Archive for July, 2010

Dan Jones: Creating a Kaizen Culture By Daniel T Jones, Co-author of 'Lean Thinking' and 'The Machine That Changed the World' - Last updated: Monday, July 26, 2010

In my experience a Kaizen culture is set by example, is enabled using a common method and language and is nurtured by recognising achievements, telling stories and building upon the resulting learning. In 1993 I was fortunate to be involved in creating what is still one of the best examples of a Kaizen culture at the Unipart Group of companies in the UK, who make and distribute automotive components. From the beginning the initiative has been led by the Chief Executive, who teaches regularly in the company university, reviews progress on the shop floor of their many operations and attends ...

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Art Smalley: What type of Kaizen? By Art Smalley, author of Creating Level Pull and co-author of A3 Thinking - Last updated: Sunday, July 25, 2010

Kevin Meyer and his organization were kind enough to invite me to his company a couple of years ago to introduce the basic concepts of the TWI Job Methods (JM) program. JM is a very easy way to introduce some of the fundamental concepts of improvement to most any organization. JM falls short of capturing the entirety of Kaizen or the Toyota Production System (TPS) and that was never its intent. However as I like to tell people it is an easy first step for a lot of places looking to improve and develop internal resources. The exact date of the ...

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Michael Ballé: Pull creates an architecture for kaizen 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 ...

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Jim Huntzinger: Right-Designing: Freeing up Kaizen Capacity By Jim Huntzinger, Author of 'Lean Cost Management: Accounting for Lean by Establishing Flow' - Last updated: Wednesday, July 21, 2010

My response is not necessarily kaizen in complete context, but I will address a certain aspect which, unfortunately, consumes a significant amount of kaizen effort. I am assuming several assumptions – clear objectives already existing or are being processed – customer requirements in volume, features, and functions.  And that the process, as articulated by Mike Rother in Kata (current condition and target condition – reference Mike’s slideshare referenced in his post) is what is driving the overarching work of the manufacturing engineers I address below. While TWI is a great structure to develop kaizen and a daily and normal function structure, it ...

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Mike Rother: The Evolution of Lean, Part Two By Mike Rother, Author of Toyota Kata and co-author of Learning to See - Last updated: Monday, July 19, 2010

The question asked: What are the upsides/downsides of using TWI "Job Methods" as our approach for kaizen? Just last week I got an email and Powerpoint presentation from a small plant that introduced its first assembly cell. Most of us know the excitement that comes with first efforts to eliminate waste. Not only do the processes operate much better than before, but our eyes also become opened to the potential! At the beginning of a lean effort, eliminating waste works and is exciting. But after a while -- four or five years into a lean journey seems about right -- those of ...

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Jeff Liker: There are no particular tools that are better than others to get to continuous improvement. By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Sunday, July 18, 2010

In my new book in progress we talk of three levels of lean (inspired by David Meier).  The outer level of the sphere is proliferation of tools by the experts which by itself is a "lean facade."  This level is not sustainable.  If the experts teach managers the tools and they embrace and apply them they can get to the next level of "management as lean implementers."    This level is sustainable, but typically managers tend to be sporadic in making improvements "when they have time."  The best companies then advance to "continuous improvement by the work group."  The final step ...

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Kevin Meyer: Any upsides/downsides to relying on JM/TWI process deconstruction as kaizen? Yes it works… but I can already see the limitation with non-documented processes By Kevin Meyer, President of Specialty Silicone Fabricators and Factory Strategie Group, co-author of 'Evolving Excellence: Thoughts on Lean Enterprise Leadership' - Last updated: Sunday, July 18, 2010

Mike Rother: The Evolution of Lean, Part One By Mike Rother, Author of Toyota Kata and co-author of Learning to See - Last updated: Tuesday, July 13, 2010

The question asked: What would be our best success stories to illustrate what lean is all about? You’re asking that question at a moment when the lean community itself is trying to answer it. The thinking about lean, and the definition of it, are evolving. Also, trying to answer the question by looking at success stories may be too surface-level. To gain a better understanding of what Toyota has been doing to generate its successes, some of us have been looking more closely at the intentions behind Toyota’s visible practices and concepts. Learning to ask a different question A comment you often hear when ...

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Art Smalley: Lean Success Stories – The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly By Art Smalley, author of Creating Level Pull and co-author of A3 Thinking - Last updated: Monday, July 12, 2010

I appreciate the reality that people need to see success stories about Lean or any topic for that matter in order to further their interest with the topic and move onto action. We are all somewhat risk averse by nature I suspect due to the way we evolved. For example you go over there and eat the purple berry on the bush and if you survive then perhaps I'll give it a try! Implementing Lean or any improvement methodology has a bit of that conservative bias to overcome. If you are interested in some Lean success stores then I recommend reading ...

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Steve Spear: What to learn from Toyota for those who already haven’t … Improvement and Innovation needed now more than ever By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit' - Last updated: Monday, July 12, 2010

BACKGROUND: WHY LOOK AT TOYOTA?  BECAUSE IT CAME FROM BEHIND TO DOMINATE ITS COMPETITION! Understanding the tremendous commercial success of Toyota, rising from an uncompetitive auto maker in the 1950s and 1960s, to the most dominant in the world by 2000s, and understanding the vast benefit that has come to some that have diligently sought to emulate Toyota--sharp reductions in time and cost, with vast improvements in quality and responsiveness, is reason for others who have not yet to look more closely. Toyota's success, after all, is rooted in its ability to generate and sustain broad based, high speed, relentless improvement and ...

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Michael Ballé: Waste elimination (in dire straights) as a key to competence increase (and saving the day) 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, ...

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Jeff Liker: Can we positively influence Short-term transactional thinking? By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System - Last updated: Sunday, July 11, 2010

Let's consider a company that we are working with that has already decided it needs lean to improve quality, productivity, and timeliness of delivery to the customer.  It happens to be a major retailer and they brought in an outside CEO to “professionalize” the business. The outside CEO is a financial guy who grew another similar business by several times.  He claimed to use lean, but it quickly became apparent that it was what we might call "fake lean" focused only on the tools.  What we mean by that is that he had a bunch of black belts certified ...

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Jean Cunningham: Flow works for marketing as well 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 ...

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Steve Spear: Lean is about making clear and explicit the best known approaches to achieving success By Steven Spear, Author of 'The High-Velocity Edge' and 'Chasing the Rabbit' - Last updated: Sunday, July 11, 2010

Sales and marketing may seem a far cry from the production shop floors on which 'lean' was first observed.  Nevertheless, that type of work lends itself to exactly the same disciplines of rigorous discovery that allowed Toyota to come from beyond, over take its rivals, and run away from the field. There is a mistaken notion that the essence of 'lean,' as an approximation of the Toyota Production System, is the stabilization of processes, heretofore chaotic, as an endpoint in and of itself. Not so when practiced by the masters.  'Stabilization,' or more generally 'specification' is both a means of making clear ...

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Mike Bosworth: Lean Success Stories By Mike Bosworth, Author of 'Solution Selling' and 'Customer Centric Selling' - Last updated: Sunday, July 11, 2010