This Lean Tool Will Have You Celebrating a Lot More Small Wins
Well if a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step…and a Lean transformation is a journey; then when do we get to celebrate? I think that’s what everybody’s really wondering. As with any journey, you can take the long, hard, and treacherous path, or the one that’s lined with beautiful flowers and breathtaking landscapes. Well I can promise you one thing, if you chose the former path, not everyone is going to make it – and that sucks – because it doesn’t have to be that way.
A Lean journey is full of everyday small wins. For the same reasons we all ran out and got Facebook accounts and get so excited when pictures of the baby gets a million likes, those everyday small wins have an immensely powerful effect on our motivation and desire to take action. These small wins are vital assets for leaders to keep people engaged in the journey and motivated to keep going in the right direction; so its crucial that leaders handle them effectively. The challenge for you as a leader is knowing that a small win, or success story, has been achieved; when it is achieved. A small win might include an operator setting a personal best in line efficiency, a team setting a downtime reduction record, achieving a target condition, or other. Tracking OEE is a great starting point – but if you’re still using a manual OEE tracking process (ie whiteboards or paper), you can forget about capturing personal bests by employee or team. Also, mostly all software platforms, with the exception of impruver.com, tracks OEE by line but not the individual, and thus can’t assign a personal best – to the person. As a leader, one of the most demotivating things you can do is fail to recognize and reward the right behaviors at the right time. Sometimes your people know when they’ve set a personal record but they expect you, as a leader, to know as well – without them having to tell you. Its almost like forgetting your kid’s birthday – and if you did that too, you aught to be ashamed.
Why celebrating small wins is so powerful
Think about this from the line operators perspective. In the absence of any other indicator, the only way to define success is by producing more product that ever before, which may actually be harmful if you’re overproducing; or at least completing the schedule on time, which just means you’re not getting worse. Additionally, these events come too few and far in between to motivate you to strive for everyday improvement. You really don’t have an incentive to “do better everyday”, which is at the heart of Continuous Improvement. You just want to clock in, do good enough, get paid, and go home.
How to create “pull” for Lean from the Shop Floor using Small Wins
If you think about it in the context of a CI journey, those small wins are like winning basketball games in route to the championship. In order to build “championship-level” confidence, you have to win a lot of games throughout the season. Setting a personal best in yield losses today, changeover time tomorrow, and then line uptime the next day gives you the motivation to set new personal bests going forward. Couple this with a social element of automatically broadcasting these success stories throughout the company and you’ve got a recipe for rapid growth. Imagine you just finish a successful kaizen event and set a personal best in rate attainment the next day, then received a “like” or comment from the CEO and other leaders recognizing your achievement. That’s an incredibly powerful motivator to engage in more improvement activity on your line. You’d come to work everyday knowing that a new personal best is well within reach; excited about trying out that new idea to see what impact it has on results. You’d stick around while maintenance is repairing the line so you can learn how to make those repairs yourself – so you don’t have to wait around for maintenance next time. You’d be asking your supervisor or CI resource about new Lean Tools and methods you could use to get better results. This approach creates “pull” from the shop floor for CI as opposed to having it pushed upon you by management against your will or interest.
You might be thinking about all the impossible daily number crunching that would be required to get this done. Or if you’re using spreadsheets, this file could become incredibly large and useless and inaccurate in no time. And speaking of time, it would take an incredible amount of time to build, update, and maintain such a tool. But don’t fret. This technology already exists and is ready for you to use to accelerate your CI journey. When the geniuses at Toyota and their observers wrote the books on Lean, the tech unfortunately did not exist. In fact, Toyota had an aversion to the use of technology in their Management System (TPS) because they feared it would automate too much and allow the operator to disengage. They’ve since changed their approach as they saw their competitors leveraging various technologies to great effect. We’re learning everyday that Toyota wasn’t right about everything; but you can get it right.
Check out this video to see what I’m talking about:
So.. never again should an operator go a day without their leaders even being aware that they just had the best day ever. Take the scenic route – engage your people in recognizing everyday small wins and watch the powerful impact it has on your Lean culture.