Life.Currenttoday.com - 2 Cents

This is a topical walk-over of the first portion of Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean by Andy Carlino. It is the perfect book for any organization wanting to introduce lean principles to their people. It doesn’t bog down in the mire of data and formulas like so many others.

This is an extremely quick glean of highlighted phrases throughout the first section. The book is very easy to read. It will change your organization.
___________________________________

Understand the fundamentals.
Copycats never achieve success.
Lean must be internalized.
Changed beliefs drive behavior.
Changing only tools and policies is ineffective.
Employee’s beliefs cannot be changed by force.
Employee beliefs must be lead into alignment with company belief.

These principles provide direction.

Observation
Waste elimination
Agreement
Problem solving
Learning

Observation
Most managers believe they already understand the company’s reality and make decisions a priori.

Observation is about how to understand the current reality.
Subsequent principles are adopted more easily when an organization is in sync through observation.

It develops a sense of how work is done, and why it is done a certain way.
Learn how to observe and understand.
Understand and develop value stream mapping.
See the activities, connections, and flows.
Understand that activities are the steps taken, and that produce results.

Connections are paired functions between internal customer and supplier.
The customer wants something.
The supplier provides it.
Both customer and supplier are responsible.
There should be only one path for request and response in paired function connections.

Flows are paths taken by material, information, and people.
The flow bridges the white space between processes.
It must not cause waste.
It should have only one standardized path.

Waste elimination should be the every day thought—a daily test.

Waste is defined in:
Overproduction
Transportation
Inventory
Motion
Waiting
Over processing
Defects

These are the definers of the view into the company’s current reality.
These definers are the tools to organize, identify, and eliminate waste.

People should be utilized to their full potential.

All activity must add value that the end customer wants, that develops the product, and that contributes to the product being right the first time.

Value added activity becomes untouchable. It may only be explored and refined for waste elimination.

Agreement is a foundation for standardization.
It defines how activity is performed.
How an activity is performed must be in high agreement among those involved in those processes.

A common way or process must take priority over an individual’s own way.
Failure to focus on how to perform an activity causes ambiguity and disconnects paired functions.

Problem solving must be seen as opportunity.
The belief system must change to expose and turn problems into tools.
Dig deeper into problems. Surface them immediately. Design work to reveal them. All problems are equally valuable tools.

Contain problems and ask why until there is no why to ask. Attribute a problem to their relevant activity, connection, and flow.

Validate each ‘why’ answer.

This must be embedded to capture root causes.

Learning holds lean principles together.
Learning isn’t only information. Information does not produce results.
Being right is only right when it is effective.
Improvements through experimentation need to be verified. Good experimentation revolves around a good hypothesis.

Ideas must be tested quickly and cheaply. Learn about a process to be able to verify it. Implement it into action and standardize the solution.

Develop a learning environment through reflection and apply it to sequential events.

Base processes on real experience, not theory.

Remove the barriers of fear and comfort zone. Expand the learning zone, but establish good boundaries to avoid chaos.

Reflection and experimentation are real work, and need to be priorities in leadership.

Lean principles cannot be engineered without gaining people’s hearts through leadership.
Leadership moves toward the company’s ideal state.

Good leadership teaches. It transfers ideas and skills. It is managements direct responsibility.

Solutions are right when they are right collectively.

Good work-place tension is a source of energy, not stress. It imparts the sense of urgency with a clear path to help and move forward.

Good tension projects a vision of the ideal state, a hatred of the current state, and the skills and actions to move toward the ideal state. The ideal state is a vision of how the company should function. It provides direction. It is individualized for every process, activity, and person. It presents a clear path.

The leader must choose the path and create a way to drive change through consensus and healthy dictatorship.

Learning mostly occurs outside the comfort zone. The lean leader eliminates the comfort zone and directs people to the learning zone, setting clear goals, providing mechanisms, and experimenting purposefully. Fear can be abated in an atmosphere that provides physical safety, emotional safety, and professional safety. The person who takes risks and learns should be rewarded. This activity should be modeled. Leaders should be ‘learner leaders’.

The leader should be in the front of it pulling not pushing. Management buy-in should exhibit a leadership commitment.

The leader’s activity should be standardized. Lean must be applied to management function and convey legitimacy to lean efforts. Leadership is an act.
Mistakes should not be hidden. They should be used for learning.

Lean should be applied across the board, not just to manufacturing. An even order flow must be provided. Suggestions should be all about what is best for the customer, not just manufacturing. Frame everything around adding value that is delivered to the customer with less waste.

Develop lean thinking that applies lean principles and rules as the foundation to apply to any process.
________________________________

As I said, this article is just a quick passover of points within the first section of a well written book on lean. You won’t find a better way to train and get people on board. You need this book if you’re even thinking about lean.

Regards.

Share this link with others on the following sites:
               

If you work for a company that does any fabrication and has more than one hundred employees, then you have most surely heard of lean manufacturing.

I won’t give a full explanation for the unschooled, but here is a short description of lean manufacturing:

The main feature is the goal to eliminate all waste of any kind from every aspect of the business:
• customer relations
• product design
• supplier network
• factory management

The principles applied in a lean enterprise can be stated simply:
• Zero waiting time
• Zero Inventory
• Scheduling — internal customer pull instead of push system
• Batch to Flow — cut batch sizes
• Line Balancing
• Cut actual process times.

Once you have your employees on board and understanding lean principles, there are very few enemies left to overcome in a working lean manufacturing environment.

I have discovered two major enemies in our business to lean manufacturing.

We have some lines in our product stream that are very friendly to lean principles. They have very similar, repetitive assembly and processing functions.

One difficult fabrication area has two real problems.

1) Extreme Variation.
2) Short Runs.

Extreme variation is a problem in lean manufacturing because it is perhaps the anti-type to lean manufacturing principles. A well functioning lean product stream attempts to remove all variation. When this is impossible, the next step is to standardize the processing of the variation–effectively minimizing the negative impact of any variation that is inherent in the product. The variation in this fabrication area isn’t bad variation. I’m talking about the difference in one part from another, not poor designs or bad components.

This leads to the second problem, though part of the first problem. Our average production run in this problem area is less than ten units per run. We started trying to look for similar products on different work orders in an attempt to reduce the variation–treating them like a single run. We had very little success with this. Why?

1) Huge Product Line.
2) Extremely Short Lead Time.

The huge product offering keeps similar products separated more often than not.
The short lead time keeps us from being able to schedule similar products together. The first work order usually can’t wait for the similar product on another work order. One day turn around for custom built units happens every day.

We will not abandon continuing to make this better. In fact, we are far from exhausting this effort.

I think the next step for us in lean manufacturing for this problem area will be a heavy effort aimed at treating the processing of small runs like the product itself.

In other words, short runs have a bulk of the percentage of effort into getting them out the door wrapped up in their processing. A gain in cleaning up the processing is as good as a gain in fabrication in the net result.

Combined with this, I want to get standardized work and work stations established to the max in this area. We have had a very busy season that kept us from fully implementing all that we want.

Also, we still have a lot of material movement to streamline.

Lean Manufacturing is the only way to go. It is, however, quite challenging in some situations.

It will be interesting to see the hybrid approach these problems fashion over the next few years.

Maybe I’ll write the new version of lean manufacturing for the anti-widget industry someday.

Regards.

Share this link with others on the following sites:
               

When I first started working where I have worked for eighteen years now, there was a guy running one of the departments that used to really bug me.

The business we are in has an extreme pressure for quick turn-around. We are often called upon to stretch our manufacturing capabilities as well as push the threshold for how we assemble and what materials we use and what, exactly, we can do with materials and processes.

Well, back when I first started, I was mister gun-ho. I was always running around getting extreme things done in departments that had said, “We can’t do it.” I received several awards in those days and moved up quickly.

Over the years, I continued to make it happen. I still make it happen all these years later.

However, these days, I often say, “We can’t do it.”

I keep waiting for some young gun-ho person to come along and make things happen I just said, “We can’t do.”

After a while, you get tired of the seventy hour weeks.

Now, I’m just like the guy that used to really bug me. It’s a shame. But, we have to find a comfortable place to live for the long haul. I wonder what cool thing or process hasn’t been developed because we want to go home and hug the kids?

It’s one of those ironies of necessity for living a real life. We have to give it up to have it.

In some ways, I still long for the days when I always thought I could fix this–this being the lumbering processes of a large fabrication facility.

I still can fix it. But, you know what I say instead?

“We can’t do it.”

Regards.

Share this link with others on the following sites:
               

Most any of us that work in an office, manage a shop, run a business, or deal with co-workers in today’s world have grown accustomed to depending a great deal on our computers and email.

I remember the chuckle we had when our company was threatening to remove the privilege of email and internet from anyone who continued to abuse the privilege.

What a joke. They would take away the tool to perform the job they wanted us to do and leave us doing what, digging through and old Thomas Registry and snail mailing clients and vendors? It was rather laughable. Take the hammer from a carpenter and try to build a house.

Email has become an indispensable tool for many, if not most of us today.

Email is a love and hate relationship for me. I can’t work without it, but I can’t get much done because of it.

It really amounts to a tool that we need to learn to use all over again now that our world’s have sucked it in to the point that we use email rather than managing jobs, projects, and people.

OK, what do I mean by needing to learn to use email all over again? What do I mean by using email rather than managing jobs, projects, and people?

Well, how often do you dig through your sent box or archives? Only every day, right?

Why?

Sometimes it is for that tad bit of information you misplaced. Sometimes it is for that company name or email you need. But, I’ll bet you dig through it as often to prove you sent an email, or prove what someone actually emailed you!

That’s right. Email has become the ultimate ‘cover my butt’ tool in most work environments.

I work in a company with manufacturing facilities all over the country. We often have projects that have to be coordinated between facilities. It becomes an email quagmire.

There, that kind of rhymes, doesn’t it: Email Quagmire.

I have a friend who is an excellent example of those who avoid technology. Not because he is stupid, but because he doesn’t want to take the time to learn it. Yet he has become the Email King.

He hasn’t mastered storing and retrieving things, so he prints them. He will print an email and staple it to a work order and file it. For the information? NO. Because he needs it? NO.

He does it to cover his butt. It’s just to prove he told them to do it and what he said and when he said it.

So, this wonderful tool for communication has turned into management by proof of blame.

How do we fix it? I don’t know.

If you find out, send me an email.

Regards.

Share this link with others on the following sites: