Five Ways to Find Time for Continuous Improvement

A common question I get on tours of our factory is how do you find time for improvement. My usual response is “we just do” but that is not entirely true.

“You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it.” – Charles Buxton (Philanthropist and Politician)

It is an age-old battle — production time versus improvement time. Two worthy rivals attempting to occupy the same narrow 24-hour space. The issue is not which is more important. Production is! This is as it should be: a company is in business to sell its products and services. It must first make them. And that takes time. Production time always comes first.

Too often improvement is left to chance and the ingenuity of the willing to eke out small pockets of time — and make magic happen. We all know these people. They see the vision burning brightly before them and are determined to make it happen. Time and again, these people prove — with their own mental, emotional, and physical health — the familiar adage: Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Improvement doesn’t just happen.  It takes time, and in the pressure pot of our day to day activities, there is never enough time to improve our situation. The structure of Lean permits and requires time be set aside for improvement. If managers do not definitively provide time for the task of improvement, then people will know that they are not serious about making improvement a formal part of the work.

One of the most common reasons I hear when improvement activity stops is ‘there is so much going on, we’re too busy to find time for improvement. The predominant culture in many organizations is on of firefighting – implementing temporary fixed to problems. Ultimately, however, fire-fighting organizations fail to solve problems adequately. Firefighting prevents us from getting to the root cause. And if we don’t get to the root of problem we will be right back to firefighting soon.

There are some ways to build continuous improvement into your business:

1. Remove roadblocks.
Management’s job is improvement. They must remove roadblocks that hinder this achievement. If managers do not take the time and make the effort to incorporate improvement in their work they are not serious about the effort. It takes time and effort to make changes in the way we do things, but it takes the time to consider and implement those changes if they are to survive in the long run.

2. Look for quick wins.
Don't start by trying to save a million dollars overnight. This is the type of work that makes people think they have no time for continuous improvement. After all, you can only work on so many of these projects at once before you really do run out of time - or you don’t even have the time to get started on any of them. Small, incremental changes can give you quick wins—without disrupting your operations or demanding a huge amount of effort. 

3. Engage and develop entire team to solve problems.
Sometimes supervisors and managers think they need to implement all of the suggested improvements themselves, as in the old suggestion box model where employees point out problems and the boss fixes them (or ignores them or rejects their ideas). This approach results in the boss becoming a bottleneck. 

In a successful culture of continuous improvement, managers accept that they can’t (or shouldn’t!) implement every little idea that their staff come up with. Instead, they empower the staff to act on their own ideas! Successful managers save time by developing their staff as critical thinkers and problem solvers.

4. Doing is more important than thinking
Improvement never comes to you while you are thinking about it. You are what you do. Knowledge is basically useless without action. Good things don't come to those that wait, they come to those that ask what they can do today to learn and move forward now.

5. Never stop.
It’s called “continuous” improvement for a reason. Once you’ve found your first quick win, start looking for the next one right away. A long-term commitment to continuous improvement will help you respond to growth and change—and keep your competitive edge sharp.

Adopting a culture of continuous improvement can benefit both you, your team and your business. Finding a suitable way to begin your never-ending quest toward it doesn’t need to keep you awake at night. Why don’t you start by implementing these 5 ways in order to set yourself up for all the benefits that come hand in hand with improving continuously!

Learn to Discover, Discover to Learn

In the US we are celebrating Columbus Day which recognizes Christopher Columbus who discovered America. This is a good time to talk about the importance of discovery to Lean thinking.  Fundamentally, discovery is the act of detecting something new, or something "old" that had been unknown. Discoveries are often made due to questioning.

Thinking is not driven by answers but by questions. To think through or rethink anything, one must ask questions that stimulate our thought.

Questions define tasks, express problems and delineate issues. Answers on the other hand, often signal a full stop in thought. Only when an answer generates a further question does thought continue its life as such.

Thinking is of no use unless it goes somewhere, and again, the questions we ask determine where our thinking goes. Deep questions drive our thought underneath the surface of things; force us to deal with complexity. Questions of purpose force us to define our task. Questions of information force us to look at our sources of information as well as at the quality of our information.

Encourage a questioning culture.  Urge everyone to question. Ask why several times to try to get to the root cause of problems.  Challenge everyone to think and learn. Because without questioning there can’t be discovery. And without discovery there can’t be improvement.


In the spirit of Columbus Day take some time to discover and learn about your company, your employees, your problems, your processes, and your customers so that you can think Lean improvement.

Lean Quote: Journey, Not a Destination

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.

"Excellence is not a destination; it is a continuous journey that never ends." — Brian Tracy

Lean Thinking is often described as a “journey, not a destination”. In many regards this is true since the best Lean companies have found that their improvement efforts never end. Each set of improvements result in improved bottom-line results but also exposes more opportunity.

Continuous improvement as the name says, is a journey that never ends. There will always be a gap between where you are (current state) and where you would like to be (True North). Since there will always be a gap, there will always be an opportunity to improve.

The road to continual improvement is a rocky one with many ups and downs. Value the incremental improvement approach to continuous improvement. Through simple, common-sense, and low cost experimentation a great deal of process improvements can be made. Experimentation is the exercise of a healthy Lean journey. Understanding this allows one the opportunity to stay on the path along the journey.

Lean doesn’t end after you reach your first set of goals, and it’s not a finite project with a beginning and end date. Rather it’s a way of business life that everyone needs to pursue continuously.

A Lean journey is full of steps not all of which are forward. Failure will occur. Its ok, the purpose is learning, and we learn through experimentation. Trying new approaches, exploring new methods and testing new ideas for improving the various processes is exercise for the mind.

Sustaining the Lean effort and overcoming inertia requires institutionalizing your process. The real benefits of Lean come from a sustained effort over years, not weeks or months.

Lean: Doing More to Get More

A common definition of Lean manufacturing I hear often is paraphrased as “doing more with less”. Honestly, it is my least favorite. I don’t like it because labels like this rarely capture the essence of the approach and minimize Lean. It’s origins come from summarizing Toyota’s results where they we able to do more with less resources.

It is too easy to link this phrase with firing people. Unfortunately, there are too many people who launch Lean with the only objective of personnel reduction. Lean manufacturing is not a head-count reduction system; instead Lean manufacturers understand employees on the shop floor know their work best. Lean manufacturers don’t want employees to work harder, or faster – they want employees to work more efficiently. Lean manufacturing focuses on improving employees, providing more value to the workforce, and, overall, establishing a dependable and stable workforce.

Lean is about doing more to get more, knowing that reducing waste is a growth strategy, a way to help the company be more competitive. Lean is about value — a bigger and more inclusive concept than mere waste. Lean is a systematic way to learn to see the inefficiencies in your processes and to solve these opportunities in such a way to grow the business profitably by adding value the customer will pay for. If you want to be a successful company you will learn to empower and engage the entire organization to focus improvement on value-added work from the customer’s perspective.

Lean is a relentless, continuous, never ending focus on waste reduction. Lean is all about finding better ways to do things, so that they require less effort, less time and fewer resources. It is not about cost reduction – penny-pinching, cutting investment, taking out people – it is about finding better ways to get work done. Traditional cost cutting occurs in silos, without regard to who is affected upstream and downstream. These impacts cannot just negate the initial cost reduction from the unilateral approach, but exceed them. Lean examines each process, internal and external, finding and removing the waste, and reducing cost while maintaining the health of all constituents.

Lean manufacturing means creating more value for customers with fewer resources while we deliver what the customer want, with the quality expected and when they need it.  Value is whatever the customers are willing to pay for.  Less resources means:  less time, less human effort, less machinery, less materials, less space.  

Lean is not easy. It's not easy to understand. It's not easy to implement. And it's especially not easy to sustain. But anyone who has embarked on a so-called lean journey already knows this. Lean, in fact, is hard work and it's a challenge to keep it going.

A label like "doing more with less" just doesn't do justice to Lean and all it is.

Lean Quote: Compounding is the Greatest Mathematical Discovery of All Time

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.

"Compounding is the greatest mathematical discovery of all time." — Albert Einstein

Continuous improvement is about small changes on a daily basis to make your job easier.  Small step-by-step improvements are more effective over time than occasional kaizen bursts, and have a significantly greater impact on the organization culture - creating an environment of involvement and improvement.

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.

The smallest ideas are likely to be the easiest to adopt and implement. 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.

Small victories tap into motivation. Achievement is fueled by making small amounts of progress, such as accomplishing a task or solving a problem. Help employees break projects, goals, and work assignments into small victories. Help them jump into an achievement cycle. 

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.

Have You Seen Tim Woods Today?

Employees want to do their best, sometimes the system or process does not position them to be successful. At times, it can be difficult for employees to see the forest for the trees. Sometimes they cannot see past the mounds of work at hand. This is why Lean Thinking shifts the viewpoint from a worker-centric vantage to the eyes of the customer. The customer’s perspective enables us to understand not only where we might be standing in the forest but also how to navigate through it.

Lean thinkers focus on waste, which we call muda. To make processes more efficient and move closer to the value stream (those steps that take us from beginning to end of a process and which add value), we use lean thinking approaches to remove muda from processes.

There is a handy acronym for knowing the 8 types of waste: “Tim Woods”

Transportation
Transporting items or information that is not required to perform the process from one location to another. While the product is moving, no value is added to it.

Inventory
Inventory and information queued-up between people and processes that are sitting idle not being processed.

Motion
Excess movement by people or equipment only consumes time and resources without producing value. People, information or equipment making unnecessary motion due to workspace layout, ergonomic issues or searching for misplaced items.

Waiting
Idle time created when material, information, people, or equipment is not ready. No value is added while people wait for product to process or product waits for people or machines.

Over-Processing
Performing any activity that is not necessary to produce a functioning product or service. Doing more than what is necessary to generate satisfactory value as defined by the customer.

Overproduction
Waste from producing product that is not currently needed or product that is not needed at all.

Defects
Products or services that are out of specification that require resources to correct. Defects are the result of executed processes that did not produce value.

Skills
The waste of underutilized intelligence and intellect commonly referred to as behavioral waste. When employees that are not effectively engaged in the process.

We encounter muda every day. It is all around us and present in everything we do. Lean thinkers strive to reach perfection—that state where all waste has been removed from a process and only value remains—but so far no one has achieved the desired state. It helps to remember, therefore, the eight types of muda and watch for them in what you do each day. You don’t have to engage in a kaizen event to get rid of all waste, you simply have to identify it and stop doing it.

Starting a Lean journey can be easy, but mastering Lean can take a lifetime. In a Lean world, the only thing worse than finding waste is not taking the steps to get rid of it.

Not seeing is not knowing. The following steps can help you see Tim Woods.

Step 1: Scan the forest from the mountaintop. View the entire workplace from a single standpoint.
Step 2: Observer the woods. Look at the entrance and exit points of each line or cell.
Step 3: Observe the groves. Study machines, people, and materials at each process.
Step 4: Observe the trees. Look at machine motions and people motions.

As you work through the day, ask yourself whether what you are doing fits into TIM WOODS. If it does, then ask yourself if there is way to avoid doing the wasteful step and if you can, eliminate that step. Have you seen Tim Woods today?

Golden Rules for a Successful Kaizen

An essential element in Lean thinking is Kaizen.  Kaizen is the Japanese word for continuous improvement or change for the better. It’s a tool to make work easier, safer, and more productive by studying a process, identifying waste, and applying small incremental improvements that ensure the highest quality. As no process can ever be declared perfect, there is always room for improvement.  Kaizen involves building on gains by continuing experimentation and innovation.

From my experience there are some golden rules to make your kaizen successful:

1. Kaizen starts with the three “Actual” Rule.
        Go to the actual place where the process is performed.
        Talk to the actual people involved in the process and get the real facts.
        Observe and chart the actual process.
        (Improvement is not made from a conference room.)
2. Ask why (5 times) to get to the root cause.
3. Base decisions on data not opinions.
4. Try-storming
        Don’t spend too much time talking about a solution, try it!!
        It’s okay to fail early on as long as you learn from your mistakes.
5. Value of the team.
        Listen to the operators, your team, and your customers.
6. Don’t seek perfection.  This will be obtained one step at a time.
7. Think of a new method that works. Throw out all your old fixed ideas on how to do things.
8. Creativity before capital. Don’t substitute money for thinking.
9. Think safety during the Kaizen, both for employee and process.
10. Assure a quality product will be consistently produced through standardization and process controls.

Not all techniques will work for everyone the same way. Acknowledge what you learn and use what is useful to you. Improvement is made from action.

All improvements must be maintained if we wish to secure consistent gains. Think of the smallest step you can take every day that would move you incrementally towards your goal.