How do you know when a culture of Lean or Continuous Improvement is taking hold in your organization?

“When will this Lean thing work?”. Or, “How do we know if it works?”. Those questions have been posed to me by many of my employees at all the places I have been where we embarked on a journey of Lean and Continuous Improvement. Heck, I asked them myself the first time I learned about Lean from Don Makie and Dr. Tom Jackson (Taktx) 15 years ago. And I still discuss that with Andrew Bernhardt (Bernhardt Consulting) after he has helped me along the way across 4 locations. How do you truly know it is taking hold? For me, it is when I hear and see daily improvements from the shop and front office, and I am not aware it is happening.

I think we can all agree that when we try to install a culture of Lean or CI, the key is the support of all the employees in the company. Top down. But one of the lasting principles that is etched on my brain is “do it with the people, not to the people”. Don Makie drilled that into me in my first Kaizen event and I never forgot it. If a leader is not wiling to get dirty and teach interactively while learning from the team, it will not work. At Wellflex, we have remembered the importance of “doing it with the people” and it shows both financially as well as visually. And let’s face it, we need to see physical change before we can say “it works”. And at Wellflex, we have seen the change.

Our journey began in earnest on August 30, 2018 when Greg Patterson, our VP of Operations conducted our first formal Kaizen event. As we know, everything starts with 5S, and so we did. Greg led an event in our Weld Shop that included removing all items from the building and starting over. Everything (Rich McCorry taught me that in 2003). The employees developed a single, standard cell after having a competition. We cranked up the Red Dirt Country music, ate well but worked hard. At the end of the day, we all agreed that the new cell would be the standard. And while this was happing, other departments peeked at it and 3 months later, most departments had conducted a 5S event. Today, we have a monthly audit and the winner of the audit gets a catered lunch, a small trophy but more important, chooses the music in the shop. Today, our shop looks nothing like what it did in 2018. That’s because all our folks care and work together to sustain the gains. “Do it with the people”.

15 months later, our Director of Operational Excellence, Larry Hanks, is called in by our teams to conduct SIPOC events to truly understand our processes and how to make them better. Who is the internal customer and what does each group need to do to support them? This happens because the conversations are productive, and everybody involved participates and is heard.  “Do it with the people”.

Today, Greg walked me to the shop and showed me two tool carts that the folks in the shop are creating. On their own. Because they think we can be better and more efficient if we have them. Mobile, with power to charge tooling and compartments for prints, ITP s and control plans. Not that I have not understood that our folks have embraced our culture of Lean and Continuous Improvement, but it drives home that they fully embrace our core values of Teamwork, Better Everyday, Disciplined, Accountable and Gritty. Our shop and our employees answer the question on “How do we know if it works?”. I thank them for that.