Jo?o Paulo Oliveira.

JOAO-PAULO OLIVEIRA

Senior Vice President

Bosch Termotecnologia Portugal SA

• Kaizen Must Begin With a Vision

For me, it was very clear that we needed to define a certain vision. For one, we wanted to have a continuous improvement mind set not only on our shop floor but also for people who worked in the indirect areas of the company, including management, whom are often not involved in such matters. So we implemented activities such as value-stream mapping and value-stream design in all our areas. This was not always easy. Early on, I had two middle managers who were sabotaging our company’s kaizen efforts. They would come to meetings and say “Yes” to everything, and then they would turn around and tell their people to forget about kaizen. After several attempts to get them involved, I decided to put one of them on different tasks and dismiss the other. This gave a very clear signal to the rest of the company that we were not going to divert from our improvement efforts. We developed our vision for the plant and were able to convince most of the team that this was our new direction. The vision embodied our goals of aspiring to world-class manufacturing standards and embraced the eight basic principles of the Bosch Production System. Much emphasis was placed on the involvement of our people.

• Use Kaizen to Develop the Workforce

The key for us was getting all employees to embrace the spirit of continuous improvement something we could call kaizen culture. Bringing this kind of change involves many considerations, of course, and a very important one is that you have to know what country you are in. For example, if you want something to get done in my country, you have to ask every day. I worked for a couple of years in Germany, and if you ask your employees to do something several times there, then you are considered to be out of line because they are more independent. In Portugal, we also have a very extreme class system in many companies. On the manufacturing level, you have low skilled, uneducated people, and in the indirect areas, you have very skilled, educated people who may speak three, four, or five different languages. Kaizen helped us to build a culture that valued our blue-collar people even more than our white-collar people. When we implemented total productive maintenance (TPM), for example, we realized that the operator has to have ownership of the machine. I became very aware of this when I was visiting a plant in Japan and saw a shop floor worker screaming very angrily at the plant manager. I asked one of my translators what had happened, and he said that the shop floor worker had just gotten married. When you get married in Japan, you leave work for five days, and during those five days, nobody had taken care of his machine. In the kaizen culture, this machine was not the machine of the company or the owners it belonged to the operator. This is very important. I returned to Portugal and explained this principle to others, and that might have been a turning point. All of a sudden, people started believing in TPM, and I realized that kaizen didn’t require so much energy. At the beginning it does, but once you have people on the path, it becomes much easier.

Our numbers began to improve, but this did not happen overnight. In 2003, we achieved 275 points out of 800, not the strong rating we had hoped for. By 2007, however, we had reached the 500 point level, which is the benchmark for a good plant at Bosch. Bosch held a contest that year, and we were nominated as one of the top five Bosch Production System plants in the world. In addition, some of our practices for involving and empowering our people were considered for Bosch worldwide. This is not bad for a small country like Portugal.

• You Cannot Delegate Kaizen

None of this is possible without leadership. The first advice I give to CEOs is that you have to be ready to put yourself as a manager and as a person out of your comfort zone. You have to be willing to try new things and to work against difficulties; otherwise, don’t bother. In addition, you cannot delegate kaizen. I always tell this to people whenever we implement something within the company. Kaizen is a job for everybody, but especially for top management. You cannot create a kaizen department because kaizen must be within everyone’s spirit. As a top manager, you have to set an example. When we implemented 5S throughout our company, this included the offices of senior managers. I told people who were auditing our offices not to tell senior management when they were coming. It is very important that people see that you are committed to the same process as they are.

SOURCE: Masaaki Imai's "Gemba Kaizen"