Right now, I want you to read the first article, “Would Doctor Deming Have Been A Black Belt?”. It’s more interesting than it sounds, so go ahead…I’ll wait right here. I’m especially interested in having you read the case study embedded in the article.
On reading the article, I went down to the comments section, thinking I’d read a set of sharp denigrations of the company and the approach to problem solving portrayed in the example. None of the commenters mentioned the example. My guess is that Deming would say something like, “Neither Six Sigma nor any other improvement approach has a chance of providing value in this organization until it replaces some managers and significantly changes its culture.”
ANY manager who would put a team to work on order entry, then threaten the team leader with losing his or her job because the costs of the process weren’t reduced isn’t fit for his or her job. ANY leadership team that would see fit to take advantage of process performance improvement by reverting back to previous performance so as to enable the reduction of capacity, needs to be replaced by the board. Right now. We’re talking about a dysfunctional organization led by utterly incompetent “managers”. There’s no chance that any approach to continual improvement would work under such circumstances.
All this is apart from the bad approach to process improvement carried out by the “black belt”. But I’ll address that in my next post.
In a recent article on the Lean Enterprise website (“Why Are There So Many Opinions About What Lean Is and Isn’t” by Michael Balle), I found the following statement: “Volkswagen’s latest scandal should not detract from the high overall quality of their cars…” (Latest? You mean there are others?) That’s kind of like saying John Dillinger’s latest bank robbery shouldn’t detract from the fact that he sends his mother a birthday card every year.
I think I’ve mentioned any number of times that I always start with selecting a set of metrics whenever I start with a new client. (For more about that, check my post here.) I recently ran across a new(ish) blog by James Womack, in which he addresses the issue of lean metrics. In that post, he starts with this imaginary (I suppose) illustration:
It’s nearing the end of the second shift and the plant manager of a large factory is standing in the shipping lot. He’s making sure trucks are in place to get all of the cargo loaded that needs to go out tonight. Is this a good example of an earnest leader who walks his talk to meet customer demand without fail? Well, not exactly.
To grasp the situation, you need one more fact: it’s the last day of the quarter. The cargo must get through the gate by midnight to meet the plant’s sales target (the manager’s key metric), no matter the condition or destination of the goods. Otherwise the manager gets a reprimand from headquarters, no bonus, or worse.
That last sentence gets at what makes it more difficult than it should be, at times, to develop metrics.
Don’t move forward with a lean strategy without first ensuring the processes being evaluated and optimized are consistent and predictable. Standardized tasks and processes are the foundation for continuous improvement and employee empowerment.
I agree with the sentiment of the statement. On the other hand, (and maybe this is just quibbling with wording), I view the “ensuring the processes being evaluated and optimized are consistent and predictable” as a central component of any lean implementation.
We’re in the third phase of implementing a lean manufacturing initiative, Straigthen and See. Last time, we went over the initial steps of the phase. You’ll remember they looked a lot like the initial steps of the second phase of the implementation, Sort and Shine.
Before moving on, I want to spend some time talking about how Straighten and See (and Sort and Shine, for that matter) adds value to the enterprise. In other words, we need to talk about answers to the question: Just what is Straighten and See for anyway?
I was at a client yesterday whose managers had recently attended a lean seminar that had left them unsatisfied. During our discussion, the production manager asked if lean really helped with the problems that were most impacting his company. In particular, he mentioned the challenges that the company faced with respect to some of its vendors. Given that vendor performance was, for the most part, out of the company’s control and given that vendor performance had a direct and substantial impact on his performance as production manager, how was lean going to help him?
I was just listening to NPR and Alan Alda was on The Dianne Rheam Show. He was talking about his participation in something called the Flame Challenge.
Here’s the backstory: when Alda was just about 11 years old, he looked at the flame atop a burning candle and wondered, “Just what is that thing?” It’s not solid, not even really ‘real’. But I can see it, smell it, feel it (in a way), even hear it, so I know it’s “there”. But…what is the IT that’s there?” So, he asked his teacher. Her answer: “It’s oxidation.” That was it. Oxidation. To a sixth-grader, of course, that’s a non-explanation. Yeah, it’s true, strictly speaking but little Alan was no more well informed about what a flame actually is.
First, I’ve had that same question Alda had regarding flames, so I went to the Flame Challenge website and looked around. I suggest you do so, as well. It’s devoted to helping science expert types communicate better to us non-science expert types.
Second, I’ve had the same experience with many lean concepts and ideas. The clearest example, in my case, is takt time. Lots of books (too many) mention takt time in the first chapter or two. Almost none of those books do a good job of telling readers just what takt time actually is. Oh, they all have a definition…in fact, they all have pretty much the same definition.
Here it is from several sources I found by searching on the term:
“Takt time…is the average unit production time needed to meet customer demand.” [Wikipedia]
“Takt time is the rate at which a finished product needs to be completed in order to meet customer demand.” [iSixSigma]
“[Takt time is t]he available production time divided by customer demand.” [Lean Enterprise Institute]
These definitions are like the answer Alan Alda’s teacher gave him: they’re accurate as far as they go but they don’t help much. My work with small companies told me that customers demanded products in large lots and small lots on generally unpredictable schedules. There was no “rate” at which they demanded finished goods. (My thinking on this was modified a bit when I got clients who supplied the auto industry. But even in that case, it wasn’t easy to think of matching production rate to demand rate, which is what the definitions seemed to advocate.)
Another example is “5S”. You might be thinking that 5S isn’t jargon; after all, it’s pretty self-explanatory, right? Here’s the thing…most “definitions” of 5S just list what each S stands for.
Let’s do another web search:
“5S is the name of a workplace organization method that uses a list of five Japanese words: seiri,seiton,seiso,seiketsu, and shitsuke.” [Wikipedia] (As if using foreign words to explain something helps make it more clear.)
“The 5 Steps are as follows….” [Kaizen Institute]
“5S is a methodical way to organize your workplace and your working practices as well as being an overall philosophy and way of working.” [Lean Manufacturing Tools]
To be fair, each of these sources goes on to say more about 5S and its use. But that effort to provide a neat, tidy definition to new and. often, strange words and terms doesn’t provide much value. It gets in the way of really getting into the “What’s it for and why should I do it?” discussion. The fact that everyone is using pretty much the same definitions and the same approaches to expanding on those definitions doesn’t help in the least. (If I hear or read one more treatise on “The Eight Wastes”, I’m gonna scream. I’ll save that rant for another post, though.)
What to do, then?
Let’s go back to the example of takt time. After doing a bunch of reading and asking other folks what the heck the import of takt time was, I finally (kind of) figured it out. All that stuff about “customer demand”, while not irrelevant, diverted me from the real import: run at a consistent rate all the time. Consistent rate…that was the important factor. Now, it’s true…if you run at a consistent rate that’s faster than the rate customers are ordering stuff, you’ll pile it up in the warehouses. And if you run at a consistent rate that’s slower than customers are ordering the stuff, you’ll run short. But the first step is to figure out how to run at a consistent rate all the time. Once you figure out how to do that (and it’s not easy if you have lots of things going wrong in your process), the whole “customer demand” thing will be pretty much self-regulating (assuming you don’t like running short or filling warehouses.)
So, I can implement lean in a variety of contexts and never once mention the term takt time. On the other hand, I talk a lot about smooth, consistent flow of information and material with all my clients. And it makes sense to all of them.
I’ve spoken and written fairly often about my insistence that lean isn’t about cost-cutting. In fact, a focus solely on cost cutting is a barrier to an effective lean implementation.
I found another blog post (For the Last Time: Cost Cutting Isn’t Lean) that addresses this issue nicely. It links to a relevant WSJ article (that you can’t get to unless you either register or buy a subscription, which is a pain, but…oh, well) that was obviously written by some dunderhead that hasn’t a clue…the smallestCLUE!…as to what the heck lean is.
Here’s the best part of the post:
“Neither is the infantilizing, management-directed, and disrespectful (to employees) cost cutting that the Wall Street Journal describes:
After chicken processor Pilgrim’s Pride Corp. adopted it a few years ago, it scrutinized how much paper it used to print documents, how much soap employees used to wash their hands, and how much Gatorade hourly employees at one processing facility drank during breaks.”
That stuff just drives me nuts. And it badly, badly represents what lean is all about. I mean, where in hell did anyone get the idea that tracking worker Gator-Ade consumption has anything whatsoever to do with lean or continual improvement? To be sure, I didn’t read the whole WSJ article and it’s possible that it was actually deriding such short sighted measures. But I don’t think so. WSJ is a good rag but I know of other examples in which it’s coverage of manufacturing issues left a lot to be desired.
In the end, WSJ may have done me a favor. I’m going to start using the illustration above as something of a litmus test. I’m going to show it to managers and ask if they think it’s a good example of lean practice. If they answer yes…well, it’ll be an indication that we have LOTS of work ahead of us.
I’ve been developing materials for a series of client workshops on DMAIC. (It’s an acronym that stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control. It’s pronounced “Deh-may-ik”…I think.) As I told the participants on the first day, I haven’t taught DMAIC before but I’ve taught other problem solving models and they’re pretty much all the same. DMAIC is the model of choice, it seems, for the Six Sigma set and if there is a difference between it and other problem solving models, it’s that DMAIC has a strong focus on the use of data collection and analysis…LOTS of data collection and analysis.
As I’ve been putting together the materials, I’m reminded that the most important step in any problem solving model is that first one: Define the Problem. Sometimes it gets represented as Define the Current State.
