Telltale Signs that your company is not ready for #Lean Transformation

Companies looking for accelerating their #lean transformation journey often engage #Lean consultants to train and coach teams on identifying and addressing Muda, Mura and Muri from their manufacturing and business processes, with an aim of achieving significant and sustainable business results.

While #Lean Consultants use all applicable lean tools and methodologies to assess the improvement opportunities, the execution of the improvement projects, thus identified, often does not yield the intended business results.

What can be the reasons? Is this because the consultants lack the knowledge or fail to apply the right tools/methods or fails to engage the key stakeholders appropriately or there are other factors at play.

While all the above factors may contribute, the often overlooked but most important factor contributing to ?less than expected business results, often stems from the fact that company does not have the right operating system for making the lean tools and methodologies work for them.

Just as the most ubiquitous office applications like (Word, PPT, Excel) needs an operating system (Windows, etc) to work and unleash its intended value. Similarly, application of right Lean tool/methodology, no matter how pertinent they are, would ?not yield desired fruits (business impact) if the organization does not have the right operating system.

Here are some tell-tale signs that would point that the organization lack the right operating system for unleashing the benefits of lean transformation.

# 1 Poor Engagement of Top Management – While the top management may say they are engaged, but all they do, is to appoint a SPOC or Single Point of Contact Person (who may have role names such as , Kaizen promotion Office, Lean Leader, OpEx Leader etc) to work with consultant/s for lean deployment. Top management neither shows active interest in daily workflow management happening at the Gemba nor take effort to understand issues faced by the Continuous Improvement project team/s. They do not have a structured governance process (e.g. tiered meetings) to bubble up the ‘hardy/chronic’ Gemba issues to them while they are still at a manageable level. ?Leader don’t go the Gemba? on a periodic basis, and fails to fixe the ‘rubber band’ effect of ?lean improvements done at the Gemba. ?Another ?clearest indication of poor engagement is when management picks the SPOC who is available rather than who is capable

.# 2 Strong desire for fighting fire - The employees who are expected to support Lean transformation, are always busy with firefighting tasks. They feel fighting fire is the best utilization of their time and that is how they can keep their business running. They join the meetings with #Lean consultants or provide response/data etc. only when coaxed or forced by their top management team, Little do they realize they are struck in the trap of Dooming cycle, moving perpetually from one firefighting task to another.

#3 I Suffer because of ‘Other’ - The employees, would often point out that the present issue had not been caused by them but by ‘other’ people (who have had worked in the past). For example, warehouse folks would attribute the lack of storage space, to poor planning by procurement team while ordering items. Daily work management team, when challenged why they are not updating the RCA/KPI charts on time, they will point out the data was not made available by other team. On excess finished goods lying in storage, the answer from production team would be that the marketing (other) team has been overcommitting to their customer. It only takes a small effort to bring all parties together on a common page and solve the problem cross functionally wearing a ‘big picture’ hat. But they would not like to solve the issue themselves as they strongly believe that issue is caused by others.

.#4 Why shift when we are making profit –The business is making a good profit at present , hence all their inefficiencies (Muda, Mura and Muri) remains hidden. Lean transformation or shifting to new way of doing thing is not the need of the hour. Those employees would ‘softly’ push back on #Lean consultants by saying, “we are already making profit”, what else can #Lean transformation can bring to the table?

As Warren buffet had famously said, “Only when the tide goes out do you learn who has been swimming naked.” The company/industry might be simply riding the wave of growth and favorable external factors or may not have enough competitors as of now. But the moment market reverses or some competitor challenges them, will they realize the mistake of not carrying out their #Lean Transformation on time.

#5 I do what you ask me to do – the sponsor hired the #Lean Consultants, as s/he believes strongly in the importance of Lean Transformation as lever for growth and profitability. However the employees does not resonate the same way.? Employees continue to do what they have been doing (business as usual and firefighting tasks), and they just execute what #Lean Consultants tell them. They do not take active interest in learning problem solving methodologies and how to program manage their projects to completion. All they do is Passive Compliance.

#6 Let’s Lower our Manpower - When the top management fails to exude confidence and walks the talk that there will not be any ‘job loss’ from the productivity improvements. If the employees working in the Gemba gets a feeling (from fact or through rumor mills) that top management is using lean to do a restructuring ?exercise, they will try their best to create barriers for successful implementation. When the end objective spelt out covertly or overtly is all about how many equivalent FTE hours would be saved, and how this can be used to get rid of few people, then the rumor mills start working overtime and puts brakes to # lean transformation execution.

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#7 Folder is the only Data holder – When the organization has the process of data collection, but recording, archiving and analyzing them is very poor. If the data is sitting in paper form and neatly archived in a folder, then it cannot be analyzed. When you ask them to transfer them in excel, they would say they do not have the time ?to do that or it is not necessary. But we all know "If we cannot analyze the data, then we cannot use the data for deriving insights and driving improvements.

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#8 Let the Consultant Say, What I Can’t Say – Many a times one leader or one department head finds it difficult to align with his/her critical stakeholders, from same or another department, on a particular topic. ?Some examples can be the need to scrap a particular process or machine or drive a particular strategy. ?Now the #Lean consultant is onboarded by that leader to recommend things they could not or cannot say or to settle personal score with another department or leader. The ?#Lean Consultant, in such cases, ??either will not commit to this assignment or not take special interest to analyze all the data and put all the tools/methods to good use to get the best outcome

So if you are one of those #Lean Consultants working with your clients to accelerate their Lean Transformation Journey, then these tell tale signs can provide good clues for you to align expectations with your key stakeholder. This can also help you in taming your execution challenges and perform necessary course correction to help you get the best business possible outcome from your assignment.

Those were my thoughts. would love to hear thoughts from other #Lean consultants.

#Lean, #LeanConsultants, #Kaizen #LeanTransformation