We can't Handle the Truth

In the movie, A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson playing the role of a hard-core, old-school, tough-as-nails Marine Colonel delivers the famous line in a military court, “You can’t handle the truth” in answer to Tom Cruise’s cross examination demanding the truth about a code red.

This is a problem for many of us. We can’t handle the truth. Maybe our huge egos prevent us from seeing the truth. Perhaps it is rooted deep in our survival genes to protect us from harm both physical and non-physical. Maybe it is our arrogance from our over-the-top self-image or self-importance. Whatever the reason, we can’t handle the truth if it is not in alignment with our thinking.

We all believe in truth however the truth is not always easily believed. What blinds us from seeing the truth? What in our minds automatically blocks us from seeing the truth? Why do we not want to believe the truth? How do our perceptions create different lenses in seeing the truth?

According to Jon Miller in How to scold like a Kaizen Sensei, the role of the Sensei is “to speak truth to power in ways that a member of the organization could not.” This honest, insightful and raw truth telling skill has very powerful results depending on the delivery by the sensei and the reaction of the learner. Regardless if you are an outside consultant or inside the company, there is a risk in truth telling.

It is easy to see why this truth telling skill does not work coming from within an organization. Unfortunately, the proverbial “kill the messenger” is alive and well in American business. People who speak the truth are often labeled as a non-team player, a disrupter, a trouble maker or the current tag of being “not a good fit”. End result the person either quits or is fired.

Have you ever compromised the truth to keep your job? What about keeping silent? How does your company leadership handle the truth? How do you handle the truth?

It doesn’t take much to see that the truth can get watered down, altered or hidden entirely inside a company, especially as it moves vertically up the ladder. We may believe, at least in the short term, that this is the best way considering the risk, political correctness and social politeness but at what cost? In the long term, is the cost greater? Doesn’t this render our problem solving capabilities as impotent? Isn’t our continuous improvement quest towards perfection halted without seeing the truth?

“New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.” Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

Management Magical Mystery Tour

I strongly believe that one of the keys to a successful lean transformation is management involvement, not just management support. Involvement means full contact, hands-on, go and see for yourself approach. Involvement means leadership. That means more time away from the comfort of your desk and spending this time on the shop floor, in the office areas, in the warehouse, or going to customer sites.

Company executives have gotten so comfortable with seeing their company through the lenses of reports, emails, charts, graphs, boardroom meetings or what their staff tells them that many never venture out for a first hand experience. Charts and graphs are fine tools however I would prefer to know about my operation by experience. Which gives you a better understanding of Hawaii – a) reading travel brochure, looking at pictures and hearing stories by people who went there or b) by your own travel adventure walking on the warm sands of Maui, taking in a deep breathe of ocean air and seeing the waves crashing onto the shore?

Unfortunately, we get distorted glimpses of C-Level executives going “undercover” in TV shows to see first hand what is going on in their company as some great revelation. Kevin Meyer has a great post, MBWA is not a Gemba Walk, that I tend to agree with.

Closer to reality is the planned visit by the high level leader to a site which turns into huge parade of leaders trying to look their best, normally part of a Management Magical Mystery Tour. It’s just like if you invited your priest or pastor over for dinner, you get your house all cleaned up and a special meal is planned and prepared (not a typical night at home, right?).

The plant is notified well in advance so the facility is cleaned up (even to the extent of hiding stuff out of view until after the show) along a pre-determined tour route. Everybody practices and rehearses their lines for the presentation. The smell of fresh paint is hanging in the air. We are ready. Places everyone.

The show usually starts in a conference room with a presentation by the plant staff. If the plant manager is cunning, he will give the executive time to pass on some words of wisdom which can easily take up some of the time for the planned tour. At best, the tour will be rushed which minimizes the chance for problems to surface. It is even possible that the tour is canceled because the meeting, which there was great discussion, took all the time allocated for the visit. Then the C-Level and his entourage travel to the next site.

The only thing missing is the official tour t-shirts. What a wasted opportunity.

How can we get out of this management magical mystery tour routine. First, the C-level executives should visit so often that the event is not special. Second, a visit should not always be a planned event that prompts a show and tell. Third, the C-level executives should not make it a visit to punish but a visit to learn, teach and mentor. Fourth, visit with a purpose and not make it a social hour. It’s nice to talk with people but don’t let that become the mission. If a problem is found, help by coaching and not seeking to blame someone. This would be a good start.

A true lean transformation changes the way the entire business operates from sales to the shop floor. This requires a hands-on, personal approach that cannot be delegated to staff or outside consultants. It is a new way to run the business that requires behavior changes. It is not a project or event. It demands leadership based on first hand experience and it must start at the top.

Cats and Dogs in Manufacturing

Many times in manufacturing career I have struggled in dealing with the dilemma of producing the cats and dogs. The cats and dogs are those parts or products that are typically the small volume, hard to make, mainly less profitable, or generally the pain in the ass parts that cause us headaches and disrupt the harmony in our manufacturing flow.

Since our lean manufacturing focus is to improve flow, how do we deal with our cats and dogs?

Do we outsource our cats and dogs so we can maximize our internal efficiency by producing only our high runners? Do we discontinue making the cats and dogs entirely if they are not profitable? Do we outsource some of our high runners to work on the cats and dogs? Do we separate the cats and dogs from the rest of the pack?

It would be easy for us to take the path of least resistance and either outsource them or drop them from our product offering. Life is too short so why struggle with the headaches day after day. With our short term thinking and pressure for quick results, we can present convincing arguments to get rid of these cats and dogs and do it fast. Especially if we are not making any money on them, it should be a slam dunk to get rid of them. Let’s just focus on our core competency and we will be more profitable.

Sounds logical or not?

From my experience, I do not completely trust our accounting systems in determining the profitability of individual parts or products. With the typical standard cost method, erroneous data, estimated inputs based on some formula or worse, some average and our sometimes strange allocation of costs; how can we really make good decisions on true profitability on a part by part basis? Just take a stopwatch to gemba and do a simple random audit to see that our data is as reliable and trustworthy as a celebrity in rehab.

If we outsource these cats and dogs, passing the headache on to others to deal with, we will only add additional waste to our overall process. We will need to increase our efforts to insure the quality of these parts now on the outside, increase our inventory levels to protect our delivery to our customers and most likely soon end up paying more for these parts. Before long, we will end up dropping them because they will be deemed unprofitable.

In the book, The Birth of Lean, Taiichi Ohno faced the same dilemma at Toyota; his thoughts on this issue were described as follows:

“A lot of people in the company thought that we should outsource small-volume parts to low-cost contractors and make the large-volume parts on our own, like bicycle manufacturers did. They figured that we could build an export business by getting the contractors to supply parts on a just-in-time basis and by assembling vehicles from those parts and from the parts that we made in-house.

I argued for taking the opposite approach. I insisted that we should produce low-volume items in-house and buy large-volume parts-stuff that anyone cold make inexpensively-from outside suppliers. Making the low-volume parts in-house would mean high unit costs, and that would pressure us to tackle kaizen improvements and cost reductions.”

What a great viewpoint, to send out the easier, high-volume parts and keep the hard ones in-house to pressure our kaizen efforts. Think about that for a moment. Do we trust outside suppliers to kaizen better than we can internally? Do easy, high volume parts present the same kaizen opportunities that low-running parts provide? Which would challenge us to be better problem solvers? As for our customers, which kinds of products are growing in demand, the generic, high-volume products or the custom, low-volume products? How about the trend in the future?

What do you think?

Mocking Boards

As we embrace many of the lean ways including shifting to a more visual management approach, be careful not to turn a good visual management board into a mocking board.

Let me explain. Recently, while on a gemba walk through a plant, I spotted a new TPM board by one of the machines. TPM stands for Total Productive Maintenance. From the aisle, I could see some cool stuff on the board including a TPM map, TPM checksheets, timelines, problem logs, problem tags, etc. Excited and curious about this new visual management board, I approached the operator and asked her about it.

Her reply surprised me. “Oh, that. It’s my mocking board.”

I asked her what she meant by mocking board. She explained that the board was just put up a month ago by maintenance. She even attended a training session on filling out all the forms and how to do tasks to check on the machine herself. The first couple of days, they (the maintenance guys) were responsive to fixing items on the machine but than nothing.

For weeks nothing more happened despite all the tagging and logging of items requiring attention. She had asked her supervisor, on several occasions, on the status when maintenance was going to fix the items. No answer and no action.

As a result, she now views the visual board as a mocking board. All the items stay on the list, always in front of her, mocking her, because they are still undone. It is a visual monument to all that is wrong and broken with her machine with no activity to fix it.

Wow. Here are the beginnings of a cool visual management system that is quickly turning into a clear message that as managers we do not care.

The good thing is that this problem is quite visible and all we have to do is see it and take action to correct it.

Where's the SMED?

The SMED system which stands for Single Minute Exchange of Dies, developed by Shigeo Shingo and published in his 1985 book, guides us to achieve a machine setups in under 10 minutes. The quick changeover thinking has been around for a couple of decades now but many companies still have not achieved this level of changeover. To this day, we have setups taking 60 minutes and longer. Why?

Are these long setups not viewed as a problem?

Do we just accept the status quo of long setups?

Do we even track and monitor setups?

Is it easier the just buy faster (more expensive) machines than to roll up our sleeves and figure out how to reduce our changeovers?

Is it not a priority? Are we too busy with out limited resources (yet we let go resources in the last layoff)? Short term thinking wins again?

Where’s the SMED? Can any company report that all of their setups are 10 minutes or less?

Best Kanban Signal of All

There are many types of kanban. A kanban could be cards, bins, containers, trays, carts, spots on the floor, golf balls, ping pong balls just to name a few. What’s the best kanban signal?

First, what is a kanban? A kanban is simply a signal used to authorize production in a production system. Any method of signal works can work well if we are disciplined to follow and maintain the system. A kanban is typically tied directly to the physical parts making it easier to keep in synch with demand. As parts are pulled for consumption, this signal is sent to the supplying workstation or source as authorization to make more parts to replace the ones used.

However, before we automatically jump to using any kanban system just because we believe it is the “lean” thing to do, is there a specific problem or need in the first place? This is one of the most common mistakes made on the lean journey. We see a lean technique and rush to put it in use everywhere we possibly can. It’s like holding a hammer and running around looking for nails to hit, soon everything starts looking like nails. We rarely take the time to really understand our problems or needs before we act.

What if we can produce products for our customers in one week while the customer delivery expectation is two weeks, would we set up a kanban system to replenish parts? No, just build to the actual customer order which is the best kanban signal of all.

In this example, there is no need for a typical kanban replenishment system at this time. But if our leadtime extends beyond our customers delivery expectation, we certainly have a need to set up a production system to satisfy our customer with the least amount of inventory. After gaining a better understanding of the problem, we might consider using a kanban system while we are working on reducing our production leadtime within our customer delivery expectation.

Lean Six Sigma Survey

James Marsh, Senior Researcher at Sheffield Hallam University is requesting our help in the lean community on his research project exploring Lean and or Six Sigma and its environmental benefits/tradeoffs. It takes 5-10 minutes to complete and is completely anonymous.

Please click on this link http://www.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/staff/sea/LSS

Thank you for your help!

Top 14 Ways to Reduce Changeovers

If you are looking to boost your output or increase your responsiveness to customer demand but want to avoid the significant capital costs of purchasing new equipment, take a look at reducing your changeovers or setups. If you typically spend one hour to changeover a machine and run 8-10 setups a week, you are wasting a whole day a week or up to 52 days a year of potential machine time. Try focusing on these few things and you can spend less time in your changeovers almost immediately.

1.Have Everything Ready for the Changeover Next to the Machine Ahead of Time. This means everything- material, tooling, tools, fixtures, paperwork, check gages, etc. Our goal is not to leave the machine to search for anything while doing a changeover. No more walking around and searching. Create a home location staging area for these items or use a tool setup cart and make it easy to find these items in order of need during the set up all within reach. Anyone can really lead this activity once trained in what needs to be collected up-the machine operator, the setup person, the leadperson, the supervisor, a temp employee, or even one of the office employees. Even if you don’t do any of these others items list below, DO THIS ONE.

2. Use a Checklist. The easiest and simplest way not to forget any items needed for each changeover is to list everything on a checklist and use this list to verify things are not missing ahead of time. A pencil and paper is all you need to create a checklist.

3. Fix Broken Equipment. What gages, tools and equipment are broken and we force the setup operators to workaround these problems? Find what is broken and repair it.

4. Keep up with Current Events. Make sure all the data (program numbers, machine settings, etc) are the latest and greatest. The only thing worse that not having information is to have conflicting or wrong information. Review all the standard set up documents and make sure all the right information is recorded and consistent.

5. Just Ask. By simply talking with the set up operators and asking what would be helpful to make setups easier, you can find out what they need. If you ask, be prepared to act on this information fast. If not, you will be sending a message that management doesn’t care and this valuable source of information can be lost in the future.

6. Look for Cheat Sheets and Share the Knowledge. Some operators who perform changeovers have a log book or set up notes to help them remember setup information. Use this information to look for helpful “tricks” or techniques that is undocumented. Officially record this information to eliminate the need for having personal notebooks and share it.

7. Improve Homemade Work Aids. Perhaps the setup operator has made up some cool homemade work aids to position, lift, gage hold, align or perform some other function in a setup. How can we improve this homemade devises?

8. Double up the Changeover Team. Most setups are done by a single person which can add to the wasted time in a setup especially when we need to work on both sides of the machine. What would happen if we used a two person team for changeovers? More likely we can cut our setup time in half and do tasks in parallel.

9. Don’t Skimp on the Tooling. Invest in additional sets of tool holders so the tooling can be pre-set ahead of time. But before you wake up your purchasing person to start ordering all this brand new tooling, do a plant wide sort (step 1 from 5S) and see if there are any underutilized tooling that can be used. Check the auction pages for potential sources of used tooling. Go to local shops or manufacturing facilities to see if they are willing to sell any of their tooling. You don’t have to duplicate all the tooling immediately to make a big impact, target a few critical setups and concentrate on getting a few holders to start.

10. The Best Changeover is No Changeover at All. What opportunities are there to dedicate equipment to certain parts thereby eliminate the setup completely?

11. Don’t Screw Around. How much time are we spending bolting, fastening, blocking and clamping the tools? Can we reduce the number of bolts and clamps? Can you use ¼ turn bolts or other quick clamps? Can we replace manual tools with an air ratchet?

12. Throw Away your Hand Tools. Taking the last step a bit further, can we eliminate the need for hand tools all together? Instead of using allen head screws or bolts, can we use hand twist ¼ turn fastener?

13. Put it Away Later. Sometimes in our eagerness to maintain an organized workplace, we have conditioned ourselves to put things away immediately. This is a great behavior but don’t delay a setup with putting items away. Wait until the machine is up and running and then put everything back in it’s home location.

14. Don’t Go the Mountain; Make the Mountain Come to You. What resources demand the setup operator leave the machine? For example, do we have to take the first piece parts to a Quality Lab for approval? Instead of going to the Quality department what if we had the Quality department came to us? Take a close look at our quality procedures and requirements with the goal of approving the part at the machine with no waiting. What do we need to make this happen? Can’t we get the quality inspector to be at the machine when needed? Do we really need to use that monument QA equipment instead of portable check gages or go/no-go gages?

Leaving Batesville Casket

It is with mixed emotion that I am officially leaving my position as Lean Sensei at Batesville Casket Company. I am happy with all that we accomplished the last several years however not satisfied since there is so much more to do. All the milestones I first set out to accomplish were completed and the lean journey at Batesville is stronger as a result. I wish all my friends at Batesville many years of continued lean success.

Looking forward, I am extremely excited about my new adventure working with Jon Miller as part of the Gemba Research team helping others on their lean journey. If you ever considered bringing in lean consultants on your lean journey, please contact me. Our staff at Gemba Consulting North America are all top notch lean practitioners with many years of successful lean experience. I will continue posting ideas, thoughts and stories as I continue learning and sharing on the lean journey.

Go to Gemba

Knowing is better than guessing.
Seeing is better than hearing.
Doing is better than talking.

Pursuit of Perfection

One focus on the lean manufacturing path is the pursuit of perfection. When this point is brought up, many people don’t believe perfection is possible so this objective is pushed aside as not realistic so why try?

The same goes for goals of zero inventory, zero machine breakdowns, zero accidents, zero defects and zero customer disappointments. How many of us believe these goals to be impossible? So why try?

After all we are just human and humans are imperfect and make mistakes. So why try?

All systems are imperfect including lean manufacturing so why try?

Looking to religion, as Christians we are on a path to live by the example that Jesus Christ has given us. In other words, we try to be Christ-like in our words and actions. Many other religious beliefs, if not all of them, teach each follower to become better in their life. All religions acknowledge our human imperfections yet each pursue a path of perfection in life. Perhaps the quest to be better is at the core of being human.

I believe that is our purpose in life-to become a better person so “trying” is what life is all about.

The same goes for our pursuit of perfection in lean manufacturing. It is all about the never ending pursuit of perfection. Emphasis is on the pursuit and not on perfection. Are we moving to be better today than yesterday? Can we be closer to perfection each day? Do we learn from our mistakes?

Do we see the gap between where we are today and our vision of perfection? Do we view this gap as the impossible or as an opportunity? Do we view this gap as a pointless journey or a path of many small steps?

English Speaking Lean

After reading Mark Graban’s post, 10 Things I Wish Lean Practitioners Wouldn’t Say in 2010 on his Lean Blog, I thought it was interesting that 4 of the 10 things were aimed against using Japanese terms. Mark clearly states he is not opposed to Japanese terms but asks if we might be “getting a bit carried away in embracing Japanese words.” He further suggests that we should avoid using Japanese words in an English-speaking environment, and just use simple, plain English.

But perhaps simple, plain English is not what we believe it to be. Although it is difficult be exact with our dynamic and expanding vocabulary, it is estimated that over 80% of our English vocabulary has come from other languages (source: Wikipedia.com). Most of our English words come from Latin, French, Italian, and Greek origin to name a few. Due to contact with other cultures over the centuries in conquests, commerce, travel and immigration, the English language has adopted or derived many words into our fold. As our world gets smaller and contact increases with the speed of the internet and television, I can easily speculate that our “English” language will add many more words in the future and at a much faster rate.

If we choose the path of halting the spread of Japanese words in our lean approach except for select few like kaizen or gemba, would we be promoting the status quo (oops, Latin)? Maybe we should form an ad hoc (Latin, again) committee to set a policy on the use of Japanese words in our company? If we can’t decide, we can leave it up to the head honcho (Japanese) to put the kibosh (Yiddish) on this glitch (Yiddish) in our improvement path.

Instead of sending our kids to Kindergarten (German) we should say we are sending them to Pre-First Grade. Or should we simply say we live on a quiet, dead-end street instead of a cul-de-sac (French)? Instead of going out for sushi (Japanese), let’s go out for some raw fish..yummy. States like California (Spanish) and Colorado (Spanish) would be shopping for new names. No more going out on Karaoke (Japanese) night , let’s just go out to the local bar to sing off key to taped music after drinking some liquid courage. We would also give up using words like café, chipotle, chocolate, ballet, protégé, entrepreneur, blasé, gaffe, whiskey, banana and mosquito.

My personal bias is to use the Japanese words in talking and teaching lean because I was taught by Japanese Sensei for the first 10 years of my lean journey. It has become second nature to me and I embrace the words as I embrace the lean thinking.

This does not mean that Japanese words need to be used by everyone, it is up to each person to decide on their own. The use of Japanese words is not to impress or exclude, it is just to seek greater understanding of the meaning. Hopefully we won’t get lost in translation.

Update added (1/7/2010)
There are certainly many great comments on this topic. Thanks to all!
Please check out these other posts on this topic by :
Mark Rosenthal's post on The lean Thinker
Brian Buck's post on Improve with Me
Ron Pereira's post on LSS Academy

Be Prepared

Be Prepared is the motto of the Boy Scouts and most likely the simplest method for productivity improvement. Lord Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout movement, coined the motto for all scouts to be prepared in mind and be prepared in body. Scouts who do their best at living by this motto would be in position to do the right thing at the right time. In other words, when the moment arrives, a scout is ready for anything.

How does this relate to productivity and the lean approach?

On a tactical level, take machine changeovers or set ups for example. In my experience, the single biggest element that takes time in a typical changeover is collecting everything you need like tools, fixtures, dies, clamps, sheet up sheets, materials, gages, etc. I would certainly not be surprised if 50% of current set up time is consumed in just this activity.

If we want to make a significant impact in reducing set up time, work on designing a system or process that ensures everything we need to change over is at hand prior to the set up change, every time! A person or persons performing the changeover should never have to leave the machine or wait on any item.

No capital spending required, just planning, practice and discipline to “Be Prepared” when the set up time moment arrives. Discipline is the key ingredient which can be harder to find than this year’s hot Christmas toy on December 24th.

Go to gemba and watch any machine changeover. How prepared are we when the machine is stopped?

Using this same “Be Prepared” motto, are we prepared for meetings, kaizen events, daily production, material delivery, customer requests, etc? How much smoother and efficient would all our activities be if we spent time on being prepared?

Here is another simple example, getting ready for work in the morning. How much time do we spend? How about bathroom time, dressing time, eating time, etc? If we were to select, iron and layout out our clothes the night before, would we save time the next morning? What about shoes, car keys, laptop, or those notes needed for this morning’s meeting? If we had all our grooming items, towels, etc ready to go the night before, would we save time? What if we filled up our car with gas the night before? What are all the things we can do the night before to “be prepared” for getting ready for work in the morning?

But being prepared is more than just having things ready ahead of time, it means to “be prepared” for anything. To be mentally ready, knowing what we should do in case different events should occur and be ready to face difficulties and challenges.

Going back to the morning work routine example, what do we do if the power goes out in the night? What do we do if we have no power in the morning? What do we do if we break a shoe lace? What if bad weather hits? We could prepare for all these events ahead of time and be ready when the time arrives. (Sounds like the beginnings of a FMEA – Failure Mode and Effects Analysis).

As lean thinkers, we might consider adopting the same motto, Be Prepared. What do you think?

Do our Customers Really Benefit from our Lean Effort?

One of the principles of the lean approach is long term thinking with focus on adding value to our customers and society. We are taught to eliminate waste, things that don’t add value to the customer.

We improve flow, reduce set up time, improve productivity, eliminate waste and reduce cost. Kaizen events successful hit targets and employees are trained. 5-S activities are done daily, audits are conducted and our facilities look better. We create value stream maps and work hard to transform our company to our future state.

Somewhere in all this lean activity, our customer focus can be lost. We do all the things that we believe will make us leaner. But have we truly adding value to our customer? If not, why not?

Do our lean efforts hit the bottom line and stop there? Is our lean effort all about improving our margins? Is our lean effort all about head count reduction?

It is not enough to just eliminate waste and reduce cost. Our customers don’t care about our 5-S audit scores, the number of kaizen events we conduct, if we use ERP or Kanban, or the number of our inventory turns. Our lean efforts must add value to the customer. It must be seen and felt by our customers.

Bottom line: Are we giving our customers what they want, when they want it, at the highest quality and affordable cost? Is our lean system effort supporting this mission?

Thank You God for Giving Me Problems

I just finished reading an inspirational book “Play to Win, The Make a Difference Gameplan” by Tom Karbowski , a co-worker from Southern Indiana. In his book, he wrote the follow prayer, reprinted with his permission:

Thank you God for giving me problems.

When I am at work and get frustrated, thank you for giving me a job. There are many people who need employment and would welcome the opportunity to confront the challenges I face.


When my customers complain about problems, thank you for giving me the opportunity to meet the needs of others. My competitors would love to be in my shoes.

When I am frustrated with my career, thank you for allowing me to live in a country that has a vibrant economic system. I can always do something else or start my own company.

When I am unhappy about the pace of change in the world, thank you for allowing me to live during such incredibly exciting times. The possibilities for improvement are endless.

When I am exhausted because I have too many things to do, thank you for giving me such an interesting and full life.

And when I am annoyed with my spouse or children, thank you for giving me a loving family and for all the happy times when they make me laugh with joy.

When I am sick, thank you for allowing me to live in a country with such a wonderful health care system.

When I am unhappy with elected politicians, thank you for allowing me to live in a democratic society. I can change the future with the power of a vote.

When I do not understand something, thank you for giving me the ability to learn and the curiosity to search for a better way.

When my prayers go unanswered, thank you for providing me with patience until I understand your will.

And when I have a true problem, thank you for giving it to me. All problems present an opportunity for me to enhance my character and deepen my faith. When I resolve this problem, I will be a better person.

Becoming better problem solvers is part of the lean way. How we go about solving them is part method (scientific method) and part attitude (positive). Regardless of our opinions on politicians, our economic system, our health care system, our companies, our jobs, etc, even if we are currently facing money problems, loss of a job, family problems, etc, we all have the same choice that only we can make, are we going to face our problems with a positive attitude or a negative attitude?

Lean is Good

I recently stumbled across a new lean blog called “Lean is Good” posted by Bruce Baker with added insights from Bryan Zeigler and Scott Maruna with recent posts like “5S Shadow Boards are Bad”. I hope to learn more from reading his lean insights. Check it out.

Thanks Bruce for sharing your lean thinking with us.

What is Lean?

What seems like an easy, simple question may turn out rather difficult and complex to answer. If we are to embrace the lean approach isn’t it critical that we understand what it is we are embracing? If we don’t agree on what is lean, how do we know what action to take in becoming lean, determine if we are making progress and align everyone in the same direction?

Wouldn’t our definition of lean be important in a lean transformation? Determining scope, objectives, metrics?

If we asked the lean experts, consultants, practitioners, the CEO’s or our shop floor associates, what would be their answer? I bet each person we ask would give us a different answer. It seems to me that our answer to this question is highly dependent on our experiences on the subject. Our understanding on lean is formed by many factors including the influence of others, what we are told, what we read, along with our personal hands on experiences. In our mind, we collect all these inputs to formulate our viewpoint of lean.

Some would answer that lean is a set of tools to identify and eliminate waste. Waste (muda) elimination is the prime focus to shorten the leadtime from customer order to receipt of cash. Head count reduction and cost cutting can become the face of lean for many.

Others would answer that lean is improving the flow or smoothing work by eliminating unevenness (mura). Value stream maps will lead us to the promised land of the perfect work flow.

Another answer would be to simply focus on making all jobs easier and better by eliminating overburden (muri). Perhaps we think automation is the key to making jobs easier and we get the added bonus of head count reduction.

Some may say that we need to focus on all three (waste elimination, unevenness and overburden) together.

Another prospective is the only making what the customer needs, when the customer needs it, in the quantity the customer needs using minimal resources of manpower, material and machinery. This is the classic just-in-time thinking.

Some would say that instead of describing lean as a production system, it is better to describe it as either a business system or enterprise system. This is the beginning thoughts of a whole system approach to becoming lean. From there we could expand our thoughts to the entire supply chain including our customers, our suppliers, our supplier’s suppliers, etc. along with all transactional processes included.

Added to the mix is the focus on people development (we build people), quality focus, safety focus, problem solving, scientific thinking, long term thinking, A3 thinking, morale, kaizen events, kaizen mindset, lean accounting, new product development, contribution to society, customer focus, being flexible, being agile, being nimble and so on.

Beyond this we still have the culture and leadership of the company to consider.

With all these difference prospectives on what is lean, is it any wonder why so many stumble, struggle and eventually fail in becoming “lean”?

And would this also affect our opinion on what is not lean? Would this indeed influence our opinion on an individual’s knowledge of lean and determine how we rate a company’s leanness?

Is leanness measured only in results or does it included how we achieve results? Does the speed of getting the results impact our measure of leanness? Do we measure leanness on the number of lean tools being used? Let’s see, 5-S check, Kanban check, Regular kaizen events check, A3 no, TPM no, VSM no, (add as many tools to your checklist as your experience tells you)….sorry you are not lean.

Maybe we make things too complex and the answer is really simple.

What’s your viewpoint on what is lean and does it affect your effort on becoming lean?

Poka Yoke The Office Style

From the popular comedy show, The Office, Dwight give us some potential poka yoke advice on mistake proofing, also known as idiot proofing from the early lean days. I wonder if anyone has practiced this thinking?

Management Improvement Carnival #82

I am quite honored and excited to once again host a session of the management improvement carnival started by John Hunter through his awesome blog site Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog. On to the good stuff, here is a sample of some of the great posts on improvement from some of the best lean thinkers.

The Kipling Method vs. the Ohno Method by Jon Miller “Are you a Kipling person, taking the accepted tool or situation as given, or are you an Ohno person, constantly challenging the norms and looking for better ways?”

Lean is about More than the Myths by Tim McMahon “It’s important when you are starting out your lean journey to understand what lean is really about.”

17 Lessons I learned from Japanese Consultants by Jeff Hajek “Over the years I have worked with some premiere lean consultants from Japan. Here are some of the many lessons I learned from them.”

When the Neck Bone Isn’t Connected to the Head Bone by Bill Waddell “There’s a reason why the best manufacturers tend to be pretty vertically integrated. They take core competence to mean everything in the chain of creating value for the customers-not everything that is easy or cheap.”

Lean Inventories Do Not Excuse Failing to Deliver by John Hunter “The retailers need to design their system with lean thinking in mind (not lean-as in cut expense without thinking).”

Keeping Lean Japanese by Brian Buck “There is a trend towards removing the Japanese language or jargon from Lean transformations in the U.S. I understand why organizations would want to make lean thinking and the corresponding tools easier to digest, but I think we should seriously consider keeping it Japanese.”

Helping Make A3 Work, Part 1 by Jamie Flinchbaugh “I’ve been spending a good amount of time lately helping leaders from various organizations improve their lean thinking by utilizing A3 problem solving. In the following few blog posts, I’ll answer some of the common questions people have about A3 and it’s use in organizations.”

My New Stand Up Desk by Ron Pereira “Now, you might be wondering how I increased the height of my desk. Well, my goal was to not spend a cent on this project so I got creative”

A Problems First Culture by Mark Rosenthal “Problems first” is one of the mantras used by Phil Jenkinson, the CEO character in The Lean Manager by Michael and Freddy Ballé. Now that I have had a few weeks to let it sink in and synthesize with my mental models, I am seeing a concept that is so fundamental I would think it would be hammered into students in every management and leadership course taught in the world.’

When Flows Collide

Originally, I was not going to post about this issue but the more I thought about it, the more we can learn from it. The issue deals with lack of communication, poor customer service and colliding flows.

I recently rented a car at the Jackson, Mississippi airport from a well recognized, national rental car company. The experience was typical up until the point of returning the car at the end of the week. Normally, I just pull up to the proper return lane, get scanned in by the attendant, mileage and fuel levels checked, receipt is printed and off I go to catch my flight. Not this time.

I pull into the proper return lane and no attendant is in sight. I patiently wait and look around but no attendant showed up. Strange, I never had to wait before at this airport.

Finally, I see an employee from this car rental company pull up in one of their rental cars. He tells me that they got rid of the attendants in the return area as part of cost cutting and I need to go inside to their airport counter to return my car.

As most frequent travelers do, I plan some time for delays and problems but not too much since I dislike sitting around the airport any longer than I need to. In this case, I had a few minutes to spare however the clock is ticking. Stress levels start to elevate.

As I swiftly walk to the airport entrance, I happen to notice a small sign that states we need to return the car keys at the rental car counter inside the airport. The sign is small and located near the walking exit to the airport.

I rush to the counter only to find a line of customers waiting for service by only one attendant. This is the point where flows collide. Both customer picking up cars and returning cars are in the same line. Aghhh!

I feel the stress rising higher and try to push it back down. If worse comes to worse, I will just drop the keys on the counter and head quickly to the security line. I can always get a receipt online later.

After what seemed like forever, in reality just 15 minutes, I get to the counter to return my car. I got through security and made it on-time for my flight home.

Does it have to be this way?

Where was the customer communication when I first rented the car to tell me to allow time to return the car at this counter instead of the usual return attendant?

What about the sign? Could it be placed closer to the entrance instead of the exit? Could multiple sign be placed in several spots? Could the sign be larger and easier to see?

Could the colliding flows be separated at the counter? Should return customers get priority over pick up customers? Can a drop off box be used with an offer to email the receipt directly to you-no effort on the customer’s part?

Based on this situation, where in our processes do we fail to communicate properly and create colliding flows?

What about shipping and receiving? What about loading and unloading trucks? What about picking and putting away material on racks or shelves? What about work flow in cells?

What about patients checking in and checking out? What about receiving and dispensing supplies? Are there colliding flows in the ER?

Go to gemba and see the flow (or lack of flow). What colliding flows can we see and improve?