OK, so apparently a big mistake was made at the Oscars last night…a really, really big mistake. The wrong film was announced as Best Picture. Not Best Sound Editing, not Best Costumes, not Best Foreign Short Animation. Best Picture. That’s a REALLY BIG mistake.
To add insult to injury, the mistake wasn’t caught and corrected until the folks representing the wrong movie (LaLaLand) were on stage and had been thanking everyone in their extended families for their love and support.
One of my favorite lean videos was produced and put on YouTube a couple of years ago by a company in Washington state, FastCap. The video is about 14 minutes long and it’s a tour of the FastCap plant, conducted by the President. It’s the best portrayal of workplace organization and visual factory that I’ve come across.
I always start any project with a few days of information gathering about the operations so that I’ll know a bit of the culture and local language when I get to the leadership planning steps. The info gathering phase is always enjoyable as I get to know the folks within the client organization and tell them what I have in mind. During the info gathering I always come across conditions and situations that, on the one hand, are easily addressed but, on the other, I fear that the client will think, “Is that all you’ve got?” when I bring it up.
I had the latter experience a few years ago. I was strongly encouraging a client to implement workplace organization and visual factory methods in the plant. The thing was, the plant was reasonably clean and organized but just in the usual “decent housekeeping” way that plants sometimes are. The managers didn’t refuse to take me up on my suggestions but didn’t seem to have much energy in implementing 5S. They seemed primarily interested in “cost savings kaizens”. (They couldn’t tell me what savings had come from past kaizens, or even how “cost savings” were to be measured, but that’s another story.)
A few posts ago, I mentioned I was reading (or was about to read) a book I’d come across, The Lean Farm, authored by Ben Hartman. Well, I’m about two-thirds the way through and I’d recommend it even for (maybe, especially for) folks who are applying lean concepts and methods in other industries. (Sometimes, examples and illustrations hit home better when they are just a bit outside our intellectual comfort range.)
The book is very nicely organized. The author does a good job of breaking lean down into its most important elements. Further, Hartman provides lots of illustrations and examples of his own application of lean tools and methods on his small farm. Readers familiar with lean won’t learn much that’s new but will be interested in how an astute practitioner has been able to apply lean tools in an agricultural setting. “Newbies” will get as good an introduction to lean ideas and methods as there is.
I don’t get to the Interest Groups at LinkedIn as often as I should but I browsed around there yesterday and found a really crummy article. I don’t want to link to it because I don’t want to give it any traffic but it’s title was “The Dark Side of Lean”. It was one of those articles, the likes I’ve read a number of versions over the years, that seeks to impugn an approach of which the author makes it apparent that he or she knows nothing. Continue reading “A Really Crummy Article About Lean”
Take a look at this example of 5S. What do you think….good example or not? It sure looks good, doesn’t it? I found this example on LinkedIn, along with some comments as to whether or not it’s a good example. Some of the commenters felt it was a good example given that…well, how orderly everthing is. Others felt that it’s not such a good example and it’s not the lack of labeling that they mentioned. Those others asked if five colors of highlighters are really needed. And two different kinds of Post-Its. And two blue and red pens. After all the first S is “Sort”.
I would agree that the Sort is key here but we can’t use circumstantial evidence to assume it wasn’t done. If the user really does need and regularly uses all those highlighters, then it’s a good example of 5S. On the other hand, if the user generally just takes out the yellow one and keeps the others “just in case”, it’s just an exercise in tidiness. Same with the pens and Post-Its.
The moral of the story is, it’s not just the good organization that makes this a good example. It’s the deliberation that went into the effort along the way
I check into Industry Week’s site fairly often because I find good articles on a variety of topics relevant to manufacturing. I also sign up for their occasional free webinars. (In fact, I was the star of one of their webinars several years ago. Well…actually, I think I got called in off the bench when one of the headliners had to bow out. But, still…)
IW has an upcoming webinar, The State of US Manufacturing. (You can sign up at the link.) One of of the participants is a VP at Whirlpool. I think it’s interesting that IW should choose a presenter from Whirlpool for this particular webinar. I posted a recent article on LinkedIn, entitled “The System IS Rigged”. (I’d give you a link but I think it wouldn’t work because the link I have allows me to edit the post. Go to LinkedIn, and search the Posts, not People, using the title. You’ll find it listed there.) In that article, I talk about the state of US manufacturing. In particular, I discuss the fact that US companies 1.) have lots of cash, and 2.) are borrowing lots more cash. What are they doing with it all? Buying back their own stocks. As I say in my article, I have a big problem with this. The companies themselves will tell you, “Hey, it’s good for our shareholders,” and that’s not a bad thing. Of course, developing new products, improving existing products and processes, and hiring the best talent available are also good for shareholders. What the companies don’t tell you is that buybacks are especially good for short term shareholders and, most especially, company execs with stock options.
So, what does all this have to do with IW’s choice of a VP from Whirlpool? If you go to the signup page, you’ll see that Whirlpool has invested “$1 billion in Whirlpool’s U.S. facilities over the past 5 years”. That’s a good thing, of course. What it doesn’t mention is that Whirlpool has authorized the repurchase shares of its own stock. How much stock? $1 billion. Funny that the $1B investment in operations gets mentioned but the $1B stock buyback doesn’t. Maybe it’s because buybacks are a financial gimmick to reward senior execs and big investors looking to make a quick buck at the expense of operations, employees, and customers.
William Lazonick, professor of economics at University of Massachusetts Lowell has this to say:
“It really is an idiotic ideology, that you run the company for the people who matter least,” Lazonick said, referring to shareholders. “The people who can get in and out of the company quickest and for whom that is often their only goal.” (All Buy Myself…The Thinking Behind Stock Buybacks)
My guess is that that Whirlpool exec won’t say anything like: “We couldn’t really think of anything to do with that extra billion other than to line our own pockets and enrich short term investors.”
Awhile back (too much of awhile back), I posted about an article I’d read on the Industry Week website about six sigma and team problem solving. (Here it is, if you want to take another look at it.) In that first post, I ranted a bit about the worst condition highlighted by the IW article: incompetent managers. I promised I’d make some comments about the inept approach to problem solving described in the article in a followup post. Well, three months later, here’s that followup post.
Let me start by saying that I don’t want any of my remarks here to be seen as anything like a defense for the utterly, abjectly vacuous leadership described in the IW article. When nincompoops take up space in the C-suite, no tactic, no tool, no approach, however well conceived and implemented will save the organization. It’s doomed to a long, slow, tortuous demise. (Trust me…I’ve worked for such organizations.)
But the truth is…our antagonist didn’t seem to have learned much at his six sigma training. Let’s look at the evidence for our indictment. The article says that our six sigma guy and the team used the DMAIC approach to team problem solving but we aren’t provided with much that indicates that he or the team actually followed the DMAIC path. In fact, the path they actually did follow looks more like:
Make a chart based on only one of the many possible relevant metrics
Jump to conclusions
Present a limited solution that fits the conclusion jumped to.
Now, the article does say that the team spent several weeks in meetings and analysis but doesn’t give us much as to how that time was spent. It’s not hard to imagine the team spending its time and energy discussing how it was going to go about getting their penny-pinching bosses to spring for the new computer system.
The question posed by the IW article is: Would Dr. Deming have been a proponent of Six Sigma. But the example described in the article doesn’t really help address the question because it doesn’t really portray six sigma methods, and certainly not DMAIC.
Within the next few weeks, the blog at Employer Resource Council in Cleveland will start posting my series on DMAIC, so I won’t go into any detail here as to how that approach should actually be undertaken. (I’ll post a link when it shows up.)
Team problem solving can be hard work. It can be fun, too and is nearly always effective given adherence to the process and senior leadership that isn’t bereft of even a scintilla of intelligence. There’s nothing like implementing a solution developed by a team and seeing that solution work to motivate associates at all levels in the organization. Everyone in the organization needs to keep in mind, though, that it’s not “six sigma”, or “DMAIC”, or any other set of tools that contains the magic. It’s smart, committed leadership getting smart, motivated employees involved in making continual improvements to all aspects of the business. I’m pretty sure Dr. Deming would have been on board with that.
