The P-D Ratio was Shingo’s comparison of the time required to Produce a product to the time given by the customer to Deliver the product. A large P-D ratio, for example, was indicative of a producer who took much longer to produce a product than desired by the customer. In 1985, this was the condition in my business. We attempted to match the customer’s short “D” time by stockpiling inventory.   Our push production method, as Dr. Shingo called it, was “speculative”, that is to say we built to forecast. Unfortunately our forecasts were wrong much of the time and there was an abundance of Muda in our production system. The atmosphere in the plant was one of frenetic expediting, particularly at month and quarter end. I don’t recall using the word “culture” at the time, but in today’s terms we did not yet have a culture of improvement. Shortly after I took a job as materials manager, a question posed to me by a buyer from one of our largest customers, a compressor manufacturer, summed up our P-D ratio:

“Welcome to your new job, Mr. Hamilton.   Can you explain to me why your company takes sixteen weeks to fill an order for a product the size of my fist, while my company can make a product as big as a house and deliver it in a week?”

That mortifying question may very well have been the trigger for my first study of TPS. A read of Robert Hall’s Zero Inventories (1982) led via a footnote to Shigeo Shingo’s Study of the Toyota Production System (1981) and this is where the epiphanies began. The book was such a bad translation from the Japanese that it has become a collector’s item. (It was retranslated in 1989 to a more readable but less authentic form.) Using Shingo’s ideas, we began to shift our production from “speculative” to “authorized” – Mr. Shingo’s words to describe the shift from push production to pull. And little by little, the sixteen weeks reduced to ten and then five and eventually, over a period of years, to two weeks for our customer’s product. With starts and stops and lot of TPS learning opportunities, by 1990 we’d reduced the P-D ratio from 16:1 to 2:1, not exactly just-in-time, but improved enough to be recognized in 1990 by the Shingo Prize for Manufacturing Excellence.

By the fall of that year we were asked to tell our TPS story at the annual AME conference in Boston.   A team of seven persons from my company each told a piece of the story: what we’d learned technically and how we worked together to overcome challenges and develop an improvement culture. After our presentation, each team member sat at a different lunch table, anxious to hear from other participants. As I seated myself for lunch, the gentleman to my right was already talking about some impressive results: shorter lead-times, inventory reductions, lower costs. Not to be outdone, someone across the table talked about same day delivery.   Another told a story of enormous cost reductions. “These are really impressive results,” I thought to myself.

I broke my silence by announcing that while my company had worked very hard to improve, our results were not nearly so compelling as those described by others at the table. Hoping to capitalize on the experience of others at my table, I then asked, “What companies are you with?”  To my complete surprise, everyone else at my table was a consultant. One was pushing Theory of Constraints, another was into TPM and a third was an MRP consultant. The rest were Lean consultants, a relatively new idea at that time. All had business cards in hand. Suddenly their improvement claims seemed a bit less credible. In 1985, there had been almost nothing written about TPS and the only Lean (TPS) consultants were from Japan. It was hard to find companies that had even heard of TPS. But, by the 1990 AME conference, Lean consultants were apparently multiplying like lab rats.   The group at my lunch table outnumbered the doers by 9 to 1, a ratio that was later borne out more generally by other of my team members. “Lean is good business for consultants,” I skeptically thought to myself, “but what about their customers.”

Revisiting Shingo and his ideas over the last few weeks at conferences and training, I’ve concocted a whimsical P-D ratio for us to keep an eye on: The ratio of Pundits to Doers. (Yes, I am now a Pundit too.)   Today’s pundits have titles superior to consultant: Lean Expert, Lean Practice Expert, Sensei, Master Sensei, Black Belt, Guru and so on. Have a laugh –  We’re even on Weird Al’s radar!   My unscientific application of this Pundit-Doer ratio leads me to believe that while there are many more Doers now than in 1990 (the good news), the Pundit-Doer ratio is getting larger (the bad news.)  There are more of us, both internal and external, than there are doers.

During a recent discussion with my board of directors, the question was posed: “What do we want GBMP to look like in ten years?” One astute board member commented, “Perhaps we should ask ‘What do we want our customers to look like in ten years?’”

Where is your company on Shingo’s P-D scale?   Where do you want to be in ten years? Please share a thought.

O.L.D.

Hey! Speaking of Shingo, there’s still time to register for our next Shingo Institute Discover Excellence Course, June 9-10 at Smith-Midland in Midland, Virginia. You can register here.

Also, this week is the last call for the early bird registration discount for our 11th Annual Northeast L.E.A.N. Conference on September 29-30, 2015 in Springfield MA – a great event to meet, hear from and share with other “doers” just like you.  Read more and register here.

Finally, I hope you’ll join me for my next “Tea Time with The Toast Dude” webinar on June 2. It’s FREE! I’ll be discussing Overcoming Organization Obstacles to Lean. Get the scoop here.

I was working with a manager team at a food processing plant shortly before Christmas, observing a packing line set up especially to pack hams for the holiday.   Imagine a rapidly moving serpentine conveyor transporting hams from a chiller to a rotating shrink wrap platen and thence to boxing and palletizing operations.   Operators stood at key points, to inspect, load and unload. Because the shape of each ham was unique, proper positioning and repositioning of product was also important to prevent jams and spills.

Observation was something new for this manager team. Not that they weren’t on the floor regularly, they just didn’t spend much time focused on the process. This day we were essentially standing in Ohno’s Circle, watching the work of young lady, call her Martina, stationed at the sealing platen.   Hams arrived every twenty seconds on a conveyor positioned next to the platen, where Martina would quickly do a visual inspection and then load and activate the shrink wrapper. The packing line was paused briefly, and with the help of her bilingual supervisor we inquired of Martina if she experienced any difficulty in her work.   As none of our group could speak Spanish, we could only observe facial expressions and body language.   Her supervisor spoke to her in Spanish and then turned to us with a smile on his face: “I asked if she has any problems and she responded that ‘she really likes working here.’ I think she’s a little nervous.” Martina was looking at our team with a big smile also.

Moment of truth: The top manager in our group responded directly to Martina in English. “We know you’re a very good worker and we’re happy to have you working for us. Is there anything that we can do to help you in your job?”   Her supervisor translated to her, apparently adding a few personal words of encouragement. Martina provided a longer, animated response, demonstrating how she loaded the hams from the conveyor to the platen. We watched as she as she suddenly made a long stretch to a spot where the conveyor took a right angle turn.   Her motion was reminiscent of a first baseman stretching to shag an errant throw.   She looked at us again with a smile. Pointing to the area of the “stretch”, her supervisor translated: “Martina says, that occasionally, a ham will fall off the conveyor at this turn, but that she is always watching and is able to catch it before it hits the floor.” He paused, and then smiled again. “And, she wants you to know that it’s not a big problem, and she really likes working here.”

The packing line was restarted, and we observed this time with a better understanding, watching for the occasional falling ham. There were a couple near misses, but no opportunities for Martina to demonstrate her first base stretch. So it is with occasional problems; only the front line sees them.

Before we moved on, from the top manager came a sincere thank you to Martina for her help, and a direction to engineering to add a higher barrier to the conveyor at the point where hams might tumble. For both management and employees it was a holiday miracle, an epiphany: Each had become visible to the other.   As Goodyear’s Billy Taylor put it at our Northeast Lean Conference “if you make somebody visible you make them valuable.” This is culture change, one small miracle at a time. But, in the words of Bill Murray’s Ebenezer Scrooge, managers have to “want to make it happen every day.”   It’s management’s part of “everybody everyday.”

My New Year’s challenge to every manager: Show your personal passion for continuous improvement every day. Make the miracle happen in your organization. Make your employees and yourself visible.

Best Wishes to All for an Incredible 2015.

O.L.D.

P.S. GBMP wants to help you get 2015 off to a great start with lean training events to benefit your whole team – including Job Instruction Training, Lean for the Office, Six Sigma Green Belt, Total Productive Maintenance, Value Stream Mapping for Healthcare, benchmarking plant tours, free webinars, Shingo Institute workshops and much much more!  Visit www.gbmp.org and click on Events to see the entire list.

When the panel discussion concluded, I retreated to further reflection: “Maybe,” I thought, “there never was a social part of Lean, only a set of techniques to be implemented and layered over a traditional organizational structure that valued only a few “thinkers” and treated everyone else as expendable ‘doers.” Maybe this was why the focus shifted in the early ’90s from Total Employee Involvement to Some Employee Involvement: Blitz Kaizen teams and black belts and subject matter experts and value stream leaders, none of which existed in the pre-Lean era. Maybe the Total part was just too hard or too foreign, so we retreated to our caste system of thinkers and doers and glommed onto the technical part of TPS. Technical problems, after all, are always so much easier to solve than people problems.

In the late 80’s, Productivity Press (now CRC Press –  then the leader in bringing TPS thinking to America) published an excellent “TEI Newsletter”, a resource that provided tremendous insight about creating the environment that we are now referring to as ‘people powered excellence.’ I have all the old issues, but there is no reference to the newsletter on the Internet; and no reference to TEI in the popular Lean Lexicon or any other glossary I researched. The acronym and what it stands for have apparently been expunged from our Lean consciousness.   For those of you who’d like to revisit this prehistoric concept I recommend reading The Idea Book, authored by the Japan Human Relations Association in 1998. The book (once published by CRC Press) is now out of print, but available on Amazon for $0.01.

Digging farther into the pre-Lean period is another seminal text by William Ouchi, entitled Theory Z, a seminal dissertation penned in 1982 on creating a management system that stimulates employee engagement and loyalty.   This book came to mind during my keynote panel discussion. I wondered how many of the 1500 persons in the room had ever heard of it. Theory Z is also now out of print and available on Amazon for $0.01. Ouchi’s book is largely reflective of W. Edwards Deming’s thinking, and is still very important reading.

My post-panel musings caused me to venture to the AME exhibitors area for a visit to the CRC Press booth to peruse their latest offerings. Nearly all of the display was comprised of technical how-to books: 5S, A3, 3P, kaizen events, policy deployment, value streaming for this and that, and a host of Lean-for… texts (Lean for sales, Lean for healthcare, Lean for accounting, etc.) I asked the salesperson, “Do you still publish Ohno’s and Shingo’s books? I don’t see them here.”   He replied, “Yes we do, but we only bring new books to the conference.” (Shingo’s 1988 book, Non-Stock Production, is happily still in print, if not on the shelves.) As he answered, I recalled a warning from Shigeo Shingo that we should “not confuse means with ends,” for example, don’t think of 5S as an end in itself, but as a means to a higher purpose. All I saw for sale however was means type texts from latter day disciples.   Apparently the works from the likes of Shingo and Ohno and Ouchi have become more like the Dead Sea scrolls: they still exist, but almost nobody reads them any more. Call them the Dead See Scrolls to disambiguate.

O.L.D.

News Flash:

Don’t miss this important Shingo Institute training event, Discover Excellence.
Date: January 8-9, 2014
Place: Haworth Inc., Holland, Michigan
Instructor: Me
For more information, visit www.gbmp.org and click on Events

BTW: This is the fourth anniversary of Old Lean Dude, a blog I started partly to promote management engagement in continuous improvement and partly as a means to blow off steam. Posting about twice per month since 2010 has, in fact, been helpful to my personal sense of well being, but I hope there has also been some value to others. Thanks to everyone who has responded to my posts. I really do appreciate your comments and observations.   Keep ‘em coming.  – Bruce

The “ideas of many” built from cardboard and brown paper.

Two weeks ago I had the honor of attending the ribbon cutting for the West Suburban Cancer Center in Needham, Massachusetts.   This innovative center was conceptualized in the spring and summer of 2012 by a diverse, dedicated cross-functional team of approximately 30 docs, nurses, technicians, physicists, architects, facilities engineers and administrators using a technical method referred to as Production Preparation Process, or “3P”.   While the structured, rapid brainstorming and prototyping methods used to design the new center design were important to the success of this large project, far more crucial were two principles that guided everyone’s thinking:

1. A single-minded Patient First principle focused everyone’s thinking on the best possible experience and outcome for the patient and patient’s family rather than just maximizing local efficiencies of the providers.   Patient focus groups provided an essential perspective that kept the team grounded. Using tabletop models to simulate the patient flow, in one instance reducing patient moves from twenty-two to five, the team was guided by the philosophical position that the needs of the customer must come first.

2. The project’s mantra, “The ideas of many are better than the experience of one,” challenged team members to collaborate in a way that encouraged everyone’s ideas.   With encouragement of BIDMC management and support from facilities and architects, the new center was actually designed by the people who work in the space. In the words of one team member, “We ended up with a design that no one could have foreseen when we started the project.”

As I entered the new cancer center and surgical pavilion, I recalled the original cardboard and brown paper structures that the team had built in order to test and improve their design. At the entrance, I was greeted by one of the physicians who participated on the 3P effort.   She remarked excitedly, “This new design really works!” That excitement was shared by other team members who attended the grand opening, and, I must admit, by me also. The technical achievement was outstanding, but would never have been possible without the focus on people.

There is so much more to this success story than I can relate in a post. I hope you’ll join me on October 1 and 2 at the MassMutual Center in Springfield, Massachusetts to hear more from this team and others who are ‘putting people first’. Still time to register and recharge your Lean efforts.

O.L.D.

Leading change is marathon not a sprint. Sometimes you just have to pace yourself, give your mind and body a break and do something frivolous and fun to maintain your balance.

In 1968, racial tensions were especially high in rural Florida, and neither my fellow VISTA workers nor I were feeling the love in the segregated communities we were supporting. We were mostly a bunch of passionate, idealistic kids, referred to by many of the locals as “outside agitators.”   For some of our volunteers, the tense, resistant atmosphere triggered a response that I call ‘passion overload.’ These volunteers responded to rejection and resistance by redoubling their efforts, a tactic that sometimes worked but ultimately left them without balance in their lives.   After several months of non-stop advocacy to disinterested and sometimes hostile communities, these overly zealous VISTA volunteers began to crash. Several quit the program while others just became paralyzed by overload and stopped trying. It’s not that they cared more deeply about creating change; they were simply unable to lighten up occasionally.

I escaped those fates, mainly because I had been serendipitously paired with a VISTA partner a few years older than I who was practiced at keeping things in perspective. At the end of almost every day, David T would find an amusing distraction to put the seriousness of the moment in perspective. Bear in mind this was the pre-internet era, not even television in the rural area where we worked. We found amusement in practical jokes and makeshift competitions like tossing rotten tangelos from the grove near our shack into the lake. Somehow that frivolous diversion was a counter balance to a very bad day on the job. It took a little practice for me to join in, but after a while I got the idea.  One night, while we were competing to see who could loft a tangelo the farthest, Dave commented about a fellow VISTA worker who had just quit out of frustration: “We can’t become addicted to our work or we’ll become ineffective.”

Fifteen years after VISTA, I found myself in another outside agitator role, this time in a manufacturing company that was resisting Lean. Managers liked the status quo, and workers distrusted the new kid in town. It reminded me of Florida. In particular, I thought about David T’s lesson. Be passionate, but don’t become addicted. To be effective, change leaders must take their work very seriously, but sometimes they also need to lighten up and have some frivolous fun. In that spirit, I have collaborated with my associates at GBMP to produce another short parody video dedicated to all you serious change leaders who need to lighten up a bit. We hope it adds a little balance to you work life: Click here if you feel like you’re becoming Addicted to Lean.

O.L.D.

By the way…

There’s still time to register for tomorrow’s free “Tea Time with the Toast Dude” webinar when I’ll discuss The Technical Side of Going to See. Starts at 3:00 pm EST and ends promptly at 3:45. Hope to “see” you there. Sign up here.

Also, for those of you who don’t already know (and for those who do, but haven’t finalized their plans), GBMP organizes an annual conference for lean practitioners from all business sectors, including healthcare. 2014 marks out 10th year celebrating the region’s lean community as we get together to learn, share, network and benchmark. We hope you are making plans to attend and getting a team together to take advantage of four exceptional keynotes, 5 concurrent tracks, more than 45 breakout sessions, a virtual plant tour, the Community of Lean Lounge and so much more. Get all of the details here.

Now, back to the present. A conversation last week with another Lean friend reminded me of the 2010 post, but this time in the context of ‘the corner office’ rather than the front line (or checkout line in the case of my earlier post.)

My friend, Al, a retired divisional controller of a large multi-national manufacturer related a story about his former firm’s CEO: “It used to drive me crazy how decisions were made,” Al said. “We ran a profitable operation here in Massachusetts, but I was constantly pressured to identify work that could be shipped to low wage regions.“

The CEO’s behavior was driven by the corporation’s MBO’s. In particular, the CEO’s bonus was tied in part to increasing the percentage of ‘foreign content’ for all divisions.

“Our labor was less than 5% of our cost,” Al said. “I tried to show our CEO that relocating production for my division’s products would increase total costs far beyond any perceived part cost savings, but he had blinders on. All he saw was the mindless objective to increase foreign content. Ultimately, we were forced to move production. And when problems with quality and delivery arose as a result, our CEO wasn’t accountable. That was someone else’s MBO!”

——-

Several years ago, I heard a similar story from the factory manager of a well-known highly automated, hosiery producer: “Our entire production line was automated save for one manual step at the end of the process to sew several stitches in the toe of the stockings. Corporate decided that the three stitches should be done in China. So we were forced to load nearly completed products into containers for shipment through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific Ocean for the last stitching operation. Once stitched, the stockings were shipped back to the US for packaging and sale.” The factory manager shook his head in frustration as he told the story. “Where are these folks getting these ideas?” he said.

So, how do these two stories relate to my 2010 post? No oversight. No direct observation, in this case, by the persons who are charged with the corporation’s fiduciary responsibility – its board of directors.   The CEOs in the examples above are no different than the cashier in my 2010 post. They were following damaging directives from absentee leadership.   The difference in these cases however is that when CEOs receive nonsensical objectives the potential for damage to customers and employees is very much greater.

Are your corporate measures working for you or do they reward you for crazy behavior? Please share a story.

O.L.D

BTW: My next FREE webinar, “Tea Time with the Toast Dude”, entitled “The Technical Side of Going to See” will offer some observation frameworks for managers to facilitate their understanding of floor conditions when they “go to the Gemba.” Hope you can make it on Tuesday, June 17th from 3:00 -3:45 p.m. EST. (Read more and pre-register here.)

Also, a couple important reminders:

• The early bird discount deadline for our October 1-2 Northeast Lean Conference at the Mass Mutual Centerin Springfield, Massachusetts is fast approaching. Register by May 31 and receive a $100 discount.
• GBMP will be teaching the Shingo Institute Discover Excellence Course at Alpha Analytical in Westborough, Massachusetts on June 12-13. There are still a few slots open.

I experienced this complexity first in 1971 while working in the marketing department of that company. My job in marketing was to present these innumerable specifications and styles in a manner that made ordering products easy for our customers. I had no idea, however, how many parts were needed to produce even a single product, let alone the hundreds of millions of permutations.

Component parts and raw materials, bills of material and production routings compounded that complexity in ways I did not even try to understand while I worked in marketing. But in 1977, when my job changed from marketing to IT, the picture changed. Every product I realized had parts, and many parts were parents to other parts. The relationships defined not only the products I’d sold while in marketing, but also the parts that comprised them and the location and sequence of production. The actual production floor at that time was a half-mile away from the computer room in another building so my understanding of those additional permutations and combinations was limited to what I saw in data volumes, flow charts and reports.

In 1984, after a moderately unsuccessful attempt to implement MRP, my company fired the materials manager. Somebody had to be accountable.   And this is when I backed into a job I would never have dreamt of taking in 1971. I was offered the materials manager position.   Armed with combined experience in marketing and IT, including an understanding of the mechanics of MRP, I headed to work nearer to the factory. Once more the permutations grew, this time jumping from the printed page and data file to actual stocking locations for raw material, components, assemblies and products. Notwithstanding MRP’s elegant computer simulations, it seemed we always had too much material that we didn’t need and not enough of what we did need. All of the work that I and others had done to implement MRP seemed be without effect. My customer – production — was dissatisfied with material availability, and their customer was unhappy with our delivery performance.

About eighteen months after modest success in cleaning up the then speculative push production system work, I moved from managing materials to managing production as well; now in the factory and one step closer to the customer. The complexity problem I now saw was at a whole new level.   All of the process and system problems that I could gloss over in my earlier jobs now became painfully obvious. That pain was the birth of TPS in our plant.

Over the next two years, we experimented with the concepts of TPS, in particular Kanban, which cut through complex permutations by focusing on many 1:1 relationships between consumer and provider, enabling us to attack our biggest problem: too much of one thing and not enough of something else. The momentous change in thinking was not without some short-term calamities (stories for other posts), but by 1990 our turnaround in customer service and productivity was sufficiently noteworthy to gain recognition by the Shingo Prize. I might have fooled myself at the time into thinking that we had mastered the permutations problem.

In 1994 however we undertook a project to move from small batch to 1×1 production for our most complex product line; one that represented a third of our revenues. My experience from marketing informed me that there were perhaps 25,000 distinct end items and a thousand times as many permutations. Pondering how we would manage this complexity one product at a time felt to me like solving a Rubik’s Cube. But using the wondrous technology of computer programming, I was able to set up a Monte Carlo analysis to determine the probability of any particular set of permutations.   There was a 90% chance that there would be 2500 different base assembly permutations in any one year!   This is what I learned from experience in marketing, IT and materials management. I took my discovery to Jose L., the team leader for the pilot line that would move to one-piece flow.

“Jose,” I said, “I’ve looked at our sales history and analyzed our bills of material and assembly routings, and I’m stumped at how to layout the line for 2500 different combinations.

Jose looked at me for a moment and, trying to be respectful, replied to me, “There are only 16.”

“Sixteen what?” I asked.

“Sixteen combinations,” he replied with certainty. “We can build everything from sixteen base assemblies.”

And he showed me how.

O.L.D.

BTW: I’ll be teaching the Shingo Institute DISCOVER Excellence Course, May 5 and 6, at the 26th Annual Shingo Institute International Conference in Sandusky, Ohio. Hope to see you there

And: My next FREE webinar, “Tea Time with the Toast Dude”, entitled “Going to See” will offer some do’s and don’t’s for managers who are wondering what to do when they “go to the Gemba.” Hope you can make it on Tuesday, May 20th from 3:00 -3:45 p.m EST. (Read more and pre-register here.)

There persists a notion today in some quarters that persons with college degrees, in particular technical degrees, have cornered the market on smarts – and value.  When, in 1959, Peter Drucker predicted the rise of “knowledge work” and the concurrent demise of manual work, I think he might have inadvertently led American manufacturing down a knowledge worker rat hole, one where manual work, or in fact any kind of work involving production, became burdensome to our great culture.  Drucker’s prophecy may have been self-fulfilling, as American manufacturers raced to find ways to replace manual labor with automation.

In the 1990’s for example, General Motors spent $90 billion (yes billion) on robots, conveyors and computers in a failed attempt to supplant manual work. I wonder how they calculated the ROI.

Around this same time, manufacturer Mazda sarcastically referred to the canonization of the American knowledge worker as the “big brain approach.”  Mazda favored the collaborative thinking of many ‘small’ brains.  (At GBMP we like to refer to this as ‘Everybody, Everyday.’)

US manufacturers have spent the last twenty-five years off-shoring their burdensome manual work.  In a perversion of Drucker’s prediction, American manufacturers have largely ignored the “making” part of business, preferring to ‘innovate and incubate.’  This is their definition of knowledge work. Products can be born in the US, but they quickly migrate to other countries and grow up there to be improved by so-called manual workers.  The alluring promise of this kind of knowledge work fits well in to high tech marketing and sales plans like this one, but it obscures the holistic nature of manufacturing.

Lest I be labeled a reactionary technology hater, I’ll assert that I’m actually a bit of geek, a former IT manager.  I’m awed at the potential for information and production automation.  But I have a big problem with the implied opposite to knowledge work.  This was a recurrent theme at last September’s Production in an Innovation Economy (PIE) Conference PIE at MIT.  Speaking at the conference, Harvard Professor of Management Practice in Administration Willy Shih reflected on his work in the 1980’s with a Korean manufacturer:

“Well, I was in Asia where a high executive at a company that I was working with said, OK. You guys in the US, you do the R&D. We’ll do the commercialization. We’ll do the manufacturing. We’ll make all the money.”

Dr. Shih commented to me after his presentation “Thirty years later, American manufacturers still don’t understand how much innovation is occurring in production.  Overseas manufacturers are laughing at us and still making all the money on our good ideas.”

In my world, all work is knowledge work.   How about in yours?  Are you following General Motors’ innovation concept or Mazda’s?   Send me a comment.

O.L.D. 

BTW – There’s still plenty of time to sign up for my free webinar on Tuesday, February 11, from 3:00-3:45 p.m. EST.  The topic is “Tips for Manager Gemba Walks”.  Hope you can join me.  Click here to register. 


You can learn about all of GBMP’s public lean training events here  – from benchmarking Plant Tours to Lean Accounting Workshops, Six Sigma Green Belt Certificate programs and more. Hope to see you soon!

At GBMP’s recent Northeast Shingo Prize Conference in Hyannis Massachusetts, CCM displayed adaptations of Lean as they have applied it to Biomedical Research  in their Community of Lean Lounge booth.   Conference attendees were drawn in by the wacky display of dangerous animals and props.   But during these times of sharing, CCM staff realized that a majority of the representatives from all different industries shared their frustrations in  getting employees involved with a) active Problem Solving and b) employee engagement. It appeared that everyone – regardless of their work – is faced with the very same challenges when developing a culture of Continuous Improvement. CCM is attempting to address this challenge in novel ways and here is the story that they shared in the Community of Lean Lounge:

“Pulling the Cord”

During a Kaizen event that was focused on improving our Gemba Walks, the Team Leads and front-line technicians recognized that many members of our staff were not making the connections of how 5S and problem-solving are integrated into everyday work.  Many still see Lean as “another thing to do”; a “thing” that requires dedicated time for them to find, think, test and implement solutions to problems. The Kaizen Team announced “we are pulling the cord and we need more help to coach our staff to connect the dots”.

“Making it real”

To address this problem, leadership set out to create a realistic life-or-death simulation that would clearly illustrate how 5S, standard work and Problem Solving are part of everyday work.  From this setback was born the “5S Wetlabs”, a portable, 90-minute training session that was designed to reinforce the importance of Standard Work, workplace organization and stakeholder involvement.  During the intense and dramatic simulation, a critical step goes haywire activating an emergency response to save a life.  The “First Responders” encounter a dysfunctional and chaotic situation making the life-saving process totally ineffective, resulting in the tragic death of the victim.  The Responders fail miserably to perform effectively in their role; they articulate feelings of disappointment, of being demoralized, embarrassed and frustrated by their inability to save the victim.

“Shoveling against the tide… or Making Excuses”

The First Responders are asked to list “what went wrong”, which inevitably becomes a shopping list for 5S-related improvements. The Responders are then asked “who killed the victim” and to write an “Obituary” for the victim that will be presented to the family members at the wake.  The Obituary is often comically uncomfortable, forcing the responders to identify “who” and “what” failed, and their contribution to the victim’s death.  The Obituary exercise illustrates how we tend to make excuses, even when we have influence on a process. A short problem-solving session follows which then leads to Responders identifying dozens of improvements that will make the situation fool-proof; especially since every participant now realizes that “they” are the stakeholder.  They are personally relying on the quality and effectiveness of the system for their own survival.  The simulation is then immediately changed and improved, and the students are  challenged to create a system that will save their own lives when the process goes wrong.  5S principals are now demonstrated to the students by transforming a mundane exercise into a realistic life-or-death situation that makes the mistakes painfully personal.

Lean Learning Goes Both Ways

The theme of CCM’s 2013 Lean Lounge booth was “if we can do it, anybody can”.  The 5S Wetlabs display was an instant hit, as it attracted many trainers and managers who were interested in an unconventional approach to teaching the benefits of workplace organization and problem-solving in a short period of time. One such company was a major aerospace manufacturer that had recently experienced system failures that relied on multiple roles. The Continuous Improvement Director instantly saw the value in life-or-death scenario training for engineers and maintenance technicians who develop and maintain machines and processes that can result in death from catastrophic failure.   Other companies that visited the CCM booth expressed interest in the novel approach to personalized training concepts, and many remarked that perhaps the time has come when industry can now learn from healthcare.   While healthcare has been catching up for years, problems encountered in the dynamic healthcare setting can provide useful lessons for all industries when faced with change that threatens the life or death of an organization.  The learning pendulum has shifted, and healthcare may now be the very industry to illuminate the way to rapid improvements in a threatening market or environment.  Can lessons learned from healthcare help your organization?

Notes from O.L.D. :

1)    I think the answer to above question is:  Yes, definitely!  Lean learning is anything but industry specific.  Thanks again to Gerry and Julianne for their story.

2)    It’s not too early to register for our October 1-2, 2014 conference in Springfield, MA. – and maybe sign up for your own  Lean Lounge table. Click here for details.

3)    It’s almost too late to register for my Sign up here for “Tea Time with Toast Dude” – but not quite!  The topic will be “Killer Measures”, traditional measures that can derail your lean implementation.  Hope you can join me on Tuesday, December 10 (tomorrow!) from 3:00 – 3:40 p.m. EST.  Read more & register.

Twenty-three years ago, after my factory had received some press recognition as a Shingo Prize (now the Shingo Institute) recipient, requests for plant tours began to roll in.   In 1990 there weren’t yet many tour sites available, so the visits were plentiful; we referred to ourselves jokingly as Tours R Us.  In truth, we were early on on our improvement curve, but still a little farther along than many factories.  We accepted the tours because it gave our employees a chance to learn by teaching.

One memorable request came from the author of a then popular book on leadership.  He expressed a desire to listen in on a team meeting, a perfect opportunity to showcase our employees and to learn from an industry expert.   A cross-functional team that was meeting on the day of his visit provided a good sandbox for our visiting expert.  I don’t recall the exact problem the team was trying to solve, but I clearly remember that the meeting was unusually contentious.  We promoted openness in our team discussions, so this situation was not unusual, just on the high end of normal.

The tenor of the meeting’s discussion rose as frustrated participants sparred over questioned data and missed project assignments.   I glanced occasionally to our visitor whose visage began to show signs of concern.  Our Punch-and-Judy approach was perhaps less civilized than he had anticipated. While meeting protocols were followed – agenda, timekeeper, and minutes – it soon occurred to me that we might have needed a sergeant-at-arms as well.   I recalled my mother’s words, and resolved to say something positive to keep the meeting on track and let our visitor know that we could indeed work together as team.  I addressed the group, “You know, this team has accomplished a great deal in the last month, let’s not lose sight of that.”

Eddie V., an outspoken team member responded directly, “Well, I don’t think we’ve made hardly any progress, and pretending we have is not going to help the situation.”

Suddenly I felt like proverbial manager defending the status quo.  The room was silent for a moment. Our visitor glanced again to me wondering how I would respond.  “Yes, you’re right in one sense, Eddie,” I said.  “We should be working harder to solve the problem. You think the glass is half empty and I think it’s half full.  Perhaps we’d all be better served if we focus on the half-empty viewpoint.”

The team then continued its discussion and soon the meeting ended.  The encounter felt dysfunctional to me, and one side of me was privately embarrassed that we could not put on a positive face for our visitor.  But Eddie’s retort stuck with me as a reminder that the answer to the rhetorical question “Is the glass half empty or half full?” is:

“Yes!”   The glass that is half full is also still half empty. Management optimism untempered by a little bit of reality may be construed as complacency.

O.L.D.

BTW: Another “Tea Time with the Toast Dude Webinar” is fast approaching.  Please join me for a free 40-minute webinar next Tuesday, November 12 at 3:00 p.m. EST.  The topic: “Why So Few Ideas” will focus on gaining better participation in your idea system.  Click here to register on-line.