THE HEART OF CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

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We know that to develop real skill at anything takes a ratio of 1 hour of book learning to 20 hours of doing, hopefully with a coach. My suggestion is to practice something each week that helps you build your “lean” skills. Whether you are practicing as a student or as a coach, enjoy these materials.

The article below is part of the contents of Shingo Research Award winning book, Developing Lean Leaders at All Levels authored by Jeff Liker with George Trachilis. 

The teaching objectives for this section are to:

1.     Discuss what happens when people feel like they are wasting their time in front of a whiteboard.

2.     Share how work groups should be using visual controls in their workplace.

3.     Identify the structure of work groups that are at the heart of continuous improvement.

Figure 1. Jeff Liker discussing Why Time is Being Wasted?

A question from one of the audience members asked how I respond when somebody asks about wasting time. See Figure 1. That actually happened two days ago. This came from a guy who's a black belt learning Lean and we're coaching him; he was the one who talked about the people standing in front of the board and asking,

 “Why are we doing this?

 Why are we wasting our time?” How do you answer that question? The answer is, “Don't make people waste their time. The reason they're wasting their time is because the Supervisor has not been trained on one or all of the following:

 (a) how to effectively run a meeting,

(b) how to effectively use the metric board and/or

(c) how to effectively solve problems. 

You just stuck the boards out there.” So the message should be directed to that Chief Operating Officer and not to the people at the working level. We're just seeing the consequence at their level of a bad decision made at the top by someone who is thinking in mechanistic terms.

The COO may have been thinking the following: I saw people meeting around boards; they were making lots of improvements. I wanted the improvements; therefore I'll get the boards, and we will have improvement. 

What they are missing is the five years of work that went into training and developing these people so that the Supervisors really understood how to be effective in leading Continuous Improvement. I do not usually get complaints from working level people if, in fact, they are improving something. If they can see that we had a meeting; we saw a problem; then throughout the day there was somebody working on it, and then we came in the next day and this was improved. It might be an ergonomic issue; it might be that I'm reaching down to get parts; I come back the next day, and the parts are presented at the right height, so I don't have to reach down anymore. Now I'm going to be motivated to go to those meetings. So there has to be a good quality improvement process, and then the whiteboard becomes an aid to that process; the board is not the cause of Continuous Improvement. So there's a kind of interesting misunderstanding of cause and effect. This company has the boards; therefore the boards must be causing Continuous Improvement.

VISUAL CONTROL SO NO PROBLEMS ARE HIDDEN

Figure 2. Jeff Liker discussing Using Visual Controls

The purpose of the boards is to provide visual control, and visual control is really a way to show the gap between where you want to be and where you are. See Figure 2.  So where you want to be is represented by a standard. It could be a standard for quality; it could be a standard for how you perform the work, the sequence, the knacks that you use to perform the work; it could be a standard for productivity, for safety; it could be any kind of standard, but this is what I'd like to achieve. I'd like to cut my accident rate in half. I'd like to double my productivity.  

So the board is simply showing where you actually are compared to where you want to be;  any visual control is doing that. So, for example, let’s assume you see someone create a Kanban square, which is the most basic Kanban. With the Kanban square we are saying that if you're doing work and you put your item that you're working on into the square--it could be a piece of paper and nobody takes it--don’t perform the next job; wait until somebody takes that piece of work, and then you start the next job. So a visual signal is preventing you from over-producing.

Maybe there are three squares, so you can make three things, and then you should stop Now, if I come by and see that the three squares are filled and you're busily working on the fourth one, I know that you are violating the standard; I know you are overproducing. So you can see the goal, which is to work only at the pace of the next process, and you also can see the deviation from that standard, from that goal, from that target. When you see a deviation, now you've got a problem, and problems are good; you don't want problems, but you'd rather see them than have them hidden. So you now see that there is a problem, and now you can ask, “Why?” Number one: Why is the work backing up? So something happened; the work is not balanced and the work is backing up. 

Second issue: Why does this person who has a clear signal that says stop working continue to work? That's a second problem. So you now need to work on those problems, and probably other people are doing the same thing because they haven't really bought into the Kanban system; they don't understand it, and they think that producing more is always better. So the visual controls are communication devices to tell us how the work should be done--whether we are deviating from the standard--and then if we, in fact, have skilled motivated people with real leaders who are acting as leaders, then we will do something about the problem. We will do a Kaizen.

THE HEART OF CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

Figure 3. Jeff Liker discussing, The Heart of Continuous Improvement

This is the typical organizational structure in a Toyota plant and it's used throughout the country. See Figure 3. I've seen it in Toyota Customer Service Call Centers. I’ve seen it in engineering where the team leader becomes an engineering lead for a particular component for developing a design, a particular component for part of the car. In the factory it's clear and structured, particularly in repetitive processes. The very basic concept is number one: If you're administering and managing a group of people and if your job is to check the output expected and then punish the guilty when they don't do so; you can have 20, 25, maybe 30 people reporting to one person without any problem; as long as you have a very clear standard, really clear measures, and you don't have too many problems and production is happening. Then, the group leader, who is the Supervisor, can run around punishing people, yelling at people when they are messing up, when they are not producing. So that's the top down traditional management model. 

If on the other hand, you're jumping over to this completely different paradigm of Lean and what you want your leaders to be coaches and teachers, seeing problems as they occur and helping solve the problems as they occur, then you need more leaders, more coaches. Toyota has discovered that the ideal number is one to five; that's one leader for every five people who are doing the value added work. That a pretty large number of leaders for most organizations; very few organizations have that ratio and therefore what they are going to get is large number of managers, a large span of control who either are not really managing or leading at all, or they're checking the numbers and they're running around and they're trying to find fires to fight and they're putting out the fires and they're not going to get Continuous Improvement that way. 

So in a Toyota plant the group leaders are salaried people, and they're paid more and they get some sort of bonus, and if you have 100 people, they don't want 20 of those people to be paid that much. So they have a Team Leader who's normally an hourly employee in a production plant, and they pay them a little bit more, and they also guarantee them overtime so they can come to work early and make sure everything's set up right so production starts at the go sign and then things proceed smoothly from the first minute. They've had their five-minute, maybe it's a six minute and then they are going until a break and they are going through lunch and they're going to the end of the day and they stay until they produce the number they're supposed to produce that day. Also they have this thing called the andon system which means I'm calling for help when I have any problem. Maybe I'm getting behind or I'm getting ahead or I see that I might run out of parts; for whatever reason, I need a break so I pull a cord and a lights goes on and music plays and somebody has to come help and that person is the team leader.

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