Ironically, space constraints faced by NASA fueled a revolution in miniaturization evident in almost every innovation of modern society – from laptops to cell phones to transportation to medical devices to all things Internet.  The need to pack more utility into a small package has changed everything.  Or almost everything.  Here are some recent exceptions:

“We’re adding a new wing to manufacturing,” a colleague related to me recently, “we’re running out of space.”   As I glanced around a shop floor crowded more with material than machines, I asked, “What are you going to put in the new space?”  “We’re just going to spread out,” he said.  “This is a good time to build before interest rates start to climb.”

Another manufacturer advised recently that he was building a Lean warehouse.  “What’s that?” I asked.   “We’re relocating all of our raw material to a location that’s closer to the main highway,” he said. “We need to add several machines, so were Lean-ing out the space.”    “Aren’t you just adding more space and moving inventory farther from your floor?”  I asked.  His response: “Warehouse space is cheap.”

A major hospital requested Lean assistance to re-design its perinatal services in order to accommodate more patients.  After reviewing the current operation, I recommended that existing space could be repurposed to handle the projected growth. “No,” they said, “We’re cramped. We need more space and the budget is already approved.”

It seems that decisions regarding space are driven more by claustrophobia or perceived worth than actual need.   Flow distance may double or triple as a result of expansion, but additional space somehow still equates to growth.   More space is viewed as an investment, an alluring addition to the balance sheet, or a badge of success.   Only on rare occasions do I encounter a growing business that is interested in reducing space. Perhaps, then, space is the final frontier.  Not more space, but less.   I wonder how much Lean progress would be made if space were seen as a constraint for business as it was for NASA’s Mercury launch.

How much space do you have?  Too much?  Too little? Share a story.

O.L.D.

PS I’m teaching the Shingo Institute workshop “Continuous Improvement” at MassMutual in Springfield next week and a few seats remain if you’d like to join us. Learn more here.

PPS I’m also looking forward to presenting my monthly “Tea Time with The Toast Dude” webinar on June 20th. It’s free! The topic is “Silver Bullet Mania”. Intrigued? Read more and register here.

According to the Shingo Institute, these systems are the domain of managers who should be reviewing them regularly.  But, when business systems are ingrained as part of the corporate fabric, the idea of changing even one of them instills concern regarding the global effects.  Will changing one system negatively impact others?  Concern for unanticipated consequences will trigger risk-averse behavior.  Add to that challenge the fact that existing systems may, in fact, have been authored by the same persons who are now charged with evaluating their effectiveness.  When Shigeo Shingo declared that subjective inspection of one’s own work is not good practice, he might have included the work of managers along with that of front line employees.    It would be better apparently for these organizations to have no systems to start their Lean journeys than to be saddled with status quo systems that evoke the wrong behaviors.  So, what can be done?

According to the Shingo Institute:

First, stop basing the design of systems purely on local results.  This practice creates silos and disharmony.  Each part of the organization is rewarded as if it were its own company, rather than for its contribution to system goals.   Speaking at a Shingo Conference many years ago, Russ Scaffede, formerly an executive at General Motors (and later at Toyota) quipped, “At GM we used to say ‘All of our divisions made money, only the corporation lost its shirt.’”   That is the status quo condition for many organizations: local bogeys driven by systems that simply don’t knit together.

Second, consider the foundational principles beneath the Lean tools, or, as Shigeo Shingo noted, first ‘know-why’ before you ‘know-how.’  Many organizations parrot the tools without understanding the philosophy that makes them effective.  Simply layering tools on top of a faulty philosophy also generates disharmony rather than real results.   Many organizations, for example, have invested time to develop a quality system like ISO including QC tools and problem-solving methods; but employees are afraid to report problems for fear of reprisal.  Shingo Principles articulate the culture that must be present to make systems work.

Finally, to avoid concerns regarding the interdependency of systems, i.e., the unanticipated consequences make the changes small; in the words of Masaaki Imai, “create many small changes for the better.”   Don’t let the policy books gather dust; review and update them often.   To use a metaphor from knitting,  check and adjust your systems one thread at a time.  Don’t let the knitting unravel.  It’s called tinking, the process of taking knitting back stitch by stitch to correct a problem in the fabric. (Tink is knit spelled backward.)   In this case, let’s call it “Systems Tinking.”

O.L.D.

P.S. Speaking of the ‘know-why’ before the ‘know-how’, GBMP’s  Lean conference is coming to Worcester MA on September 19-20. The theme for our 13th annual event – “The Integration of Culture & Tools” – will be an exploration of the value of Lean tools when embedded with a Lean culture. I know September feels like a long way off, but it’ll be here before you know it. The event features four keynote presenters including Paul Akers, author of ‘2-Second Lean’ & Brian Wellinghoff from Barry Wehmiller, plus 30+ breakout sessions and more than a dozen poster presentations for yokoten in our Community of Lean Lounge. Simply put, it’s the best opportunity for Lean learning and networking with professionals just like yourself – passionate Lean practitioners. Early bird registration discount (save close to $200!)  in effect through May 31. That’s tomorrow folks. I hope you take advantage of the savings. But don’t take my word for it. Check out the agenda at a glance, testimonials and photos from last year’s event and much much more on the website and decide for yourself. I sure hope to see you in September!

Taiichi Ohno tells us there are seven wastes that account for 95% of the elapsed time between “paying and getting paid.”  Most Lean students utilize an acronym like TIMWOODS as a mnemonic to help them remember each of the seven. Many, however, are seven waste parrots. They can repeat the wastes, but don’t have a deep understanding of their significance.

These wastes, according to Shigeo Shingo are measurable impediments to flow, if we only can see them. Much of Shingo’s writing deals with unmasking waste, hidden from us by our “conceptual blind spots.”  Shingo declares, “The most dangerous waste is the waste we do not recognize.” Wastes like MOTION, masquerade as work until we understand that breaking a sweat searching for a missing tool is not really work but something that gets the way of the work and flow of value to the customer. “Elimination of waste,” Shingo declares, “is not the problem. Identification of waste is the problem.”

Students of Lean are advised by Shingo that OVERPRODUCTION, producing more than is needed or producing too soon, is the worst of the seven wastes because it causes more of the other the other six wastes – more inventory, more transport, more waiting, more defects, more waiting and more processing.

Then Shingo adds an 8th waste, unmeasurable in an industrial engineering sense, but nevertheless according to Shingo, worse than all of the first seven wastes: Loss of creativity. Management’s failure to recognize the brilliance and experience of their employees places an insurmountable constraint on the identification and elimination of waste.

Ohno exhorts managers to “go to the Gemba” in order to see the waste and show support for employees.  He is not referring to visiting the floor only to review huddle boards: “People who can’t understand numbers are useless. The Gemba where numbers are not visible is also bad. However, people who only look at the numbers are the worst of all.“

Shingo says, “Any reasonable person will try to remove waste if he or she can see it.” On this one point, I must disagree with Dr. Shingo. On a daily basis, in my work, I visit the workplace with operating managers where we observe together waste in its many forms.  When we reach out to employees, they share problems and struggles with us, wastes that prevent them from doing their best.  But when I return to these sites, even after weeks have elapsed, the waste that employees have shown us often remains. So I’ll add a corollary to the worst and most dangerous wastes:  “The most demoralizing waste is the waste that managers DO see in the Gemba and yet do nothing about.”

O.L.D.

Around the same time, however, I discovered that among native English-speaking white collar employees there existed another Tower of Babel that was at least as significant as the one from the shop floor that derived from the ambiguity of our English language.  Common terms to describe business processes turned out not to be so aligned as thought. For example, as a young marketing employee working at industry trade shows, I displayed cardboard markups of potential new products that our salespeople referred to as released. “How can you call them released?” I asked an older salesman.  He replied, “If I don’t get an order for this, we’ll never produce it. Nothing happens until we get an order.”  Such was his worldview. If a potential product made it to a trade show, it was released, i.e., mandated for sale.

Later in my career, I transitioned from marketing to IT where, as a bystander to new product development, I cataloged these additional definitions by department for the term “released.”  Depending upon your venue, a new product was considered released:

• In Design and Drafting, when the part and assembly drawings and bills of material were completed.
• In Purchasing and Inventory Control, when the parts were on order.
• In Manufacturing Engineering, when the assembly fixtures were installed and tested
• In Quality, when the inspection plan was complete.
• In Production, when the pre-production runs were successfully completed. (In some cases, the new product development process had lagged to such a point that the pre-production run was sold to customers.)

Each department used the word “released” to describe its local part of the push system, yet none really understood the relative imprecision of the word.  Depending upon who was speaking to whom, the meaning of released could be radically different.

The ambiguity of the English language can be confounding, setting up numerous miscommunications and occasional disastrous handoffs.  It occurs to me that if we are to address continuous improvement from a systems perspective, then we need a systems language to clarify key concepts for our organizations.  Call it ESL:  Enterprise Systems Language.  Can you think of examples of babel in your organization that we can add to the new ESL lexicon?  Please share a couple.

O.L.D.

PS I’m presenting a free 45-minute webinar on Thursday, March 23. I’ll be reflecting on my lean learning over the past three decades – much of it a result of learning from mistakes. Learn more and register here.

PPS I’ll be teaching the foundational Shingo Institute workshop, Discover Excellence, on June 1-2, 2017 at Fort Wayne Metals in Fort Wayne, IN. Read more and register here. See the full schedule of upcoming Shingo Insitute workshops here – including Cultural Enablers, Continuous Improvement, Enterprise Alignment and the brand new workshop, Build Excellence.

“Teaching Anna to Drive” scene: Anna has just passed her driving test.

In the fall of 2013, I was approached by Anna Possio with a request for GBMP to collaborate with her organization, Leannovator, to produce a short video exemplar for Improvement Kata.  I had known Anna and her family previously, as they marketed GBMP’s products in Italy and had helped us out on several occasions at our Northeast Lean Conference.   Leanovator is a family business and it kind of felt like they adopted GBMP as an extended part of that family.  So I readily agreed to GBMP’s participation but confessed that my background with Improvement Kata was limited.  While the creator of this concept, Mike Rother, had spoken at our conference a couple years earlier and I had read his book, I wasn’t sure what GBMP could bring to the project.   “Not a problem, “ replied Anna, “I will find the expertise and resources we need for this project.”  A short time later I found myself in a planning meeting with Anna and Bill Costantino from W3Group.  Bill was our Kata expert.  We brainstormed a few scenarios that would demonstrate the spirit and method of Improvement Kata, and settled on a theme, which later became the title for our DVD:  “Teaching Anna to Drive.”

Bill and Anna would eventually co-star in the video as Kata coach and learner.  But first, there was a fairly arduous task of creating a script and storyboard.  I’d been spoiled in the past, as most of GBMP’s videos required little collaboration or agreement.  For those familiar with GBMP videos, our messages are usually simple, single point lessons and our genre is improvisational.   For “Teaching Anna to Drive,” however, multiple revisions, including pointers from Kata author Mike Rother, telescoped the original project timeline but ultimately produced a script that was truer to the Kata concept.
Notwithstanding everyone’s sincere efforts to move the script along, nearly a year elapsed before we were ready to shoot the video.   With Bill C. in Michigan and Anna in Torino, Italy, I felt at times that life was imitating art; that we were advancing the video process through a series of experiments. In the fall of 2014, we commenced the filming process, almost joyous that we had come this far.   Finally, in February 2015, the DVD was complete, just in time for the Kata Summit in Ft. Lauderdale.  I announced jokingly that the DVD had been “years in the making.”

We had reached our next target and decided to pursue a higher one still. In June 2015 GBMP submitted “Teaching Anna to Drive” to the Shingo Institute for award consideration, and in the spring of 2016, the video was awarded a Shingo Prize.  Anna, unfortunately, was not able to be present for the award ceremony, but she let me know that she had been hard at work on the Italian language version:  “Video formativo – Kata del Miglioramento.” Always a new challenge.  Always a higher target condition.

In February of this year I learned with great sadness that Anna, not yet thirty years of age, had succumbed to pancreatic cancer.  The sadness pervaded the globe extending to all her friends and admirers of which I was privileged to be one.  We share our deepest condolences to Giorgio, Cristiano, Caterina, Francesco and all of Anna’s family.

So, one more target for Anna: GBMP has reduced the price of “Teaching Anna to Drive” to $30, and will donate 50% from each video sold to The Lustgarten Foundation for research to find a cure for pancreatic cancer as a tribute to Anna’s passion for Improvement Kata and contribution to the world of continuous improvement.

O.L.D.

From a human standpoint these conveyance devices are designed to reduce strain.  In a technical sense, it can be said they multiply our capability to do work; at least the force-times-distance kind of work: W= f x d.   Problem is, that although conveying material on wheels is embedded in our thinking as an improvement over manual transport it’s actually a mechanization of waste.  We may think the wheel has multiplied our ability to do work, but it really has multiplied the amount of waste we can create.  Odd.

Over the centuries additional wheels were added to the basic cart, enabling conveyance of even more material with less work [sic] in a single trip. Then, in 1936, the invention of the shopping cart at Humpty Dumpty supermarkets became the prototype for more recent improvements to conveyance:  A four-wheel, multi-level steel wire cart, this invention replaced a hand-carried basket, enabling shoppers to gather all groceries in a single pass.  The shopping cart, however, also required wider aisles and larger checkout counters.   Then the aisles were widened again, this time to accommodate pallet loading of the larger amounts of material needed to accommodate a new concept: EOQ.   Why buy just a little, when you can have so much more in an economy pack? Carriages became larger still to accommodate bulk quantity shopping.  All of these innovations were intended to make it easier for the customer to buy more – and, of course, to encourage them to buy more.

There are more than a few parallels in industry.  AVG’s, pallet jacks, forklifts, and conveyors are all “improvements” on the basic cart.  These machines typically require wider aisles, deeper and higher shelving, new training, and maintenance and, of course, more space to park the machines – kind of like the tail wagging the dog. Too often, rather than rethinking the cause of the waste, we automate around it.  Shigeo Shingo referred to these as “superficial improvements.”  An automatic guided vehicle (AGV) mechanizes the waste of transportation; or an automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS) facilitates the waste of storage.  Worker strain may be reduced by a superficial improvement, but the actual waste remains and sometimes even increases.  A stockroom manager, for example, lamented to me recently “I have less people now, but it takes longer to kit a job than when we did it manually.  The machine is a bottleneck and the factory waits for parts.”  Unfortunately, these expensive superficial improvements become sunk costs, hard to undo because they are depreciable assets. Thank you, management accounting.

One more insidious re-invention of the wheel is the stationery or almost-stationery wheel.  To the casual observer, these are the wheels that are on the cart that appears as if it’s for transportation; actually, that cart never moves except to move it out of the way.  Moveable storage becomes an option when material staged in front of a process has overflowed to a point that it must be staged in the aisles; funny that this is called “work in process.”  Of all uses or abuses of the wheel, this one is tops on my personal list: the appearance of conveyance.  We assume that if there is a wheel, then there must be movement.  Mr. Shingo’s comment that the “The worst waste is the one we cannot see” comes to mind.

Here is an improvement exercise for you to try in your own facility:  First take an inventory of carts and answer these questions:

• What is the total number of carts?
• What is the total floor space they occupy?
• How many are actually used for conveyance?
• How many are really only for storage or are kept on hand in case of storage overflow?
• How can you reduce each of these numbers by half?

Please let me know how much production space you liberate.

O.L.D.

PS GBMP, a licensed affiliate of the Shingo Insitute, is offering the following workshops in the coming months. The courses introduce the Shingo Model™ and Guiding Principles on which to anchor your current continuous improvement initiatives and to fill the gaps in your efforts towards ideal results and enterprise excellence. Consider joining us at an event near you soon. To read more and register visit http://www.gbmp.org/shingo-institute-courses.html

Here are a few testimonials from happy participants, followed by the schedule.

“Discovering Shingo with such a dedicated instructor helped our team gain a better understanding The Shingo Model. The workshops were engaging and we all came out of the classes with a much better idea of what we need to do as a company to continue to grow.

“The instructor made us feel that we were really learning from each other. When we were broken up into groups, he was always nearby and available to facilitate, but didn’t hover or impose his viewpoints – we came to our own conclusions as a group – and he was generous in his recognition of others’ input and viewpoints. 

“The Discover Excellence workshop was great. It challenged us to think differently. Going to Gemba at the host site was fantastic. I like that our instructor took part in the Gemba walks as a participant. We were all learning together and challenging each other’s assumptions or understandings of model, which in turn led to a much deeper understanding. 

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What is Kaizen?

Over the years my study of TPS has been guided by book learning, tacit learning and more good luck than bad.   One stroke of good luck occurred in February 1987 when I picked up a copy of Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success by Masaaki Imai.  At that time, most literature about TPS was focusing on its technical aspects so this book, which focused on harnessing ideas and creativity, was different.   Also around that time, early TPS efforts at my company were foundering.  We had “lowered the water level of inventory to expose the rocks” and to our dismay were discovering more rocks than we’d bargained for.  We needed more problem solvers and Mr. Imai’s book quickly became a blueprint for individual and small group improvements that bailed us out of troubled waters.  It was truly good luck that led me to Imai’s definition of kaizen which I’ll paraphrase as “many small improvements that come from the common sense and experience of the people who do the work.”

Thus, many small improvements chipped away at and eventually dislodged the rocks that threatened to sink our TPS efforts.   As a manager, my tacit learning from this experience was that shop floor employees were brilliant and creative – some more than others, but all of them smart, proud of their work and extremely willing to be problem-solvers.  Of course there are a lot of books that tell managers that, but that’s academic.  To really understand it we have to practice it!  While Mr. Imai explicitly described the nature of kaizen with many tangible examples, he was quick to point out that understanding kaizen requires practice:  learning by doing.  Toyota refers to this as “tacit learning” as opposed to academic or book learning.  Anyone who has learned to ride a bike can understand what tacit learning is.  It’s visceral and emotional as well as intellectual.  It’s not academic.  And I had a serious need for more problem-solvers. So there’s another stroke of luck:  Our self-inflicted crisis (hitting the rocks) created a need – and opportunity — to take a chance.   While I like to think myself egalitarian, if there had not been a crisis, the opportunity to expand the problem-solving role beyond a few support personnel and supervisors might not have occurred.

Never-ending improvement – that’s kaizen. This is what I learned by “riding the bike.”  But the common translation of “continuous improvement” doesn’t do it justice because it doesn’t connote the changes that also occur within the persons who have created the improvement. The act of being creative to solve a problem or make an improvement has not only educated us but also inspired us to go further. Now tacit learning kicks in again: Concerns by supervision that work will not get done are replaced by more time to do work. Unfounded fears that “employees will mess up” give way to positive anticipation.   More ideas from more employees offered more freely and more frequently generates an organizational confidence to do more than what was previously thought possible. Every day is a day for more improvement.  My tacit learning?  That kaizen is for “Everybody, Everyday” (GBMP’s slogan.)  The momentum and pace of improvement is governed by the breadth and depth of learning and participation of every single person in the organization.  True, there are some employees with more ideas than others, but the act of each and every employee offering his or her creativity changes the organization.

All of this learning proceeded from a definition of kaizen offered by Masaaki Imai.  Unfortunately not everyone subscribes to his definition.  The notion of “small changes” it seems was a turn-off to managers looking for faster progress, managers who subscribed to the “big brain” theory:  breakthrough and innovation emanating from the creativity of just a few smart people.  The idea that many small ideas from the shop floor were going to make any difference at all was (and still is) summarily dismissed.  This is indeed unfortunate because even though its success has been documented countless times over the last three decades, only tacit learning can teach managers the real power of kaizen.

To parody an old proverb:

“You can lead the manager to the shop floor,” as they say, “but you can’t make him see.”

And sometimes you can’t even lead him to the shop floor!  The word “small” is really a misnomer, perhaps a bad translation from Japanese, because while the cost of the small changes may be small, the effect may be huge!  I have witnessed many small changes that were worth ten dollars and many that were worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.  As one former skeptic reported to me recently, “I can only assume that the dramatic improvements in quality are attributable to the small changes we made, and these summed up to a gain I would not have imagined.”   Tacit learning.  Another manager in the same conversation stated “We’ve made more significant headway in the last six weeks than in the previous six years!  Tacit learning for her:  “Many small changes for the better” add up to improvement much faster than we think.

Still many managers remain immune to this evidence.  The big brain theorists have morphed kaizen into events.  Not something done by “Everybody, Everyday”, but some thing done apart from the work, largely organized and directed by people other than those who do the work.  I first witnessed this practice in 1989 as a visitor in another New England manufacturer at a week long “kaizen event” billed as “5 days and one night”.  I was invited as a participant even though I did not work at the company and knew nothing about its factory. Coming from a situation where improvements were mostly grassroots generated and implemented, I found the whole situation stunning.   Employees from the work center where I was participating were tangentially involved at best.  Most stood sullenly on the sidelines.  One employee confided to me that they would change everything back after we left.  He referred to the process as the BOHICA method, an acronym that I will not expand (but you can guess.)  In this situation employees had become objects rather agents of change, a situation all too comfortable for many managers.  For these employees “kaizen” meant “messes created by managers that produced fabricated gains.”   Implicit in their understanding of kaizen was that management had no regard for employee initiative or creativity, that all of the ideas were coming from the big brains.

Subsequent to that experience I’ve heard the term kaizen used as a euphemism for job cutting and outsourcing, and as a task force method to “get workers to work harder.”  Several years ago I had to even sign a contract before I started to work with a company stating that I would never use the word kaizen in the presence of employees, lest they become enraged; so distasteful was their previous experience.  Less damaging, but still confusing, is a growing tendency to break kaizen into “minor” and major”, a token gesture most often to allow a certain number of non-mandated improvements and differentiate them from the “real” events.  Others shoehorn every capital investment into the kaizen court.  Some might be kaizen, some innovation; but even a warehouse expansion has qualified with one company as a “major kaizen.”  (I thought that was waste of storage.)   Companies who can afford it are establishing mezzanine departments to foster kaizen, but too often only those in the new department are focused on improvement.  Management and supervision distance themselves, and the whole process becomes an extracurricular activity.   In these environments no real change is occurring to the organization.  It’s status quo, business as usual.

A respected friend in the TPS business remarked to me recently that maybe the term “kaizen” is itself becoming a point of confusion, that maybe it has been carved up too many times and now, like “continuous improvement”, is devoid of meaning or emotive power; this, the word that Mr. Imai explained thirty years ago is the “Key to Japan’s Competitive Success.”  Sadly, my friend may be right; maybe we need a new name.  We’re good at renaming Toyota words after all.  If such a move could enlighten us and direct our thinking to Mr. Imai’s definition, I’d support it.  But for me, it’s still, and will always be, kaizen:  many small (but organization transforming) improvements that come from the common sense and experience of the people who do the work.  “Everybody, Everyday”.

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Thanks to all of my readers for subscribing, reading and occasionally commenting on my blog. The very best wishes to you all for 2017.

O. L. D.

Last weekend, as I forked over $70 for a “live” Christmas tree, I had a flashback to a very different experience when I was still a kid.  My family had a tradition of waiting until Christmas Eve to trim our tree.  Late in the afternoon of the big night, I’d accompany my Dad to the local holiday tree sale to pick out our balsam fir.  Alas, by the time we shopped, the yard was totally picked over.  It never dawned on me then that my Dad’s timing was tactical.  He negotiated a price that was pretty close to free for a haggard specimen that, unbeknownst to the seller, was soon to be transformed.  My job was to walk around the now empty lot and pick up scrap branches that had been cut from earlier sales.  What commenced shortly thereafter was nothing short of a Christmas miracle.  We performed tree surgery, not in this case to remove branches, but to add them.   Using clippers and a hand drill, the rework process took about ten minutes.  I held the patient in place while my Dad cut and transplanted limbs in holes predrilled to fill gaps in the greenery.  He took special care to match the size and pitch with surrounding branches, yielding a particularly authentic appearance.   When the cosmetic restoration was complete, the tree was delivered inside to await the trimming ritual.  Complete with lights and tinsel and ornaments, this work of art was virtually indistinguishable from its high-priced cousins.

Now, today it seems laughable that anyone would go to these lengths to save money on a Christmas tree.  In fact, my family wasn’t poor.  We could have afforded a fully intact tree.  For my Dad however, a product of the Great Depression, the values of frugality and resourcefulness were ingrained.  He was preeminently generous to everyone around him, but never spent a penny when it was not absolutely necessary.   Long before Charlie Brown’s tree and long before I learned about the Toyota Production System, I witnessed a basic Lean principle in practice:  “Don’t spend money, use your creativity first.”

Arguably, with the recent purchase of our pricey 2016 tree, I’ve not done right by that principle.  So, as penance and also as a tribute to my Dad, I’ve recreated the magical tree rework process from sixty years ago and videoed it for your holiday viewing enjoyment.   Yesterday, I visited a local Christmas tree stand and bargained my way down to $7.00 for a  tree.   Granted, the tree needed a little rework, but I also picked up scrap branches. Here is a short video of that process:  Reworking a Charlie Brown Tree.   Enjoy!

Paraphrasing Rudyard Kipling’s poem, Trees,

“Blogs are writ by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.”

My Dad, however, came pretty damned close!   From me and everyone at GBMP, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanza or whatever you choose to celebrate.

O.L.D

P.S. Give yourself the gift of education in 2017. GBMP is offering twenty two Shingo Institute Courses – between January and November from New Hampshire to South Carolina and lots of places in between. Find a course near you and join us in 2017.

I hope you find the list useful and discover a few of your future favorite books. Happy Holidays!

O.L.D.

No doubt, this process like any other can be improved, but I wasn’t watching it for that reason.  What struck me was that seeing the “process as a whole” is quite different than seeing the “whole process.”

For example, if we walk a typical functionally organized floor we see the process as a sequence of work, material and information flow – the “value stream” –  but we lose the spontaneity of relationships as we view each component separately at a different point in time.    Division of labor along functional lines really does create a division in understanding between those functions.  Functional organization may develop focused skills and capabilities, but it also blinds workers to system efficiency opportunities.

Thinking back to my own factory, for example, welders welded, machinists machined, assemblers assembled, inspectors inspected and packers packed.

In the words of a skilled welder who worked in my factory, “Hey Bruce.  You know I’ve been working here for almost twenty years, but I’ve never actually seen where my parts go once they’re completed.”

While each function attempted internal improvements, none had a line of sight up or down stream to inform them about the whole.  Value Stream Mapping at least created a means to share process understanding, but only on a batch basis, delaying problem solving and improvement.  Subtle moment-to-moment opportunities were invisible to workers isolated by function.

On the Johnson’s line, however, sharing was instantaneous as every employee could see the process as a whole.   Perhaps we would refer to the caramel corn line as continuous flow or a pull system or some other Lean tool referring to the flow of material, but more important was the breadth of information available instantly to everyone in the process.  Imagine how much more effective our problem solving could be if every function had continuous visibility to every other function in the process.   I think we call this teamwork.

While the rest of the Ocean City New Jersey boardwalk hibernates for the winter, Johnson’s ramps up to ship its delicious products around the world.   My stash of eighteen buckets of caramel corn is boxed and awaiting holiday deliveries.   Best wishes to you and your team for whichever holiday you celebrate.

O.L.D.

BTW: If you are looking for the perfect Lean gift, I highly recommend a subscription to Leanflix: On-demand streaming of GBMP’s entire library of award-winning Lean training videos plus additional educational and inspirational content for Lean Practitioners including podcasts of more than two years of my monthly “Tea Time with The Toast Dude” webinars, 6 years of Northeast Lean Conference keynote presentations and much more, with three ways to buy/subscribe.  I highly recommend viewing them with a bucket of Johnson’s world-famous Caramel Corn : )