forward” a reader on our Facebook page recently asked “How do you reconcile between keeping everyone involved and keeping the team small?”

Highly empowered and effective teams are the key to compete in today’s world of high technology processes, six sigma quality and continuous innovation. We all have roles in our organizations but it is the power of teamwork that makes our endeavors successful. It takes everyone working together on a common goal to be successful in Lean. Teams are the engines that deliver successful process improvements.

Smaller teams are more efficient than larger teams. Smaller teams means being nimble, flexible and hungrier, which help them to be more customer oriented than larger teams and organizations. Small and stable teams over a period of time, develop the togetherness and bonding which large teams can seldom replicate.

Communication and coordination overhead rises dramatically with team size. In the worst possible case where everyone on the project needs to communicate and coordinate with everyone else, the cost of this effort rises as the square of the number of people in the team. That’s such a powerful effect, in fact, that a large team couldn’t possibly hope to achieve the goal of everyone coordinating their effort. But a small team could.

Smaller teams have lesser decision lags, act faster, are quicker to change and provide a good breeding ground for innovation. It’s easier for the smaller teams to look in 'one' direction and communicate effectively than it is for any large group. Also, there's less of pointing fingers, no working in 'silos' and 'escapism', given the small size of the team, which brings in more accountability and ownership. All of this produce more value to the customers, better profitability for the organization and more purpose for the people involved.

Getting the buy in from those who are not participating on the team is important for sustaining the improvement.  When you are part of team you are involved in the solution.  For those who are not we need to make them aware of the improvements the team is making.  If you don't they will naturally resist the improvement.

It is the job of those on the team to share with those who are not. For instance perhaps you have a multi shift operation and you have an operator on second shift participate on the team. It would be their responsibility to share what the team is thinking and the solutions with their second shift colleagues. Any feedback from their colleagues can be brought back to the team meetings for consideration. 

Also, at the end of the team activity there should be a readout to a larger audience. This presentation helps to document and spread the knowledge to the area affected as well as others. Some times this can also take the form of an A3. Many organizations even share these visually in their facility for all to see.  And of course there should be some standard work coming out of the improvement to train everyone to the new way. Keep in mind this is the new standard and not the standard forever.

The last thing I would add is that this concern for involvement only occurs when the activity is large.  As I have said many times Kaizen is not about big events but rather small continuous improvements. In this way small improvement is less disruptive and easier digested.

While we can’t involve everyone in every activity because of efficiency and practicality the methods above can be used to keep them informed. Smaller teams are more efficient but we also know there are many sizes of improvement activities along the Lean journey. Communication and education are the single best levers for change the speed of improvement.  So the best I can offer is to keep learning and deducing to practice with an eye for improvement.