Archive for the 'project kaizen' Category

ast week I worked with one of my client's executive team on some business planning. The company has been pursuing a lean approach to delivering their projects and for general operations improvement. Progress has been good at two of their divisions. The executive team came together to plan initiatives for the next two years to expand efforts to the balance of their dozen divisions. I invited Norman Bodek to join us for the session. What a treat that was for us all.

Norman is the godfather of the lean movement in the western world. He was the first to publish Shingo's and Ohno's¹ books in English through his company Productivity Press. Norman went on to lead 50 study missions to Japan and he created the very successful 5 days and 1 night approach now called 'kaizen blitz'. Norman eventually sold Productivity Press, but he couldn't stay away from Japan or the publishing business. In the last two years he's published three books all of which he authored or co-authored. He is getting ready to publish three more books in the next year through his new firm PCS Press.

Throughout our planning Norman joined the working groups and our discussion sessions. At the end of the day he spoke to the group for 90 minutes. His message:

Unleash the energy and creativity of the workforce…all you gotta do is ask!

My client came away enthused and ready for action. They invited Norman back for their annual leadership program in January. It should be enlightening. Read more about kaizen for Projects.

1. Engineer Shiego Shingo and Taiichi Ohno were the creators of the Toyota Production System [ ⇑ back ]

Can anyone upstage Tom Peters' kaizen Is…Very Dangerous Stuff? How about David Drickhamer? David has a different view on kaizen, Continuous Improvement — Crash, But Don't Burn, appearing in Industry Week.

People often cringe when I say, "Fail early and often." We work so hard to avoid failure, to encourage it seems counter to accepted wisdom. When I worked at The Neenan Company we called attention to our errors by banging on a Chinese gong in the main lobby of the building. Visitors thought we were crazy. Our subcontractors knew it to be true!

The road to process excellence and market success — and wisdom — is paved with failure.

So along comes David Drickhamer telling us to talk about our company and project failures. This is a guy who says if we don't speak about the failures we can't become great.

"What doesn't work — the major and minor failures — becomes the tacit knowledge and experience that builds up within individuals and organizations as they keep trying new things. Learning from past missteps, the next time they face a similar bottleneck, or a customer makes a similar request, these people and organizations are able to skip some of the trial and error to arrive at a solution faster."

I've learned that only the mature and wisest of managers and companies take advantage of failure. Politics, petty ambitions, and the fear of not looking good are the main enemies of an organization intent on learning, innovating, and staying competitive. David describes the usual situation:

"(W)hen the death knell begins to toll for really big projects, everybody who possibly can flees, separating themselves mentally and physically from the doomed venture."

Hey, Tom Peters. kaizen is not dangerous. Danger is an organization that doesn't systematically and continuously learn from its mistakes.

Excellence has become transient…the Pursuit of Perfection gets in the way of ferreting out the Next Big Thing.

Tom Peters is doing what Tom Peters does best — promoting big ideas and himself along the way. Don't get me wrong; I'm a very big Tom Peters fan. His in your face, not-to-be-ignored style grabs me each time I encounter his writing. In August Tom published a manifesto on the site Change This! Tom's manifesto is titled This I Believe (TIB). I'll just say that Tom's TIBs are provocative. This one caught my attention:

#12. kaizen (Continuous Improvement) Is…Very Dangerous Stuff
Caught with our pants down by vigorous Japanese competitors, we Americans quickly copied their essential competitive ideas, such as Total Quality Management and kaizen. Fair enough! Brilliant, in fact! Yet these important notions are in part cornerstones of an earlier, industrial age…when winning products stayed on the shelves in showroom floors for years, even decades.
Now excellence has become transient (few teams win back-to-back championships in sports, the competition and rate of improvement have become so intense); and the fact is that the Pursuit of Perfection (at today's "sport") gets in the way of ferreting out the Next Big Thing. My de facto mentors in all this are media guru Marshall McLuhan ("If it works, it's obsolete") and IT guru Nicholas Negroponte ("Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy").

Can this be? Can Tom be calling our baby ugly? You bet he is. And I see why. kaizen is one part of a whole system that Toyota and others use to stay competitive. But it is just one part. When Toyota decided it needed a more hip car than a Corolla it didn't just improve the Corolla in one place and another. Toyota created an all new car — Matrix — and did so in record time, reportedly about one year from conception to market. That is one heck of a project. Competitors take three times as long to launch a new car (even when based on an existing car). But Toyota didn't stop there. They added three performance levels to the car and offered the same performance levels on the Corolla. Their market share and profitability show for it. Toyota has moved in front of Ford to be the number 2 auto manufacturer worldwide and they intend to knock on GM's door.

You can get Tom Peters' TIBs in his manifesto. You can also get the same TIBs in book form along with his thoughts on leadership, excellence, and my favorite — Pity the Poor Brown: Tom Peters Challenges Jim Collins, for Better of for Worse, currently only available in the book. The book is titled Project04: Snapshots of Excellence in Unstable Times. You will also find another Tom Peters' manifesto at Change This!. It's titled Off-Shoring. It's as provocative as TIB.

By the way, Change This! is a project started by Seth Godin of Purple Cow and Free Prize Inside fame. If you act fast you can get Seth's very popular The Bootstrapper's Bible for free. It's available at Change This! 'til December 1, 2004.

A host of books have been published on company-wide improvement approaches. One of the first descriptions of the approach that makes Toyota and other Japanese firms successful with continuous improvement was kaizen, written by Masaaki Imai, published in 1986. Imai updated that work with gemba kaizen in 1997. Along the way there have been many good books about employee initiated everyday improvement and innovation. The latest is the book Ideas Are Free, by Alan G. Robinson, Dean M. Schroeder.

Robinson and Schoeder claim a company-wide practice of putting the small ideas into use will separate your firm from your competitors without tipping your hand as to what is making you more competitive. Here are their eight recommendations for an idea system:

1. Ideas are encouraged and welcomed.
2. Submitting ideas is simple.
3. Evaluation of ideas is quick and effective.
4. Feedback is timely, constructive and informative.
5. Implementation is rapid and smooth.
6. Ideas are reviewed for additional potential.
7. People are recognized, and success is celebrated.
8. Idea system performance is measured, reviewed and improved.

I have one quibble with the authors. They place too much emphasis on ideas and no attention on making assessments that lead to innovation. (There'll be another posting on just that point.) There are plenty of ideas available from our project team members and throughout our firms. Greg Howell and I have found the missing element to be what we call The Two Great Wastes: not listening and not speaking. None of this works without an environment that embraces the varied opinions and contributions of everyone. There must be attentive listening and unfettered speaking. It takes leadership to get both.

So much has been made of the opportunity line workers and project performers have for contributing ideas for improvement in their daily work. 15 years ago I worked at ABB Asea Brown Boveri. I wondered what the opportunity was for harnessing the inventiveness of our highly skilled engineers. So I did an experiment. I worked with 8 engineers. First, I taught them the standard problem-solving techniques. Then I challenged them as a group of 8 to come up with 20 adopted improvements each week. I further stipulated that the team didn't succeed unless each person had originated 1 adopted improvement in that week. They got off to a slow start. I remember the first week had fewer than 10 adopted improvements and 2 or 3 of the people didn't contribute one idea. But we kept at it. At the end of the month the team had over 100 adopted improvements with everyone meeting their weekly targets. At that point they became really innovative. The second month had even more adopted improvements. It was also at that time that ABB made major organizational changes resulting in me moving from Connecticut to Switzerland. The team was disbanded.

So are ideas free? I think not. While I'm a really big fan of continuous improvement systems, here in the USA we seem not to have the stick-to-it-ness to make these approaches successful. It takes a significant effort and rethinking of how we will manage our firms and our projects. That effort is not free. It at least comes with an opportunity cost if not a real investment in training and communication of company policy. These costs (or investments) are real. So you might ask, "Is it worth investing?" Without doubt. But take it on for strategic advantage as the authors of Ideas Are Free recommend.

For those of you ready to start here's my recommendation. One of the best guides to adopting continuous improvement is The Idea Generator: Quick and Easy kaizen, by Bunji Tozawa and Norman Bodek. Their approach works. One of the authors is by far the most authoritative person on the subject. I call Norman Bodek the godfather of the lean movement in the western world. He had Taiichi Ohno's and Shigeo Shingo's books on Toyota translated into English and published in the US. Norman's latest book is Kaikaku: The Power and Magic of Lean. He's written a history of the lean movement that presents in one place all the elements of the lean approach. It's sure to be a winner.

This week's Project e-Tip comes at the suggestion of reader Keith Ray. He has chosen Purple Cow by Seth Godin (currently #15 on NYT Business Best Sellers list) as his reward for the proposal. Next week I'll do a follow-up to this Project e-Tip. The 9th tip will come from a reader.

The Project Reformer's e-Tip of the Week

007: Create A Habit of Self-Directed Improvement

Keith Ray reminds us that an intention and routine of improvement matters more than any specific improvement methods. Too often a bureaucratic intent to adopt a standard approach runs head-on into individuals' and teams' intentions to improve. This may seem contrary to what we've read about either the Japanese firms' programmatic approaches or western firms' lean/six sigma black belts. While training and methodology can contribute to results, getting in a habit of improving seems to make more of a difference. There are three aspects to creating the improving habit: Establish and re-establish clear connections to the purpose of getting on and staying on an improving path. Provide coherent actions from supervision and company leaders that value and expect the improving habit. Engage with others who share the same intention for learning and support. Still, this may not be enough. The leading impediment to adopting this or any other change is a conflicting intention. (More on this later.) For now, set a good example by getting yourself on an improving path and invite others to join you. Submitted by C. Keith Ray while reading the book Lean Software Development by Mary and Tom Poppendieck.

©2003 Hal Macomber | weblog.halmacomber.com | e-Tip Archive | PDF | Submit Tip

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Dear Joe,

Thanks for sharing your interest in comparing the paybacks of local improvements with the paybacks of investing in the 'big' solutions. I'll offer a way of thinking about some usual cases.

Local improvement with a quick time for approval
I work in a work cell. Throughout the day I need to leave the workcell to use a drill press across the plant. It takes some time to traverse the plant. (Sometimes I have to make the trip twice because the piece needs reworking.) I discover the plant owns extra drill presses. As an individual I see the opportunity to claim one of the excess drill presses for my workcell. My workgroup leader likes the idea so we move to implementation. I spend 1 Hr arranging, moving, and setting up the drill press. The plant is now in the hole the value of 1 hour. The benefit is now the removal of the interruption — stopping, time walking to the drill press, returning, and re-starting. The drilling is the same whether close by or distant, except that the drill press might stay in a 'ready state' for drilling when it is part of a work cell. Immediately, I have the extra time for producing more throughput and I might encounter other side benefits. When graphing this the plant makes the investment of 1 Hr. and begins getting benefits immediately. When using a time scale of a week, you might not see the money spent, let alone using the time scale of a month.

Compare this with the 'big idea' improvement
An engineer and others spend time for week after week studying, collecting data, analyzing, proposing, getting approvals, dealing with well-intended suggestions from somewhat interested others, and finally implementing. (Please don't read that as cynical. It acknowledges the usual drive for a correct solution. I'll say more later.) During that time no new value is accruing. Costs accrue through the time when the proposal is implemented and returns begin. Plotting this would show starting at zero going negative for N months then beginning the climb back to zero. Only the great solutions climb fast enough to show payback in one year. Most "investments" show returns of 15-25% thus taking anywhere from 3-7 years to payback.

In the first case let's say you are getting 3 improvements every 4 days for a group of 50 people (consistent with national averages of good companies getting 4 improvements/person/year). That is not a bad rate, but it still shows thinking attached to the conventional wisdom. What's that wisdom? People can be expected to act in their self-interest rather than for the benefit of the company. (This harkens back to Adam Smith.) However, if you can avoid the approval process, then the rate of improvement can go way up. One group of 45 people I recently worked with 'adopted' just under 500 improvements in their first 7 weeks. That is about 5 or 6 improvements/person/month! Notice I didn't say 'proposed' and 'approved'. They usually did neither. We used three rules to avoid that.

1. If the workgroup agrees it will be more value, AND
2. If it doesn't require a new cash outlay, AND
3. If it can be done on your shift without interrupting production or others, then just do it.

Everything else needs the foreman's approval. I don't recall how much went to the foreman for approval, but they were acted on promptly.

Pursuing 'correct solutions'
In usual situations managers and engineers removed from the factory floor or the operations of a workgroup are responsible for improving the performance of the process. They pursue this work as projects. Workers are just responsible for production. In these cases we often find the detachment of the engineers and managers leads to proposals about improving local productivity rather than the ideal 'objectivity' and optimal solutions we are seeking from these objective people. Anyone who has even the slightest concern for prudence will choose to take time to be sure that what is being changed will do more good than harm. Investigating that is what so often consumes the time on these projects. In the end we get what we get. Some changes are real improvements while others are write-offs.

Now don't get me wrong. I think we should be doing process engineering, making capital investments, and bringing in subject-matter experts. Here's the problem: almost any investment proposal looks good when evaluated against a poor current state. But what if the current state was on a continuing path of operator-directed improvement? What if those improvements were focussed on reducing dependence and variability? What if those improvements resulted in increased throughput? And, what if those improvements were done with little to no delay? Then…what would we be investing in? I bet they would be very different. We might even have fewer projects.

Hope this helped.

Now, for all you folks who want to look at the graphs…you'll just have to wait! It will take me time to create something that shows how profit velocity varies in the two cases.