One Half of One Pillar

Carl Wright has an article in last month's Reliable Plant magazine ostensibly titled The Correct Approach to Implementing Lean.  Unfortunately that "correct approach" will lead to failure.

His premise is valid: many companies jump into the lean world by haphazardly opening the lean toolbox.

Some companies have heard that lean manufacturing implementation will reduce their waste and costs, and decide to just start implementing. They often start using one tool at a time until the boss declares it’s done. Worse yet, some companies find a consultant that knows 5-S and little else. When the consultant leaves, the clean and organized business eventually realizes they are clean, organized and still full of waste.

Those companies generally give up within a few months out of frustration.  Even if they successfully implement a tool or two, they don't realize that lean generally creates an initial negative P&L effect before true savings kick in, which doesn't please an uneducated boss.  So Wright's solution is to take an analysis-based approach to the tools.

The correct approach to implementing lean manufacturing begins with an analysis of the businesses needs, opportunities and challenges. Once these opportunities are identified, the tools are used which will solve the issues. In other words, the problems identify the tools rather than the tools being forced into the organization.

Which is an improvement.  However companies that simply do that analysis-based approach and nothing more will still fail, or at a minimum fail to realize the majority of lean-related improvements.

Lean is about much more than tools, even the correct application of tools.  It is a passionate, deep, and pervasive desire to create value for the customer by reducing waste and continually improving.  Employees at truly lean companies are never satisfied. 

And that just completes one of the two primary pillars of lean.  The other is "respect for people," and is even less likely to be implemented.  That respect is understanding that people are more than just a set of hands and have value that goes beyond a simple labor rate.  With proper training, involvement, management support, and empowerment people can create improvements that dramatically transcend their cost.  This is what most companies don't understand when they close down and move an operation to a supposedly lower-cost area.  They do not realize what they just lost in terms of knowledge, creativity, commitment, and experience. 

Even companies that have a deep focus on creating customer value can fail, and it generally due to ignorance of the second pillar.  Just last week my good friend Norman Bodek asked me if I knew of any truly lean companies in North America.  I don't know.  I do know of companies that have an exceptional implementation of tools, some that have an exceptional lean management strategy, some that have a real understanding of customer value, and in rare cases some that exhibit true respect for people.  But all aspects?  Especially to the level of a Toyota?  None come to mind.  I bet there's a small handful out there, though.  Sad.  Or perhaps, what an opportunity! 

Mr. Wright, you're on the right track.  But you have a long, long ways to go.

Comments

[c]

I disagree further with Carl Wright. I would argue that a company cannot effectively identify opportunities until it has started to implement the tools. Tools such as one piece flow and production leveling are precisely how you identify your opportunities and are able to quantify them. Until you introduce 1 piece flow you can't find the unbalanced work, rework, downtime, etc... that is affecting production the worst. You can analyze and collect data about opportunities until you're blue in the face but unless a company begins incrementally introducting the tools then the lean transformation will never take place. The cultural piece to this is setting the expectation that it will fail when you first implement the tools but the important part is how you learn and fix these failures. Therefore failures=opportunities in a lean culture...

[Louis English PhD.]

It is Lean Leadership that keeps those pillars in place.

I have done Lean Leadership training and coaching for most of my career. In implementing a Lean transformation an organization has to always know the 'How' and "Why" of the change. The lean tools provide the "How" but the leadership needs to provide the "Why" in order to justify the the change. Miscues on either of these factors put the lean implementation at risk because of either a skill gap and/or everyone not trusting the real purpose of the change effort.

A Lean change process also has to be "top down and bottom up". The "top down" part is the leaders’ direction, commitment, and attention. The "bottom up" part is the management’s listening to what the constraints are to the change effort and its ability to deal with them effectively (PDCA).

Leaders don’t have to actively resist change; all they they need do is stop paying attention to it.

Next are the remarkable and rare characteristics of the Lean leader. This is a person willing to admit that they don't know the answer in a traditional culture that rewards them for having all the answers. This is a person who is goes to the place where the problem is occurring in a traditional culture that says the further you are away from the place of production the more successful you are. This is a person who dismisses the old "success rules” that got them the position they have today (loyalty, reactivity, technology, financial analysis...) and replaces them with new ones, based on very different premises about production, quality, machinery and people.

Traditional leaders with their “ROI”, “functionl delegating”, “show us first” mentality are the reason Lean transformations are today struggling to take hold in the U.S. and Europe. It is certainly not the tools. They have been around for 50+ years.

What we need today is more leaders who know and support these lean production pillars even when the culture, the data and sometimes the results do support it. Leaders who know how to patiently grow change through proper attention and support instead of outside technologist who promise to install it overnight without their involvement. Rare stuff.

Lou English