People Process Technology Blog

Lean Leadership Summit - Top Notch Speakers & Sessions

Posted by: Jonena Relth, President and Leadership Evangelist TBD Consulting, Inc.

For people involved with or thinking of implementing Lean methodologies in your organization, this is a conference you should consider attending: Lean Leadership Summit 4/21-22 in Irvine, CA.

James P. Womack and Gary Convis will be speaking.

"Lean Leadership Summit
The "Rock Stars of Lean!" An absolutely unprecedented assemblage of many of the most capable and successful executive Lean Leaders on the planet in an intimate setting to share how they transformed their operations to create competitive advantage to grow their businesses."

http://www.advanced-imaging.com/leanleadership/

Hope to see you there! Jonena

The Simplicity of Lean

Posted by: Ken Pilone
 

Why do people make ‘Lean’, seem so difficult.  It isn’t.  The ‘Holy Grail’ for the success of Lean is found in the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) cycle first put forth by W. Edwards Deming to help rebuild Japan and its reputation for producing quality products that were ‘export worthy’. PDCA is simply a logical, repeatable, and simple method to continuously improve (‘kaizen’ in Japanese).  Even though there are tons of books out there about it, the fact is, we all practice these principles all day, every day without even realizing it.  It’s what we would otherwise just call, ‘common sense.’

I’ll prove it to you.  What was the very first semi-conscious thought you had when your alarm went off this morning?  Be honest.  Was it, hit the snooze button!  Fast.  And after 2-3 times swatting at the button didn’t you finally conclude you had to get up?  Am I right so far?  As you began to become conscious, you started ‘grasping the situation’ as it’s referred to in Lean vernacular.  This is simply collecting facts relative to the situation at hand. You finally decided to get up based on grasping those facts. You asked yourself questions like;  What time is it?  What’s the weather like?  Where do I have to be today?  How shall I dress?  Do I have to take the kids to school?  What will the traffic be like? And the most important question of all, Is the coffee on?   

From collecting those facts you started to formulate a ‘plan’ based on what we call, ‘deciding needed action’.  Think of all these facts being dumped into a funnel.  What comes out the end, is what will formulate your plan!  That’s it!  All this was probably going on before you even got out of bed!

OK, so once you made your plan, you carried it out, right?  That’s what we call the ‘do’ phase.  Maybe we should call it the ‘DUH!’ phase.  You put together your outfit, got the kids up, made coffee, checked the traffic, etc.  It’s all common sense so far, isn’t it?  But things rarely go according to plan so we adjust throughout.  Sometimes we even say ‘time for Plan B’. This is our way of acknowledging that sometimes things just don’t work out as you planned them.  You have to take a detour if there’s a construction delay, but your destination hasn’t changed.  So even in the ‘do’ phase you have to monitor your results according to your plan.  You’ll need that information later.

When your day is done, don’t you ask yourself ‘what happened today?’ Without calling it so, this is the ‘check’ part of the cycle.  In the ‘check’ phase all you are really doing is collecting OBJECTIVE data. Mr. Spock loves this phase.  Maybe you found a new short cut to work, a cool new restaurant.  Maybe you were late for work.  How did that happen?, you might ask.  If you keep a Blackberry where you check off what you got done and move to the next day what you didn’t, you’re using a PDCA tool!  The key thing here is to think about it as a judge would in court.  Just the facts! 

With me so far?  OK, here’s where it gets interesting.  In the above ‘check’ step you are simply figuring out what exactly happened.  You are comparing actual results to your plan.  But now, in the ‘act’ phase, you want to ask yourself ‘so what?’  You will standardize the positive results and problem-solve the gaps.  Let’s say you went to a meeting and were asked for data you didn’t have, you probably said (hopefully to yourself), ‘Note to self… next time bring data!  Or if it went really, really bad, you might say, ‘Time to dust off my resume’.  By the way, some renditions of PDCA call this the ‘study or adjust’ phase so as not to confuse it with the ‘do’ phase.  I prefer to think of it as the ‘react’ phase.  Think about it.  Why collect data in the first place if you don’t intend to do anything about it?  Why get on the scale every morning, scream bloody murder and swear like a sailor if you’re not dieting, exercising, or doing something to promote weight loss.  Unless you believe in the fat fairy, chances are nothing good happened during the night.  But, if you are watching your calories, etc., then you DO want to see what the results were! 

So if you had a salad for dinner last night instead of your usual mountain of pasta, you’ll want to see what results you may have achieved.  So the ‘act, adjust, study’ step in the cycle is where you LEARN!  PDCA is not a 2-dimensional disc as much as it is a slinky where you spiral up with each cycle. Lots of people and companies do a good job at PDC but a poor job at A.  Many of my clients also have a PD ‘CYA’ system in place but that’s a blog for another day. 

Here’s the big finish.  If PDCA is the Holy Grail, then ‘A’ is the holiest of the holy!  With deliberate, systematic ‘post-mortems’ at the end of your cycle, you’ll know what and how to improve.  The best part is, it allows you to FAIL!  Think about it.  If you have solid learning routines in place, like a net under a trapeze artist, you can take risks and innovate.  If not, you better do it right the first time!

Is any of this mysterious?  Difficult to comprehend?  Complicated?  I hope you say ‘no, this is easy.  I can do this’.  In the end, PDCA is no more than ‘applied common sense’.  TIP:  Consultants can help. Just make sure that they don’t try to make it more complicated than it is.  If it hurts your head, it’s not being done right.  Find somebody else. 

Lean Thinking - Value Streams and Strings of Lights

Please welcome our newest TBD Consultant and Lean Expert, Ken Pilone. 

Ken comes to TBD with 35 years experience in HR, Education, Training and OD in manufacturing, government, retail, automotive, healthcare, distribution, logistics and aerospace industries.  Of those, he spent 19 years with Toyota as a Lean/TPS Consultant. 

Jonena

 

Posted by: Ken Pilone

This past Christmas season, as I stared into our box of outdoor Christmas decorations, I pulled out our Christmas lights which had become a huge, tangled ball, intertwined with other decorations.  Once I untangled the lights from the rest of the stuff, I eventually found a plug.  When I plugged it in, some of the lights came on, others didn’t.  Was this one string? Two?  Three?  It was hard to tell where one string ended and another began.  Eventually, I was able to untangle and separate the strings.  This is exactly what most value streams look like, a tangled ball of interconnected steps that eventually have an end point. 

As I set out to straighten and hang the strings, the metaphor became even more clear to me.  As I stood on tip toes on the top rung of my ladder, it hit me (this isn’t about safety now, is it?).  A value stream is simply a set of activities that, when sequenced together, add value to a customer.  These lights are like that, I thought.  There’s a beginning point, the plug, and an end point where it either terminates or connects to another string. 

The wire is necessary to move current from one light to the next but does it add value? Really?  I mean, nobody will look at my house after I’m done decorating it and say, “Wow, nice wire!”.  We even buy them so that the wire doesn’t stand out.  My house trim is white, so I want to get white wire.  So the goal is to hang them so attention is placed on the lights, not the wire, right?  The wire represents ‘non-value added’ work.  It’s necessary but the customer doesn’t really care about it.  We buy products but aren’t interested in how they got to the store shelves.

My job as a consultant is to help my clients do exactly the same thing.  Our goal together is to untangle their processes, determine which steps in it actually add value for the customer (the lights) and which don’t (the wire).  Then we look at each value-added step and evaluate if it’s working the way we want. Put another way, we ask, ‘if this bulb burns out, does the rest of the string go out too?’.  If not, ‘do we really need it?’.  If so, what do we have to do to fix it? 

What steps in your processes are not working properly?  What is the impact on the customer?  Are your value streams uncluttered and free of knots and tangles?  What do your customers think?

To learn more about Lean thinking and how it's proven methodologies can improve your organization's processes, customer service and bottom line, contact our office.  Our Lean experts are here to help you untangle your Value Streams today! 602-263-1961