Author Archive
|
By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Tuesday, August 10, 2010 |
It's not 100% pure jidoka as Art would have it because the machine itself never detected the defect - the operator still did, but I recently saw an application of "pick-to-light" in a semi-automatic assembly process: this is an automated line where operators fit parts into the machines which then assembles the product on palets, to end up with a final product.
In this process, the plant had greatly progessed by simply noting defectives on the production analysis board, reacting rapidly and building up pareto charts to help them focus on the main problem. These actions allowed them to reduce considerably ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Thursday, August 5, 2010 |
I remember visiting Toyota’s French plant and standing in front of andon board: the call lights kept flashing on and off. An operator would call the team leader, who would sort the problem out within the imparted time before the fixed-point system would stop the line. “Management reactivity,” I said. “Nope,” they answered, “operator training.” “This isn’t used to get management to react faster to problems?” I insisted? “Operator training they repeated.” And so on.
It took me a while to understand I was projecting our usual management models on Toyota’s practice. In my worldview, management’s role was to be there ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Wednesday, July 21, 2010 |
I visited three factories this week: one that is thinking about starting with lean, two that have been doing kaizen for three to four years: there is clearly a world of difference between doing kaizen and not.
However, the two factories doing kaizen are interesting to compare. In both cases, senior management is driving the lean effort. In company A, the CEO himself is choosing problems and conducting the kaizen workshops. In company B, the group’s operations VP is driving the lean program. Both the CEO from company A and the ops VP from company B work with a sensei. Both ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Sunday, July 11, 2010 |
How about a 40% production cost reduction and a few million Euros cash flow improvement in less than a year? I’m not sure this is the best lean success story I’ve come across, but it’s the most recent. One plant of a large global group produces components for the tier one plants, and was losing its bid for the next generation product and facing shutdown because of a price difference of 20% with Low Cost Country competition. The group recognized that once you lose production, you lose development, and once that has happened, it’s really hard to bring work back, ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Saturday, June 19, 2010 |
Culture is largely about how you define success, and the acceptable means to obtain this success. Within lean programs, the issue of failure rarely comes up because we define success as learning, and failure and success are intimately linked in the process. What we do find, is that some people take to it quite naturally, while others adamantly refuse to learn, whatever the consequences.
I was recently on the shop floor in an automotive supplier plant with the operations manager, the plant manager and the area manager. They’d been working with lean for a number of years and had implemented several ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Friday, June 4, 2010 |
Rather than think about how to convince others to be lean, let’s try a different thought experiment: what does it take to be a lean leader? First, you need someone who has reached a senior position and is still committed to self-improvement and learning, and be willing to learn about the lean principles in depth. Secondly, this person must be ready to commit to going to the gemba at least twice a week. Thirdly, they must profoundly believe that if they train their people better and empower them to solve their own problems (and help them doing so), they can ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Tuesday, May 25, 2010 |
Peter Drucker once said: “since the purpose of business is to generate customers, only two functions do this: marketing and innovation.” This doesn’t seem to leave much place for lean, since lean starts with operational effectiveness – in effect the ‘industrial smile” with engineering at one end, sales & marketing at the other and production down in the middle (all problems, no glory). Nonetheless, the lean approach extends way beyond manufacturing and into engineering and contributes in specific and unique ways to innovation.
Innovation is a vast word, and we can take it to mean three different things. First is the ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Saturday, May 1, 2010 |
"Some people imagine that Toyota has put on a smart new set of clothes, the kanban system,” writes Shigeo Shingo more than twenty years ago, “so they go out and purchase the same outfit and try it on. They quickly discover they are much too fat to wear it! They must eliminate waste and make fundamental improvements in their production system before techniques like kanban can be of any help.”
Lean IS about having no back-up inventory (or at least not much) and no workaround system, but it’ about getting there, not deciding this arbitrarily. We’ve all seen companies who do ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 |
Thanks for asking the question – the difficulty in getting senior executives to focus on quality has to be my number one frustration with teaching lean (number two being people engagement). I have been puzzled for years how come all our Toyota teachers always started with quality, but somehow we never took that onboard as we did lead-time reduction or spot waste elimination. To my mind, the question is: why can’t we capture senior management’s interest on quality?
The first issue appears to be the mindset of price = volume. In Ohno’s terms, I’m increasingly convinced that this is a misconception. ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Sunday, April 4, 2010 |
A few years ago, at the first French Lean Summit, one participant would stand up at the end of every presentation and ask “what about six sigma? Couldn’t this be done better with six sigma?” – until José Ferro, President of the Lean Institute Brasil answered with his incomparable charm that he didn’t feel competent to answer, having never worked with six sigma, but that the Toyota veterans he knew absolutely hated six sigma for its anti-teamwork spirit. The idea of having a green belt or black belt present to senior management the work of an entire team, he explained, ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Friday, March 19, 2010 |
Would Toyota sacrifice safety for profits? I have no idea how to test such a hypothesis, but I find it highly unlikely. If culture is made visible by behavior, one of the first things that impressed me with Toyota engineers as I observed them working with suppliers, was their unique focus on people before machinery or parts. Certainly, their safety focus was much higher than anything we’d seen before, and they played a strong part in raising safety awareness across the board.
Indeed, one of the first points I personally raise in doing lean with any company is safety and ergonomics. ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Friday, March 12, 2010 |
FIRST LAW: without continuous process improvement, performance will deteriorate
Entropy affects organizations as it does engines: without constant attention, any process will deteriorate. In the past this has been accepted as a necessary evil compensated by occasional investment. Let the machine run down and when you can’t do anything with it anymore, buy a new one. Kaizen thinking has opened a new way: by improving continuously existing processes we can avoid the performance decline by keeping people’s attention focused on getting the equipment and its operations as close as nominal performance as possible. Overall, significant leaps in performance will still be ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Thursday, February 25, 2010 |
There are reasons leadership gets stuck in a dysfunctional cycle. To get out of a bad-outcome pattern, you first have to admit to yourself that you will need to learn to dig yourself out of the hole. Sadly, I’ve met many leaders of companies in similar situations, and they are convinced that it’s a matter of making the right decisions and then executing ruthlessly. Unfortunately, they are blind to the fact that it is their very decision-making process (and not the big bad world out there) that delivers unsatisfying results. The decision-making framework assumes that 1) we already know all ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Wednesday, February 10, 2010 |
The first answer is leadership, the second leadership and the third… leadership. But a very special and specific kind of leadership. Of all the quirks of the lean thinking the one that has always fascinated me is “problems first.” In practice this means we are not so interested in successes (the right results from the right process) because there is nothing to learn there – we are only interested in problems, failures, and things that don’t work as expected, because there is much to learn. “Problems first” also means that any employee can come up to a manager and discuss ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Sunday, January 31, 2010 |
There are two extreme ways of reading current Toyota events. From the lean perspective, Toyota is reacting to an exceedingly rare problem by stopping its sales, production and organizing its largest recall ever – regardless of the impact on its cherished quality reputation. Or in reading the press, the story is that the US government has finally forced Toyota to deal with a problem the company has been trying to fudge consistently and the accelerator issue is a red herring to divert attention and blame to a Canadian supplier from the real issue of sudden acceleration that Toyota has been ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Friday, January 15, 2010 |
Lean is not always that hard. Sure it's work: difficult to think that any method to perform better would not be. But more importantly, not all people take to it equally. A few find lean to be just work: challenging, but quite natural. Many will never get it. Peter Senge hits the nail right on the head as to the difficulties encountered with adopting the lean approach: 1) the learning component of lean is often underestimated, no matter how much the sensei insist upon it; 2) lean learning is based on acknowledging one’s mistakes and taking responsibility for the fact ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Thursday, January 7, 2010 |
Lean can certainly help in getting commitment on specific financial targets and seeing that these targets are met on schedule, but not in the way one thinks, which is again one of the interesting paradoxes of this new way of management.
First, the lean approach is definitely more precise about costs. For instance, I was recently looking at purchasing practices in the automotive industry. In a traditional group, purchasing assumed a ballpark figure of a few percents of the part cost for transportation and holding. In a company that has been doing lean for years, there are tables to calculate the ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Thursday, December 24, 2009 |
Lean management is teaching the right people to solve the right problems the right way. None of this is easy. Senior management must agree to teach, not tell; middle managers must agree to learn. This is not easy and win/win doesn’t necessarily mean nice/nice.
First off, it’s important to note that regardless how tough the managerial debate can become no serious lean practitioner has ever had a cross word for a frontline operator. In fact, many of the harshest discussions with middle-managers are about teaching respect for value-adding operators. The lean premise is that the people who add the value, who ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager
- Last updated: Monday, December 7, 2009 |
The fundamental insight is that in any cost structure there is a kernel of costs which are common to all competitors in terms of materials, components, labor, equipment, overhead etc. and then around these costs, an additional layer of costs which are due to the firm's operational method - waste, in the lean sense (costs you incur unnecessarily because of things we don't know how to do, poor planning decisions and wasteful activities this generates). "Lean" is lean in the sense that it tries to progressively take the unnecessary costs out of the system. Lean usually approaches cost management with ...
Continue reading this entry »
Question of the moment 
Sandrine Olivencia
Operae Partners