Keeping You Informed On Lean Manufacturing
I made a “PowerPoint video” that I posted to YouTube over a year ago. I just posted another video on YouTube and here it is. Yeah, it’s a bit “homemade” (I sure wish it had picked another thumbnail, for example) but, hey, I’m still figuring all this YouTube stuff out. Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think.
This is a PR video but check it out and catch the reference to Visual Management.
I hadn’t been to Jim Womack’s blog in awhile, so I went to check it out this morning. Boy, did I find a doozy of an article: Dealing with Lean’s Crazy Relatives. According to Womack, lean’s crazy relatives are (and you won’t be terribly surprised at this) Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford.
Now, I make reference to these two guys myself whenever I’m reviewing the history of lean methods and thinking. Mind you, I don’t put either of them on a pedestal, but I think they’ve each provided something to the art and science of stable, consistent work flow. Womack is a bit less inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt but we do agree that their hyper-focus on work standardization may have done more harm than good over the years. As Womack points out, the role of standardization in lean is problematic for practitioners, it’s important…it can’t be ignored…it’s often misunderstood and misapplied. Continue reading “Scientific Management and Crazy Relatives.”
I found an article about lean in healthcare over at Mark Graban’s Lean Blog t
hat describes a horrific set of circumstances an acquaintance of his and the acquaintance’s wife experienced at the Emergency Room of a nearby hospital. You should read the entire article (How Can a Story Like This Occur?) but here are a few excerpts that will give you a good idea as to what happened:
So far, we have a process map with boxes and arrows. There is one more symbol I should have mentioned: triangles. We use triangles as the symbol for inventory. Any place in the process where stuff sits, put a triangle there.
Hey, readers! I got published in IndustryWeek! Well…not in the magazine but I did get on the website.
In our last post, we talked about getting started on creating a value stream map. We said that creating a simple process map was a good place to start. Now, I could go through the steps of creating a process map but you and I both know that such instruction are…everywhere. Do a websearch for “how to create a process map” and you’ll get a few million hits. Essentially, you just draw boxes and arrows. Or put the process steps on Post-Its that you place on a sheet of newsprint you’ve taped to the wall. Rather than provide detailed instructions, I’ll just pass along a few hints and recommendations that I’ve found helpful.
I was conducting a short workshop on behalf of an agency I work with and the question came up: What do we do after 5S? The quick answer to this question is that you start to implement pull scheduling and production. The longer answer is that you start to simplify/streamline/improve all your processes, both operations and administrative, and you implement team problem solving.
A tool that ties those two answers together is value stream mapping, so let’s talk about that for a bit.
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.”
I just came across a term I wasn’t familiar with: obeya. (I think it’s pronounced o-bay-a, but I’m not certain.) It’s used most often in the term “obeya room”, which is a bit redundant given that “obeya” is Japanese for “big room”. I became acquainted with the term in this Industry Week article…you should read it because it provides several examples as to just what an obeya is and how it works.
Turns out that obeya combines a couple of ideas that we’ve all been on board with: collaboration and visual management. The concept is that you put your most important visual indicators together in one room…then you talk about them every day. Several times a day, in fact.
From the article:
“[The plant manager’s] first stop is the command center. “I can quickly — very quickly — determine if I’m on schedule everywhere or, if I’m not on schedule, where am I not on schedule and why am I not on schedule,” he says. Stop two is any place there is a deviation.”
Now, I’m going to pat myself on the back a bit here. This is, nearly verbatim, what I’ve told all my clients is the primary goal of 5S and Visual Management: to be able to tell, at a glance, whether or not a process or several processes are in control or not.
The real benefit of obeya, though, comes through deliberation and discussion of the data displayed by the visuals. Again, from the article:
“What we try to do is let the management team at the manager level lead the meeting,” Redelman says. “We want to encourage direct dialog between the managers so they take ownership of the condition.” The meeting is most effective, he adds, “when the managers and SMEs are gathered, speaking to each other, and the executive team has faded to the back and just offers suggestion when necessary or helps to prioritize the focus to wrap up the meeting.”
Discussions about lean and obeya frequently emphasize the human element, the need for individuals to physically interact with the data to take full advantage of an obeya’s promise. It’s a point Toyota emphasizes as well.”
Did you catch that? It’s not so much that a company simply posts a bunch of visuals around the walls of a room. It’s that managers and associates actually take time to look at and talk about the information on the charts. And the conversations lead to actions. This is a good example of the needed culture change that goes along with all lean methods. My experience has been that it’s actually pretty difficult to create such straightforward change. We’re just talking about regular, frequent, short meetings, after all. Some companies start them, then they fizzle out for a variety of reasons. Other companies never bother. Both types of companies end up wondering why lean methods never really worked for them. I guess they just figured that charts on the walls would, somehow, magically improve their operations.