I have been sharing thoughts for a while, now it is your turn. I wan to hear your feedback on some questions that I have been pondering. Many Lean transformations stories start with a burning platform. The term is used to describe an extremely urgent or compelling business situation in order to convey, in the strongest terms, the need for change. The crisis may already exist and just needs to be highlighted. Using this process, you can get people's attention and build awareness of the need for change very quickly. We have all heard of them. Typically is has to do with a company going out of business (poor financial results) if they don't improve. So my question is this: Does a Lean Transformation need a "burning platform" to be successful? And, what happens when the company improves and the burning platform is out, how do you keep the pressure on. I'd like to hear your feedback and experience with burning platforms.
Last week I was able to join GBMP’s 12th Annual Northeast Lean Conference in Worcester, MA. The theme was on the tacit nature of implementing Lean, the importance of tying together the technical and social sides of Lean, the significance of management’s involvement and the ability of organizations to sustain the gains. I thought I would share a few highlights from this year's conference. The first presenter was Art Byrne who was instrumental in the Lean transformation at the company where I work. Art has transformed many businesses over his career and shared his formula which he described in he book Lean Turnaround. He found Lean was a strategy to run a business focusing on eliminating waste to deliver more customer value. A key element in his approach was Kaizen which is still done today at Wiremold (25 years later). Kaizen is powerful because it is key training vehicle to teach new thinking and gets everyone on board. Art explained the importance of moving from batch to flow production (where you work to takt time, 1 piece at a time, using standard work, via the pull of customer demand). I really liked his comment to all these black belts today: "
We are running a company not a karate class."
Another great speaker was Eric Dickson, CEO of UMass Healthcare, who shared a power message on strategy and Lean transformation. He claims many organizations spend very little time on the things that will really transform their business (ie. Strategy). Their are 5 points of emphasis in his approach:
1) Establish a pre-defined goal and then run experiments (kaizen)
2) Let the people doing work do experiments
3) Standard work leads to improvement
4) Transparency creates the necessary tension for improvement (share metrics and plans)
4) Framework for Performance excellence (how the management system is executed)
With the back drop of saving lives (healthcare) he shared a compelling vision for all.
LEI's John Shook shared the Lean Transformation Framework they use when working with companies, divisions, and individuals. Practice does not make perfect it makes permanent. Perfect practice can make perfect permanent. Deliberate practice explains a substantial amount of performance variance. We need to design the entire work experience that individuals experience. The framework consists:
1.Purpose – align around the problem to solve
2.Designing, doing and improving the work
3.Develop capability, develop people
4.Management system – leader behavior
5.Basic Thinking Here is a video describing LEI's Lean Transformation Framework.
Mike Orzen gave a thoughtful talk on creating a path to Lean. He claims 90% of transformations fail primarily because: •Leadership delegates change •Middle management is not onboard •Lack of shared vision •Unrealistic expectations/little patience/time is not allocated •Key systems that drive the right behavior are not in place Mike took a look at the top 3 Lean models: 1) Shingo 2) Toyota Way 4P 3) LEI transformation model to see how they compare. All have in common: •Foundation of culture, long term vision and value mindset •Focus on continous process improvements •Respect for people and development of capabilities •Continuous learning through structured problem solving, reflection, and kaizen This suggests a pathway to Lean that all can use to transform their company. There were many more great breakout sessions and lots of opportunity to network and connect with many great Lean thinkers and implementers alike. This is one of my favorite conferences. Next year's conference will be held September 19-20, 2017 in Worcester, MA. The theme is on the integration of tools and culture. Mark your calendar so you don't miss out on a great opportunity.
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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.
"I think of innovation along a continuum of 1) basic problem solving to keep the train on the tracks, 2) continuous improvement to make the tracks work better and better and 3) innovation to question whether tracks are needed at all." — John Shook
"Innovation is a popular – and important – concept," writes LEI Chairman and CEO John Shook. What is it?
An innovation is anything that is novel and valuable. Novel means new. Especially a new idea or method or something that has a “process” piece to it. Valuable – the link here with lean thinking is clear – means that someone, anyone perceives the new thing/method/process as having value. value from the perceiver’s perspective.
Lean thinking itself was an innovation (new and valuable) and an improvement over what preceded it (and what still exists in so many places) that contains within itself the means of further innovation and improvement. Consider the role of innovation in the work we do. We think of the iPhone as a tremendous innovation, like the internet, the automobile and now autonomous driving. But, the actualization of each of these, the underappreciated enabler that propelled them to change our lives was, first of all, the many technical innovations that preceded them (no iPhone without iPod, without Macintosh, without Apple II…). The innovation in the work to be done entailed in bringing these innovations to life is also important. Here’s an animation that tries to tell that story.
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.
"Practice the philosophy of continuous improvement. Get a little bit better every single day." — Brian Tracy
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. 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. 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. Paul Akers at Fastcap knows this better than anyone. In a recent video he shows the power of the 2 second improvement.
How do you embrace small daily improvements at your company?
As a child our parents teach us to be nice to people. Treat people with respect. "Respect for People" is one of two key element in Lean thinking we have learned from Toyota. I have learned from my own personal Lean journey that many organizations fall short in this area. It generally is not from a lack of trying but from fully understanding respect for people. It is more than being nice.
Respect for people can be defined by the following 6 elements:
Don't Trouble Your Customer - Your customer is anyone who consumes your work or decisions - Relentlessly analyze and change to stop troubling customers - Don't force people to do wasteful work - Don't give them defects - Don't make them wait - Don't impose wishful thinking on them - Don't overload them
Develop People and Then Build Products - Managers act as teachers, no directors - Mentor people closely, for years, in engineering and problem solving - Teach people to analyze root causes and make problems visible; then they discover how to improve
Managers "Walk the Talk" - Managers understand and act on the goal of "eliminating waste" and continuous improvement in there own actions and decisions - and employees see this
Teams and Individuals Evolve Their Own Practices and Improvements - Management challenges people to change and may ask what to improve - Empower the worker - Workers learn problem solving and reflection skills - Workers decide how to improve
Develop Teams - Team work, not group work is part of culture - Everybody is part of a team
Build Partners - Form long relationships based on trust - Help partners improve and stay profitable
From this definition or understanding of respect for people you can see it is much more encompassing. There are a number of ways to show respect for people in your organization. A good place to start is with learning. Knowledge and the proper application makes continuous improvement possible. Just be sure to practice respect for people in all your continuous improvement efforts.
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 we reduce batch sizes by half, we also reduce by half the time it will take to process a batch. That means we reduce queue and wait by half as well. Reduce those by half, and we reduce by about half the total time parts spend in the plant. Reduce the time parts spend in the plant and our total lead time condenses. And with faster turn-around on orders, customers get their orders faster." — Eliyahu M. Goldratt, The Goal
In the book Lean Thinking, James Womack and Daniel Jones recount a story of stuffing newsletters into envelopes with the assistance of one of the author’s two young children. Every envelope had to be addressed, stamped, filled with a letter, and sealed. The daughters, age six and nine, knew how they should go about completing the project: “Daddy, first you should fold all of the newsletters. Then you should attach the seal. Then you should put on the stamps.” Their father wanted to do it the counter-intuitive way: complete each envelope one at a time. They told him “that wouldn’t be efficient!” So he and his daughters each took half the envelopes and competed to see who would finish first. The father won the race, and not just because he is an adult. Check out Gemba Academy’s "one piece flow" square off against "mass production” video.
When we work with small batch sizes, each batch makes it through the full life cycle quicker than a larger batch does. We get better at doing things we do very often, so when we reduce batch size, we make each step in the process significantly more efficient. There are very good reasons why batch size is important. Some of these benefits are: 1)Improves Quality (reduces defects). Making 1 piece at a time prevents a pile of scrap when issues are caught on a single piece versus a batch. 2)Reduces Inventory. WIP (work in process) inventory is reduced when manufacturing one piece at a time. 3)Improves Safety. Less inventory means less clutter and safer work environments. It takes less effort to move 1 piece than big batches. 4)Increases flexibility. Less inventory, rework, and scrap make short cycle times possible providing more opportunity to react to customer demands. 5)Requires less space. With less inventory more space is available for value added activities. 6)Increases productivity. Most of the 7 wastes found in typical batch and queue processes are eliminated or reduced with single piece flow. Reducing the batch size in manufacturing is therefore a desirable goal: it improves the speed of response to the customer, whilst improving the ratio of value-added to non value-added work. A silent productivity killer, batching is an extremely difficult mindset to overcome and, as a result, numerous Lean initiatives have been destroyed by it.
We’re only a
few short weeks away from GBMP’s 12th Annual Northeast Lean Conference.
This year’s conference in Worcester, MA October 4 – 5, 2016 emphasizes the
tacit nature of implementing Lean, the importance of tying together the
technical and social sides of Lean, the significance of management’s involvement
and the ability of organizations to sustain the gains.
This conference
features exceptional keynote and breakout presentations, expert panels,
peer-to-peer discussions, hands-on simulations, interactive learning and
sharing, and unlimited networking opportunities.
The keynotes
include Art Byrne, John Shook, Eric Dickson & Steven Spear. I have only met
one on this list (worked for same company, you’ll have to guess who) so I am
looking forward to their message.
It is one of the
best conference I go to. It is very well
organized and wonderful event for learning and sharing knowledge. You can find my reviews from other years here. If you
can attend you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
