Tag Archives: Hajime Ohba

WYSIWYG

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Computer geeks over the age over 40 will recall that once upon a time, the images of text and graphics that appeared on computer screens bore little relation to the product outputted from the printer. There was a bit of an art involved using special ‘markup tags’ to control the printing font and format.  Prior to 1980 we could not see our work in advance of printing.  Then in the early ‘80’s came a miraculous software advance referred to as WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get.   This may seem trivial today, as everything we see on computer screens, including moving 3-D simulation models, is a faithful and accurate representation of the actual.   But for those struggling on early PC’s or Macs, the ability to see was a breakthrough.

The idea of “seeing what you get” pre-dates the emergence of IT.  The revolution began with Flip Wilson’s Geraldine in the 1960’s and entered our musical vernacular in 1970’s as a laidback Motown classic.    The message in both instances was “Here I am with no guile or pretense and no hidden agenda.”  What you see is what you get.    So by 1980, when the phrase was usurped by techno geeks, we understood what it meant.   [BTW: For a bit of nostalgia, take a couple minutes to click on the links above.]

In the 1990’s with the popularization of the Toyota Production System we were once again Learning to See, except this time, the process ran in reverse as we struggled to correlate our mental image of the workplace with Gemba – the “real place.”  Using a new method referred to a Value Stream Mapping, we toured our factories and offices, our OR’s and ED’s intending to understand and separate the real value provided to the customer from a sea of waste.   With post-its and pencils in hand we walked the process flow to “see” the real place.

But what did we see?  The traditional supposition, that the workplace was dirty, unimaginative, unmotivated, cut-and-dry often tainted our observation.  A general manager of a large consumer goods manufacturer commented to me in a loud voice as we stood on a load dock watching a worker unload a truck, “Wow you can tell we’re paying him by the hour.  How much time is he going to take to unload this truck?”  The worker shot around and glared at the manager, responding, “Last week I got my butt reamed for making a mistake on the count.  The way shipments arrive here it’s a miracle anyone ever gets the count right!  So now, I’m taking my time and triple-checking everything, BOSS.”

It seems that what this general manager saw was exactly what he got.   Respect is a two-way street, something with which many managers still have difficulty.   Thirty years (and 14 million copies) after Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson advised managers to “catch someone doing something right,”  this continues to be a challenging concept.   The VSM symbols describe material and information, but they don’t provide a WYSIWG of the people who do the work.

How about in your workplace?  Are employees your most valuable resource or a necessary evil?  Geraldine was right:  What you see is what you get.    Share some thoughts.

O.L.D.

Signs

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Do you remember a post-hippie era song called Signs?  The song’s refrain came to mind recently during a workplace walkthrough:

“Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind
Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?”

Both office and factory were heavily invested in workplace organization, striving to create a workplace free of confusion.  Employees told me, when asked, that they never had to search for anything – ever.  The manager who walked with me proudly spoke of their team effort to create order from chaos by sorting out unneeded items – information, material and equipment.  “The employees in each department were the change agents,” he said.  “They decided first what should go and then where to place the things they need.”

To be sure, there were clearly marked, set locations for almost everything. Floors, bench tops, shelving, cabinets and bookcases all were taped and addressed. But one thing bothered me.  Lots of signs.  Little reminders were posted everywhere (“do this, don’t do that”) intended to usher the flow of production and information sans delays or defects:

  • A decal on an assembly fixture warned:  Caution. Do not operate without material.  An operator explained to me that fixture would be damaged if run empty. “Has that ever happened? I asked.  “Why do you think the sign is there?” she replied.
  • Above a packing bench in the shipping department a cute sign inquired, Got manuals? to remind packers to include operating instructions with products.
  • In the test lab, a sign over a test bath read, Turn on at shift start, off at shift end.  “Do you ever forget?” I asked.  “Yes, occasionally,” was the reply.
  • In a production control department, signs on computers read, Please log off at night.
  • Signs for the order desk were everywhere, some formal and some just hand-written notes.  “How do you keep track of all of these exceptions and special conditions?” I asked the order-entry person.  “I just know,” replied the employee, “and many of these notes are out of date anyway.”

“Sign, sign, everywhere a sign ,” I began humming to myself.

“Why all of the signs?” I asked my host as I pointed a couple do-this-don’t-do that’s.  “They’re work standards,” he replied.

“But aren’t most of these signs just warning employees about problems that haven’t been fixed?” I asked.

My host looked at me incredulously and said, “It’s just part of their jobs.”

“Is it really?” I persisted.  “Are these things they were hired to do, or are these signs just mental clutter?”

What do you think?  How many signs can you find in your department?  Chime in.

O.L.D.

Cost Subtraction

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Last week, a drive-by a 99 Cent Store (see photo) reminded me of my first real job in an industrial marketing department.  In the 1970’s, one function of this department was to set prices, a task simplified in the early going by the market’s acceptance of whatever surcharges we added each year.   In some years prices were increased twice!  My job was to gather cost data on each product family, and multiply costs times our expected profit to determine a new price.

The basic formula was:          Price = Cost + Profit

There were no reviews of costs – didn’t need to be.  Nobody blinked when prices went up.   In fact, each price increase created an opportunity for distributors to stock up just before the increase at a lower price: more sales for us, at least in the short term, and more profit for distributors.  This was sales’ perpetual motion machine.

Sometime in the early ‘80’s the winds changed; customers in our market no longer accepted price increases.  On the contrary, they began asking for price decreases.  Our first instinct was to object.  We were in denial for about five years thereafter, our salespeople forced to haggle with customers just to avoid an increase.  In the process, we lost customers.   A principle referred to by the creators of TPS as “cost subtraction“ had put the customer in the driver’s seat:

Profit = Price – Cost

The phrase “new normal” is used to describe a recent sea change in the world economy.   “Cost subtraction” marked a less obvious sea change in the 1980’s, but one that arguably has contributed significantly to our latter day new normal.   Simply put, the cost subtraction formula assumed that the customer determined the price and that profit therefore required effective cost management.  Organizations that had previously been free to pass along cost increases, now had to find ways to reduce costs.

How did US industry respond?  With outsourcing, off-shoring and leveraging of suppliers.  We purchased larger lots from suppliers to avert their price increases, and then rewarded buyers for “cost avoidance”.  We downsized our workforces and reduced employee benefits.  A company president quipped, “we’ll charge employees for parking spaces if we have to.”  Companies large enough to afford it sought to automate their way out of the dilemma, replacing employees with machines.  These superficial improvements created paper savings while weakening productive strength and emptying cash reserves.  Russ Scaffede, a former executive at General Motors, joked as a Shingo Conference speaker, “All our plants made money, only the corporation was losing its shirt.”

My little company did not have the financial resources to exercise many of these superficial options, which fortuitously led us to the discovery of TPS.   We learned the story behind the cost subtraction principle: that the lion’s share of cost reduction could be found through many small improvements.

Forty years after the cost subtraction sea change, many organizations continue to deny it.  Some are “lucky” companies, still able to price their products or services to cover wastes; others revert to superficial improvements to eke out a profit.  Where does your company stand?  Are you a lucky company?   What are your cost subtraction strategies?  Share a story with us.

O.L.D.

5S First?

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Some time ago, while speaking at a conference in the land down under, I was taken to task by a participant for suggesting, “5S is usually the first improvement” in Lean implementation.   I had carelessly adopted this posture because, as a consultant I had found that workplace organization was usually the most palatable way to demonstrate improvement on the shop floor.  (I’m not sure of this, but I think the sixth S – safety — was added at U.S. manufacturers in the 1980’s because improved safety was the only thing management and labor adversaries could agree on.)

“That may or may not be so,” my friendly heckler responded, “but just because 5S is easy, should that make it first?”

“What do you suggest as a first step to improvement?” I asked.

“Kanban,” he replied.  “A pull system is the thread that holds everything else together.”

“Pull systems are a tough place to begin,” I offered.  “Maybe it would better for a company to “get its feet wet on something less conceptually challenging.”

“No,” he shot back, “the pull system is where my company started and it’s worked very well, end-to-end.”

I hesitated, then gave a consultant’s non-committal b.s. response: “Where you start may be less critical than just getting started.  No two companies are alike,” a non-answer that ended the question, but was not satisfying either to the questioner or me.

For the next half hour, I pondered his challenge.  I recalled a quote from Hajime Ohba, then General Manager of Toyota Supplier Support Center (TSSC), about doing the right thing:

“True North is the vision of the ideal.  Always do what we should do, not what we can do.”

This seemed to contradict my “do the easy things first” theory.

TSSC had worked with my plant in the mid-90’s to help us better understand “true TPS.”  Mr. Ohba had said to me after his first visit to our site, (I’m paraphrasing) “You have made some nice individual improvements, but you will not receive the full benefit of TPS until you can put them all together.”  He asked us to identify a product line where an improvement was needed.   I picked a small assembly line that had delivery problems, one where we were not betting the farm, and we went to work.  There was no mention of 5S, or kanban, nor any lean ‘tool’ with which we were marginally familiar.

Instead there were many questions:

“Why is that assembly fixture over there?”

“How do you know what to build first?”

“Where do the finished products go next?”

“How long has this machine been down?”

One question frequently led to another.  Sometimes the answers were obvious, and other times we had no answer.

“Why don’t you have the answer?” was the next friendly but persistent question.

They wanted us to watch and think.  It was hard, and I guess it was what we should do.

———-

Back in the land down under, about a half hour later, I caught up to my Aussie friend to apologize.  “I think I headed in the wrong direction today with my comment about 5S.  Consultants like me tend to break TPS into little pieces because it’s easier for us to describe.  Implementing TPS isn’t about 5S or kanban or any other tool.  Sometimes we just ask the wrong questions.“

“Well I still hold that kanban is first,” he replied.

“No worries,” I said.

O.L.D.

Standards Part 1

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I attended a gathering of healthcare providers recently to participate in a site review and listen to some nice TPS success stories.  During a Q&A session at the conclusion of the review this question came from one of the participants:

“How can we get the docs to accept standardization?”

I smiled at the question, not only because doctors as a group are notorious individualists, but also because they are not so different from any other occupation in their view of standards.   The word “standard” makes people cringe because to many it implies loss of personal choice:

  • Several years ago a program manager at a local defense contractor offered this view of standardization:  “I never liked the idea of sameness. I want my engineers to be creative.”  I snapped back at her with some frustration, “When you’re driving home tonight on the right side of the road, would you consider that “sameness?”
  • On factory floors, where work has been measured (although too infrequently) for a long time, standards have a bad name as well.  A shopfloor employee related to me, “They (the industrial engineer) ‘made up’ a standard when the product was released and it’s been wrong from the start.  Then last year to meet a cost reduction target, they just arbitrarily reduced the labor figure.”
  • My friend Gifford Brown, a former site manager at Ford relates the outcome of a set-up reduction exercise at his plant conducted by Shigeo Shingo (a story for another post) back in the mid-80’s.  In just half a day, working with Dr. Shingo, Ford operators, tool makers and set-up folks changed over a 300 ton press in just 10 minutes, down from a previous standard of four hours.  When Gifford saw this, he ran up to congratulate the Ford team:

“Did you imagine this time-savings was possible?,’ he asked one operator.

“Actually, much of what Dr. Shingo showed us we already had discussed,” the operator replied.

“Then why didn’t you make these changes before now?” Gifford queried.

The answer?

“We don’t set the standards, boss.  You do.”

So there are more than a few reasons for skepticism surrounding standards.  American industry’s track record of time-setting without careful observation and without significant involvement of workers (be they doctors, engineers or machine operators)  has created an almost universal cynicism.  The road to standardization has many obstacles, but the start of the journey is often the hardest because of a legacy system that suggests standards will be forced upon us and will stifle originality.

On the other hand, coming from a musical family long before I got into industry, I understood “standards” to be the great songs that every musician should learn.  They define a level of excellence to which we should all aspire.  I have never heard a blues player complain about sameness because only three or four chords are a standard for blues.  In fact, those standards define the genre and are the basis for creativity.  We establish boundaries within a norm and sometimes stretch that norm to create new standards.  Just as in TPS, the standards for musicians are the baseline for creativity.  Standardization means “reading from the same sheet of music.”

So I responded to the question posed to me at the hospital gathering:

“Doctors worry that forced conformity will impact their ability to care for their patients.  Docs don’t want to be the objects of change.  So, make them the change agents by first finding a few small things on which they already agree.  Dr. Shingo referred to this as “Socrates Secret.”  Then pick some small differences and normalize those.   Every doc will have some preferred practice on which he or she is intractable – don’t go there, leave those objections alone for now.  The first objective is to create a more positive view of standardization itself. “

 In the words of Dr. Sami Bahri, 

“Do whatever is possible, and the impossible starts seeming more possible. “ 

O.L.D.

BTW:  The deadline is fast approaching to take advantage of the 25% discount for the 2012 Northeast Shingo Conference.  Register today!