The Largest Room in the World
What is the largest room in the world?
I just heard this yesterday. Any guesses? Think about it.
Or give a hint to other readers if you know the answer.
I'm not telling.
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What is the largest room in the world?
I just heard this yesterday. Any guesses? Think about it.
Or give a hint to other readers if you know the answer.
I'm not telling.
I had a very interesting conversation today with a friend who is a manager spearheading a Lean effort at a local facotry. His latest focus is on connecting the metal forming operations with the assembly operations using kanban. He observed that although there is a great need for kanban, there is so much confusion about kanban in the U.S.A.
Here is a short list of what kanban is not:
- A taped, painted, or otherwise marked storage location
- Two-bin systems
- Carts loaded with a specific number of parts and placed in a specific area
- Anything abbreviated IPK
- A faxed work order or P.O.
- Other methods for information transmission that end in -ban
- Just about any execution method promised by an ERP system
In the broad definition, the world calls nearly anything "kanban" that acts more like a pull than a push. If the result of kanban-like is less overproduction and more pull than push in this world, it may be OK. Then again, this leaves a lot of inventory and unimproved processes on the table.
I'm talking about the narrow definition of kanban. This is the system of cards developed by Taiichi Ohno to signal consumption downstream and order production upstream. The cards come in withdrawal, production, signal varieties with variants of these. The main purpose of kanban was to limit overproduction while linking processes that could not flow one-to-one.
Why is there no comprehensive, step-by-step book or instruction manual for kanban on the market, in English, yet plenty on kanban-lite? Does this reflect that there have been so few true kanban implementations from the ground-up in the United States? Or is it that only none of these have resulted in a book? Even in Japan, where better books and manuals on kanban are available, there are surprisingly few kanban systems implementation documents.
Kanban is not easy. Ohno said in his book that at one point he forbade the management in one Toyota factory from operating a kanban system with their supplier because the Toyota factory itself had neither an internal kanban system nor the discipline and systems this required for a kanban system.
Kanban requires being thorough with a lot of the basics such as 5S and not passing on defects. People must follow procedures to at least a quasi-Standard Work level. It also requires SMED and a certain degree of heijunka if lot sizes are to be kept small. Then there is the homework you need to do with container sizes, quantities, address system, delivery routes...
Perhaps it not so much confusion as being satisfied with kanban-lite or intimidated by the requirements of a full kanban system.
There is a curious mention of Nissan purchasing an American automobile factory before World War II and moving it to Japan in chapter 21 of Taiichi Ohno's Workplace Management:
Before the war Nissan had purchased an American factory and moved it all over to Japan, and there were even engineers from overseas who came along. So in that sense, Nissan must have been much more advanced than Toyota.
Nissan got a head start on Toyota by moving an American factory with American engineering know-how, to Japan. Toyota didn't have the money so they had to figure it out for themselves.
Doing some research on on Taiichi Ohno recently, I came across a passage from an interview with Ohno where he names the factory that Nissan purchased. It was a Graham-Paige factory. Unless you are a classic car buff, Graham-Paige may not ring a bell. It took me some Google work to find out more about them. This Wikipedia entry has an interesting summary of Graham-Paige history with some nice photos of their cars. No mention of their factory being sold to Nissan though.
Chapter 21 is titled "Rationalization is Doing What is Rational" and the theme of the chapter is that when something has been thoroughly kaizened, or rationalized, it appears as nothing special. If you see a factory that makes you think "Wow!" then that is probably a bad factory. Being thorough with the most humble, obvious, seemingly common sense things is the sign of a rationalized factory.
General Motors is pondering the purchase of Chrysler. Seriously? It is "rationalization" in a sense, but is this rational? What do they hope to gain other than market share? What do they hope to learn? Is that question even being asked?
In the short term, grabbing market share by buying a competitor may seem like a good idea. If a leader is rewarded on short-term performance, that is what a leader may do. In the long term, figuring out for yourself how to do it better than the competition is a better idea. The Toyota way is based on long-term thinking. That may be the hardest lesson to learn of all for our leaders to learn.
I heard a story about a Toyota employee. This was years ago when Toyota Motor Sales merged with Toyota Motor Company to form Toyota Motor Corporation. The employee from Motor Sales asked for paper to write a report. A woman in the office gave him one sheet of paper. "If you need another piece, please come to get it." She told him. That must have been a bit of a culture shock.
This is another example of the Toyota habit of driving out waste. Paper was issued one-piece flow, on demand, rather than in notebooks. This was back in the days when ink met paper through a pen. There wasn't a lot of typing done and stored in digital files.
Another moral to the story is the one-page report, often called A3 or even A4 because of the paper size. If you can't summarize it in one page, you haven't thought it through, or you are wasting words.
I printed out a skill matrix format today to show several people in our office for the purpose of review. Then I recycled it. I would venture to say that less than 1/200th of the page had ink on it. It made me think of this story. White space muda.
Nemawashi is the building of support for a project through advance communication and consensus. The Japanese term nemawashi (根回し) comes from "to dig around the roots" in order to prepare a plant for transplant. Without proper nemawashi, a bonsai tree transplanted to new soil may die.
Many people first hear of nemawashi in the context of Hoshin Kanri (policy deployment) which is a fact-based approach to planning and tracking breakthrough objectives. As awareness of the Toyota Way and its elements become more mainstream, the mention of nemawashi as a management behavior has increased.
In business how many projects die because ideas were transplanted to minds that were not prepared to nurture them? The only place I can think of in the U.S. where nemawashi is practiced regularly is in Congress, where the passage of laws requires the support of a certain number of votes and lawmakers spend time and effort to gain support for their ideas.
Like much of kaizen, there's nothing mysterious about nemawashi. It's not a science (though you could take a scientific approach) or a 12-step process. If you have a project that requires decision and support, here's how to get started with the art of nemawashi:
Create the project document. What is the current condition? What are the root causes? What is it costing us to do business this way? What are possible countermeasures?
Tip: Fit this on one page, even if it's a big piece of paper (A3 size).
Review the project document with people. Do this in person (in many cultures doing this individually will yield better results than review in groups). Ask each person if they understand the current condition, the root causes and the actions proposed. If you are a leader, prepare to listen and teach but resist the tempation to justify or explain.
Tip: Send the project description to people in advance so they can review it and prepare for your face to face meeting.
Rewrite the project document. At this stage the document it is no longer a proposal as such but a summary of what has already been agreed by those who influence and make decisions in the organization.
Tip: Keep the original document hard copy with your notes to show the various changes and inputs you gained from people throughout the nemawashi process. Until nemawashi becomes second nature this "draft" document will help people visualize how nemawashi works and how their ideas and inputs were valued.
Meet to decide formally to support the project. This should take less than an hour, including time for questions and clarifications.
Tip: If at first you fail to gain smooth agreement at this meeting, spin the PDCA cycle and learn why. Did you miss certain people in the nemawashi process? Was the project document unclear? Did the nemawashi process go on too long so that priorities changed?
There are three main benefits to the nemawashi process:
1) You will have a better understanding of the current condition as people challenge the initial assumptions and results of root cause analysis
2) It creates ownership for the project because others have had a chance to influence and shape it. People support what they create.
3) Time waste in meetings is eliminated or replaced with time doing nemawashi.
Nemawashi is best done in the project design phase or Plan phase of PDCA. How long should this process take? Probably as long as you need to make sure the project will be successfully transplanted in the minds of the people who have the ability to nurture or neglect it. The more that people in positions to influence significant change practice nemawashi, the greater the chance of success will be for these changes.
Here is a follow up to reason #3 from of the post Here are 4.5 Signs that Your Lean May be L.A.M.E. from earlier this week. I could think of 12 reasons to tell customers about your Lean manufacturing efforts.
1. Customer behavior is the problem you need to solve next. Once your Lean effort has progressed to a point, next you will need to involve customers and suppliers. You might even say it is the problem you need to solve first but why don't we start with the mote in our own eyes. Saying "it's the customer's fault" isn't really helpful, since presumably your business exists because you are able to satisfy a unique request that your customers have, even if their request is a difficult one. If this was easy, anyone could do it.
2. Your customer may have a more mature Lean effort than you. What a great reason. Ask for their help. Learn from your customers. Tour their best facilities. Have peer-level exchanges to raise the awareness and knowledge level of your people. Build a stronger relationship with your customers.
3. You may have a more mature Lean effort than your customer. The same as #2 above, but in reverse. I have heard that Boeing got into working with Japanese consultants in their Lean efforts in large part due to the urgings of United Technologies, Pratt & Whitney, who make the engines for aircraft. The airlines are now also getting into Lean, and this no doubt has something to do with Boeing or Airbus sharing the benefits of Lean with their customers. Lean alumni from both Boeing and UTC have been known to head up Lean efforts at the airlines.
4. Invite customers to join your kaizen workshops. This is a great way to find the waste of processing, one of the hardest wastes to find but easiest to get rid of once found. Many times the root cause is "just because" and the customer will be the first one to tell you that a process adds no value to them, or is over-processed.
5. Build in your reputation for built in quality. Let your customers talk about how they know your products are good because of the way you design and produce them, not because of warranties you tack on at the end to fix the ones that got through.
6. Make your customers think twice about taking their business elsewhere.
Tell your customers that compared to competitors you have a head start in meeting their goals. Whether it's to a local competitor or offshore, if you have a health Lean culture in place or under development, you have momentum in the areas of cost reduction, quality improvement and delivery performance. A lower priced supplier may in fact cost more in terms of total landed cost, and you can demonstrate this through your flexibility and responsiveness.
7. Hold yourselves accountable. There's nothing like telling your customer "You'll see a kanban system functioning between your warehouse and this production line in the next 60 days" to keep you honest and on track. Your customer won't accept excuses that your managers will.
8. Get Lean into the heads of the salesmen and deal makers. Talking with your customers about your Lean efforts will require the people who deal most directly with customers every day to keep a clear idea of what Lean is all about in their minds at all times.
9. Getting your customers to think Lean creates a "pull" or an expectation from them to make you continuously improve and keep up your Lean efforts. "Our customers require that we do this" is no longer lip service.
10. Borrow expert knowledge from your customers. During your kaizen activities or at any point in your Lean implementation when you are using a cross functional team, invite one of your customers to participate, preferably someone who fills a skill or experience gap you have. In exchange for hands-on experience in Lean implementation they receive, they will give you their fresh ideas and expertise on how to solve technical problems you may have. Who knows, maybe they already fixed that problem at another supplier.
11. Finally get that doggone design change approved. Those engineering specs you were sure "they're never gonna change" can become Lean roadkill when it's either a customer requirement to change it, or no longer a customer requirement to maintain it. If it's not Lean, and it deserves changing, there's nothing like the voice of the customer to provide authority.
12. Put the money on the table and see what happens. One of the reasons not to tell your customers about your Lean efforts may be that your customers will want you to rebid their parts at the new, lower, "Lean" price and effectively take away your savings. This is common practice by corporate purchasing departments who are measured on price as opposed to cost. Don't do this haphazardly, but thinking long-term it may be better to know just how your customers will react to your Lean efforts and the savings that result. If they see you as a strong long-term partner that will continually improve quality and capability and be financially secure, they will not be so eager to grab the money on the table. If not, or if they themselves are not financially secure, they may ask for immediate savings. In either of the latter cases, you would be well-advised to have "find new customers" as part of your overall Lean Enterprise strategy.
These are all from the perspective of a supplier to an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) and not from an OEM to an end user. I don't know how well these would apply to a software company, a hospital or a restaurant. Ideas welcome.
Mark Graban at the Lean Blog coined L.A.M.E. as "Lean As Misguidedly Executed" and Kevin Meyer at the Evolving Excellence blog builds on this idea in pointing out how Lean is often added on in press releases, though it may be out of context.
Here are 4.5 signs that your Lean effort may be L.A.M.E.:
1. Assuming that your employees know why you are going Lean. The first assumption people will make is that Lean means Less Employees Are Needed. There are simply too many L.A.M.E. cases where this is true. No matter how many times you explain the big picture, customer-focused, long-term thinking reason for going Lean, people will tune back into radio station WIFM - What's In it for Me? So keep communicating the reason Lean is essential until they understand and believe it.
2. Setting an "adequate" level of Lean education for your people. Whether it be a number of hours, certification through attending a number of seminars or courses, reading books or being on a number of kaizen events, as soon as you set the "enough" level of Lean education and ask them to get back to work, you have a misguided Lean execution. Toyota says "monozukuri wa hitozukuri" or "making things is making people". Real Lean is the Thinking People System, and this requires a long-term commitment to superior manufacturing (or service) through people development.
3. Not telling your customers about your Lean efforts. There are so many good reasons for telling your customers early and often about your Lean efforts, that this will have to be a separate blog entry (WIP creation in action!).
4. Not marketing Lean to your own organization. Resistance to change is everywhere. There are so many reasons in people's minds NOT to implement Lean right now, or not in this area or not for this product. There are so many other things demanding attention. The benefits, challenges, countermeasures to challenges to Lean as well as the need for constant change and learning should be to be marketed and promoted until it becomes part of the air you breathe and the language you speak.
4.5. Having a completion date on your Lean implementation plan. This receives only half marks for being L.A.M.E. because of partial credit for having an actual implementation plan in place. But once you truly understand Lean, you'll want to put a zero after whatever number you have as the completion date, or scratch the number off all together.
The Lean principles of the seven types of waste, flow, building in quality at each step, and making small improvements locally each day are all readily accepted by knowledge workers with a minimum of explanation and demonstration.
Visualization and standardization are more difficult for knowledge workers to understand and accept. Both are very powerful and essential to a Lean office. When knowledge work is done at a computer, as it often is today, making the effort to visualize this in analog fashion seems like a non value added activity. And perhaps it is. Yet making the progress of work and the current status of a project visible is the first step towards solving problems and improving flow. You can't fix a problem unless you can't see it, and we can't see inside your head.
Standardization in knowledge work can be as simple as reusing prior art, having different people use common tools and a common process, or begin by having each same person follow their own standardized process for each unique request. Knowledge workers are creative by nature so part of the resistance to standardization comes form the perception that this creativity will be limited. In fact when new methods are tried, if these are tried as improvements to a standard, there is plenty of room for experimentation and creativity.
When we teach knowledge workers how to apply Lean concepts, quite often one of the mental breakthrough for them comes when they understand how inventory applies to their work. At first glance knowledge workers will think "I don't have any inventory." Quite the contrary.
An example of work in process in knowledge work would be the 15 blog entry ideas that I have saved as drafts. Each one has some time put into it. Some of them may never see the light of day. After many weeks I may forget what the idea for the blog entry was all about. Or I may lose interest in the topic. Work in process in knowledge work may not take up space and have a carrying cost as physical inventory does, but it does use up time and capacity (cash), and it may also become obsolete more easily than physical inventory.
When this type of work in process inventory for knowledge work occupies physical space and materials in the form of prototypes, samples, files, drafts of documents, etc. they can have all of the associated wastes as production inventory.
How to reduce this work in process in knowledge work? Visualizing this work in process in knowledge work is the first step. It is important to become aware of it as waste. It is important to have a clear customer and a clear request for each piece of knowledge work WIP. We've found that often just visualizing this type of knowledge work done in office environments can result in a person walking by say "We don't need that anymore," or "So and so is also working on that."
There are some good online solutions and software applications that allow tracking of projects and sharing of visibility. For project teams divided by time and space, these provide a critical link. In the interest of going to gemba, maintaining face to face information sharing for people in the same office, and resolving issues in real time (flow), there is a benefit to analog visualization of knowledge work.
Another way to kaizen knowledge work WIP is to create a standard for the amount of knowledge work WIP you allow and limiting how many projects or ideas you work on at any one time. Only accept or introduce one new project or work in process every time you complete one.
From personal experience this is very hard to do. I have yet to see excellent examples of flow and pull in knowledge work, but we're working on it through visualization and standardization.
I left the training room too eager to go to gemba today and forgot to put on my safety glasses. Within two minutes one of the safety coordinators on the shop floor stopped me and sent me back to get them. Kudos to the management of this company for instilling this level of safety awareness in their people.
In order to keep kaizen going over decades, you need to be dissatisfied. In order to be dissatisfied you need have high ideals. The definition of "ideal" in TPS includes safety. A product, process or service should be safe, first and foremost. All kaizen should improve safety.
Why do most American factories require people in the factory to wear safety glasses? Perhaps it has something to do with Ralph Nader. The obvious answer is that the safety glasses protect peoples' eyes from injury caused by flying debris. Why do we have flying debris? Safety is not built into the process.
The Japanese consultants I worked with always puzzled at why American and European factories had such inadequate guarding at the source of the debris. They used to say that safety glasses are a sign of unsafe processes. I think of safety glasses as an sign of a process that is far from ideal, just like inventory is a sign of a lack of flow or forklifts are a sign of disconnected processes.
I have not been to all Japanese factories, but I have never seen safety glasses worn in the factories I have visited. In Japan they do wear caps, called "safety caps". These caps are thinner than baseball caps, so presumably the flying debris in Japanese factories is quite flimsy.
There is an interesting story about Taiichi Ohno. In the early days of implementing the Toyota Production System at Toyota, one of the workers in the factory who was not so eager to change threatened Ohno with a hammer. From then on, Ohno did not wear a safety cap when he went to the gemba. Part of this was to show people that he was putting his life on the line to make TPS succeed. Part of it may have been that he saw how silly it was to wear the safety cap in an unsafe workplace.
Safety glasses protect your eyes, but they can also make your unsafe processes less visible.
I just finished reading Lean for Dummies. It covers a lot of ground in 362 pages. It's full of diagrams, lists and other useful visuals. It is light and accessible reading. Parts IV "The Lean Enterprise" and Part V "The Part of Tens" are particularly valuable as reference and for setting the tone for how you will approach TPS implementation.
Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones, and by no means is our work error-free. In the spirit of kaizen, I am dissatisfied with the product. I criticize because I care.
On page 21, both pillars of the TPS house read "Jidoka" when one of them should be "Just In Time". Oh the irony, to have made a quality error by doubling the pillar for Jidoka, standing for Built-In-Quality! Perhaps final inspection was eliminated.
The meaning of kai （改）is "change" and the definition of zen （善） is "good". Zen does not mean "to see, or to gain wisdom from doing" (p. 118) in Japanese. As long as you do kaizen I don't care what you call it or how you explain kai and zen. But if you think "zen" is "to see, or to gain wisdom from doing" rather than "good" you can make a "change" that is "bad" and "gain wisdom" from it without doing any good. This is not kaizen. This definition is potentially misleading.
The book claims (p.119) that companies like Toyota and Canon receive and implement 100 suggestions per person per year, more than two per week. The source is not cited. The number typically quoted by Toyota is one per month per person, implemented. Canon only went through their TPS conversion a few years ago, so for a short period of time they may have had two per week. The 100 suggestions per person per year number is misleading and unrealistic.
Page 121 discusses PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) and introduces something I have never heard of before, SDCA (Standardize, Do, Check, Act) as a way to start when you have no standards as a basis for improvement. The "Plan" portion of PDCA defines the gap between current condition and ideal condition. If the current condition is that there is no standard, the Plan would be to "study and establish a repeatable standard". If so, do we need SDCA?
The lack of mention of production preparation, either as 3P (Production Preparation Process) or simply equipment and process design to support one-piece flow, was disappointing. While one book cannot cover all Lean principles and tools, given the critical role of process design, a few paragraphs would have been fitting. To be fair, there is no good book on 3P in the market today, and not a lot of material other than on blogs or occasional articles. Production preparation know-how is one of those technical areas that Toyota does not share as readily with the outside world.
I am glad that Lean, TPS and kaizen have now become even more accessible to the masses through this cheerful yellow Lean for Dummies book.
We have been fortunate to visit Ricoh factories in Japan and in my opinion Ricoh is an excellent company and a great example of implementing the Toyota Production System outside of the automotive industry. They are also a leader in reducing the negative impact they have on the environment as a manufacturer. I continue to learn from Ricoh.
Masamitsu Sakurai served as president of Ricoh UK Products Ltd. before becoming CEO of Ricoh Co. Ltd. One of the insights he gained upon returning to Japan was the difference between what he called Japanese-style "management by kaizen" (改善型経営) and Western-style "management by selection" (選択型経営).
One example Sakurai gave was that in Japan the first response to a high rate of absenteeism is to conduct root cause analysis into the behavior of absenteeism, leading to kaizen. In Europe the management would replace the worker who had an attendance problem with another workers. Problem not solved, but deferred.
Likewise, when there is a supplier performance problem the management by selection approach would be to find an alternate supplier while management by kaizen approach would be to keep the supplier and help them improve. Once again the root cause may not have been addressed at all. A selection was made, but in fact no improvement was made.
Granted this is a generalization and not true of all management in Japan or Europe, but as generalizations often go, it is true. Just as necessity is the mother of invention, or as Taiichi Ohno said, "Your wits don't work until you feel the squeeze," when you have no options to choose from other than what you have now, your choice is to do kaizen or perish.
Having a kaizen mindset requires starting with scarcity. When you have abundance, you become lazy. It becomes harder to see the need for kaizen. The typical human response when resources are plentiful is "Why change?"
That is why we have to imagine and pursue the ideal customer experience and strive to provide it, because this requires more resources than we already have. The customer wants to pay nothing to have a perfect product right away. This requires going beyond the selection to doing kaizen.
An important corollary to this rule is to do kaizen when times are good. Otherwise when you are faced with true scarcity you may not have enough resources to even make the improvements you need to make in order to survive. If you are practicing management by selection, select management by kaizen.
I've heard that at Toyota the meetings are 60 minutes long, with 50 minutes of actual meeting time and 10 minutes to get to the next meeting. The use of the standardize A3 size one-page format to communicate the progress on PDCA problem solving keeps meetings on time. This is truly impressive, but we won't all get there in one leap.
Here are nine rules for fighting endless meetings:
#1 Start on time. You don't arrive 15 minutes late for a school examination. You don't arrive 15 minutes late for your flight. If you do, you don't fly. You don't arrive 15 minutes late for a job interview. Yet once we pass the test, make the flight and get the job, we think nothing of making others wait for meetings at work. Why?
#2 Have clear objectives. Meetings will be more productive when you start with an agenda that answers the questions: Why am I at this meeting? Who requires that I be here? When does this meeting end? How will we know if the meeting is successful?
#3 Be prepared. Review the agenda or other background information ahead of time. Know where the meeting will be held and how long it takes to get to and from that meeting place so you can be on time.
#4 Be engaged. This starts with turning off your cell phones or blackberries. Ideally, put them all on the table where they are visible to all. Make reaching to answer them is a visible offense. Pay $1 towards charity if you reach for your phone, unless it's an emergency. As long as meetings are kept short, you can get back to people who call you in a reasonable amount of time. Stand up rather than sit, it will keep you more aware.
#5 Communicate visually. Humans process more than 80% of information through their sense of sight. Psychologists say most of communication happens through body language, then tone of voice and a smaller portion through the actual content of speech. Give and read visual cues. Use images to tell a story and anchor your communication, rather than talking on and on about something without structure.
#6 Solve problems. If everything is going well, why meet? Ideally meetings should help solve problems. If there is a clear objective and a problem to solve, the meeting can end either when the problem is solved or everyone knows what to do to start solving the problem. Problem solving is engaging, and in that is what we are all here to do.
#7 Practice genchi gembutsu. Whenever possible hold the meetings at the location where the particular problem or issue being discussed has occurred. This is more visual, engaging, and improves direct access to the facts. This speeds up problem resolution by taking away opportunities for conjecture and blurring of the actual condition.
#8 End on time. You need to get to the next meeting on time.
#9 Avoid the Three Evils of Meetings as taught by Takeshi Kawabe, former executive of Showa Manufacturing Co. and student of Taiichi Ohno:
1. Meet but don’t discus
2. Discuss but don’t decide
3. Decide but don’t do
These nine rules will develop the behaviors to support more effective meetings.
There was an encouraging article about Lean government in the March 15, 2007 NB Online (Nikkei Business) titled City Hall in Aichi Studies at Toyota to "Enhance the Capabilities of the Staff" (愛知の市役所がトヨタで修行して「職員力」アップ). Takahama City in Aichi Prefecture, Japan, has been studying with Toyota since the end of 2005 in an effort to improve productivity and quality of service they provide to citizens.
There is a large Toyota Industries Corporation (formerly Toyoda Loom Works) factory in Takahama City, and the article reports that the city hall staff were instructed in Toyota Production System principles by Toyota staff. The article reports that 12 staffers from the city hall learned the TPS method at Toyota Loom Works using the same method described in How to Learn the Fundamentals of the Toyota Production System in 30 Days, and that a second wave of 12 staff have gone through this training in how to observe and time processes, map material and information flow, and redesign their work.
One of the objectives of the mayor of Takahama is to enhance capabilities of the staff. To this end, various Toyota Production System concepts such as 4S, Just in Time, multi-process handlers and standard work are used in various parts of the city hall. Material and information flow diagrams (value stream maps), yamazumi charts and skill matrices are used for problem solving at the Takahama City Hall.
One simple example of kaizen in public service from the article was to move the desks of the city hall staff to face the counters so that they could see their customers (citizens) approaching. That is a true example of a "customer facing" organization. One of the goals stated for doing this is to reduce the citizens' waiting time to zero.
In addition, the article describes something like a "red tagging" of unwanted city services, so that the 200 city hall staff can better focus on providing services the citizens actually want. A customer-driven, rather than an ideologically-driven government - what a concept.
When do you know a management concept has hit the mainstream? Like a bug to a windshield, "Lean" as a management approach has now hit bookshelves in the form of Lean for Dummies. It set me off on a minor rant in the office when I learned about this today.
The title is unfortunate. I realize it is a successful franchise, and the format itself of the "dummies" books is very good. Can Lean be summarized successfully in 362 pages? We shall see. Kudos to them if they do it.
On the other hand, if your organization is led by, or filled with people who see themselves as "dummies" attempting to discover how to:
* Understand Lean and how it's implemented
* Speak the language of Lean
* Identify and eliminate the seven forms of waste
* Construct and use Value Stream Maps and other Lean tools
* Engage people in a Lean transformation
by reading a book that explains it all in 1-page and 2-page snippets, you will fail. Context is key. One of the 10 pitfalls listed in the table of contents of this book is the "Quick Fix" and there is a danger of this if the subject matter is not respected and instead dumbed-down.
There is a quote about Toyota building brilliant processes that average people can perform flawlessly. The quote does not say they are building processes for dummies. That would not be respectful to people to begin with, and most likely not practical since just like there is no limit to people's ability to think, there no limit in the other direction as well.
Art Smalley who is a former Toyota manager, and a highly reputable source on how Lean should be implemented, has written about creating basic stability as a precondition for TPS implementation. It's a simple idea, but in hindsight many of Gemba's failed Lean projects (whether they be internal projects or with clients) resulted from some basic lack of stability in the human, material, machine or method conditions. I would suggest that stability in the areas of management ability, respect for people and average or better intelligence are also preconditions to a Lean transformation.
That said, I bought the book today for research purposes. We may even recommend it in spite of the unfortunate title. The book is billed as a fun and simple guide to improving performance and profits for your business. Hey, I'd be a dummy if I didn't get me some of that.
During training in how to do kaizen, a key activity is helping people understand the concept of waste and make it relevant to their own organization and to their own work. As long as waste is something abstract, or something that happens in the factory but not in software development activity or the executive suite, you are losing the war on waste.
"How much of your work do you think is waste?" People's answer to this question differs quite a bit depending on what point in their Lean education you ask this question. Suffice it so say that the number gets asymptotically larger the more they learn about Lean.
How much money do you think the U.S. healthcare system wastes in a year? About 50% of costs, or $1 trillion, according to numbers we have cited from Dr. Robert Mecklenburg of Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle. Stunning, and sickening, yet help is on the way in the form of consultants and instructors from other industries who are working with patience and dedication to educate healthcare professionals on how to see their work as a process which can be improved continuously.
One of the places you can read about this exciting work being done at the Group Health Cooperative at the Daily Kaizen blog.
How much money do you think the U.S. government wastes in a year? First of all, just how much does the U.S. government spend? Here are the budgets for the last 12 years:
- U.S. federal budget, 1997: $1.6 trillion (submitted 1996 by President Clinton)
- U.S. federal budget, 1998: $1.7 trillion (submitted 1997 by President Clinton)
- U.S. federal budget, 1999: $1.7 trillion (submitted 1998 by President Clinton)
- U.S. federal budget, 2000: $1.8 trillion (submitted 1999 by President Clinton)
- U.S. federal budget, 2001: $1.8 trillion (submitted 2000 by President Clinton)
- U.S. federal budget, 2002: $2.0 trillion (submitted 2001 by President Bush)
- U.S. federal budget, 2003: $2.1 trillion (submitted 2002 by President Bush)
- U.S. federal budget, 2004: $2.2 trillion (submitted 2003 by President Bush)
- U.S. federal budget, 2005: $2.4 trillion (submitted 2004 by President Bush)
- U.S. federal budget, 2006: $2.6 trillion (submitted 2005 by President Bush)
- U.S. federal budget, 2007: $2.8 trillion (submitted 2006 by President Bush)
- U.S. federal budget, 2008: $2.9 trillion (submitted 2007 by President Bush)
How much of that is waste? Just the act of measuring how much of this number is waste would no doubt cost taxpayers many millions of dollars, which is waste. We can get some idea from this CBS Evening News report on Pentagon spending, titled The War On Waste:
"We know it's gone. But we don't know what they spent it on," said Jim Minnery, Defense Finance and Accounting Service.
Also from the article:
"According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld admitted.
Appalling.
And the words of Retired Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan, commanded the Navy's 2nd Fleet:
"With good financial oversight we could find $48 billion in loose change in that building, without having to hit the taxpayers."
The U.S. Senator Everett Dirksen has been credited with saying, sometime in the 1960s, “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” Let's turn that around. The same is true when we make war on waste. A billion here and a billion there does add up to quite a lot in cost savings if everyone learned to recognize the vast amounts of waste around them, and if everyone was empowered to change that through kaizen.
Sonu asked, "Can single minute exchange of dies concept be used in office?"
Yes! Since SMED or single minute exchange of dies refers to changing dies, moulds, and tooling in under 10 minutes, we might want to call this Quick Changeover so that it doesn't seem so foreign to people not working with tools and machines.
The key concepts in Quick Changeover are:
1. Separate internal and external time. When a printer runs out of ink, we typically stop printing, go find the spare ink cartridge, take it out of the box, and replace it. All the while, someone is waiting for their print job.
Think of internal time as the time when you have to stop the printer to add a new ink cartridge. Getting the ink cartridge, opening the box, and having it ready to swap while the printer is still printing would be external time.
A knowledge work example of external set up could be as simple as having the next task or project prepared and waiting for you in a folder so that you could get to it right away, rather than having to go seek out the instructions and information to start the next project smoothly.
2. Cut out waste. This is mostly motion waste, but transportation, rework / correction / defects and processing waste certainly come into play. Most if not all waiting should have been eliminated in step 1. If not, see step 3.
A copy machine changeover is pretty quick, but for office equipment needing many connections or settings, it would be a matter of making these "one touch" or as easy as possible and keeping all necessary items close at hand.
A knowledge work example would be to reduce the number of clicks and screens needed to access information from a server, or make paper files more visual and easier to find.
3. Parallel changeover. Here you can imagine a pit crew in a F1 race. If it takes 10 minutes for one person to clean a large conference room between meetings, it might take 5 people only 1 minute. Improvement using a coordinated, pit crew-like parallel changeover is usually more than a linear effect, since steps can be done faster, without waiting or be eliminated all together in some cases.
A knowledge work example would be to have a team of assistants start the conversation with a new customer on the phone and do research online while while the sales executive wraps up a conversation with another customer.
4. Power tools. Just like a vacuum cleaner can clean faster than a broom, adding RAM to your computer to speed it up or having two or three monitors so that time to changing from one task or tool to another can be eliminated is an example of using power tools to speed up the internal changeover time.
Do this last, as it makes no sense to use speed tools on tasks that should be done externally (step 1) or things that should not be done at all (step 2).
In all cases the goal of SMED or Quick Changeover is to reduce down time so that you can reduce the lot sizes of work in an effort to shorten queue times, keep lot sizes constant but increase capacity, or some combination of both. A good place to start with quick changeover in the office is to ask, "Why do we need to reduce changeover time?"
These are just a few quick thoughts from an airport lounge. Readers! Do you have other good examples of Quick Changeover or SMED in the office? If so, post them here!
Today Patrick Shumaker from Gemba forwarded a great example of asking "Why?" persistently until the root cause is found. Why are U.S. standard railroad gages 4 feet 8.5 inches? Rome. You can find the full story on this bulletin board.
The "ask why 5 times" approach is also great way to find one of the seven wastes, the waste of processing. Often very hard to spot, but very easy to eliminate once you do, the waste of processing is an otherwise good process that simply isn't needed or does more than needed. Typically the process is done "because we've always done it that way" or because of a long-forgotten or long since changed requirement.
I ran into that recently when one part still had to go through a batch oven process while another one 20 feet away did not. After going through the 5 why questions it turned out that they knew the oven process was not necessary, but it would be too much hassle from their customer to get the specs changed... So they were smart enough to design this waste of processing out of new parts, but the cost of removing it from older parts was too high due to another waste of processing, paperwork approvals.
People talk about pride. It's a funny thing. I've never seen a "pride" poster in a factory or workplace that had their 5S down, good visual management in place and smiling employees. Maybe they 5S-ed the pride posters. Or maybe I haven't been around enough.
I've heard some say that doing 5S for the sake of impressing customer is the wrong reason. If that's the only reason, I agree. But I think we should all do 5S to build a workplace we can be proud of. Whether it is customers, family members or fellow workers, excellent 5S is a way to display high morale.
The word pride puzzled me for a long time. "Proud of being __" or "Pride in __." Perhaps growing up American in Japan, I didn't get my childhood dose of pride rhetoric. The Japanese were rising from the ashes between the 1950s and the 1980s and pride wasn't a big byword. Or even "__ pride" with name of the city sports team or school mascot filling the blank. What is that about?
I do understand the feeling of accomplishment or authorship. People support what they create. This is one of the reasons why people resist change. They are defending something they created, and by extension they are defending themselves. Maybe this is called pride.
When doing kaizen and changing the workplace, whether it be changing the design of an assembly line, taking out a robot that is over-designed and far too fast and complex for building one piece at takt, or challenging long-held but shaky engineering standards, pride can be injured.
How can we turn this injured pride, which can become resistance to change and dislike of kaizen, into something positive? We need to tell people "build a workplace you can be proud of" and give them the opportunity to do this little by little each day.
Too often organizations put the authority to make changes in the hands of a limited number of experts or specialists, and the majority is led to believe that they cannot affect change. So these people may hold on to some small thing that they had a part in creating and take pride in it. When it comes time for the things they are proud of to change, they feel a sense of loss.
If you are asking people to give up something they created and they have pride in, you need to fill this sense of loss with something of greater value. I think the ability to do kaizen, to improve your work and yourself every day, is that something.
That's 60 minutes from everyone in supervisory position and above, at least once every three weeks, forever. If that's too much to ask, save yourself two minutes and stop reading now.
There's something called "stand in the circle" and although it might be known by other names, it is said to have started with Taiichi Ohno telling managers "Draw a circle and stand in it!" in order to teach them to see waste.
You'll need a piece of paper with 30 or more lines on it. You'll need something to write with. You might need something to put the paper on and write against. This exercise starts with picking a spot in your gemba and standing in that one place for 30 minutes.
Find 30 things to improve in 30 minutes. Write them down.
Take the next 30 minutes and make at least one of the improvements you wrote down. The other improvements you can spend the next three weeks working on bit by bit, delegating to the appropriate people, or asking people "why" until you find the actionable root cause.
You've got 58 minutes left. Go stand in the circle.
"How do you sustain improvement?" This is one of the most common questions posed to us about kaizen and Lean. I used to think this question required a thoughtful pause and a serious three-part reply. But lately I ask "How do you not sustain it?"
Whether you have an inventory problem or a lead time problem or a quality problem, kaizen and Six Sigma can make a big change quickly. Change happens to things quicker than it happens to people. But we're interested in changing people since people change things, and without people what use are things anyway? And how did that inventory problem get there in the first place?
The lure of rapid results and quick solutions to problems is what draws most people to Lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, kaizen and variations on these. Maybe these improvement efforts need to be slowed down just a bit and spread around a lot more. Getting an idea into peoples' heads and keeping it there is far more important than following some step by step improvement program.
If you had to choose would you rather have persistent or rapid change? Sadly, many people who are in a position to answer this question and to influence the direction and speed of change efforts are more concerned with what happens during the next 90 days rather than the next 900 days.
Leaders may give lip service to "continuous improvement" yet the reality is that they want it fast. With enough wisdom, time and resources you can certainly have both rapid and persistent change. A leader can always gain more wisdom and resources, but not more time. So how should leaders spend their time in order to have persistent change?
Persistent change requires leaders to take more interest in what is happening today on the gemba than in what reports or dashboards say happened yesterday. Persistent change requires asking people "What needs to change?" and "Why?" and really listening. Persistent change requires teaching as many people (your organization, customers and suppliers) as possible to do the same thing.
Anyone who has ever tried to keep a pet turtle alive knows that you don't just put it in bowl in a closet in a another city and then ask, "How do I keep it alive?" Yet this is how many leaders "support" their Lean efforts. How do you sustain improvement? You go to gemba. You water and feed it. You give it sunlight. It is your work. You sustain it. Personally. Persistently. Seriously.
How do you sustain improvement? You bought the turtle. How do you not sustain it?
Can you have Lean manufacturing without Lean enterprise? Can you have Lean enterprise without a Lean culture? Can you have Lean culture without a motivated shop floor?
All of the trappings of operational excellence such as one piece flow cells, kanban systems, TPM programs, and corporate Lean Six Sigma officers do not make Lean manufacturer a sure thing.
What's needed is the attention and brain power of hundreds and thousands of people working in these factories each day. As more jobs are off-shored and as subcontract or temporary labor becomes a larger part of the shop floor workforce in low cost countries, will there be any motivation for these workers to embrace and sustain a Lean culture?
These are somewhat rhetorical questions, and some companies are beginning to realize the perils of this race to the bottom of the hourly wage, even seeing that they could be facing a crisis in 5 to 10 years as they are grooming no home-grown talent for management positions.
Some companies are slowly increasing the ratio of full-time workers as compared to subcontracted or "rental" workers in an effort to build a culture based on values, rather than just an hourly wage. But these are only the ones that can think beyond the next quarter.
The trouble is, Wall Street punishes companies severely for such long-term thinking. Then again, the Shanghai stock market just punished Wall Street, so maybe it all works out.