Feb 8, 2011 | Change, Collaboration, Lean, Operations
Typically, we see things in an “either/or” context, you can do one thing at the expense of another, take your choice!. You can have line efficiency, or line flexibility, not both, advertising reach or frequency against a narrow target, but not both in the advertising budget, covering inventory requirements of A, or B by the end of the week , but not both. Happens very day.
This trade-off is programmed into us, but has the unintended consequence of “allowing” shallow problem analysis, facilitating our “jump” to a conclusion, rather than going through the hard work of real problem articulation, consideration of many possible solution options, and the testing and recalibration of hypotheses that should occur and re-iterate to identify where more data is needed, more ambiguity dissolved, and more responsibility taken.
When was the last time you acted too soon, and laid all your bets on a single obvious solution being the right one, only to find the siren song of “easy and obvious” led you astray?
I first came across this phenomena in the late 80’s (to my younger readers, some of us were working then) when my then employer was running “Ski” yoghurt down a new form/fill/seal machine designed for long runs to meet the demand in France, where the machinery was made. Run raspberry yoghurt for a few days, and it worked wonderfully, great in France, but for us it would have been a years stock, so we had to change flavors after little more than what would have been a changeover run in France, in many cases, less than an hour, with the attendant changeover times and start-up/finish-run inefficiencies, which the French engineers assured us were “absolutement” unavoidable.
Over a period of time, in a structured and progressive way, our fitters and operators who ran this piece of French engineering revenge on the rest of the world, using what would now be described as a PDCA continuous improvement cycle, made that machine do what its makers said was impossible, and we got both efficiency and flexibility out of it.
Either/or was not good enough, progressively, with many small steps, a great deal of experimentation, and recognition that the operators often had a better view of the intricacies than an engineer working off a plan, it evolved it into a “both/and” machine.
As a result, we made pots of money, because we had very low inventory levels, almost 100% order fulfillment , and an increasing market share because our customer service to big retailers was better than our opposition, and the consumers loved the product. Truly a lean virtuous circle!
Jan 31, 2011 | Branding, Lean, Operations
I’ve written a bit over time about the value of a unifying business purpose, the way it can unify and motivate the stakeholders of an enterprise, often beyond the boundaries of just employees.
It is all easy to say, but apparently very hard to do, as the number of mission statements, and articulation of business purpose that are around that are no more than a bunch of cliches written on a whiteboard in some strategy session simply because it is on the agenda of things to get through.
Tom Fishburne again nails the notion of business purpose as a cliché in this cartoon, one picture tells the story of most efforts.
The video embedded in the copy around the cartoon is worth a look, it articulates via the story of Raleigh jeans the value of a real purpose as opposed to a confected one. The video also addresses the notion of manufacturing being brought closer to the geographic source of the business purpose, another hobby horse, as I see the beginnings of supply chains contracting around local capabilities, rather than being outsourced for apparent short term cost benefits, without understanding the long term implications.
Jan 27, 2011 | Change, Collaboration, Customers, Lean, OE, Operations
Lean is at its core a management system, a holistic way of looking at the way an enterprise manages itself through a culture tuned to improvement, group and personal responsability, while six sigma is a quantitative process of managing in quality by getting it right first time.
Six sigma quality requires 99.997% perfect, or 3.4 defects/million. When you are manufacturing and supplying to customers even simple products, this is a very high bar indeed.
Motorola was the first US company to recognise and articulate the challenge in the face of Japanese competition in the 80’s, and they boomed, becoming the gold standard for western manufacturing, and inspiring thousands of others to lift their performance, from which we have all benefited. The article that first bought Motorola to public attention is this Fortune article from 1989, and it started a revolution.
Now the revolution appears to be over as Motorola is broken up into two separate listed companies after almost 2 decades of failing to build on the foundations built in the eighties. The leadership that followed those that built the foundation did not recognise the importance of the management systems necessary to support the continued improvement and Motorola fell back into the trap of conventional management accounting where inventory is an asset, cycle time and flow ignored as core metrics, functional management over-rides bottom up innovation, and all the other stuff that makes a lean environment work, got squeezed out.
As I work with clients on improvement initiatives that usually start with marketing and strategy, my patch, the necessity to improve operational processes to support those that engage with the customer is always a major driver, and the failure of Motorola after being the icon it was simply drives home the difficulty of not just improving current performance, but in the process, building the management and leadership processes that make the performance improvement process self sustaining.
Dec 20, 2010 | Demand chains, Leadership, Lean, OE, Operations, Strategy
The next time you hear an argument that justifies moving Australian manufacturing to a low cost country in order to compete, refer to this post on the Evolving Excellence blog describing the work practices in a Toyota’s Kyushu plant.
Labor is much more than a pair of hands doing a repetitive job, it is an opportunity to improve processes and identify and solve problems before they can impact on the customer, or even the next bay in the production line.
It may be hard to get to this point in Australia, but you will have no chance of making the changes necessary in a contract manufacturers plant in a “low cost” country. The accountants will generate their numbers, which can be pretty persuasive until you recognise that they do not account for the things that make a difference in the market, or count the wasted time, emotion and energy in their “productivity” calculations.
When an abundant country like Australia becomes a net importer of food, we have a real structural and strategic challenges in our demand chains that urgently need to be met, and the sooner we recognise the scale of it, and do a bit more than just mouth platitudes, the better.
Dec 19, 2010 | Lean, Management
Culture is about the hardest thing to change in any organisation, and I have seen many so called “culture change” initiatives fail at the first hurdle.
If culture really is, as Michael Porter put it many years ago “the way things are done around here” and I believe it is, then it follows that in order to change culture, you must change behavior. The only way to change behaviour in a manner that it becomes a sustainable change, is bit by bit, accompanied by good reasons for the individual to change behavior, encouragement and rewards for changing (acknowledgement, not money) and the stories of success.
Sounds like the manufacturing “continuous improvement” or Kaizen process applied to culture change, and that is exactly what it is.
Dec 15, 2010 | Lean, OE, Operations
Applying a band-aid to a problem, a measure to counter the impact of a problem is often an attractive short term option, particularly to a management measured in the traditional way on output, to whom stopping a line is heresy. Superficially it may hide/solve or move the problem, and it is easier in the short term than doing the hard yards to identify the source of the problem, and eliminating it.
However, counter-measures are rarely solutions, and they almost always come back to bite, usually at the worst time possible.
Years ago in a plant I was running, we suddenly had trouble with a carton erector at the end of a high speed line, and whilst we kept the thing running with numerous counter-measures of various types, the impact was obvious when you looked at the overall line productivity numbers.
We eventually took a hard look at the problem, formed a team of people who had a range of specific skills we thought relevant to the problem, and went through a process of what would be now called “root cause analysis” using the “5 why” tool , but then was a little less defined, at least to our early but evolving understanding of the principals of lean.
Below is a summary of our steps through the 5 why process :
Why did the case packer crash?
- The sensors failed to “find” the edges of the flat cartons
Why did the sensors fail to find the edges?
- The edges were a bit more “ragged” than was usual
Why were the edges “ragged”
– The suppliers knife used to cut the cartons became blunt with use, producing a ragged edge
Why was the supplier not replacing or sharpening the knife more often?
- We had changed suppliers to get a small cost reduction, and there was nothing in our specifications about the tolerances required by the sensors to pick the edge of the carton, state of the edges or knife maintenance.
Got to the answer in 4, but it took a while, and was a bit messy, but once we understood the root causes were the performance measures imposed on the Purchasing Manager, and the lack of cross functional communication and complete specifications, the solutions were blindingly obvious, and nothing like any of the counter measures that had been used to date.
