| Volume 7 No. 9 September 2006 www.superfactory.com | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The next few weeks bring us the two premier manufacturing excellence conferences of the year. The Lean Accounting Summit will be held in Orlando later this month, and the AME Annual Conference will be in Dallas in October. The folks at the Lean Accounting Summit have also started the Lean Accounting Newsletter with regular updates on the lean accounting field.
I also encourage you to visit the Evolving Excellence blog. Our posts have been picked up by several mainstream media outlets, and we have also added several new features such as audio podcasting.
As always we appreciate your support for our mission to spread manufacturing excellence knowledge. Click here for more information on sponsorships.
- Kevin Meyer |
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Get a regular dose of in-your-face manufacturing reality by subscribing to the Evolving Excellence blog. Recent posts in the Evolving Excellence blog include:
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Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems and Transformable Factories In this book the problems of theory and practice of development in Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems and Transformable Factories for various machine-building branches and above all automotive industry are discussed. Problems are studied concerning the development of a new class of production systems which in comparison to the Flexible Manufacturing systems are composed of a far less quantity of machine-tools. In comparison to the conventional automated lines they make it possible to rapidly transform the equipment for new products manufacturing. In 37 chapters more then 50 authors from all over the world discuss the main aspects of the mentioned above problem using their latest scientific and practical achievements. |
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 What is Kaizen? by Bruce Hamilton Over the years my study of TPS has been guided by book learning, tacit learning and more good luck than bad. One stroke of good luck occurred in February 1987 when I picked up a copy of Kaizen: The Key To Japan's Competitive Success by Masaaki Imai. At that time, most literature about TPS was focusing on its technical aspects, so this book which focused on harnessing ideas and creativity was different. Also around that time, early TPS efforts at my company were foundering. We had “lowered the water level of inventory to expose the rocks” and to our dismay were discovering more rocks than we’d bargained for. We needed more problem solvers, and Mr. Imai’s book quickly became a blueprint for individual and small group improvements that bailed us out of troubled waters. It was truly good luck that led me to Imai’s definition of kaizen which I’ll paraphrase as “many small improvements that come from the commonsense and experience of the people who do the work.” Thus, many small improvements chipped away and eventually dislodged the rocks that threatened to sink our TPS efforts. As a manager, my tacit learning from this experience was that shop floor employees were brilliant and creative – some more than others, but all of them smart, proud of their work and extremely willing to be problem-solvers. Of course there are a lot of books that tell managers that, but that’s academic. To really understand it we have to practice it! While Mr. Imai explicitly described the nature of kaizen with many tangible examples, he was quick to point out that understanding Kaizen requires practice: learning by doing. Toyota refers to this as “tacit learning” as opposed to academic or book learning. Anyone who has learned to ride a bike can understand what tacit learning is. It’s visceral and emotional as well as intellectual. It’s not academic. And I had a serious need for more problem-solvers. So there’s another stroke of luck: Our self-inflicted crisis (hitting the rocks) created a need – and opportunity -- to take a chance. While I like to think myself egalitarian, if there had not been a crisis, the opportunity to expand the problem-solving role beyond a few support personnel and supervisors might not have occurred. Never-ending improvement – that’s kaizen. This is what I learned by “riding the bike.” But the common translation of “continuous improvement” doesn’t do it justice because it doesn’t connote the changes that also occur within the persons who have created the improvement. The act of being creative to solve a problem or make an improvement has not only educated us but also inspired us to go further. Now tacit learning kicks in again: Concerns by supervision that work will not get done are replaced by more time to do work. Unfounded fears that “employees will mess up” give way to positive anticipation. More ideas from more employees offered more freely and more frequently generates an organizational confidence to do more than what was previously thought possible. Every day is a day for more improvement. My tacit learning? That Kaizen is for “Everybody, Everyday” (GBMP’s slogan.) The momentum and pace of improvement is governed by the breadth and depth of learning and participation of every single person in the organization. True, there are some employees with more ideas than others, but the act of each and every employee offering his or her creativity changes the organization.
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In 1990 Jones, Womack and colleagues had published ‘The Machine That Changed the World’ as a description of the Toyota Production Systems , and coined the term Lean. The book itself was an offshoot of their research project, funded by the Western automobile manufacturers, to define World Class in automotive manufacture.
The answer, Toyota’s system, did not surprise anyone in the industry, and what the research failed to adequately address was not what Lean was, but how to implement it. There are at least three different perspectives on Lean. The first was Shigeo Shingo ’s industrial engineering perspective. There are currently ongoing debates about Shingo’s influence on the Toyota system.
The facts are that he taught Industrial Engineering courses at Toyota for over 25 years from 1955 onwards. He taught the people who implemented Lean the engineering principles behind it. He saw Lean in terms of Non-Stock Production – producing with minimal inventory. There is a grain of truth in Dan Jones’ comment above, in that Toyota have never been too interested in theory, only practice.Shingo was a theorist as well as an engineer, and his theory was articulated as far back as 1946.
The theory was that manufacturing is a network of process (product flow) and operations and that non-stock production meant focusing on flow not individual operational efficiency. He derived this from Henry Ford’s dictum that the longer anything is in the factory, the more it costs, at exactly the time when Sloan and GM were doing the direct opposite. How much Toyota were influenced by this theory, or how far Shingo’s theory is just an explanation of Toyota’s developing practice is being debated, but there is a match between theory and practice. The overarching theory behind this is the theory of demand amplification, a result of Systems Dynamics research.
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