Gemba Panta Rei

During a conference call to plan the agenda for a global meeting of Lean manufacturing leaders at one of our clients, they identified their desire to establish "one definition of Lean manufacturing" at their company. This might seem like a simple thing to do, but with 10 languages spoken in their factories, a strong pre-existing foundation of Six Sigma at this company and a decision to call their Lean manufacturing program by another name, the result has been a vague understanding of the link between Lean manufacturing and their operational excellence strategy.

"The Toyota Production System is a series of activities to lower cost by improving productivity through the thorough elimination of waste."

This is the first sentence in the first chapter from the first textbook on the Toyota Production System published by the Toyota Motor Corporation education department in 1973. It should be noted that when the Japanese say "productivity" they do often not mean only "labor productivity" but overall performance.

Since Lean manufacturing is a phrase used to describe the Toyota Production System, one definition of Lean manufacturing would be "A series of activities to lower cost by the relentless elimination of waste." Choose your own synonyms for the words in the sentence above, as appropriate in your language, culture and business.

I want to emphasize the first four words in this definition: a series of activities. Lean manufacturing is not about theories, ideas, thoughts, philosophies, methodologies, but what you do with them. Taiichi Ohno said "Understanding means taking action" and Lean manufacturing must always be in action to reduce cost by cutting out waste.

"What about quality, delivery, safety?" you may ask. In the interest of keeping it simple, the one definition of Lean manufacturing should only talk about cost. In business, cost is how we keep score at the end of the day. Quality can and should be measured (both poor quality and good quality) as cost. There are cost elements to both on-time and late delivery. Safety has a direct link to cost. If you can not link improvements to quality, delivery and safety to improved cost in the short-term or long-term, you may need to question your measurement methods or whether it is a true improvement.

"What about muri (overburden) and mura (uneveness)?" you may ask, if you have read the recent e-mail sent out by Dr. Womack advising people to not only focus on waste, but also on variability reduction and reducing overburden. Ignore his advice. Mura leads to muri, muri leads to muda (waste). If you focus on the total and relentless reduction of waste, you will need to ask the 5 whys and get to the root cause, which will lead you back to to muri (overburden) and murd (unevenness). Keep the focus on waste. Keep the one definition of Lean manufacturing as simple as possible.

Of course if you have eliminated nearly all waste in sight and you are looking for something else to do, go ahead and tackle mura and muri. You might want to get your eyes checked first.

Posted by Jon Miller at 3:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I learned a new Chinese expression this week from a Six Sigma Master Black Belt from Taiwan. We were discussing how Lean manufacturing and Six Sigma fit together, and how sometimes there can be misunderstandings and conflicts between the two.

The expression in Chinese translates as "using a cow knife to kill a chicken" and sums up the reason we say Lean manufacturing should most often be implemented before Six Sigma.

Most of the problems visible as the 7 wastes of production in a traditional manufacturer can be solved through Lean manufacturing implementation. Lean manufacturing offers many quick and practical solutions to problems in the factory. These changes can be made with minimal training by anyone who is willing to get their hands dirty.

As valuable as Six Sigma is, when used to as a multi-week project to solve a quality problem that could be spotted through hours of direct process observation and a few days of implementing pokayoke, Standard Work, and visual controls (all of which are primarily Lean manufacturing tools) this is an example of "using a cow knife to kill a chicken".

Six Sigma is an essential complement to Lean manufacturing because sometimes the root cause of the problem is not visible, or the process parameters can not be observed directly. A Six Sigma approach is the surer method to solve these problems. In these case the chicken knife will not suffice to kill the cow.

The most important thing in doing kaizen is to understand what type of problem you are trying to solve, what the true root cause of the problem is, and having access to the tools that will solve the problem most effectively.

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Because it's so easy once you own a Chinese sweatshop to hop on an airplane and sell hundreds of thousands of electromechanical parts built in asweatshop to American OEMs. There's no better time to be in this market than today.

In between sales trips I would spend time in my sweatshop mopping the oil on the floors and red tagging just about everything in sight. I would guard all of the machines' moving parts. I would add lights to the ceiling and clean the windows.

I would put in a venting system to suck out the paint fumes from my sweatshop. I would fix the hole in the roof of the warehouse that drips water down on the boxes of obsolete raw materials when it rains.

And despite my neglect of sales activity due to the attention I'm paying to the basics of Lean manufacturing at my sweatshop, American OEMs would still come calling for my lowest cost sweatshop products and keep me in business.

That's why I want to own a Chinese sweatshop.

And here's some bonus footage from an intersection in an industrial suburb of Shanghai. File under "not something you see everyday in my neighborhood" category.

My guess is that this is doo-doo dropped by a dragon flying overhead.

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In order to have a just in time production system function properly you need to work towards zero defects and build in quality to every process. Otherwise the lack of extra buffer inventory will shut down the material flow when a defect is produced. One of the ways to build in quality is to check quality at every process. Another is pokayoke, a Japanese word meaning "error proofing" or "mistake proofing".

Pokayoke are typically two types. The first is to error proof human errors and the second is to error proof machine errors. For human errors, pokayoke are implemented based on an analysis of the opportunities for people to make errors in judgment, errors in checking their work after completion, errors in detection or errors in the human motions themselves. For machines, pokayoke are implemented based on a similar analysis of failure factors by root cause.

Pokayoke can apply to not only quality improvement (preventing errors that result in defects) but also for safety improvement (preventing errors that result in harm to people). For instance, physical covers and boards or warning signals or lights can be pokayoke devices when they provide a clear signal that an action or area is unsafe.

It's very important to pokayoke the pokayoke. You must error proof the pokayoke, just as you error proof the process. At a recent visit to stamping facility on a supplier development Lean assessment, we saw a visual board representing the welding line posted in the factory. It was full of green and red buttons marked 'pokayoke'.

"What do the colors mean?" we asked.

"The green pokayoke are functioning. The red ones are not."

In this case the pokayoke devices of various types received rough treatment and often broke down and needed repair. About a third were red.

As in all aspects of a Lean transformation, with pokayoke implementation you are never really done. If a pokayoke is a mechanical error proofing device, there will be design limitations, and it will someday fail. If it is an electromechanical device or if it is software driven, there will be flaws that cause malfunction. Of course there will also be deterioration. Pokayoke devices will require maintenance be people who understand the original design intent of the error proofing device.

The existence of the Pokayoke devices need to be included in the Standard Work Instruction Sheets (develop these first if you don't have them, it's silly to error proof a non-standard process). When there is a change to the way the work is done, this may render the pokayoke useless so consider whether the pokayoke is requires redesign. The Lean manager's job never ends. You have to error proof the pokayoke, then pokayoke that error proof, and so on and on and on...

Posted by Jon Miller at 7:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Speaking of change, I arrived in Shanghai, China a couple of hours ago. It's quite a change of scenery from Seattle. There's a forest of yellow construction cranes across the highway from the airport building what looks like... another airport.

On the way downtown from the airport the maglev (magnetic levitation) train zoomed overhead, back and forth a few times. Fourteen hours earlier I drove by the light rail line Seattle has been leisurely building to the airport for what seems like years.

The government here is building infrastructure with a vengeance, and jobs are being created. Things here are constantly moving and changing. It's something you can hear, see and sense.

Shanghai smells like a machine shop. Call it pollution, but it's the smell of infrastructure being rapidly built. Closing my eyes, it's easy to imagine being in the middle of a giant factory full of machines cutting chips and misting cutting fluid. There are low clouds suspended in dark grey puffs, like the giant oil mists from factories below.

This is my fifth or sixt trip here. Each time I learn something new. So far I'm amazed that the building frenzy hasn't seemed to slow down. It makes me think of the "imperialist guilt" tactic sometimes used in international business negotiation in China, where the Western party in the negotiation is made to feel they owe the Chinese party something because of imperial misdeeds of Western countries, a century ago.

Whatever we can learn from China, hopefully we pay attention and learn fast. Otherwise 20 years from now the West may need to use "offshoring guilt" negotiating tactic.

Posted by Jon Miller at 7:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

People often say that sustaining the gains of kaizen and Lean manufacturing is the hardest thing. How well you sustain kaizen is really about how well you adapt to change. Kaizen and Lean manufacturing are not "one time and done" types of things. When people say 'we tried Lean and failed' what they are really saying is that they stopped trying. They ran into a change that resulted in failure, and they did not adapt to this change. Failure is the other side of the success on the coin of continuous improvement.

In making change a habit, people can get caught up in what they call it. Names are important, but the trappings of large company Lean Six Sigma programs shouldn't get in the way of doing practical problem solving everyday by everyone. Toyota is moving away from calling their system the Toyota Production System or even the Toyota Way towards the Thinking People System.

Some wise man said "What you say affects how you think, what you think affects how you behave, and how you behave affects your destiny" and this is just as true for how you talk about your kaizen and Lean manufacturing efforts. So go back to basics and keep it simple. Look for and cut out wastes, and remember flow. Go to the gemba.

When we visit world class firms succeeding at doing kaizen in Japan we rarely hear much more than this. We seem to have much shorter attention spans in West and always want to move on to the next fad or something better. As in " What's next after Lean?"

Sticking to something simple and making it a habit has huge impact. Human habits are hard to break. Habits can be good or bad. The problem with this is that habits can tend to make you dumb. Success as a habit can make you comfortable or complacent. The key to sustaining kaizen is to make change a habit.

If you’re always changing then as long as you know what “good” looks like you can always be improving. This means never being satisfied, thinking deeply about the problem, and taking many small, quick actions. This is essentially kaizen.

Posted by Jon Miller at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Standard Work may be the most important Lean manufacturing tool that you don't know enough about. Built on the three elements of takt time, work sequence and standard work in process (standard WIP), it is the cornerstone of the Toyota Production System.

More managers are reading about Standard Work as it is used at Toyota and they want it in their factory. But many misunderstandings remain. Standard Work is not about work standards. Standard Work is not about work instructions for the operator. It is all about kaizen instructions for managers.

Many managers like the idea of Standard Work because they see it as detailed work instructions for the operators. The Standard Work Instruction Sheet is used as part of the work instruction documentation, but the Standard Work Sheets and Standard Work Combination Sheets are meant for visual management, not work instruction.

By documenting the current most effective combination of manpower, machines and materials, these two documents show how the line or cell should be running - the standard. Any deviation seen requires kaizen. This is abnormality management.

For example imbalances between operators cycle times that results in waiting time can be identified on the Standard Work Combination Sheet, calling out for kaizen. Standard Work Sheets point out the proper work sequence on a layout of the work area and identifies safety and quality checkpoints. Managers auditing the Standard Work can see at a glance where kaizen is needed.

Standard Work is much more than a way to document the standard and create work instructions for the operators. Standard Work is kaizen instruction for managers who go to the gemba to observe the process. Stay tuned to this blog to learn more about Standard Work, or if you can't wait get your Standard Work here.

Posted by Jon Miller at 11:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

g.e.m.b.a.
(to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.”)

Young man, there's no need to feel down
I said, young man, pick your reports off the ground
I said, young man, 'cause your boss ripped you a new one
There's no need to be unhappy

Young man, there's a place you can go
I said, young man, when you're short on ideas so
If you stand out there, and I'm sure you will find
Many ways to improve your bottom line

It's fun to go to the g.e.m.b.a.
It's fun to go to the g.e.m.b.a.
They have every problem for young managers to solve
You can get your hands on all the machine tools

It's fun to go to the g.e.m.b.a.
It's fun to go to the g.e.m.b.a.
You can clean the machines
You can learn to weld steel
You can look for the parts that need to ship

Young man, are you listening to the floor?
I said, young man, what do you want you on-time to be?
I said, young man, you can make all of your shipments
But you’ve got to flow it one piece

No man, fills the whole order by himself
I said, young man, don’t put finished goods on the shelf
And just go there, to the g.e.m.b.a.
I’m sure you can walk the whole value stream today

It's fun to go to the g.e.m.b.a.
It's fun to go to the g.e.m.b.a.
They have every problem for managers to solve
You can get your hands on all the machine tools

It's fun to go to the g.e.m.b.a.
It's fun to go to the g.e.m.b.a.
You can clean the machines
You can learn to weld steel
You can look for the parts that need to ship

Young man, put on your steel toe shoes
I said, put on your safety glasses too
Tool belt, let them know that you’ve arrived
Make sure you take off your neck tie

And if someone comes up to you
And says “young manager take a walk to H.R.”
You’ve got a home called the g.e.m.b.a.
Tell them you’re here to say

It's fun to go to the g.e.m.b.a.
It's fun to go to the g.e.m.b.a.
They have every problem for managers to solve
You can get your hands on all the machine tools

g.e.m.b.a.
It's fun to go to the g.e.m.b.a.
It's fun to go to the g.e.m.b.a.
Young man, young man, see the andon lamps flashing now
Young man, young man, it's time to show them you know how

g.e.m.b.a.
Just go to the g.e.m.b.a.
Young man, put on your steel toe shoes
I said, put on your safety glasses too

g.e.m.b.a.
g.e.m.b.a.
g.e.m.b.a.
g.e.m.b.a.

Posted by Jon Miller at 11:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

When I saw the article I thought surely one of the other Lean bloggers would jump all over it. Perhaps it was too easy. So I let it slide for a few days. Then I changed my mind.

What's next after Lean? Asks the interview with author, consultant and blogger Patricia Moody in Supply & Demand Chain Executive Magazine. Says Ms. Moody:

Patricia Moody: I had a feeling as I went into this that people had reached their limits working on Lean Manufacturing on the production floor. Many companies had reached what they thought was the limit of their savings, and they didn't know where to go next. That's why I wrote this book: I knew that there were opportunities out there — I call it Beyond Lean

Oh boy. Why don’t we just all get beyond pervasive problem solving, PDCA, and relentless and endless elimination of waste, shall we? That’s all so industrial age... I have news for Ms. Moody: the vast majority of manufacturers have not yet tapped into savings from Lean manufacturing, much less the savings possible through supplier development efforts by extending kaizen into logistics and the operations of their suppliers.

Ms. Moody's example from beyond Lean cost savings:

A woman from a recycling company in Texas achieved 20 percent savings by standardizing her whole company of 9,000 people in the United States and 12,000 people worldwide on five varieties of uniforms.

Brilliant, but this is neither pre-Lean nor post-Lean. It’s just basic materials management.

It's a lot quicker than building a kaizen team to try to figure out how to take a Lean initiative out to the supply base. That usually takes months, but many companies out there right now don't have a lot of time left.

Months to deploy a kaizen team? Are we making them walk to the supplier?

They have spent a lot of energy working on the manufacturing and assembly side, but if 60 to 70 percent of their costs are in materials, they really have to focus more on the procurement side.

Very true, and these materials are manufactured, distributed and sold by suppliers who have operations that need to be kaizened in order for costs to be reduced.

Manufacturing used to be more of an art than a science, but we know how to do this stuff now. We know how to organize flows so that we don't have piles of inventory sitting all over the place. We know how to do quality so that we have zero defects. We've been doing all that for 20 years.

I suppose this is true if by “zero” you mean something between 1% and 5% or if by “20 years” you mean “not yet”.

I'm a technology freak. It's the advantage that we have in the United States, the fact that we have technology that we can use to be more flexible and responsive. We've been slow to admit that because, again, we've been very preoccupied with Lean. One of the jokes in the back of my book is that even Toyota uses computers now. For a long time they really didn't; they had a kind of anti-computer bias. But I think technology is the answer; it's the advantage that we have.

I guess I’ve been so busy doing kaizen for the last decade that I missed a) the arrival of zero defects manufacturing in the USA and b) technological solutions to logistical problems. I must have been distracted by the rattling of the abacuses at Toyota.

Technology is a commodity. Everyone has access to it. The answer is the process and people who use technology is only an enabler. The process she describes that generates cost cutting ideas, without fully understanding, is kaizen.

The Manufacturer ran an article titled Supplier Development in a Lean Age also featuring the expert opinion of Ms. Moody on July 10, 2006. The article asks:

Lean organizations have begun to apply continuous improvement and kaizen to their supply chains, but is that simply complicating supplier development?

and

Are suppliers expected to achieve excellence on their own, or must they be taught to be the right kind of supplier for a customer, and taught by the customer?

To tell us that we've done that already, and to tell us what's next...

Such supplier development activities can both raise the performance of the entire supply base and foster closer relationships within the supply chain. Supplier development is often used for process improvement, but author and lean expert Patricia E. Moody, CMC, observes a trend away from continuous improvement and six sigma, to a more gut-level focus. “It’s all about profit,” says Moody.

“We need to keep in mind why we are doing supplier development and relationship management, and profit needs to be the focus of our efforts. Profitable suppliers will tend to be happier suppliers, and happier suppliers will ultimately perform better.”

Ms. Moody gets it right when she is quoted “we need to make sure that suppliers are doing well. Strong supplier relationships, especially where companies are incurring 85-90 percent of costs from suppliers, are critical, and I equate relationships to profits.”

If it is process vs. profit that is a problem since the entire purpose of process and continuous improvement is profit.
The rest of the article talks about the observations of the lack of Supplier Development in the industry, based on observations from people at Boston Scientific, which contains some good points.

Some good practical examples of cost savings are given in the article in Parcel Shipping & Distribution magazine from Ms. Moody's book The Big Squeeze: Ten Ways to Cut Your Spend 10% Right Now!:

• Milk runs. [Such] runs save transportation money and build more consistency into your supply network. If you are a small company, consider buddying up —consolidating — with another small company with similar needs, and the two of you will save money.
• Keep that driver moving. Carriers want to do business with "easier or friendly freight”—easy delivery, easier pickups that don’t tie up the driver and no last minute changes. Freeing up a driver’s time is paramount.
• Electronic interchange. Only do business with providers who are reliable and provide electronic interchange. When you tender a load to them, do they accept it electronically? Do they follow through on that commitment and then provide status [reports] along the life cycle? Do they report once the shipment has been delivered in a timely way?
• Drop-trailer. Another money-saving solution is the drop-trailer program enabling the driver to come in, pick up a preloaded trailer, and move on.
• Order picking. Pickers spend more time traveling, whether walking or riding a vehicle, going up or down than they spend doing everything else combined, including handling products, referring to paperwork, using a computer and scanning. So if you’re going to do one specific thing in your distribution center to reduce your costs, attack order pickers’ travel.
• Packaging. You can cut transportation costs in half if you make the package half the size.
• Substitute plastic for cardboard. Cardboard is not a world-class material! Have suppliers use plastic totes for transporting inside the plant. Cardboard is expensive, and it is the number one cause of dust and some quality issues in plants. The initial investment for plastic will pay for itself.

I haven’t read Ms. Moody’s book so I can’t comment on it other than to say that it has an attractive cover. Based on the description of it in the article above, and that she wrote the book around the cost savings ideas from her blog readers, it sounds interesting and I plan to pick up a copy. I'd like to find out what’s next after Lean, for career planning purposes if nothing else.

Posted by Jon Miller at 11:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

“When I’m sitting in the board room I have no idea what’s happening on the gemba.” Taiichi Ohno begins, and proceeds to tell the story of what would happen when he was sitting in another office, Production Control. When his eyes met the eyes of a female office worker she would always pick up the phone and make a telephone call.

“If the person on the other end of the phone was free that may be okay, but if they were working the call is a nuisance to them.” This office was a typical Japanese open office and the lady felt uncomfortable when her eyes met Taiichi Ohno’s eyes, so she picked up the phone to look busy. She was not only wasting her time, she was wasting someone else’s time on the other end of the line in an effort to look busy.

“The gemba is not the only production floor. When you observe what is happening in the office or any workplace you should notice a lot of things. A lot of managers just think it is their jobs to keep everyone from getting bored. As long as people aren’t bored, they won’t complain. They’re not thinking about ‘What should we be working on now?’ They don’t know how to use their wits to come up with good ideas.”

“I talked about the ‘game of wits’ earlier but your wits don't work until you feel the squeeze. So think how you can put the squeeze on people.” When people are in difficult positions they will use their wits, because they must.

“How can you put the squeeze on people? You have to put the squeeze on yourself, and struggle together or you won’t use your own wits either.”

Taiichi Ohno says that his 'game of wits' is thinking of ways to make people feel the squeeze, make them feel desperate, so that they will be forced to use their wits and come up with good ideas. When managers don’t challenge their subordinates and make them feel desperate Ohno says it is often because the managers themselves don’t use their wits and have no solutions.

When their subordinates say "It can’t be done" in response to a challenge, these managers accept this answer. Ohno says you must make people feel that saying "It can’t be done" is not an option because the situation is that desperate. But as a manager you must also feel as desperate and use your wits and think about how to solve the problem.

“I suppose this means you have to become an attractive human being.” Since there are mostly men in automotive companies, Ohno says it’s a question of how to be a man that other men are drawn to. “Men think hard about how to attract the opposite sex, but rarely do men think about how to become attractive to other men, to become a man that other men will follow anywhere.”

At this point Ohno must have looked up from the manuscript he was writing, in between his work teaching kaizen and the Toyota Production System to Toyota Boshoku. He writes:

“The ladies at Toyota Boshoku are very charming and kind. At my age I don’t do what I do to draw the attention of these ladies. But it’s true that whether it’s men or women, when people are drawn to you they will volunteer to get things done for you.”

As a way to become an attractive person Ohno says it’s important to go to the gemba frequently to make people comfortable talking to you.

“It’s much better for the ladies to feel comfortable smiling at you when your eyes meet, rather than making a telephone call. So I guess I have to seriously think about what I have to do to keep her from picking up the phone.”

Posted by Jon Miller at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There have been many books on the bestseller list with variations on the theme of “how to become a millionaire”. A fellow named T. Harv Eker rolled through Seattle a few years ago and gave a free seminar on the subject. It seemed like an interesting way to pass an evening so I spent 3 hours in a hotel ball room with about 150 people watching this man who told us the secrets of the millionaire mind with the energy of Robin Williams. This was several years before he refined his act, wrote his books, and hit the big time. Even so his act was entertaining and I learned a few things. These things did not make me a millionaire, but that is not T. Harv’s fault.

Last year I bought his book Secrets of the Millionaire Mind for a friend. This was an attempt to help them think more about managing their money. I’m not one to pry, but there seems to have been some change in my friend’s behavior regarding money. Now the book has found its way back to me.

Reading the first several pages of the introduction, I thought it would be interesting to ask “what are the secrets of the Toyota mind?” Much of what I write about on this blog has to do with this question of what is the thinking behind the Toyota Production System. I haven’t catalogued all of the secrets of the Toyota mind so this is not a comprehensive list. Many of them are found in the 10 Commandments of Improvement, which we made into a poster several years ago and now available online.

The Toyota mind asks “How can I improve by 10 times?” rather than “How can I improve by 10%?”
Cutting cost by 10% or even 50% is easy with focus, effort and the strategic application of Lean manufacturing principles. Cutting by 90% is the mindset needed to make you question all of your assumptions, take the customers' viewpoint and think about long-term kaizen.

The Toyota mind focuses on changing the process rather than on changing the person.

The Toyota mind asks “Why?” until it finds the root cause, rather than solving the problem at the first opportunity.
This is harder to do than you think because it’s very tempting to solve the problem at the earliest available opportunity and get on with life. However, these fixes tend to be band-aids. Evidence-based, deeply considered plans can be quickly and effectively implemented once, rather than seat-of-the pants, instinct or belief-driven plans that result in a lot of wasted resources.

The Toyota mind seeks council from many other minds rather than a few expert minds.
This is related to the one above. You can get much more useful feedback on how to solve a problem when you have reduced the problem to its root causes. Kaizen succeeds when you ask a variety of people for fact-based countermeasures rather than the resident expert who may have fix for the wrong problem.

The Toyota mind asks “What does my customer want from this process?” rather than “What do I want from this process?”

The Toyota mind builds brilliant processes that enable average people to be high performers, rather than flawed processes that enable even brilliant people to be only average performers.
Developing processes and hiring average people may run counter to the Western culture. The whole idea of superstar celebrity executives and CEOs and the self-made man are part of the American dream. The problem with building a business around brilliant people is that it is not sustainable across the decades, without a process for hiring these people and eventually for developing them further upstream. The superstar CEO may save a few billion, write a book or two, retire, only to watch your legacy undone by the next contestant. The recent recasting in the media Jack Welch as a stifler on innovation at GE and the de-emphasis of the work he did at GE to establish a process-driven Six Sigma culture is but a recent example of this. On the other hand, how many Japanese superstar CEOs have you heard of? Why do you think this is?

The Toyota mind learns from both failed and successful actions.
They now say “beat Toyota” at Toyota. This is a good way to motivate yourself and avoid complacency when you're the best manufacturer in the world. Even if you are not the best and can learn a lot by benchmarking externally and copying what others are doing successfully, you should learn from your own successes and failures. Even organizations that do a good job of learning from failures often do not ask "Why did we succeed?" and try to learn from this, for fear of exposing that the reason for success is luck, market forces beyond their control, or something else that will not support their superstar CEO image.

The Toyota mind does kaizen and thinks “Now things are the worst ever” rather than “Now things are better.”

T. Harv Eker writes in the introduction to his book “Don’t believe a word I say” and goes on to explain that he can only speak from experience and none of the concepts or insights in his book are inherently right or wrong, true or false. Likewise, don’t believe what I write here. I only write based on my experience of seeing what Toyota does and of learning from both the failures and successes of other companies trying to implement Lean manufacturing the Toyota way. Experiencing the kaizen results that come from Toyota minds has been amazing.

The Toyota mind is the source of what you see on the surface of Lean manufacturing. Try it for yourself. As T. Harv says “Whatever works, keep doing. Whatever doesn’t, you’re welcome to throw away.” Just be sure to learn from both your successes and failures.

Posted by Jon Miller at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Taiichi Ohno loved wordplay. He would take a few choice Japanese words and pack in as much kaizen wisdom as he could. He chose his words carefully, even though in much of his writing he was informal and direct, and not highly articulate.

During the years when I was an interpreter for Ohno’s students, the members of the Toyota Autonomous Study Group who formed Shingijutsu consulting, I had many opportunities to hear Ohno’s pearls of wisdom second hand. These are what I conside the top 8 pearls of wisdom on kaizen from Ohno, as they were taught to me. Some require explanation, some don't. They all deserve deep consideration and action.

Sanjutsu vs. Ninjutsu
This is one of those phrases that takes 2 seconds to say in Japanese and about 20 seconds in English to explain. Mr. Ohno was fond of Ninjas. Ninjutsu is the art of technique of ninjas, the Japanese black-clad spies of the samurai era who were known for being very clever and resourceful. Sanjutsu can mean arithmetic, calculation or a colloquial term Ohno used for cost accounting. Taiichi Ohno liked to say if you use ninjutsu (your wits and your training) you could double your throughput without doubling your resources, while traditional management based on calculation could not help you do this.

The production line that never stops is either excellent or terrible.
The explanation I received was that the line that never stops either has so many extra people, buffer inventory or other “slack” that the problems never come to the surface and it is a “terrible” line, or that all of the problems have been brought to the surface and kaizen has been done so that it is fool-proofed to the point where you could not stop it if you tried, and it is excellent. This is true not only for production lines but for any operation.

You are smart enough to make excuses, so use your smarts to take action.

Check is hansei.
The check step in the PDCA (Plan Do Check Act) cycle is reflection (hansei) and this is true of course when you were not able to achieve your target but even when you do achieve your target you must also do hansei and reflect on the reasons why you succeeded so that you can use what you learned from your success.

All decision must be based on “Will this actually reduce cost” and “Will this actually result in improved business performance”.

Education is teaching what one does not know and training is repeated physical practice of what one knows. We need not only education, we need also training.
Kaizen leaders and management need more than education (what and why) but also training (how). Even today we see too many executives who “support kaizen 100%” by dropping in at the end of the kaizen event or at review points in a kaizen project, but do not involve themselves for days hands-on in order to physically practice and learn the new way of thinking, managing and doing business.

Hearing one hundred times is not as good as seeing once. Seeing one hundred times is not as good as doing once.
This is similar to the English expression “a picture is worth a thousand words” but probably comes from the saying of Confucius “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

Understanding means taking action.

Posted by Jon Miller at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This is an image of the first textbook ever written on the Toyota Production System. The title reads Toyota Style Production System – The Toyota Method. The Toyota Education Department published this in January 1973.

Taiichi Ohno wrote the foreword to this book. The foreword is titled Practice, Not Theory.

In the foreword to the first textbook on the Toyota Production System, Taiichi Ohno said the following:

Looking back at the many things we tried over the years and reading about it now in these pages, prepared by so many people who were involved in our efforts, I realize it was quite an undertaking.

However, if the “理” of 合理化 (to rationalize, to do kaizen) is the same as the “理” of 理想 (ideal), then for those of us who do kaizen, we absolutely must achieve the ideal, or at least challenge ourselves to get as close as possible to the ideal.

Forever and ever, neither tiring nor ceasing.

Posted by Jon Miller at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

One has to be careful these days when making statements about the origins of TPS and check the facts, or else be pinned to the mat for a count of three by the investigative tag-team of Art Smalley and Isao Kato. So I'll confess to a terrible truth of Lean manufacturing that I've known about, but only for a short time: Taiichi Ohno never said there were 7 types of waste.

Kaizen consultant and author Yoshiya Ito was a journalist when he was younger, and knew Mr. Ohno. On his website Ito shares his memories of Mr. Ohno and words that he spoke. In a section called Words of Taiichi Ohno Sensei, Ito credits his teacher with the following:

"I don't know who came up with it but people often talk about 'the 7 types of waste'. This might have started when the book came out, but waste is not limited to 7 types. There's an old expression "He without bad habits has seven" meaning even if you think there's no waste you will find at lest 7 types. So I came up with overproduction, waiting, etc. but that doesn't mean there are only 7 types. So don't bother thinking about 'what type of waste is this?' just get on with it and do kaizen."

Wow. At this point it's tempting to follow Mr. Ohno's advice, give up thinking and writing about the 7 types of waste and TPS and just do kaizen. If I suddenly give up blogging, you'll know why.

Mr. Ohno was known for making shocking statements. One of the other gems Ito attributes to Ohno was "Just because it says so in a book doesn't mean I said it."

So who did arrive at the number seven and codify the 7 types of waste? My guess is the managers at Toyota who in 1973 wrote down the Toyota Production System ideas and philosophy that was in the air. Perhaps on his next trip to Japan this summer the Green Hornet* (a.k.a. Art Smalley) can find out more about who actually coined the 7 types of waste if it was not Taiichi Ohno.

Bonus Section: 5S Contains 25% More S than You Need

While we're shattering myths of Lean manufacturing... do you think there are actually 5S in the Toyota Production System? There aren't. There are 4S, the first four. Who needs self-discipline if you do the first four properly? In some smart Japanese companies I have seen 3S, where they drop seiketsu which is literally "cleanliness" as in "spic and span" or "wash your hands with soap". Who needs that if you Sweep properly. Originally 5S was seiri seiton which means "tidy up the place". But 2S was too simple to make a book that sells.

The real reason we have 5S in the Lean manufacturing lexicon instead of 4S is that Hiroyuki Hirano wrote a book on 5S that was translated into English. Had a Toyota person written about workplace organization we would be calling it 4S. Just because it says so in a book doesn't mean it's the truth.

Kaizen. Read about it, think about it but most important, do it.

*For those of you who are not familiar with the Green Hornet, he is an American comic book hero and crime-fighting newspaper owner.

Posted by Jon Miller at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently went to Japan with a group of directors from an aerospace company to see Toyota and other leaders of Lean. One of the results of the trip was that the director or engineering really saw the waste walls cause in the office and he decided to eliminate offices for his managers, including himself.

They were all going to sit in an open room so as to foster their communication. As predicted, there were howls of protest from some of those who thought that their reward for 20 years of loyal service was an office with solid walls.

They asked me my opinion and I said, "A great number of you are awesome leaders who really have a lot of good to give the company. The only problem is that if you're stuck in an office, the great aura oozing out of you is wasted. I think it's a wonderful thing that you're going to an open office, and I know this is cutting edge stuff in your industry". After I said this, I thought about my statement a bit more and was struck by the irony of it.

In most companies in North America, the more valuable a person becomes in a company, the more things are put in place to limit the amount of influence they can have. For instance, when a person newly joins a company they are out working in the open. They are talking to their colleagues, participating in groups and are involved in the daily operations.

If, they happen to be promoted, they then get to go into a small cubicle. There they may get a computer which they will spend a lot of time on it doing their e-mail. If they get promoted again, they'll get even higher walls - high enough so that they can't see the operation and neither can the people doing the operations see them.

Let's say they manage to get promoted even under these uphill circumstances, and now they get a solid wall office. Unfortunately, there's no door so someone can occasionally still walk in but they are largely removed from the day to day contact with the people around them.

One more promotion, and, hooray, this time they get a door! The company has now quite isolated them from the other employees and their ability to influence people has been diminished quite a bit at this point. OK... one more promotion, and this time they get a secretary to keep the riff raff out of their office. At this point in time this person is so far removed from the daily work that most of their decisions are either based on bad information or late information. As a result they'll make their presence most felt through constantly changing people's priorities and forcing their underlings to provide them with reports in PowerPoint.

If this isn't bad enough, ask yourself who gets the most training dollars spent on them? The person who has the least influence in the company of course!

Posted by Brad Schmidt at 8:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Every so often the NAVAIR AIRSpeed organization gives me a reason to sing their praises. I have a lot of respect for the kaizen activity that's going on there and how they communicate it. They really seem to be getting it right.

Today's lesson is in what the Japanese call yokoten which is literally "horizontal implementation" but is better termed "copying" or in the case of AIRSpeed, "replication" of kaizen results to other areas where they can be applied.

A July 6, 2006 article in the DC Military website today titled Replication: Spreading AIRSpeed Success outlines how. It all starts out with a blend of DMAIC and a 5-day kaizen workshop:

"Kaizen" is a method for accelerating the pace of process improvement. It's a rapid intense event where progress is made through all the AIRSpeed steps: define, measure, analyze, improve and control. This requires preparatory work be completed at the Define step and even sometimes the Measure step by a small team led by a team lead and a Black Belt. The rest of the steps - analyze-improve-control - are performed by a full kaizen team in just one to five days!

Then there are three criteria to successfully doing yokoten, the AIRSpeed article tells us:

1) The replication benefits are worth the replication cost
2) The replicated kaizen idea is portable with minimal modification
3) The expected benefits can be quickly achieved

How do they select the kaizen ideas to copy? The original project should be:

- A clearly defined process change and prove to be effective
- Well-documented
- In the control phase for at least 90 days

In other words, copy the kaizen idea when you have established the new Standard Work and it is stable. Based on the examples given, we can infer that it may also be easier to copy transactional kaizen ideas that are more portable, often virtual and require less reconfiguration of factory or office hardware.

Too many companies think too hard about how to "adapt" the TPS philosophy instead of just copying whatever they can. This is a way of making excuses rather than doing the hard work of changing. I am not saying that you can copy TPS exactly 100% successfully. I am saying grasshopper too often quarrels with sensei.

Consider martial arts. In martial arts, first you copy the master as closely as you can. You don't talk about how "you are different" or how "it doesn't apply to me" to your martial arts sensei. Only after you have mastered your kata (forms) can you break out of these forms and make variations that suit your body and mind better. Then you can develop your own style and go beyond your martial arts sensei.

How can we copy good kaizen ideas effectively? It starts with humility. Admit that your process might be just like someone else's process and not so unique that you can't copy someone else. Admit first that someone else might have already figured out the answer. Choose "I can be better" instead of "I can be right".

I hope AIRSpeed and all of the great men and women in the armed services doing kaizen will replicate their kaizen ideas all the way through the government to the heart of Wahington D.C. and the oval office. In the mean time, read about their approach to replication, and copy it.

Posted by Jon Miller at 6:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a follow up to a previous post on How Toyota Uses Information Technology (IT) for Kaizen based on an interview with Toyota CIO Amano in the Nikkei BP magazine. This one is titled The Role of the CIO is to Change the Way We Work by Sharing Information – Using IT to Cut Time to Develop New Automobiles in Half. Like many things with Lean manufacturing, it sounds awfully simple:

"I think an important role of the CIO is to use computers and information as weapons to transcend departmental boundaries and make work flow more smoothly.

A 'common language' is needed in order to share information effectively. We implemented a new CAD (computer aided design) tool to allow this. We also structure a common BOM (bill of materials, which also includes assembly methods and a code system). Previously the BOMs used in each region were created based on the special characteristics of each region but this did not allow for a common language for each regional operation to work together. We emphasized using IT as a basis to develop a 'common language' for working together."

This is a great example of deciding first what your work style (process) needs to look like to achieve your business goals and then implementing an IT system that conforms to that process, rather than the other way around where the process is conformed to the information technology based or some "best practice" dreamed up by consultants, as is too often the case.

Posted by Jon Miller at 7:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today is a good day for Daily Kaizen! The intranet blog for the Lean healthcare team at Group Health Cooperative is now open to the public. The authors are Lee Fried, internal consultant who is spearheading the Lean effortsat Group Health Coopeartive in Seattle, and Ted Eytan, a physician who is heavily involved in kaizen there.

Today's post is on a 30-day follow up to Standardized Work implementation in one of the hospital administrative areas. They have overcome initial skepticism and change management challenges, and now

Cycle times are dropping rapidly, and most team members were quick to voice their excitement about the new process. Standard work is a powerful tool.

There are over 80 posts in the archives since April 2006. Be sure to add Daily Kaizen to your list of favorites and share your comments and experiences in Lean healthcare with the Daily Kaizen bloggers.

Kudos to everyone at Group Health Cooperative who is involved in the important work of redesigning how patient care is delivered so it can be safer at higher quality and lower cost, while maintaining the respect for and dignity of people.

Posted by Jon Miller at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Or at least that's the title of an article in the July 10, 2006 BusinessWeek. It's good to see Lean production being featured in mainstream business magazines like this even if it's likely to stir up the emotions of quite a few Lean manufacturing advocates in the U.S.

The story of Matsushita's factory in Saga, Japan is interesting but hardly justifies the title of the claim that no one does Lean like the Japanese. The Saga factory cut their production lead-time from 2.5 days to 40 minutes. They did this with the help of robots and software to help them implement flexible Lean manufacturing cells. The factory

...makes a batch of 500 phones per eight-hour shift, vs. 1,500 phones in three days before the most recent changes.

It sounds like a fairly standard Lean manufacturing conversion from batch to one-piece flow, the type that's going on all over the U.S.A. and other countries.

It's a familiar story. The factories need to become more agile in order to produce a wider mix of products and perform quick changeovers, responding to changing demand. By the time new products near peak volumes they have moved to lower cost countries.

The article describesthe practice of yokoten or "horizontal implementation" of copying good ideas tested and implemented at one factory to another.

Weeks after Hirata and Tsuru gave the green light to the new layout, six other Matsushita plants in China, Malaysia, Mexico, and Britain started copying the setup.

Intel is well-known for their "copy exactly" policy of taking improvements and standards set at one plant and implementing it across all other plants. Yokoten is something that more non-Japanese companies doing Lean manufacturing should definitely copy.

Designing prodcuts to fit the production process (rather than having the product designs dictate process variations) is another Lean practice that Matsushita demosntrates. Smart, but the best Lean companies outside of Japan do this.

Not everyone does Lean. Like the Japanese, those who do Lean manufacturing need to use all available technologies, tools and strategies to stay ahead of the competition and responding to changing market needs profitably.

Posted by Jon Miller at 11:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)