Gemba Panta Rei

Most Lean transformations and kaizen programs start at the Gemba (workplace, actual place where value is created) which for manufacturers is the factory. A question Lean Champions often come across is "Why are we starting kaizen with the workers and not with the office?"

In many cases the kaizen team members who ask this single out the President, Marketing, Sales, Design, Engineering, Scheduling, Corporate, and others. We will lump into a category called "The Office" for the sake of this discussion.

This is a tough question for a kaizen consultant, Lean Champion or facilitator to address because the kaizen team members have a very good point. They are onto something. We know they are right. In fact, we might be thinking exactly the same thing.

Certainly no serious Lean or kaizen effort should be started without a strong commitment from the top, and a clear understanding that kaizen and Lean will be applied everywhere in the enterprise sooner or later. So how do you make a case for starting in the factory and not The Office?

The more you know about Lean, are able to see the 7 Wastes, and have used kaizen to rapidly make your job better, the more you see the problems in the organization. You may have always known about problems in design, sales, planning, etc. but after several successful kaizens it becomes almost unbearable for people who are thinking and seeing Lean to tolerate waste that comes from non-factory areas.

It's true that the vast majority (80% to 90% by some studies) of cost, lead-time, quality, and safety of both processes and products are determined not by what happens at the Gemba (value added workplace) but in the marketing, sales, engineering, and scheduling stages. So why focus on the 20% of the cost and not the 80%?

The following are a few reasons for starting at the factory / Gemba / worker level rather than at "The Office" level. Use them in whatever combination you feel is true and appropriate for your situation:

1. It is harder to do kaizen on a job that only person does (the President, CEO, Sales, etc.). This is true whether it's welding or business development. It is probably less routine than factory work and less standardized. More of the process tends to be undocumented. It may be well worth doing, bet there is probably lower-hanging fruit to pick.

2. It is easier to make kaizen take root if you can show results. Typically quicker results can be achieved in production than in marketing, sales, etc. It is easier to “see” what happens in production environment than in work done in "The Office". Since half of the purpose of kaizen is results and the other half is education & awareness, it's important to have visible impact early to begin to gain enthusiasm and change the culture. It can be harder to do this in areas such as R&D, etc.

3. It is easier to put together a cross-functional team to watch production than to watch the President do his or her work. It may be difficult to get buy-in from the outside sales person in having kaizen team following them out to their Gemba looking for waste. This is not to say it's always easy to get buy in at the factor level, or that The Office folks should get a free pass. It's a question of what's higher impact, higher ease.

4. We start at the end of the process and work our way back so we can systematically eliminate root causes by seeing their impact downstream. It makes sense to start close to the customer, closest to where you deliver value to your customer as a finished product (the production floor) and work your way back upstream. This is because you are starting with the 'effects' (late delivery to customer due to problems in assembly) and looking for the 'causes' (poor design due to lack of DFM procedures).

5. By starting at the end of the process we create a "pull". One of the fundamental principles of Lean is downstream pull of material (e.g. kanban). If we begin in the middle of the process and make that more productive, we risk pushing more product downstream. If you begin downstream and attack the bottleneck to create a stronger pull, you will have better results.

If none of the above are true for your situation, or if it just doesn't make sense, you may need to start again with a Business Assessment, look at where the costs are in the Value Stream, what the Customers' Voice is telling you, and refocus your Lean efforts.

Be open to the possibility that the kaizen team is right and you might be starting at the wrong place. We have in more than one case started not in the factory but in both the factory and in The Office in order to show the commitment level to the workforce. There's nothing like the President and his taff red tagging the office and being a shining example of 5S to motivate the troops.

If you've found others ways to address this question, or if you completely disagree, we'd like to hear from you.

Posted by Jon Miller at 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I came across an interesting article while riding the bullet train in August during our last Japan Kaikaku Experience (Lean study trip). On page 69 of the September 2004 of Wedge magazine (Vol. 16 No. 9) there was an article by science writer Hideaki Fukami on the origins of the counterclockwise direction of athletic fields (baseball fields, track fields) and how they came to be so. There I found the reason why my kaizen sensei insisted on designing work cells and work flow counterclockwise.

According to Fukami there is a scientific reason for the standard counterclockwise flow of race tracks. He explains that in the 1896 Athens Olympics, the tracks were actually clockwise. However, due to complaint from the athletes that it felt unnatural, it was changed to "left hand inside" or counterclockwise in 1913. Was this just a feeling, or did it actually affect the athletes' performance?

Fukami conducted an experiment by having 4 university track athletes run the 400 meter both clockwise and counterclockwise. The results of the average times were 58.62 for clockwise and 56.52 seconds for counterclockwise. More than 2 seconds difference!

Fukami further explores various examples of "left hand inside" phenomena in the article. One interesting examples of the findings of his research is that 80% of fleeing criminals fled to the left, according to the Hyogo Prefecture Police. Arrests rose by 60% when the number of police officers pursuing the fleeing criminal from the left were increased.

One of the strongest reasons given for the innate "left hand inside" preference for human motion comes from brain science. According to a Professor Matsumoto, since the right brain processes spatial recognition human perception of space is stronger through the left side of vision (the hemispheres of the brain control opposite sides of the body). When you are running "left hand inside" or counterclockwise, you have better visibility of space on the left side and you are able to run more comfortably, confidently, and quickly.

Interestingly enough, Matsumoto points out that amusement rides that are designed to terrify tend to be clockwise, putting human visual spatial perception at a disadvantage and increasing your fear and discomfort. The merry-go-round, which is not designed to make you afraid is... you guessed it, counterclockwise.

So, Lean Champion, the next time you're challenged about the direction of the flow of the cell, and location of chucks on lathes, right-handedness, and "sensei said so" doesn't cut it, you can explain it using brain science.

Posted by Jon Miller at 9:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

During a recent sales presentation to a prospective client, the issue of Standardization came up. This company has multiple factories around the globe and is struggling with a lack of harmonization between them.

As an example, different lines in different factories would use their own settings on SMT lines, rather than follow the standard. Even between shifts in the same factory there were differences. They are making the same product so the settings should be the same. How do we get people to Standardize?

After asking a few clarifying questions, a few interesting things became clear.

1) People use the environmental and equipment differences as justification for coming up with their own settings

2) The more highly educated and trained operators tend to adjust settings more than the less educated workers

First, there are probably some genuine reasons that "the best" settings from one plant may not be the best for another. Standards are set to be improved, and deviation from the standard should have a demonstrable, fact-based improvement (overcome differences in temperature, etc.)

Second, people want to think and be creative. It's more fun to solve problems, even if it means being scolded for changing the settings. So how to make standards, and in particular Standard Work, stick?

At Toyota they say that there are two things that are part of everyone's job. First, follow Standard Work. Second, find a better way to do your job. This is a simple idea, but it's a big one.

How many of our processes have been Standardized, much less fully documented as Standard Work? How many of us know the best way to do the job and do it that way every time. How many of us continuously measure and improve this standard and re-document it?

All of the tools of Lean/TPS are great, and the culture of empowerment and daily improvement is wonderful. At the end, making it stick requires a firm commitment by management to required Standard Work as a foundation of continuous improvement, from everyone.

Posted by Jon Miller at 6:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

On our Japan Kaikaku Experience trip in August, we visited Omron, a manufacturer of sensors and factory automation products. They have been implementing TPS step by step and they are very Lean in the factory. They have relocated their Product Development team to the same campus as their production team and they have taken a Value Stream Organization approach they call Work Shop Management.

They are in Phase III of their Lean transformation, nearly 7 years into the process of applying the Toyota Production System model. As part of this they are taking kaizen beyond the factory (Phase I) and factory indirect (Phase II - purchasing, production engineering) and into the Product Development process itself.

There are many notable aspects of kaizen at Omron. One thing that was particularly eye-opening was their response to the question of "How do you measure productivity of your engineers in Product Development?" At Omron, the performance of Product Development engineers is measured by the sales of the new product over their lifespan.

The significance of this is that it places the responsibility for launching a top selling product not on sales or marketing, but also on the Product Development team. This requires the people coming up with new ideas to truly understand what their customers needs are, and how their factory automation products will be used and need to be improved. In addition, if the products are long-lived and difficult to imitate, this means Product Development did their job well.

This type of Lean Product Development requires a higher degree of customer intimacy as well as a cross-functional coordination with sales, marketing, R&D, engineering, and production. The fact that Product Development and Production are co-located, as well as the fact that Omron factories use their own factory automation devices (they can hear their own internal Voice of Customer) makes this easier. Pretty impressive, nonetheless.

Posted by Jon Miller at 10:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Of the week of August 22-28 we conducted a private Japan Kaikaku Experience (Lean study mission) which was a great learning experience for everyone. There were many take-aways in Lean management (of which more later).

One of my greatest personal 'a-ha' moments was in the area of what leading Lean companies in Japan are doing to reduce waste through environmental management and energy conservation.

We visited 8 companies, and each of them showed us something they had done in the environmental & energy areas. All but one of them were ISO 14000 certified, and had been for years.

We saw "zero landfill" factories, where nothing that goes in the factory goes out as trash. It is either all recycled, reused, or purified (in the case of water). There were no trash cans that were not separated for plastic, glass, paper, etc. Employees who bring non-recyclable material to work are asked to take their trash home.

Two of the firms shared with us their "green purchasing" efforts. They found that one of the major sources of landfill waste was packaging materials. This is especially acute for materials purchased from SE Asian countries where stuffing old newspapers, old plastic wrap, etc. in along with parts is common. Educating their suppliers and converting to simpler, more reusable packaging reduced environmental impact.

One of the companies used solar panels on their roof to generate power, reduced air conditioning cost by applying a reflective paint to the roof and a tinted film to the windows. At almost every company we visited, there were lights conspicuously turned off in the office, hallways, and factory. When we arrived at a display, our guide would turn the lights on, then off again as we left. At break time lights in vacant production areas would turn off or dim.

Japanese manufacturers are under incredible pressure from low cost competition in Asia, environmental regulations in their own country, the high price of energy, and a market that is improving but still not strong.

We all know that we have a long way to go in eliminating the 7 wastes from our value streams, be they healthcare, production, engineering, service, etc. The Japanese, driven once again by need, are charging ahead with waste elimination in the energy and environmental areas and doing it profitably. I hope all of us Lean thinkers and practitioners will lead the in not way wasting our environmental and energy resources.

Posted by Jon Miller at 1:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)