Lean Quote: It's Supposed to be Hard

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.

"Of course it’s hard. It’s supposed to be hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. Hard is what makes it great." — Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks), A League of Their Own

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.

Lean is a process. It's a culture. It's a system. And at its core, Lean seeks to optimize manufacturing processes and reduce or eliminate waste — everywhere in the value stream.

But Lean is not a quick fix and you cannot pick and choose the tools you use.   The key to ongoing success is to embed Lean as a philosophy, and a requirement in everybody’s role; ensuring the right levels of line-management responsibility and accountability for gradually implementing the various tools and techniques that support it.

Implementing Lean, or any change initiative is difficult.  If it wasn’t, everyone would be doing it, and they’re not.  The answer is that the philosophy, tools and techniques are relatively simple, the hard bit is the culture, people, training, employee acceptance and ultimately perseverance and endurance as improvement does not happen overnight.

 

Book Review: Management Lessons From Taiichi Ohno

It can be invaluable to learn from the creator of a system and the book “Management Lessons from Taiichi Ohno” does just that. Takehico Harada is the author of this comprehensive and informative guidebook into the Toyota Production System (TPS) and to the man who invented it, Taiichi Ohno. Mr. Harada shares firsthand knowledge of tools, techniques, and challenges to deploying Lean from 4 decades of practice applying Lean principles.

The book was translated by Brad Schmidt, a Lean consultant living in Japan. While written to keep the integrity of the original he added his own comments and clarifications to drive home key learnings.

The book is organized into four chapters. In chapter 1 is a collection of 15 sayings directly from Taiichi Ohno.  These illustrate the importance of the role of top management in the deployment of Lean.

Here are the 15 ”sayings” of Taiichi Ohno that Harada wrote down, each of which he discusses.

1. “No One Really Understood What I was Saying, So I had to Go to the Gemba (“the real place”) and Give Detailed Instructions” (7-11)

2. “Kaizen Equals Getting Closer to the Final Process” (11-17)

3. “You Need by the [Assembly] Line Only the Parts for the Car You Are Assembling Now” (17-20)

4. “Building in Batches Stunts the Growth of Your Operations (Don’t Combine Kanbans [improvement systems] and Build a Group of Them” (20-24)

5. “Nine Out of Ten, One Out of Ten” (24-29)

6. “The Foreman or Leader Is the One Who ‘Breaks’ the Standard (When You Make an Improvement and You Can Take Out One Person, Give Up Your Best Person” (29-32)

7. “Multitasking Means Learning the Next Process — Keep It Flowing Until You Reach the Last Process” (32-35)

8. “What’s That Red Circle on the Top Right of the Graph?” (35-39)

9. “Are You as the Manager Having Them Do It, or Are They Just Doing It Their Way? Which Is It, Man?”(39-41)

10. “Standard Work for the Andon [indicator of a problem] Is, ‘Go There When It Flashes'” (42-45)

11. “Standard Work Is the Foundation of Kanban” (45-49)

12. “When the Worker Pushes the Start Button, He Has Stopped Moving. Can’t You Guys Figure Out a Way to Push Start While Still Moving?” (45-52)

13. “You Bought an Expensive Machine, and Now You Want an Expensive Foreman or Engineer to Run It? Are You Mad?” (52-55)

14. “Engineers in Production Become the Horizontal Threads in the Cloth” (55-60)

15. The Lowest Kanban Quantity Should Be Five” (60-63)

  

Chapter 2 goes into more detail on what exactly top management should do and how to go about doing it. Harada introduces the four categories of things:

1. Waiting
2. Being Inspected
3. Being Transported
4. Being Processed.

All four of these are needed to complete things however only processing increases value, others just increase cost. Management must understand this way of thinking.

Chapter 3 is about the role of the front line manager. This chapter underscores the importance of having a vibrant and happy workplace to motivate and empower employees. Harada stresses the importance of mutual trust and team work to effectively implement Lean. If you want a successful deployment, then it is imperative that you value the concept of “all of us doing this together, helping one another out, and doing it at the same pace.”

Chapter 4 covers how one would deploy Lean. Instead of a hard road map to implementation, this versatile guide offers a flexible approach with:

• Expert tips for implementing 5S
• A step-by-step action plan for changing organization to align with kaizen principles
• Management techniques for growing employee empowerment and motivation
• Effective strategies to assess flow and decrease waste
• Approaches to encourage Lean in and outside of your company including suppliers

At only 156 pages this book is a quick read which should be desirable for the target audience, managers. The top management and middle management play a very crucial role in ensuring the success of Lean deployment.

I highly recommend Takehico Harada’s Management Lesson from Taiichi Ohno a must read guidebook for change managers in any organization. It fills in the leadership gaps that are needed to make Lean sustainable.

Happy Labor Day

Happy Labor Day to all my American readers! For a lot of people, Labor Day means two things: a day off and the end of summer. However, Labor Day is a day set aside to pay tribute to working men and women and acknowledges the value and dignity of work and its role in American life.

In honor of today's Labor Day holiday, here are nine "interesting office facts":

1. Americans spend at least 1,896 hours a year at work.
2. One percent of U.S. employers allow employees to take naps during working hours.
3. Women business owners employ 35 percent more people than all the Fortune 500 companies combined.

4. Americans now spend more than 100 hours a year commuting to work.

5. More than 50% of lost work days are stress related, keeping approximately 1 million people home from work every day.
6. When we think, we only use 35 percent of our brains.
7. More people walk to work in Alaska than any other U.S. state.

8. The average office worker spends 50 minutes a day looking for lost files and other items.

9. Forty percent of worker turnover is due to job stress.

10. People spend one in every four and a half minutes online on social networks and blogs.

Americans need today's holiday, since we work more than anyone in the industrialized world. We also take fewer vacations, work longer days, and retire later. And the trend is not positive. One expert concluded back in 1990 that we work nearly one month more per year than in 1970, and time pressures have only gotten worse since.

We celebrate Labor Day because we are all in this world of work together. Let’s enjoy the fruits of our labor and the solidarity of workers, the work we do, and the nation and economy we and our parents and their parents have built. Happy Labor Day!

Lean Quote: No Time for Improvement

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.

"Don’t be too busy mopping the floor to turn off the faucet!" 

— Overheard by Colleague

Whether a company has just switched to Lean production or is still using a traditional manufacturing approach, if it does not establish an official improvement time policy, very little improvement will ever happen there.

We have seen this everywhere, even in companies which loudly proclaim their commitment to continuous improvement. Little or no actual time is set aside to do the very improvement the company says it wants.

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.

Without an improvement time policy, however, the danger is that needed improvements will never happen.

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.

In a sad and important way, these quiet heroes do their companies and the rest of us some bit of harm. When they make magic happen, in the absence of a clearly defined, improvement time policy, they unintentionally send the message that separate time is not needed. Wise, indeed, is the company that sees through this double-think and takes steps to establish the policy nevertheless.

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.

Most of us don't set aside time in the day, much less the week, just to improve. It doesn't take much time or skill, mainly just will. We need to be encouraged and reminded that it only takes a few minutes to do kaizen. Without assistance from management, people have no good way to make time for improvement within the workday.

There can be no improvement without the time and resource commitment from management to solve problems.

 

Creating Flow is Critical to Driving Improvement

A Lean Enterprise is centered on the concept of flow. Flow is one of five key Lean Principles identified by Womack and Jones in their book Lean Thinking. They stressed that you need to make value flow. It was this creation of flow that would make it possible to eliminate waste. When material and information flow continuously, there is less waste in the system. This is true by definition. If there were a lot of waste, material and information would not be flowing.

The first step is to focus on the analyzing the value stream. Find out why the inventory is necessary and what purpose the work in progress is serving, then reduce the amount of things that are waiting around.  If frequent machine breakdowns are the problem, then focus on the machine and reduce the stoppages. If the quality is unstable, then repair the equipment and standardize the workers’ processes to reduce variability. If people are holding inventory because they are afraid of running out of parts, then talk with the leader of the area and decide how many parts should be held.  As the ability of the area improves, the inventory can be reduced accordingly. Focus on the foundation of the value stream. Keep reducing the amount of things waiting around and get closer to flow.

Once the amount of things that are waiting is reduced this will mean that you have less time to solve problems that occur in everyday operations.  Problems will appear faster, and also will affect other areas faster. This is actually the desired result. Many things in the company will now have to speed up to prevent production stoppages. Once you get enough strength, you can continue to reduce the amount of inventory.

Creating flow gets production and engineering involved. People have to come up with improvement ideas. Kaizen involves every employee - from upper management to operators. Everyone is encouraged to come up with small improvement suggestions on a regular basis.

Once you get to one-piece flow then you can make a Kanban for the line and start with a downstream pull system. As the name suggests, creating flow is about making and moving one item at a time (or the smallest batch size possible) through a series of uninterrupted steps, with each step in the process making exactly what is requested by the next step while never knowingly passing poor work forward.

Flow is often not actively pursued because people feel it is more realistic to eliminate waste from work processes, introduce workplace organization through 5S or apply other lean tools. This is a mistake – it turns out that, when you introduce flow into any process, problems (i.e., opportunities to deliver customer value) become vividly apparent and demand immediate attention. Introducing flow can be a bit scary, but it can also sharpen your focus on improvements that will be immediately felt by your customers!

A consistent flow of work is essential for faster and more reliable delivery, bringing greater value to your customers, team, and organization.

Lean Quote: Teamwork

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.

"Respect your fellow human being, treat them fairly, disagree with them honestly, enjoy their friendship, explore your thoughts about one another candidly, work together for a common goal." — Bill Bradley, American Hall Of Fame Basketball Player, Rhodes Scholar

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.

A team of people can achieve far more than the sum of the total of the individuals skills alone. In business teams can achieve:

They can generate a wider range of ideas and innovation than individuals;
They are able to motivate themselves;
They can bounce ideas off each team member;
They often take more risks than individuals;
They have a range of personalities such as workers, thinkers, leaders who contribute the right balance of skills necessary to achieve high performance;
They support each other and are not just task-orientated;
They can be a support mechanism which provide mentoring and allow others to grow in self-confidence.

Teamwork is important to the success of an organization, but as the saying goes: “it’s like getting rich or falling in love, you cannot simply will it to happen.” Teamwork is a practice. Teamwork is an outcome. And teamwork leverages the individual skills of every team member.

To create effective teamwork across your organization, you need to break down any departmental barriers to collaboration so that you can draw on the best people. You need to set clear objectives and define working relationships so that members can work as a cohesive team, and you must provide tools that support efficient collaboration.

Most people respond well to being a valued member of a team by putting forth their best efforts. Human beings are hard wired to work cooperatively with one another to achieve common goals, so remember that not all performance rewards need to go to individuals. Incentives can be provided to the team as a whole for working efficiently together to reach goals.

Collaboration and team work create an environment that allows the collective knowledge, resources and skills of each team member to flourish. When people work together they can complete tasks faster by dividing the work to people of different abilities and knowledge. Teamwork can lead to better decisions, products, or services.

 

Daily Lean Tips Edition #83 (1246-1260)

For my Facebook fans you already know about this great feature. But for those of you that are not connected to A Lean Journey on Facebook or Twitter I post daily a feature I call Lean Tips.  It is meant to be advice, things I learned from experience, and some knowledge tidbits about Lean to help you along your journey.  Another great reason to like A Lean Journey on Facebook.

Click this link for A Lean Journey's Facebook Page Notes Feed.

Here is the next addition of tips from the Facebook page:

Lean Tip #1246 – Implement a Continuous Learning Strategy

Make it clear to your employees that most learning happens past the initial training. Employees will be less stressed because their development will occur gradually over time, rather than be front-loaded at the start. It also makes it clear that your first priority is their well-being, which translates into higher workforce morale.

Lean Tip #1247 - Foster a Work Environment that Encourages Continuous Learning

Replace the idea of training with capability development. This empowers the employees to be more self-motivated and more likely to want to improve themselves. Build a culture around employee satisfaction and improvement. Integrate continuous learning into daily routines.

Lean Tip #1248 - Offer Consistent Feedback to Employees

Communication is key for finding areas of improvement and adapting to your employees’ needs. Experience-based feedback with actual work context is much more effective than feedback based on rout training. Give your employees concrete goals and paths to improve their work.

Remember that communication goes two-ways. Take feedback from your employees as well, to help improve your own continuous learning strategies.

Lean Tip #1249 - Leverage Technology as a Learning Tool

Use a variety of multimedia options to encourage learning from many different angles. People have different ways of learning, through audio, visuals, text or hands-on approach. Creating multiple solutions for training ensures that employees can learn at their own pace and in a manner they are comfortable with.

Lean Tip #1250 – Continuous Learning Makes Employees Satisfied

Think of continuous learning as smoothing out the bumps and valleys of your employees’ learning curve. A front-loaded strategy has a huge spike right at the beginning that demands a lot out of your employees. This may have a negative effect in their motivation, stress levels and skill proficiency. Implementing continuous learning straightens this curve out.

Lean Tip #1251 – Be Willing to Teach or Mentor Others

I think sometimes we forget how much we know. Maybe we know something so well we do it automatically. Be willing to give others a hand and teach them what you know. Plus something magical happens when you teach someone something—you begin to understand it better yourself and deepen your mastery of that subject.

Lean Tip #1252 – Strive to Learn Something New Each Day

Approach life with a beginner’s mindset and look constantly for one new tidbit or a new way to expand your expertise or knowledge. Be open to learning and at the end of the day reflect on what you learned or sometimes maybe even relearned. Journal, meditate or contemplate the ideas you have learned to help ingrain the lessons learned. Then you can decide how to put it into practice.

Lean Tip #1253 - Follow Your Intuition For Better Learning

Lifelong learning is like wandering through the wilderness. You can’t be sure what to expect and there isn’t always an end goal in mind. Letting your intuition guide you can make self-education more enjoyable. Most of our lives have been broken down to completely logical decisions, that making choices on a whim has been stamped out.

Lean Tip #1254 - Schedule Time for Learning

It is too easy to say that you didn’t have time to partake in some form of development. The best way to find time is to make it. Put aside some time every day, week, month and even year to allocate towards continuous learning and development. Allocated daily time could be 5 minutes every morning to read the latest industry headlines, for instance. Weekly time could be apportioned to catching up with a leading industry periodical or journal. Over the longer term, managers could dedicate a handful of days towards conference or course attendance.

Lean Tip #1255 – Continuous Learning is a Process of Constant Evolution

In any organization, continuous learning means growth through learning events and experiences. It can be applied to individuals, team, and organizations- a process that will help them to achieve their overall objectives.

Undergoing a continuous learning process entails change; one cannot learn and still be the same person, team, or organization. There is a constant evolution in the way we think and act, brought about by new understanding, new knowledge, and new skills.

One of the worst phrases that any person or entity can say is “I already know that” because this can very well destroy any chances of continuous learning. And when there is no learning, there is no growth.

Lean Tip #1256 – Don’t Try to Measure Too Much

It sounds like a contradiction, but measuring too much can actually have an adverse effect on your business operations. There are an intimidating number of ways to measure a business, and trying to measure everything will leave you exhausted and will stop you focusing on what’s important. Think of it like setting out to eat a chocolate mountain – tempting, but eating it in one go will make you sick.  It’s better to take one bite at a time. Pick just one objective for your business to measure in its initial stages as you begin to develop your KPIs.

Lean Tip #1257 - Only Measure What’s Important to Your Organization

There are lots of practices that a business can measure, and as illustrated in Point 1, it’s inefficient to measure absolutely everything. So you need to figure out what the priorities are for your business and thus what KPIs you should set to measure the most important activities within your organization.

Lean Tip#1258 - Don’t Design Business Measures for Somebody Else.

Don’t design measures for a staff member or team without their involvement. The measures will fail unless you involve those people in the process. Work with the people concerned and they will have higher ownership of the measures produced and more buy-in to using them – this will improve the performance of the processes in which they work and will consequently have a positive effect on business results.

Lean Tip #1259 – Good Metrics Should be Actionable

Evaluating the metric should help you make a decision.  This is why metrics work best with a target, so you can clearly see if you have or have not hit your target, and then take appropriate action.

Lean Tip #1260 - Make Metrics Visible.

The best way to connect every member of your team to the company’s metrics in a meaningful, regular way is to make them visible. At my company, each department has an analytics dashboard and scorecard, which display high-level goals and how the organization is performing on the specific tasks that comprise them. Making metrics visible encourages transparency and can dramatically increase motivation.