The Remedy — Bringing Lean Out of the Factory to Transform the Entire Organization by Pascal Dennis

What’s The Remedy About?
The Remedy is a business novel about a major auto company in free fall. Taylor Motors is bankrupt and subsisting on government handouts. To survive they need to prove they can manage in a different way.
So SVP Rachel Armstrong enlists Tom Papas, the hero of Andy & Me (Productivity Press 2005), and asks him to transform not just an auto factory — but an entire platform, a new environmental car Taylor Motors is counting on. So Tom enlists the help of his mentor, Andy Saito, reclusive ex-Toyota executive. The Remedy is about their adventures.

Why Did You Set the Book Outside the Factory?
Because that’s where the opportunity lies — in Sales, Marketing, Design, Engineering, Planning, Human Resources, Distribution and so on. Waste is waste — and much harder to see, let alone fix, upstream and downstream of the factory. The obstacles to Lean thinking are even greater — as are the potential benefits.

Why a Novel?
I like stories and story-telling is fundamental element of Lean thinking. Strategy is story-telling, as is A3 Thinking, and problem solving in general. If you can condense a complex problem or strategy to an interesting one-page story, you probably understand it.

Why All the Doodles?
The protagonist uses doodles to help him understand what he’s learning. I love doodles. If you can draw out a complex story or idea, then maybe you understand it. At the best Lean companies you see doodles everywhere.

For more on The Remedy please see our YouTube video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEyEaHr330I

with the information flow.  When we physically transform a process by moving

things around we are acting on the material flow. When we transform the

information presented to help make decisions we are dealing with IT whether it

is in the form of an empty space on the floor, a card, or something from a

computer. The concept of value stream mapping is to design the material and

information flow intentionally based on defined principles to achieve a clear business purpose.  One principle isthat one piece flow is the ideal.  Another is that the value of people is in doing kaizen which requires information at the right time, right place, and right amount to facilitate kaizen.  When we think of things this way then it is natural to want to shape your IT to fit your principles and process.  In other words if the IT department comes to us with their new whiz-bank linear optimization scheduling package that will tell us exactly where and when to move every thing we could ask whether it: A) is moving us further toward one piece flow and B) it is supporting people doing kaizen.  If the answer is no

to either question we could reject it as anti-lean or we could ask if we can

use it more effectively.  We might do this by asking why it fails to support

people or one-piece flow and whether we can change something to enable this

effectively.

At one office furniture maker they made hundreds of thousands of

end items and had a policy of build to ship complete orders of all the pieces of

furniture someone wanted.  The old system was MRP building individual pieces

in batches and trying to mix and match to find what the customer wanted.  They

developed with a third party an optimization package that would look at all

the orders coming in, look at their capacity, look at the parts they had in

the warehouse, and build a schedule to optimize throughput and minimize the

lead time for whole orders.  If sales committed to a builder that all their

furniture would be at a certain site on a certain day that could be specified

in the software as a constraint.  They organized around work cells by product

type and each cell had a computer screen.  They worked hard to customize the

screen design so it was very easy to see the current order being worked on and

what was up next.  Parts coming from the warehouse were pulled one order in

advance and staged in sequence.  For the parts coming from the warehouse they

developed a parallel card-based system so you could visually see if the things

that were supposed to be there were in fact there and whether you would be

short on some parts.  If there was going to be a problem making a delivery on

time it would get flagged very quickly so the team could problem solve.  At

the front end the system told the sales person what they could promise based

on plant capacity and parts availability. The lean cells, visual kanban, and

optimization system worked wonderfully and this plant had almost perfect on

time delivery and very little inventory.  The point was to envision the

material and information flow and then develop the right IT system that

supported it in the right way.  Then continue to kaizen the IT system.

If one frames Lean that way, it seems hardly possible to practice it in any modern firm without getting across information technology questions: most of the work load nowadays is achieved using information systems (from emails to forms-filling); we use IT to report data, calculate indicators and analyze performance; alerts are often generated by sensors, sent through networks and treated by computers; amounts of data that can be used to analyze problems are stored in servers.

Nevertheless, the “IT pledge of productivity” is about standardizing activity through interface and global rules; global and instant deployment of improvements; light-fast circulation of information; availability of scores of data… And all this is very different from the “Lean pledge of productivity”.

Therefore, and empirical data support that, it seems that IT and Lean often ignore one another — Lean Sensei treat IT as a “Black Box”; IT Gurus look upon Lean as a soft management technique which they don’t have to bother with. Sometimes, IT and Lean collide and things get ugly. Rarely, Lean and IT people try and talk, as seems to be more and more the case with “Agile Development”. But this remains scarce and tentative.

How could this change ? Is there a “Lean Way” to look at one firm’s IT, and to make it change? What would be the first steps in such a journey?

1.     Jidoka is a socio-technical system.  Both the social and technical challenges are tough — but the former more so.

2.     Technical challenge:  How to translate customer requirements into meaningful upstream measures?  How to make the Good/No Good condition visible (see Art Smalley’s post)?  The following are part of the answer:

a.    Deep understanding of the customer — and the ability to translate that understanding into the meaningful quality specs

i.     In the consumer goods industry this might entail providing clear simple answers to questions like:

1.    What does “soft” mean? What does “dry” mean?

ii.     In the auto industry it means answering stuff like

1.    What does “good fit” mean?  What does “quiet” mean?

iii.     These end-of-pipe specs can then be translated by Design and Engineering into meaningful downstream specs — the critical Good/No Good goal posts upon which Jidoka depends

b.    Strategy Deployment — (a planning and execution system that supports getting the right things done)

i.     Defining True North, your strategic and philosophical objective,

ii.     Identifying the obstacles to achieving True North and developing sound strategies to eliminate them

iii.     Deploying — i.e. translating — these strategies level by level into meaningful metrics and activities

c.     Core understanding of Lean fundamentals throughout the organization

i.     Team members have learned 5 S, visual management, standardized work etc. — and know how to use them to make the Good/No Good visible.  Moreover, leaders know the fundamentals too — and encourage their use

d.    Supportive Human Resources policies

i.     We encourage kaizen by providing team member with the time and resources to develop pokayokes (e.g. training in small tool use, maintenance support when team members lack the skill to build a given jig etc.)

3.     Social/governance challenge: How to create a culture where people “wanna do it” (to use Mike Rother’s phrase)?

a.    Mental models underlying jidoka are understood and reinforced. For example,

i.     Problems are gold — treasure them

ii.     Problems are the “process talking to us”

iii.     Don’t ship junk!

iv.     Every day a little up!

v.     The leader’s job is to develop capability — by challenging existing thinking

vi.     And so on

b.    Leaders recognize and reinforce the core mental models every day — to help you “wanna do it”

i.     So “junk merchants” don’t get promoted

c.     Reward structures support Jidoka — to help you “wanna do it”

i.     Most obvious one: you don’t get reward for shipping junk!

d.    Consciousness that jidoka is as important outside the factory

i.     We deploy Lean thinking outside the factory

ii.     We tackle the socio-technical aspects of Jidoka in Marketing, Design, Engineering, Distribution, Purchasing, Scheduling and so on

1.    (That’s what my book, The Remedy, is about)


Meeting Jidoka’s technical and governance challenges entails understanding the nature of the challenge, developing a good Jidoka strategy, and taking the long view (3 – 5 years).

I’d second my colleagues who say that true Jidoka is rare.  It’s an Ideal — one we may never achieve, but we have to try.

In my consulting work, we find that comparatively few companies are ready to work on both the Technical and Social/Governance sides of Jidoka.

(We advise companies to spend the first few years of their Lean journey developing stability.)

Here are some prerequisites for successful jidoka:

a) We’ve been practicing Lean for years and have stability in the Four M’s — (manpower, methods, machinery and materials),
b) We understand our customer and are able to translate and deploy their needs to all levels of the organization,
c) We have a solid Strategy Deployment system which keeps us focused on what’s important, and
d) We have tough, talented leaders (at all levels)

We find companies that commit to Jidoka “partially succeed” — which means industry leadership and “money falling from the sky.”

I think Jeff Liker and Art Smalley wrote standout responses to the question.  Interestingly, both describe Jidoka as operating within an organizational culture of problem solving and getting to the root cause of an issue. Yesterday an acquaintance, Mr. Angelo Lyall of Kaizen Solutions Inc., put it this way:

“A leader can establish, communicate and train his associates to look through a particular pair of glasses so that their perception of problem solving and their mentality towards it is conditioned, thus generating a culture of capable problem solvers. But it is up to the leaders to establish this method by understanding it, believing in it and turning it into common practice, making it the “instinctive” response to problems. The obvious starting point is that the leader must deeply understand the method they wish to introduce.”

“Is it trainable, or is it a born gift? If a leader is not these things, how close can we build them to it? Toyota gives me hope because of the consistency of well established culture throughout different locations of the company. Toyota has leaders who are disciplined and it’s no fluke.”

All I would add to Angelo’s comments is that, yes!, our neural pathways are changeable, so the mindset and behavior is trainable in leaders for sure, as the Toyota case suggests. However, according to some brain-research colleagues, training practice alone will not necessarily create new ways of thinking and acting.

One of those brain researchers tells the story of an experiment, whereby subjects do a session of defined text messaging while in an fMRI scanner. When young subjects performed this task the researchers could see new neural areas activating during the repeated practicing. But when the researchers got older persons to practice the same task, in some cases no neural change was observed. Some of the older subjects disliked the texting activity, i.e., had a negative emotion associated with it, so despite the same amount of practicing with the same text messages, they weren’t developing new neural pathways.

The interpretation (in other studies too) is that new ways of thinking and acting develop from deliberate practicing, when combined with postive emotions. “You gotta wanna,” in other words.

Here’s a link to a little more on the subject:  Develop or change your organizational culture