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In this short summary we’ll detail some of the ‘shift’ that must occur in a Lean deployment and some of the key enablers that make this transformation possible. The benefits of a Lean enterprise are obvious – lower costs, better responsiveness, and higher quality; not to mention improved morale.
Assess / Build / Execute:
The deployment started with a number of key assessments; some of which included value streams, overall equipment effectiveness calculations, policy deployment, and scored Shingo audits. Benchmarking best demonstrated practices are still very central to the deployment in areas like maintenance health, quality, and tooling. These assessments are created for one purpose – identification & prioritization of improvement gaps that exist in the business.
After the initial assessments were started we then moved to begin building some foundational elements of the deployment that focused on long term goals. One such goal is internalization of a ‘continuous improvement engine’ that would allow the client to self-teach, self-facilitate, and self-certify. While an exhaustive list of these building elements isn’t feasible, some of them include use and engagement of champions, active skills certification matrices, and the project pipeline that demonstrated where our savings would likely come from. The list is extensive – and continues to build as we learn more about how to improve the business.
“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results,” Winston Churchill. Execute is the phase that follows assess and build and often is where real challenges surface. Difficult decisions have to be made – approving travel expenses, scheduling overtime in order to cover employees on Kaizen teams or training events. And that’s not to mention solving complex problems. Results also includes … well, results. As these investments have been made into the business & personnel, teams have responded in kind by producing tangible savings that have flowed through to the P&L statement of the company. One exciting element of our deployment has been top line organic growth with existing customers that have recognized the positive trends in our plants & people.
Lean Deployment Penetration:
Leading a balanced deployment requires that we canvass (3) primary cross sections of the organization. It’s unfortunate that many deployments fail or stall does so because they ‘isolate’ themselves to the ‘shop floor’ or restrict themselves to ‘employee training.’ The deployment has made significant and storied gains in each of these areas.
Management:
- Measurements: It’s been said that “what you measure is what you get. What you measure is all you get.” From a Lean stand point often management is measuring the ‘wrong’ things so alignment of resources & metrics to value streams (strategic) is a critical shift in any Lean deployment. How management measures the execution of the strategy is unquestionably contained in the X matrix within Policy Deployment and linked directly through 3 or 4 tiers of ‘daily management’ that extends down to the machine level on the shop floor. Further, it can’t be stressed how much emphasis has been on making data-centered decisions within our management teams. During the deployment we’ve required the managers to speak w/ data – to sift & sort data – and to verify that the data baselines have integrity. Movement of management teams from an “I feel” to an “I know” has been a tremendous shift and the amount of measurements have increased ~ 5X.
- Leaders standard work: Y=f(x) is a term that is used to explain the segregation of ‘critical X’s’ that have tremendous impact on our business. Cycle time, %cavitation, and amount of scrap produced in change overs are some examples of the factors that we must measure, understand, and control. Our ability as management teams to efficiently and consistently focus on process factors has allowed us to make changes in how we manage the business. Leaders standard work is one of the enabling Lean tools that document what we do, when we do it, and how it should be done every day.
- PDCA cycles: Plan – Do – Check – Adjust is cycle of improvement and learning that requires more time and diligence on the part of management. The deployment has required our management teams to become expert observers. Problem statements (good ones), objectives that are SMART (specific, measurable, aggressive, relevant & time bound), and after action reviews are all examples where we’ve changed the business. We have moved from fire-fighting, hunches, and assumptions – to installing cycles of PDCA learning/improvement, which gives us confidence that the results we are achieving are here to stay.
Operations:
- Equipment & tooling reliability – is (almost) everything. Overall equipment effectiveness is a measure that measures performance, availability, and yield and when all (3) factors are at world class levels we need a lot less equipment to produce a lot more quality product. During the deployment we’ve developed extensive tools to measure, analyze, and improve OEE and the client will slowly take machines out of service as our primary equipment becomes more productive. There are many components of this strategy, but one is to change our approach to down time. “Run to failure” is a very expensive strategy that has been used in the past and our goal is to identify when failures begin to occur – at the earliest possible point, and to intervene with repair, replace, or rebuild prior to causing unscheduled down time. Doing this requires a whole new set of tools in maintenance and our push is to move from a reactive organization – to a predictive and precision one.
Employees:
- Train every employee to identify and reduce waste (WORMPIIT): Wastes can be categorized into (8) categories and we use the WORMPIIT acronym for this purpose (waiting, overproduction, rework, motion, processing, inventory, intellect & transportation) and we’ve trained > 75% of employees in methods to accomplish this. Our employees intellect – when engaged – is one of the most powerful tools that exist, and our engagement of the workforce has been central in this deployment. Involvement = commitment and employees have helped design fixtures, produce equipment layouts, build procedures and the wealth of experience has produced many tangible and intangible benefits.
- Our goal is to create scientists: As we move forward in the deployment, the employees will play a more significant role. From charting daily measurements each shift, using problem solving tools, leading & teaching training classes, and participating on teams, we will continue to instill in every employee the desire to produce positive change. As we move closer to this objective each person in the organization will become a ‘scientist’ – using the tools, to see the waste, to improve flow.
