MORE A3 STORIES

These materials are from Jeffrey K. Liker and the book, Developing Lean Leaders at All Levels.

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STATUS REPORT STORY

The third type of story, which is shown after the problem-solving story, is reporting on status; in this case you're establishing activities for new goals or reporting on major points of a large goal such as annual plans.

In the case of Hoshin Kanri there is a major review half way through the year and a major end-of-year review, and that would be reported in the form of an A3 status report.

It might look something like this. 

What's the theme of your status report? You need a title for the book, and you need to give background and share your objectives at the time you started; and then tell how you're doing compared to those objectives and your status of implementation.

Your status report could be very simple; sometimes it could be as simple as the green means on target; yellow means I'm not on target, but I have a plan to be on target and recover; or I'm red and we still have to find a solution to get back on track.

There may be a bigger summary with graphs and charts of the total effect of what has been done up to this point and unresolved problems and obstacles that must be faced and where we're going next.

INFORMATION STORY

The information story summarizes the current situation. You don't need to evaluate; you need to be conscious of the problem and make others conscious and share something that they might find useful in their work. 

If you are doing a technical information story, you might include something that looks like the solving-problem process. Tell what problem you were starting with; then include data that shows that it works and talk about the initial conditions and boundaries. So in that case you are showing analysis. 

As in each A3 you have to ask yourself who is the audience; what do I want to convey to this audience, and how can I do it in the simplest way possible.

THE PROBLEM-SOLVING STORY A3

The problem-solving story is the most common and if we define problem-solving as the core of continuous improvement and respect for people, then the problem-solving A3 is part of that core. 

The purpose of an A3 problem-solving story is the purpose of problem-solvingitself. There is a plan, a goal or standard, and we're not currently meeting it. 

We may be meeting the current standard, but we have not been asked to set a new standard like a 60% reduction in warranty. 

This is just one example; and I want to emphasize this, one example for the problem-solving A3 format. This is an example of a format; it's pretty high level, and you could probably fit almost any good PDCA process into these boxes.

For example, you could fit the Toyota eight steps into these six boxes. The eight steps are shown again below for your review.

As you go through your problem-solving approach, we're going to be very flexible and if you have a standard approach in your company, use it unless there is some inherent weakness.

What is an inherent weakness?

You need to have a definition of the problem, and you need to have a target or goal.

You have to do a cause analysis. You have to come up with countermeasures, and it should be more than one countermeasure, and if there is some way that you use priorities, you should include that prioritization. Tell why you picked those particular countermeasures to trial. You need an implementation plan and you need a follow-up plan.

The plan goes all the way through the countermeasures; the doing is the implementation, and then follow-up is the checking and acting. Now if you want to make eight boxes to follow the Toyota Business Practices, that's fine. The number of boxes is not as important as the acid test of; Am I really following the plan, do, check, act process?

THE DETAILED PROBLEM-SOLVING STORY A3

In each of these boxes we're giving you some details; once again this is not the end all and be all for every single report, but it gives you some guidelines.

The theme should be a question. 

By looking at the theme, the top description of the problem, I should understand what you are trying to do.

For the problem situation, I should know what the standard is that you want to achieve. I should know the current situation. I should know the discrepancy, the gap, and I should know the rationale for why you picked this particular problem. 

For the target, I should know what's going to change, quantity and by when. 

In the root cause analysis, I should understand the point of cause, where you found the cause to occur, and how you drill down and what methods you use. If you used the 5- Why method, then I should see the 5 Why analysis. Then I should see the root cause that you've come up with. 

Then for the countermeasure I should understand if there were temporary measures; you should report that and then tell what the longer-term countermeasures are going to be. This is what you're going to testing. 

Share the action plan schedule of who, what, where, when and the follow-up. Share the checks and the proposed actions. 

I am not pushing this format; by saying you need to follow this format. What I am saying is that you should go through these questions and make sure that your format has included them.

Specifically, in the Follow Up section; if you know your current methods really doesn’t do a great job of addressing how we're going to do the checks and when we're going to do the checks, then you can add that to your problem-solving method. 

You don't have to throw it out; you can add whatever is missing.

A MANUFACTURING EXAMPLE

This is an example; this happens to be a manufacturing story that is discussed in great detail in the Toyota Way Field Book. It is something my co-author, David Myer worked on.

In this case the problem was a particular department, not in Toyota, that involved a supplier that David was consulting with. The problem was that they were not making the schedule and they were under-producing consistently. 

To understand the cause they created a work balance chart that looked at the different processes and measured how long a cycle took and immediately it became apparent that compared to the takt time of 122 seconds; they had one bottleneck operation at Seam Weld (as shown below, the cycle time is greater than the takt time) and the remainder of the processes were under-loaded. 

In this case, they went further in the analysis towards understanding the root causes and looked at 4 categories; method, man, machines and materials, they used, the 4M; some people at times use 5 M’s (where the 5th M, Milieu is used for environment).

The point of this is to broaden your look; we might only focus on machines and forget that people are involved, or we forget that there are materials and if materials are out of specification, then that's going to stop production. 

They wanted to get a broader look at a wide variety of possible causes before they zoomed in on the causes. The causes they focused on are in the action plan, and you'll see who is going to do something and by when. 

Then you see the results.

We show an arrow pointing from the results back to the original problem statement, and you can see a direct correspondence. 

We were not meeting production; now we are regularly meeting production. There was an imbalance in the work load and now the work is being re-balanced; there are no bottlenecks and all the people are fully loaded and therefore we have eliminated a lot of waste and in fact fewer people are needed for this project.

Then there is a set of future activities. So, this is a nice problem-solving A3. In manufacturing you often can be a bit more precise about your measurement than in say an engineering process where the work is less routine.

 A3 PROBLEM-SOLVING MANUFACTURING STORY

You might notice this particular A3 has been done by computer; in fact, it was done on PowerPoint and you might have heard about the use of paper and pencil and that anygood report should be created by paper and pencil.

Why pencil? Because you can erase.

This is a story that is unfolding so you are actually writing the story as you're living it. The early stage of this report was done by paper and pencil and for purposes of sharing, they decided to put it in PowerPoint.

If you look at the A3s in Toyota, they are all in PowerPoint, but they all started by writing things on paper and maybe somebody used a pen but they surely crossed things out.  

But the story as it is occurring is actually box by box. We first define the problem we are going to work on and it might show that data is missing in production. In this case it is obvious that something has to be done. In other cases, it might be a proposal to improve efficiency through a new technology, and you have to get permission to even go ahead and do any analysis and check vendors.

Where you have to put a proposal together, your initial box is going to be challenged. Many questions may come out of this.

Is this a problem today?

 Is it a problem that requires IT? 

What is the problem?

If the problem is that we want to improve productivity, then state it that way and that leads to lots of different ways of improving productivity and not, simply improving it with IT.

If you're getting push back box by box, you're doing a good job. If you sit in front of a computer, or if you sit at home with paper and pencil and you write out the whole A3, then you're not telling the story; you're not developing the story; you're not doing real problem-solving; you're just report writing.

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