|
|
January 30th, 2012
Often people will attend a class about lean, usually a basics class, and on the last day feel a little overwhelmed with what they are going to do when they return to their workplace. There are stories about positive results that have been experienced after training. Here are a few things that increase the probability of have good results using lean after your initial training:
- Get started right away. Choose something you can do within the first 5 days after returning to work. The sooner you put something into practice the more likely you will be to build the learning into skills.
- Keep it simple. We love big wins and “homeruns.” This could be a trap when starting your personal lean journey. Choose something simple to start with such as a waste walk, direct observation of a challenging or frustrating part of your process, do a product process map of one part of your responsibilities, use 5 why’s, conduct an After Action Review.
- Make it worthwhile. Try your new way of thinking or tools to something you need to do anyway. So often people think of lean as extra work in addition to their “real work.” You knew what your goals were and where improvements were needed before you went to your lean class. Apply you new thinking to opportunity areas to avoid wasting time.
- Let people know what you are doing and why. You will want to consider the culture and your team’s exposure to lean to decide how much lingo you will use. In addition, be careful of over promising the benefits at this point. However, having members of your team know what you have been doing, why the training is important, and how they might see the benefit of the use of lean, and what help you will need for them is essential. Ask to see if there are a few people who would be interested in learning more or working with you on a few simple projects.
- Keep notes. Often you will hear or see opportunities to use lean before you are ready to pursue them. Write it down. You will be surprised how helpful the list will be as you develop and expand your skills and those of your team as you start your lean journey.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
January 30th, 2012
“by: Jim Sonderman”
Most lean practitioners understand and would agree that it’s a good practice to try things out prior to making changes permanent. Trying things out through simulations and mockups allows us to test changes against anticipated results so that we can see what works and what does not. The practice of testing ideas against an anticipated result allows us to learn from every change we make. This is the essence of making improvement through the scientific method. In practice, many lean practitioners experiment without first clearly defining what is ideal in terms of the total process.
A common approach to improvement begins with making an intense observation of the current state. After the current state situation is understood, the next step taken by many individuals is to brainstorm on the current state for improvement opportunities. Subsequently, ideas are generated, tested, refined and then implemented. This seems like a fairly sound practice and using this approach will more than likely achieve some positive results for you. However, when I see individuals taking this exact approach and I ask them why they made that particular change or took that particular course of action, the response seems starkly familiar to the response I gave my lean coach from Toyota many years ago. “I made this improvement because it removes waste and it’s certainly an improvement on the current condition.”
Years ago, I was assigned by my company to help a supplier over a 6 month period of time improve the total value stream of the part they were supplying to us. A coach was assigned from Toyota to guide me in my project. I began immediately removing waste wherever it surfaced. I had made significant progress in reducing labor and inventory. My coach returned for a visit and reviewed my progress on the production floor. I was expecting applause but only got a question? What specific problem are you trying to fix? You are jumping all over the place making changes without clear direction. Then he asked another question. “Please define for me what ideal is in terms of this total process”. I answered by providing the following: “one piece flow, no delays, full utilization of manpower and produce only what the customer wants when they want it”. His reply was “Very good!……… Now go do it”. I was expecting a little more direction than this. However, what he did was to help me establish a clear pathway forward to an ideal target condition. Then every experiment we structured was with this end in sight. We never did achieve one piece flow, but we came much closer to achieving it during those 6 months. We freed up so much floor space that we eventually consolidated two facilities. Without a clear vision of the ideal process, we would have never achieved this magnitude of outcome.
Tags: Experimentation
Posted in Jim Sonderman | No Comments »
January 28th, 2012
Sustaining 5S is the hardest part. The average life of a 5S program is 1 year, and sustainability is the reason. So what behaviors should you exhibit to make it work?
Finding something out of place in the 5S’d area is not a sign that the system is broken. In fact, it’s a sign that it is working. It worked because you noticed it. You’ll never keep everything in place all the time. Unless it’s a serious violation, my first reaction to something is just to move it back where it belongs. Many people might disagree with that, because it’s an opportunity for coaching. But if you literally grab every opportunity to coach that you find, you’ll never leave the one area. Correcting it is the behavior you’d want from those in the area, so if the system tells you what to do, then just do it. That’s role modeling the behavior you want to see in others. If it is not straightforward, then ask an operator in the area what is the item, or where it belongs, or why it’s not in the right place. They are the ones who will best know. If needed, coaching can be provided. If it becomes a pattern, then it needs to be brought up with the supervisor in the area so that they can coach as well as hold accountable.
If you are on an audit, then the right first response is to the supervisor, because the audit is specifically focused on the process. You are surfacing issues about the system working when on an audit, so that is meant to facilitate the discussion with the supervisor in the area.
Furthermore, if all of these fail, then change the system. This means find a way to make the particular failure easier to do right, easier to spot when wrong, impossible to do, etc. We can’t always go back to coaching and reminders. Find some way to make the repeated failure no longer a problem.
What’s important about these behaviors is that they are widespread and consistent. This isn’t just for the manager immediately of the area in question. Anyone in management should be in the same page. Get other people who might be going through the area engaged, such as engineers and HR.
Tags: 5S, Flinchbaugh, sustainability
Posted in Jamie Flinchbaugh | No Comments »
December 30th, 2011
by Jamie Flinchbaugh
Startup companies, and their corresponding entrepreneurs, often focus on the “big idea.” Recently I disappointingly saw an entrepreneur state “all the big ideas have already been taken.” Wow, has history proved that wrong again and again. As an angel investor myself, it’s often easy to focus on the big idea: is it original? is it defensible? is the market big?
But I believe we focus too much on the idea, and too little on the execution of the idea. Execution is often the difference between winning and losing. What does that mean for investors? Focus on the team, their perspective, and their plan.
Here’s some evidence: in a statistical review of 32 startup company postmortems, this review categories 20 failure reasons. By my count, execution makes up 13 reasons that startups failure. Strategic failures make up the next biggest category.
Execution means that we must focus on process: decision making, customer support, problem solving, spending, and so on. Startups like to believe that process is the domain of all, boring, mega-companies. They can believe that, but only to their own peril.
Tags: entrepreneurs, process management, startups
Posted in Jamie Flinchbaugh | No Comments »
December 22nd, 2011
by Andy Carlino
Those of you who know me are aware that I have been slow to embrace the power and value of social media. Fortunately my friend and partner, Jamie Flinchbaugh, has convinced me of the error of my ways. This is my 1st foray into the blogosphere and I hope to be a valuable contributor.
Although it is becoming less common, unfortunately it is still not uncommon to find employees, and even entire departments, unwilling to participate and contribute ideas or suggestions to improve their organization. The reasons are wide and varied and often would take a psychiatrist’s couch to understand. The following is a tale of an extremely important department in a company, we will call them AAA, that was not only unwilling to be engaged, they were downright militant about it.
They were a very mature workforce with many years of experience with a long history of employee engagement being unwelcomed and, in fact, discouraged. The only requirement was “just get the work done”. How efficiently or effectively you got the work done was not important. Times have changed at AAA and so have the expectations. Efficiency and effectiveness are now paramount and absolutely critical. Unfortunately these employees are in an “entitled” environment and they are essentially employed for life unless they commit some significant egregious offense. Little to nothing can be done to force performance improvement and professional “encouragement” was not working.
A previous and proven method we have used to promote employee engagement and performance improvement in a difficult environment was to simply post real-time performance metrics at the point-of-activity. In most cases we see a 3%-7% improvement in performance by posting the metrics. The thinking is that most of us want to know what the score is at any time and the metrics will stimulate the competitive and winning spirit in all of us. So, of course, that was that was our solution at AAA. Up went the metrics with the goal lines and the traditional and simple visual management technique of red, yellow and green color coded performance indicators. The color coding made it easy for everyone, including the department employees, to recognize performance status. We might as well have put a red cape in front of a raging bull. The reaction was a disaster. What a mistake. None of the metrics were even close to goal so they were obviously “all” red. Not only was this not a motivator, it was a demotivator. They were insulted and even more resistant to contributing and improving. The cautionary tale is simple. Regardless of how powerful or effective you think a simple lean tool/technique like color coded visual management indicators may be, never underestimate the power of the culture. You too will experience the “unintended consequences” of acting without thinking.
We are trying to correct the mistake. Still have metrics at the point-of-activity but they are only bar and trend charts. No color coding, no goal lines. Not sure if we can recover but the data suggests things aren’t any worse off than before and possibly getting better. Time will tell. I can tell you this, I don’t want to ever go through this experience again and hopefully you never will.
Tags: alignment, assessment, business process, Carlino, culture, employee engagement, Flinchbaugh, leadership, lean, Lean Experience, lean journey, learning activities, roadmap, transformation, union
Posted in Andy Carlino | 1 Comment »
September 1st, 2011
Process mapping is a tool used pretty extensively in lean journeys. It is also used because the problem is complex enough that it is required, and therefore, there are plenty of opportunities to improve its use. Here, Jamie and Andy share some tips in using process mapping effectively.
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
June 27th, 2011
Escalation is an important process. It exists in every company – it is how senior leaders find out about problems within the organization. It is often ad hoc, and not a designed and deliberate process. Andy Carlino and Jamie Flinchbaugh discuss the building of effective triggers and escalation.
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
November 10th, 2010
In this video blog post, Andy and Jamie discuss using a lean roadmap. There is no one way to drive a lean journey. It depends on where you are and where you want to go. There are 5 phases to the lean roadmap:
- Phase 0 – Exploration
- Phase 1 – Building the Foundation
- Phase 2 – Expand and Focus
- Phase 3 – Integration
- Phase 4 – Momentum
Please watch, but also share your comments and questions.
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video.
Follow this link if you have problems viewing it to go directly to the source page. If your company blocks streaming video, you will have to watch this from another location.
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
October 11th, 2010
One of the simplest ways to begin your lean journey is through the use of After Action Reviews. Andy Carlino and Jamie Flinchbaugh discuss how After Action Reviews can be used to drive reflection and learn and improve both from our failures and our successes.
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
September 7th, 2010
Regardless of where you sit in the organizational hierarchy, daily huddles are a great tool for any team to create engagement, alignment, surface problems, and more. Andy Carlino and Jamie Flinchbaugh discuss daily huddles, which are a great add-on if you watched our last video about scoreboards.
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video.
Please let us know if there are any topics you would like us to cover in the future.
Tags: Carlino, Flinchbaugh, huddle, scoreboards, teams
Posted in Andy and Jamie's videos | 6 Comments »
|
