Joel Stanwood: Where to start with Hoshin Kanri in a not-yet-lean company?
A mid-sized manufacturing company is finalizing its strategic plan and believes that it is time to begin Hoshin Kanri. The company is not currently operating as a Lean Enterprise -- functional silos create significant amount of waste which results in poor product/service quality and high cost to serve. Additionally, different departments and regions of the company are "pulling in different directions." What advice, resources, and lessons learned can you provide to the managers of this company to successfully organize and deploy Hoshin?
Posted on April 27, 2013
Author Archive
|
By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster'
- Last updated: Monday, February 18, 2013 |
If you have read about Lantech in the Womack and Jones, Lean Thinking, then you know that our application of lean principles in the product development processes yielded huge reductions in lead time. And what better way to enhance margins than to have the first product to the market!
However, the recommendation I have as you launch LPD, is to include Finance/Accounting as an essential team member. There are two reasons: first, the finance person can help gather the financial information needed for target costing and evaluate cost impact of different design alternatives. ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster'
- Last updated: Sunday, January 27, 2013 |
What great input from the other bloggers on this question. And here is what I have learned:
If you ask 3 people how a metric is calculated and you get 3 answers, it isn't a good metric. The metric needs to be simple to understand and to measure, because it's purpose is to drive problem solving.
If all your metrics are outcome metrics (sales per person, inventory turns, shipments per hour) then add some process metrics. (how often was a sales order entered with incomplete information, number of times with unplanned downtime on the line, orders not entered within 2 ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster'
- Last updated: Saturday, January 5, 2013 |
The role of the KPO is to launch the lean understanding in the
organization by piloting and proving concepts and then later supporting
the pull from the rest of the leadership for support/mentoring. Ultimately
the KPO is the source of all future leaders in the organization as part of
the organizational development efforts.
I strongly support the idea of all the KPO team members sourced from
within the company and using external coaches to develop this team. Why?
Because the internal people know the business best and the lean concepts
are not difficult to learn from external coaches. Additionally, this
dramatically reduces the cost of the lean start-up ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster'
- Last updated: Monday, November 26, 2012 |
Lean failing to capture the imagination of the sales team…what a question! Our sales team loved the fast lead times. Our sales team loved the improved quality. Our sales team loved rapid pace of new product offerings. We loved to leverage the web for selling. But just as every other department outside of manufacturing, the improvement cycle was not grasped without some tangible structured introduction of the power of eliminating waste in the process. The sales team was certainly interested in activities that would make the sales job easier: getting marketing ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster'
- Last updated: Sunday, June 24, 2012 |
The first activity I would suggest is just walking a quote through until
the order is completed, invoiced and recorded. Talk to the people about
what their steps are. Ask what they spend their time doing. Ask how long
it takes to do the main purpose (the value add) of the task, and then how
long to do the task overall. Ask which parts of the task are done in the
IT system and what tasks are also done on spreadsheets. Ask how many
emails are created to do the job. I bet you will be worn out! And ready
to take action.
|
|
By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster'
- Last updated: Thursday, May 31, 2012 |
Standard work is the best way that is currently know to do the work. As
decided by the people who do the work. To get the best possible
standards, the people doing the work might have involved customers and
suppliers of their work to better understand what is needed. The
standard will evolve over time as the work content changes, the
understanding of waste improves, and the supplier and customer needs
change. The real question I think is "why have a standard?" And as the
question implies, the purpose of the standard is achieve repeatable
results irrespective of who does the work which improves downstream
quality and results. Additionally, ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster'
- Last updated: Saturday, March 3, 2012 |
A lean leader celebrates disclosing problems. A lean leader celebrates
other people's abilities to solve problems. A lean leader follows standard
work themselves and expect it from everyone in the team. A lean leader
creates time for improvement and starts every meeting with "what have you
improved since we last met?"
A traditional leader celebrates good news. A traditional leader promotes
fire fighters. A traditional leader believes people have to be managed. A
traditional leader evaluates how closely the plan was followed. A
traditional leader sets targets based on internal capability.
|
|
By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster'
- Last updated: Friday, May 27, 2011 |
Any change takes thought leaders and when others see great results they
will follow. Unfortunately we often do not know what to look for in
terms of results, or we are too far from the action to see results other
than in a report out or meeting notes.
Another risk is having the initial launching efforts so diffused that
there is activity all over, but no real point of focus to demonstrate
success.
The third risk is when the efforts for change are lead by a charismatic
leader who has some success and then is promoted or leaves the company,
and the standards for day to day improvement is ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster'
- Last updated: Monday, April 4, 2011 |
As CFO, one method I used to sustain lean thinking was to ask "what has
improved since our last meeting" during each of our monthly metric
meetings. Each person on the team was empowered to make change within
their jobs or with others. And we had a cadence....for instance we had an
arbitrary Takt of 1 per week. So as well as discussing what had changed,
one team member who was our "counter" would share "it is week 15, we have
18 improvements" or "it is week 32 and we have 28 improvements". When we
were starting to fall behind, we would spend more time that session
talking ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster'
- Last updated: Tuesday, January 4, 2011 |
Training is even MORE important in the lean organization! As we move work away from a function and toward a process, the lines currently drawn between employees begin to shift. For an example, in one company (as in many) the credit check for new employees was done within the accounting department. However, to reduce the time to meet customer needs who were ordering spare parts, the credit check process had many hand offs and waits leading to extended lead time. It turned out that most of the spare part orders were of low dollar value. So the credit checking access ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster'
- Last updated: Monday, November 22, 2010 |
Lean IT results from the application of lean principles to information systems and the IT function. Changes made to IT are directly related to changes made and learnings discovered while converting manufacturing to the Toyota Production System or “lean”. Via an evolutionary spiral that began in earnest in the early 90’s, the elimination of waste in all processes at the shop floor yielded huge improvements in lead time and quality. This was accomplished through the use of continuous improvement thinking by all employees who were trained in lean principles and adopted a lean attitude. Then, over the past decade, this ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster'
- Last updated: Wednesday, August 4, 2010 |
After introducing the concept of Jidoka, specifically the element of poke
yoke or mistake proofing, a kaizen team came up the following improvement:
At the hospital, when an employee goes on worker's compensation, their pay
is no longer via payroll system, but though worker's compensation insurance
provider. However, the supervisors, who did not have experience with this
very often (thank goodness!) where unclear about whether they should put the
employees' hours in the payroll system as sick time, or as unworked time.
Previously this problem was supposed to be avoided based on education; but
that wasn't working well. Education of rules rarely works when you have to
apply the ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster'
- Last updated: Sunday, July 11, 2010 |
What could be worse than developing a great marketing plan with a very
timely message, then spending all your time pushing the project through the
company,only to find the key dates slipping by and ultimately missing the
opportunity? To compensate, we plan the new marketing approaches months and
months in advance and the message is not integrated with other selling
activities. What if instead you could have a cross functional meeting of
all the key contributors to look at the existing process for delivering a
marketing program, eliminate steps in the process that are not adding value
to delivering the message, and reduce the time from concept to ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster'
- Last updated: Sunday, June 13, 2010 |
One way to support a "opportunity culture" is to stop rewarding
firefighting. Instead of performance reviews discussing specific objectives
and challenges overcome, target more on lack of crisis and even flow. I
remember discussing with a manager the performance review of a cell leader
that described him as not being "action oriented" and "lacking leadership
skills." I had actually managed this person before and it did not fit with
my experience. What we determined was the new manager was expecting to see
more heroics and had not really thought about the fact that the cell under
this leader's guidance had steadily improved all the key metrics and had
developed ...
Continue reading this entry »
|
|
By Jean Cunningham, Co-author of 'Real Numbers' and 'Easier, Simpler, Faster'
- Last updated: Thursday, June 3, 2010 |
Monday I was at a Memorial Day cook out (where else!). I met a guy who does systems consulting and was telling me how he was into process improvement. His firm had hired this “crazy” guy who was into lean. He went into the client and showed them how they could get all the work for a process (I think it was entering orders) done in one and half day for the entire country by creating a flow line. Each job had standard work and they paced the flow based on the printer sound which was ...
Continue reading this entry »
Sandrine Olivencia