| Volume 8 No. 1 January 2007 www.superfactory.com | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| From the Editor | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Superfactory is proud to announce that we will be a sponsor of the first TWI Summit this coming June in Orlando. We are also a sponsor of the 2007 Lean Accounting Summit.
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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| Manufacturing Excellence News | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| In the Blog | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Get a regular dose of blunt manufacturing reality by subscribing to the Evolving Excellence blog.
Evolving Excellence received some media coverage again last month, with the Myths of Manufacturing Productivity post being mentioned on CNBC. That prompted a follow-up post with comments we received from several economists, and a second follow-up with data partially confirming the problem we discussed.
Recent posts in the Evolving Excellence blog include:
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| Book Review | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Getting the Right Things Done For companies to be competitive, leaders must engage people at all levels in order to focus their energy and enable them to apply lean principles to everything they do. Strategy deployment, called hoshin kanri by Toyota, has proven to be the most effective process for meeting this ongoing challenge. The book is designed to provide readers with a framework for understanding the key components of strategy deployment: agreeing on the company’s “True North,” working within the PDCA cycle, getting consensus through “catchball,” the deployment leader concept and A3 thinking. It links action to theory and reminds us that lean tools - like value-stream maps, kaizen events, and 5S - are only the means to an end, not ends in themselves.
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 Too Much Selfish Thinking by Bob Emiliani
The Lean community has struggled for many years to gain buy-in from senior executives in large corporations. Perhaps it's been so hard because there is too much selfish thinking and not enough Lean thinking. If so, what countermeasures can be applied?
There is no doubt that Lean management has been mischaracterized as a “manufacturing thing” for most of the last 30 years, with a nearly singular focus on continuous improvement and the use Lean tools. This has been a principal factor that has limited the application of Lean principles and practices beyond operations, and also, of course, into services businesses, government, non-profits, etc. It also helps explain why nearly 30 years after Lean came to America there are only a few big businesses that practice Lean management pretty well. Shouldn’t there be many more?
Taiichi Ohno told us that Lean (TPS) was a management system in 1988. Yet it is only within the last few years that the larger community of Lean practitioners has started to realize this. However, a very small community of president and CEO-level Lean practitioners at The Jacobs Manufacturing Company and The Wiremold Company in Connecticut knew this in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. For nearly 20 years they, and some others, have been passionate advocates of Lean as a management system, yet few presidents or CEOs of big companies have listened.
The question is how do you get presidents and CEOs on board? The general nature of the problem is one of trying to get people to think and work differently – to better serve the interests of customers first, as well as employees, investors, suppliers, and even management itself. It’s definitely not a new problem.
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| Other Perspectives | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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In part one of this three-part series, we established that lean manufacturing can only help you over the long term if you have committed to making it a company wide standard operating policy. If, instead, you make a raft of positive changes during your lean transition and then expect the program to be self sustaining, chances are that employees will slip back into what’s comfortable and easy, rather than what’s efficient and lean. The bottom line? A company that commits to a proactive, continuous lean effort has a far better chance of succeeding.
One major foundation pillar of lean is the sustained support that its initiatives must receive from management. Executive management supports initiatives by showing support for the people running them. When there is no support, workers lose enthusiasm; there is nothing driving them to improve. Any momentum that was originally created will fizzle out.
Management’s responsibilities don’t end there. Since lean is fueled in large part by the people on the plant floor, management must ensure it provides an outlet for employees so they can make suggestions when they note problems in their workspaces. Such problems could include faulty or unnecessary processes, missing tools, even the improper placement of certain pieces of machinery.
Remember, your shop floor workers are your front line people and, as a result, they are the most likely to be both: 1) frustrated by waste and 2) able to quickly benefit from lean improvements.
But how do you empower employees to make their own lean-related suggestions? How do you take these suggestions and put them into practice?
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Thanks to popular demand we have categorized, edited and updated our most popular blog posts into a 400-page book to be published later this month. To learn more or to be notified when it becomes available, 
