Many companies have not tapped the full potential their product development process, because their management thinking has not evolved as quickly as the technology for execution:
they still approach the Highly variable information-generating work of product development as if it were like manufacturing, failing to recognize it is profoundly different.
Details why lean product development works and applying manufacturing principles to product development does not:
(from LEI, David Verble article, follow link)
Examples of the confusion caused by unclear standards in engineering, late change submissions, and HR facilitating management agreement to support training by David Verble.
https://www.lean.org/the-lean-post/articles/no-standard-no-problem-not-really-its-a-big-problem
key points:
“Most companies have KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), but these are generally operational output or end-of-process measures. They also are “lagging indicators” because they show the result of the work performed but not how smoothly and efficiently the work is flowing in the process–unless they fail to achieve output KPIs. With no process or work standards, those completing the process have no way to evaluate how they are performing or where to focus problem-solving when there are problems in output results.”
“Without a standard, there is no way to see what improvements need to be made to improve performance or see the impact of changes that have been made. It’s hard to improve on a base of chaos.”
1) you can’t just drop responsibility for something on people. You must make sure it works with their situation and priorities if you expect them to follow through on it.
2) you have to understand the broader context of what else is going in the company when you ask for agreement to a plan.
*It’s the thinking that is important
I originally read
At Toyota, The Automation Is Human-Powered in 2017. An AME conversation this morning reminded me of it:
“While the rest of the auto industry increasingly uses robots in manufacturing, Toyota has taken a contrarian stance by accentuating human craftsmanship.”
it also contains some info stating historically there is a direct correlation between productivity growth, which robots should naturally contribute to, and job creation using ATM's as an example (see chart).
Two more from 2014 I found, and there few more in addition to this, but the same thinking applies.
Results from one of these articles:
“Toyota has eliminated about 10% of material-related waste from building crankshafts at Honsha. Kawai said the aim is to apply those savings to the next-generation Prius hybrid.”
“We cannot simply depend on the machines that only repeat the same task over and over again,” Kawai said. “To be the master of the machine, you have to have the knowledge and the skills to teach the machine.”
“Fully automated machines don’t evolve on their own; Mechanization itself doesn’t harm, but sticking to a specific mechanization may lead to omission of kaizen and improvement.”
https://financialpost.com/transportation/toyota-robots-humans
This one from PEOPLE POWER in Bloomberg, my notes, link below:
“Car makers have embraced automation and replaced humans with robots for years. But Toyota is deliberately taking a step backward and replacing automated machines in some factories in Japan and creating heavily manual production lines staffed with humans”
“It’s an unconventional choice for a Japanese company. Japan has by far the most industrial robots of any country, with an estimated 309,400 (pdf p. 17.) Only South Korea has a higher ratio of robots to humans.”
Toyota’s latest strategy has two main aspects:
“First, it wants to make sure that workers truly understand the work they’re doing instead of feeding parts into machines and being helpless when one breaks down.”
“Second, it wants to figure out ways to make processes higher quality and more efficient in the long run.”
“The company worries that automation means it has too many average workers and not enough craftsmen and masters.”
“So far, people taking back work done by robots at over 100 workspaces reduced waste in crankshaft production by 10%, and helped shorten the production line. Others improved axle production and cut costs for chassis parts.”
“We cannot simply depend on the machines that only repeat the same task over and over again. To be the master of the machine, you have to have the knowledge and the skills to teach the machine.”
“The manual lines are a refocus on “Kaizen,” or continuous improvement, and “Monozukuri,” which is essentially the art of making things well. It’s a re-commitment to management ideas behind the decades old Toyota Production System.”
“Machines are great at doing things quickly and at low cost. But people—especially ones with the experience of performing tasks themselves—bring craftsmanship, insight into process design, and consistency of quality. Toyota has found that the race to reduce the human element can end up making processes less efficient.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-04-06/humans-replacing-robots-herald-toyota-s-vision-of-future
Great article by FastCompany, key points:
It restructures a little bit every work shift.
10 hours in painting. Robots did much of the work, then as now, but they were supplied with paint through long hoses from storage tanks. “If we were painting a car red, before we could paint the next car white, we had to stop, flush the red paint out of the lines and the applicator tip, and reload the next color,” Georgetown literally threw away 30% of the pricey car paint it bought, cleaning it out of equipment and supply hoses when switching colors.
Cars now spend 8 hours in paint, instead of 10. The paint shop at any moment holds 25% fewer cars than it used to. Wasted paint? Practically zero. What used to require 100 gallons now takes 70.
Not only does Georgetown use less paint, it also buys less cleaning solvent and has dramatically reduced disposal costs for both. Together with new programming to make the robots paint more quickly, has increased the efficiency of its car-wash-sized paint booths from 33 cars an hour to 50.
“We’re getting the same volume with two booths that we used to get with three, so we shut down one of the booths.” If you want to trim your energy bill, try unplugging an oven big enough to bake 25 cars. Workers dismantled Top Coat Booth C, leaving the open floor space available for some future task.
shutting down Top Coat Booth C liberated a handful of maintenance engineers–who turned their attention to accelerating the next round of changes. Success, in that way, becomes the platform for further improvement. By the end of this year, Buckner and his team hope to have cut almost in half the amount of floor space the paint shop needs–all while continuing to paint 2,000 cars a day.
tenaciously competitive quality
Lean / continuous improvement have been around for more than a quarter-century.
You outflank them next decade. They just don’t realize it.
Toyota wasn’t just another workplace but a different way of thinking about work.
Contrasted to the American business culture of not admitting, or even discussing, problems in settings like meetings.
please talk to us about your problems so we can all work on them together.'”
improvement is much more realistic, much more human
improving something starts after understanding the standard – understanding how we do it now. If you don’t understand what you’re trying to improve, how do you know that your suggestion is an improvement?”
How come the checkout lines at Wal-Mart never get shorter?
How come the customer service of your cell-phone company never improves, year after year? How come my PC gets harder to operate with each software upgrade?
doing it in every single department, every single day. They’re doing it on their own
You simply can’t lose interest in it, shrug, and give up – any more than you can lose interest in your own future.
Doing the task and doing the task better become one and the same thing
Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board improves licensing process with Lean
Significantly reduced time to obtain license & eliminated 150-170 calls per month from frustrated customers. To zero
A look at improvements made by the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board to create a better, faster licensing process.
Washington Department of Social and Health Services
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bct_H8X7HoE&list=PUsuYgYm8vWyUNUfI3CMzuSQ
I will put together notes from this and have 2 more coming up.
quick draft of notes
3:20
6:00 need to know why
11:00 empathy for Governor; making the case
16:00 barriers at the senior level
17:50
26:00 your why must get in tune with what they believe
29:00
34:00 why biological imperative to lean
DSHS results
37:00 work environment
40:00 make supervisors ready; don’t know how to manage
41:00 strategic plans real, change
46:00 no action; alienation; visual communication
48:00 QU
getting to front line
48:30 until we’re ready – energy
49:00 Heirarchy
51:00 last 5% wasting 15%
52:00 QU
1st thing when you get back to office check in with them; they think you’re at a party; piña coladas Las Vegas
Share something you learned, that it’s about them, and they get to have a more active voice
Share strategic plan
54:00 but you have a stakeh
Squarespace is trying to figure out why embedding is not working but the link above should be ok for the interim
The Department of Social and Health Services is the State's largest agency with 2.2 million diverse clients including seniors, children, juvenile offenders, ...
Improved its transportation vehicle purchasing, resulting in $2.5million dollars cost avoidance in long-term vehicle replacement expense as well as achieving several other efficiency, environmental (cleaner air produced by reduced fuel emissions) and safety benefits. Read whole article pdf
2017 Strategic Lean Project Report link:
I have a lot of notes from this, may post if requested; watch it twice
Lean and the global Covid-19 vaccine race
Pall Corp. used lean product and process development (LPPD) principles to reduce normal 40 week development times down to 8 weeks.
Example how a commodity seller can become a solution provider growing market share.
CEMEX is one of the rare firms executing lean business strategy beyond the merger & acquisition stage.
Article here: https://www.strategy-business.com/article/00325
These are my unedited notes, however I HIGHLY recommended reading the article. Twice.
Also leveraged mergers & acquisitions including entering new businesses in ready-mix concrete and aggregates
Strategy
long track record in lean operations (“ruthless operating efficiency”) evolved to become one of the most successful companies from an emerging market, and developed a high level of customer responsiveness. It delivers cement within 20 minutes of receiving an order in many locales. Its international business strategy enabled CEMEX to grow rapidly during the 1990s and early 2000s, when it became one of the biggest cement companies in the world.
while maintaining consistently high profitability levels. (In 2014, the company reported US$2.7 billion EBITDA on revenues of $15.7 billion.)
developed a capability for environmental sustainability:
decreasing the company’s own fuel use
removing or mitigating pollutants in materials
and looking for ways its products and services could lead to sustainable practices for all the industries CEMEX serves.
get good at postmerger integration, and extract more value out of those assets than the former owners.
“Enforcing is really the right word. A good example is the emphasis we put on closing the books on the 1st or 2nd day of every month. A lot of managers initially wondered why it was so important to do this. They thought nothing would be lost if they did their closings on the seventh or eighth day. But we believed that having that information readily available would increase the likelihood that managers would make the right decisions. And the practice had a very high-level overseer: Mr. Zambrano himself, into whose email inbox all of these reports flowed. This was not subject to negotiation.”
accounting management
[any] product has a disadvantage in that a customer can find a substitute for it. A solution, by contrast, cannot be that easily replaced. So we started to develop offerings that more closely resembled solutions.
“For CEMEX to play that kind of role, the company needed new capabilities. We needed a new kind of executive, connected with the environment, who understood the real needs of any given locality. We changed old habits; for instance, in the past our people were not prepared to interact with our communities or with the media. We had become an efficient company with an inward-looking culture. But our operational guys realized that they needed to be able to talk to the media, and to local communities and their leaders. The operational guys had to recognize that it wasn’t enough to lower costs; they also had to connect with local people and address their concerns — for example, about the dust generated by trucks picking up materials.”
“The sales guys had to learn not to wait for people to come in with orders; if markets were soft, they had to go out and propose solutions to problems that had not yet been brought to public attention. “We don’t just mend holes in your street — we can prevent those holes from recurring for the next 30 years.” selling concrete
Partly it’s a matter of how we talk about these things with customers. We’re not just selling cement or ready-mix; we’re helping you build a street. We’re helping you build a home. We aren’t selling a product to you; we’re working with you on a solution.”
each business must recapture transport dollars. We won’t dictate how you do it, but we require that you recapture all your freight somehow.
Left to their own devices, big companies will continue to act big. They’ll put in more rules, procedures, and standardization. When you’re running a hyperlocal business like ready-mix concrete and aggregates, you can’t allow that to happen. You have to fight all the time to be small
about 40% of the direct cost of cement is wrapped up in [energy use], you need to watch the expense of fuel and electricity carefully.
Michael Balle is an excellent resource to learn from:
“Lean systems are really about establishing the conditions for learning - this is the key to a deeper understanding of lean.”
“From a leadership point of view this requires balancing the focus between today (solve problems now or you won’t have a tomorrow) and tomorrow (worry about the next product or you won’t have a tomorrow either). This never is simple and, again, can be learned only through experience.”
“In the end, the success or failure of any serious effort hinges on THE WILLINGNESS OF” senior executives “TO ADOPT revolutionary…”
great comment also: “people confuse a system to produce value more efficiently with a system to add value: continuously develop people to find better ways”
Business management values to live by:
- Customer satisfaction over company internal interests
- Problems are learning opportunities, not occasions for blame
- Shorter lead-times are better than longer ones
- Teamwork over individual heroes
- Fixing problems as they occur over working first and fixing later
Full article: Michael Ballé identifies a set of lean management values to live by
https://planet-lean.com/michael-balle-identifies-a-set-of-lean-management-values-to-live-by
Improving Your (Production) System - applies whether you’re producing a service or any other type of output
Healthcare practitioners share a set of tips hospitals can apply today to support their battle against the corona virus.
read here:
What to expect as a Lean Manager?
- depends on the CEO's commitment
Operational Excellence: the CEO has delegated to one of their executives a program to generate savings or improvements.
Lean transformation: the CEO is working with a coach to spend more time where the revenue generating business is done and change how they are running the company.
understand which problem we’re trying to solve:
a program of productivity improvement workshops to deliver savings,
or a program of gemba walks to deliver ideas and voluntary engagement in trying new ways of satisfying customers.
Great article by Michael Balle here: https://www.lean.org/balle/DisplayObject.cfm?o=5173
- Fundamentals of current design & engineering practices most companies are behind on – where is yours?
seminar presented by Allen Ward to Saab
knows as Material & Information Flow Map
Do you have a current state maps posted that’s dusty, changing colour and so outdated the corners are starting to curl? send me a photo, & read David’s article
‘The map is a problem solving tool for identifying, prioritizing, and addressing problems in work flow that affect performance as measured, first and foremost in terms of effectiveness in delivering the work flow (timing, quantity, and quality) to the customer.’
‘Cost is a separate issue, and efficiency is a concern that comes only after delivery.’
“These plans are meant to focus on contributing the operation’s hoshin (or strategic) priorities for the year. “
Part of this pdf (which is full of great business content)
http://www.lean-transform.com/Customer-Content/www/CMS/files/Learning_Together_LTGMarch2020.pdf
credit to Jason Premo
“A great example of how display of information visually can have a great impact on the customer experience. Paul Akers, the author of “2-second Lean” talks about “fix what bugs you” and we all have opportunities to do exactly that at work and home.”
like it or comment where he posted it on linkedin here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jasonpremo_leanthinking-leantransformation-leanmanufacturing-activity-6549633776622854144-A_Mu
“Several companies have Lean programs in place, but the uptake has too often proved superficial and focused solely on the use of tools (like 5S or visual management).
So far, most of industry has failed to understand the importance of changing managerial practices and leadership behaviors.”
https://planet-lean.com/lean-management-mining-industry
while driving to the airport in AZ I heard a podcast on how mining is adopting current business practices, drop me a line if interested
Clarification for those still confusing the two as somehow related or similar - they're not.
They’re two different things. One is tool for reducing variation. The other is a customer focused philosophy.
read on:
