LMJ Issue 9

Staying Lean Professor Peter Hines

GL£AN bigger profits by consolidating your lean and green agendas

Simply Sustainable: Louise Nicholls explains the relationship between efficiency, effectiveness and ethical trading at Marks & Spencer and why lean is an integral means for embedding sustainability in the supply chain.

Lean equals ‘green’: Jon Alder of Rexam explains how a decade’s worth of lean thinking is accelerating a new imperative to leverage green capabilities to improve competitive advantage and the bottom line.

Diagnosis before treatment: Warwick Business School’s Paul Walley discusses a recent lean healthcare implementation in Canada to demonstrate the value of understanding the current state before devising a lean improvement strategy.

The Lean Management Journal is supported by the Lean Enterprise Research Centre, Cardiff Business School

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Issue 09 March/April 2011 www.leanmj.com

In this issue:

Dear reader,

From grain prices and wasteful fishing practices to carbon emissions and oil depletion, the news is full of commentary on the way in which environmental concerns affect our personal lives and business interests. In the 12 months since LMJ last looked into the business case for lean and green, the UK alone has implemented more than 24 new pieces of environmental legislation which either amend existing laws or bring into force entirely new expectations about resource consumption and waste disposal.

There is much scaremongering and sensationalism around these issues and many more. But whether you are a climate change sceptic or a die-hard green activist the sheer quantity of legislation and regulation which governments around the world are now bringing to bear on businesses in an effort to minimise their negative impact on the sustainability of ecosystems and climatic conditions compels action.

For businesses used to thinking of environmental actions as compromises; as occasionally necessary exchanges of improved corporate image or customer ratings with competitive capability, this must be a worrying prospect. However the question which many are still failing to ask is “why compromise?” In this issue of LMJ we will examine a growing awareness that lean principles, tools and techniques can be leveraged to augment both environmental and competitive interests. The old lean adage ‘do more with less’ sums up both the challenge and the opportunity but, as we will see, supply chain dynamics and ingrained attitudes towards the way companies interact mean that this phrase easier said than done.

Other content in this issue challenges readers on whether they truly understand the systems and behaviours that influence their organisation’s performance (see Paul Walley’s article on p19) and whether they fully appreciate the potential of deceptively simplistic lean techniques, like visual management, for revolutionising their operations (see Gwendolyn Galworth’s artice p24). It is worth noting that both of these themes will also be addressed at two of LMJ’s forthcoming events, firstly at LM Connect, where speakers from a range of service and industry environments will lead discussion (see p43). And secondly at LMJs first Visual-Lean Work Shop and Tour, which will be led by Gwendolyn herself but will also include a gemba tour of Siemens Motion Controls’ plant in Congleton, Cheshire (see p22 for more details).

In addition to all of the above I am pleased to say that LMJ’s letters and comment section, launched in the last issue for the publication of considered practitioner observations on past LMJ content or current challenges in reader organisations, has continued to gain input (see p38).

Garnering reader commentary and providing a platform for experts working across sectors to share their insights is what LMJ is all about so Editorial please keep your contributions coming in.

Commissioning editor – Jane Gray j.gray@sayonemedia.com

Untill May, happy reading,

Design

Art Editor – Martin Mitchell m.mitchell@sayonemedia.com

Designers – Viicky Carlin, Alex Cole

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studio@sayonemedia.com

Jane Gray Commissioning Editor Email: j.gray@sayonemedia.com Tel: 0207 202 4890

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ma r ch / ap r i l 2 0 1 1 c o n t e n t s

05 Lean News 06 Towards lean and green

Keivan Zokaei, SA Partners gives some context into the challenges around finding lean and green synergies

07 Principles and purpose Resource resourcefulness

Andrew Kuyk, the Food and Drink Federation, looks at why the food sector is championing the business case for going green.

10 IT’s a wasteful world

Derek Kober, the Business Performance Innovation Network, looks at the environmental impact of the most universally pervasive characteristic of modern business, IT, and gives insight into the imperative behind making IT systems leaner and greener.

14 Simply Sustainable

Louise Nicholls, Marks & Spencer explains the company’s standpoint on the relationship between efficiency, effectiveness and ethical trading and why lean is an integral means for embedding sustainability in the company’s supply chain.

16 Lean equals ‘green’

Jon Alder, Rexam, explains how a decade’s worth of lean thinking in the group is accelerating a new imperative to leverage green capabilities for competitive advantage and to enhance the bottom line.

19 Diagnosis before treatment

Paul Walley, Warwick Business School, shares insights into a lean healthcare implementation in Canada to demonstrate the value of truly understanding current state before forming a lean improvement strategy or attempting to implement change.

24 Let the workplace speak

Ahead of her UK workshop for LMJ readers on workplace visuality Gwendolyn Galsworth, the Visual-Lean Institute, gives a grounding in the often underestimated value of building tangible lean environments and highlights the potential so many organisations are failing to capture.

28 Process focus The role of HR in lean deployment.

The human touch: LMJ’s editor, Jane Gray, talks to lean practitioners in manufacturing and financial services to discover how the growth of lean in large enterprises is necessitating a new approach to the engagement of HR departments in lean implementations.

32 The history and evolution of: Value stream mapping

Jim Luckman and David Verble, faculty members of the Lean Enterprise Institute, contribute the next installment in LMJ’s History and evolution series.

This article traces the origins of one of the most widely used of all lean tools, value stream mapping, and explains the evolution of mapping techniques as they have expanded into new industries.

36 Special Report

Jane Gray, editor of LMJ, reports on the presentations discussion and controversy experienced at a London based lean and green community meeting held on March 3

38 Letters and comment

Responses to articles and commentary on real implementation challenges. This issue’s contributions come from a range of authors including: Andy Woods, Adnams; Chris Galante, Boeing and Jeff McGowan, Johnson and Johnson.

42 Book review

Owen Jones, Cardiff University, reviews John Bicheno’s interactive manual for lean facilitators, The Lean Games Book.

43 Events

Britannia House, 45-53 Prince of Wales Road, Norwich, NR1 1BL T +44 (0)1603 671300 F + 44 (0)1603 618758 www.sayonemedia.com.

Lean management journal: ISSN 2040-493X. Copyright © SayOne Media 2011.

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04 Introducing the editors

Introducing your editors Articles for LMJ are reviewed and audited by our experienced editorial board. They collaborate on comment against articles and guide the coverage of subject matter.

Jacob Austad

LeanTeam, Denmark

Professor Zoe Radnor

Cardiff Business School

Bill Bellows

Ebly Sanchez

John Bicheno

Peter Watkins

Norman Bodek

Wendy Wilson

Brenton Harder

Dr Keivan Zokaei

Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne

Lean Enterprise Research Centre, Cardiff Business School

PCS Press

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Credit Suisse

Volvo Group

GKN

Warwick Manufacturing Group, University of Warwick

SA Partners

More information on our editorial board, their experience, and views on lean is available on the LMJ website: www.leanmj.com 4

New help for lean practitioners across sectors LMJ editorial board member Keivan Zokaei has released a new book, edited in collaboration with systems thinking advocates John Seddon and Brendan O’Donovan. The work, Systems Thinking: From Heresy to Practice gives insight into case studies (many described by past contributors to LMJ) in

which systems thinking has been leveraged for improvement.

This includes material from both public and private sector case studies and aims to clarify the difference between conventional approaches towards organisational change and those that use systems thinking has been.

Lean father to release new book Jim Womack, co-author of seminal lean works, The Machine That Changed The World and Lean Thinking is due to release a new

book titled Gemba Walks. The work will give insight from possibly the Western world’s most influential figure in lean practice for gemba

visits and share Womack’s thoughts on the application of specific tools and the role of management in sustaining lean.

Spear’s Contribution celebrated ASQ, the world’s largest network of quality resources and experts, will award the Philip Crosby Medal to Steven J. Spear at a ceremony on May 15 in Pittsburgh USA. This accolade for the author of The High Velocity

Edge has been awarded in recognition of Spear’s contribution the body of knowledge around quality through the identification of common factor for organisational success across sectors.

Banking behaviours The debate over bankers’ bonuses continues with Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Stephen Hester defending the decision to award £950m in bonuses to investment banking staff this year despite the Bank posting an annual loss of £1.1m in 2010.

In response to criticism Hester responded: “Our ability to attract,

retain and motivate the best people is still not what we want it to be. Our business challenges and the external environment lead to management compromises that add risk to the achievement of our business goals.”

Hester was confident that RBS is: “Working hard to move forward and balance staff motivation with

external acceptance that past mistakes have been addressed.”

However, this statement seems to contradict a widely accepted truth in the lean community that incentive schemes drive behaviours and that failing to understand the dynamics of you reward systems can distort performance and an organisation’s ability to create real customer value.

Fishing for change

Now, with resource depletion being given a high profile by documentaries like The End of the Line and

the recent Channel 4 television series, headed by the food writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the need for change has gained greater momentum.

The latter programme alone helped to gather more than 650,000 signatures for a petition to end the practice of dumping catches which exceeded EU quotas and there is now an opportunity for a leaner approach to waste and resource utilisation to guide fishing reforms.

If you have any news that you think would interest and benefit the lean community please let us know. Send submissions to the commissioning editor Jane Gray: j.gray@sayonemedia.com

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March 1 saw a major milestone for the fishing industry as EU ministers campaigned to reform the infamous quota system which has driven over 40 years of wasteful fishing practice. As much as two-thirds of the fish caught in some areas is thrown back into the water, usually dead, as a result of the current EU system of fishing quotas.

Towards lean and green Dr Keivan Zokaei gives some context to the challenges around finding lean and green synergies.

more frequent deliveries into, and out of, a factory. While this follows lean principles it can also raise CO2 emissions.

perational excellence has a mature toolbox which is underpinned by decades of continuous improvement and dissemination of knowledge. Lean is about ‘tomorrow better than today’ and creating learning organisations which systematically eradicate all constraints to economic goals. In pursuing this goal lean organisations have learnt to create engaging environments where every employee is able to bring about necessary change and to sustain it.

However, many companies have started to find a better balance. To start with this will exist in a way which separates leanness from greenness, developing a kind of ‘ambidexterity’ with the two interests. These companies separate lean from environmental management and try to avoid any negative effects caused by their economic success on the environment, but they overlook a potentially catalytic relationship.

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Environmental management, on the other hand, has previously been more concerned with technical fixes and top-down implementation.

Lean’s greatest contribution to environmental management is in creating alignment. Lean offices across different industries have the potential to leverage continuous improvement knowledge behind the implementation of green objectives, not in an effort to teach green experts ‘what to do’, but rather ‘how to implement’ and then ‘how to sustain’.

A number of key stages can be stipulated to trace the progress of lean and green maturity in organisations. At the less mature end of the scale we tend to see organisations harbouring the opinion that there are ‘trade-offs’ to be made between the two considerations. For example, the implementation of smaller but

A small number of companies have leaped to a stage of maturity where lean and green are seen to be mutually beneficial and a two-pronged ‘lean and green’ strategy is systemically pursued using lean tools traditionally employed for the elimination of economic waste.

The final stage of maturity is where lean and green become synonymous. Arguably Interface Inc, Marks & Spencer and even Toyota have achieved this. Interestingly, Taguchi Ohno described quality in terms of minimising “the loss imparted to society from the time the product is shipped”. This requires a systemic approach to the understanding of lean and implementation thereof.

In writing this introduction Dr Zokaei would like to acknowledge the original contribution of Fabien Martinez and Diego Vazquez to development of the stages of lean and green maturity.

Companies who adopt a holistic approach to lean and green reap benefits. Deploying a bespoke lean and green toolbox on the shop floor engaged lean, green and engineering teams from a multi-national food manufacturer in a recent study. In a single weeklong kaizen event, the improvement team identified 16% of the site’s total energy consumption and 15% of water usage as waste. Continuous improvement teams were formed around the identified opportunities and A3 management was deployed to deliver the results.

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Furthermore, since this approach clearly should not to be limited to a single firm or factory, an extended value stream project pulled together representatives from across the supply chain to map an end-to-end food chain. This led to the identification over £6m in potential cost savings and a similar figure in potential sales uplift as well as around 15,000 tonnes of CO2 and 40,000 m3 of water saving.

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More important than these impressive savings themselves however, is the fact that the likelihood of sustaining these environmental and economic benefits is far higher due to the use of a lean problem solving and deployment methodology.

Resource resourcefulness Andrew Kuyk

Resource

resourcefulness O

n one level, the business case for going green is very straightforward – being more efficient in the way you use inputs has a direct and obvious payback by saving on costs and boosting profitability.

It also helps the corporate image, with or without added ‘green-wash’.

But to be a truly sustainable business is a much more challenging task than simple efficiency.

It means looking beyond the business itself to the broader supply chain, the resources used in the production of primary raw materials and how your customers use (and dispose of) the products you make. It is nothing less than achieving a better quality of life for everyone, now and in the future, by helping to safeguard natural resources and using them to support the needs of current and future generations – without which businesses themselves will not have a future.

P rinciples and

The UK Government Office for Science recently published its Global Food and Farming

purpose

As the voice of the UK food and drink industry, the Food and Drink Federation (FDF) represents the largest manufacturing sector in the UK. Our membership is made up of businesses of all sizes with a combined turnover of £72.8bn and employing some 440,000 people (14% of the UK’s manufacturing workforce) – not a minor industry by any means! This is why we at FDF see sustainability as being vital to everything we do – essential not only to the competitiveness of our members, but also to our work on food safety, health and wellbeing.

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Andrew Kuyk, director of sustainability at the Food and Drink Federation, looks at why the food sector is championing the business case for going green.

If there is any one message to take away from this report it’s that ‘business as usual’ is no longer an option – we will have to produce more food while using fewer natural resources

Futures report, which looks in detail at the sheer complexity and immensity of the issue of food security and the consequences of depleting resources. If there is any one message to take away from this report it’s that ‘business as usual’ is no longer an option – we will have to produce more food while using fewer natural resources. We have to change what we are doing if we are to meet the challenges ahead.

I think Unilever’s CEO Paul Polman articulated the business case for sustainability eloquently at a recent City Food lecture on food security. He stated that as a father he didn’t want to “be party to any economic system that steals resources that rightfully belong to future generations”, and that as a businessman, he knows that his company “requires a stable environment and a continuous supply of raw materials to survive and grow.” Growth is of course key to businesses, but it is no longer a case of businesses choosing between sustainability and the bottom line – businesses of the future must deliver both. And this rings true whichever sector you work in.

As far back as 2007, FDF launched a Five-fold Environmental Ambition as a means of taking practical and achievable action to tackle the highly complex problem of climate change. Last year we reported on our members’ progress over the three-year period since launching the Ambition. Key achievements were: A reduction in members’ carbon emissions by 21% since 1990 A saving of more than two million cubic metres of water since 2009 Cutting food and packaging waste sent to landfill to just 9%.

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Cutting waste is a good example of where environmental best practice has brought about positive financial and environmental benefits. From a business perspective, it simply does not make sense to invest in raw materials to create products, the remnants of which are then simply thrown away – especially at a time when commodity prices are volatile and businesses are still recovering from the recession.

On environmental grounds, waste is a problem not only because of the considerable resources, including energy, that go into producing, protecting, distributing, storing and preparing products now deemed to be waste in the first place, but the added complexity of how to get rid of these products in a way that does not negatively aspect the environment. Solutions such as landfill raise further problems, particularly with food waste which produces methane – a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than CO2. With this in mind, our members have committed to sending zero food and packaging waste to landfill by 2015 at the latest.

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Resource resourcefulness Andrew Kuyk

FDF members include big global companies such as Kraft Foods and Müller Dairy, both of whom have successfully incorporated effective waste management into their business models and as a result, are reaping the benefits.

Kraft Foods UK

Kraft’s sustainability programme has a major focus on waste and is using best practices to more effectively manage what waste goes to landfill. Kraft Foods UK has found that viewing waste in monetary terms makes more impact than only reporting the number of cases of waste arising. Regular reporting and updates provide early awareness of products at risk of creating waste and allow teams to work on solutions to avoid product write-off. This enables the team to see how their actions reduce waste to landfill.

The report also allows category teams to see products that regularly come up on the report, so drivers of waste can be addressed on an individual product level.

Results in 2010 were positive – in the first three quarters, 480 tonnes of food waste were avoided through clearance, the staff shop and charitable donation.

Müller Dairy

One of Müller’s targets is to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill by 66% by 2011 based on the tonnage sent to landfill in 2007, and aims to achieve zero waste to landfill by 2015. While Müller Dairy is working hard to reduce as much food waste as possible, there are occasions when, for a variety of reasons, surplus stock that is still within its ‘best before’ date does not reach retailers’ shelves. Instead of these products being thrown away, the company now contacts national charity FareShare. The charity takes perfectly edible food that would otherwise be destined for landfill and distributes it to a network of 600 community organisations around the UK working with people who struggle to get a regular meal.

As you can see, environmentally-prompted business benefits can range from improved internal reporting systems to partnerships with organisations which have a need for what you no longer want. Other solutions found by members include finding new markets for waste, and using waste to generate energy.

Lean promotes eradication of all sorts of trade-offs and all sorts of waste at the point of root cause. Although I am sure the charities mentioned here are happy to make use of available waste streams, I suggest that the approaches shown are still in the realms of short term fixes and that there is more that could, and should, be done to become efficient and effective in both business and environmental terms.

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This is a valuable article for readers but it could go further. The two case studies shown here from Kraft and Müller explain how food waste can be distributed through charitable distribution or similar means, however I feel this approach could perpetuate trade-off thinking?

P rinciples and

Keivan Zokaei comments

purpose

I hope that by showing true leadership, the food manufacturing industry has shown what is possible when companies and stakeholders alike are on board and committed to making a difference. Businesses of the future no longer have the luxury of opting to get engaged in issues of environmental sustainability – it is now a necessity for every business to understand their impact and to actively seek to make a positive difference. E N D

IT’s a wasteful world Derek Kober, senior vice president of the Business Performance Innovation Network, looks at the environmental impact of the most universally pervasive element of modern business, IT, and gives insight into the imperative behind making IT systems leaner and greener.

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computer disposal is the fastest growing type of waste in the world

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he crisis of mass power consumption in corporate computing has come to a head. The power required to run data centres in the US alone is estimated to be as much as that produced by five power plants in a year. Energy expenditures and requirements have doubled in the last five years, and computer disposal is the fastest growing type of waste in the world, according to Stanford University researchers and Greenpeace.

Consequently, green computing and energy efficiency are starting to assume a front-seat position on the priority list of IT departments. Most see the need for better utilisation and consolidation of systems as important in combating soaring energy costs and the staggering expenses of lighting, power and cooling that data centres incur as they handle more data and transactions than ever before. But concern and action are two different things. Most IT professionals say green computing is at least somewhat of a priority, but relatively few have any specific plans in place and even fewer have actually done anything about it.

What’s needed is for organisations and IT executives to embrace the synergy between the need to be more environmentally responsible in corporate computing and the tangible business benefits and efficiencies that can be achieved through a green computing approach. Too often, sustainability measures are considered as an expensive prospect, and particularly so in the lingering recessionary period, where competitive survival has often trumped environmental sustainability initiatives. But the reality is that going green can positively affect the bottom line by saving companies the associated costs of operating an inefficient data centre infrastructure.

i t ’ s a wast e ful w o rld D e r e k Ko b e r

In a study, Lean & Green, that we conducted two years ago at the Business Performance Innovation Network (bpinetwork.org), we focused on educating CIOs about ways that IT organisations can benefit the environment, reduce power usage and lower their costs through more efficient computing and data storage practices.

The Lean & Green programme commissioned a comprehensive online survey of more than 150 North American IT professionals and executives along with executive advisory board dialogues to measure and quantify their needs, obstacles and attitudes as they weigh decisions about investing in green technology. The survey examined challenges and success scenarios in creating lean computing infrastructures that deliver exceptional performance in an environmentally sound IT setting.

More than 20% of respondents thought their organisations could save $100,000 or more per year by reducing server and network storage energy consumption

The study showed that despite rising costs of data centre energy, and increasing concern over global warming, IT energy consumption continues to expand within a large percentage of organisations. In fact, nearly half of these companies have consumed to the point of running out of space, power, or cooling. IT professionals by and large realise that improvements must be made but most give their companies poor or failing grades in green achievement in IT and can only cite a few big companies as leading the way in green computing practices.

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P rinciples and

Fortunately, new technologies exist to make real lean and green improvements a reality in the short term. Just how quickly these technologies and practices are adopted is a factor of additional education and awareness as well as overcoming the inertia to make change.

purpose

Organisations on the leading edge of environmental and efficient data storage and processing practices are, however, realising an important truth – that they can save “green” (i.e. cash) and be green at the same time. In other words, it’s not cost prohibitive to be environmentally sound, but rather it helps save substantial sums of money – to the tune of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars annually over the long term. More than 20% of respondents thought their organisations could save $100,000 or more per year by reducing server and network storage energy consumption. Six percent could save more than $10m annually.

The need for a new green computing and Eco-Logical approach

Enterprises are going to have to deal with the looming data centre environmental crisis in the short term, particularly with increasing server sprawl and spiraling power consumption. It is the responsibility of IT professionals to address these issues through exploring alternatives, updating traditional but inefficient systems, and looking at available resources. As the results from the Lean & Green survey and the Think EcoLogical programme suggest, profitability and environmental responsibility are not conflicting goals but rather the only possible future strategy.

In the Think Eco-Logical study, we set out to examine the progress and pitfalls of the IT function and to educate enterprises and organizations on how to combine environmental concern and commitment with rational and intelligent business management. Under this new mantra, IT professionals can appeal to the environmental ‘eco’ consciousness as well as the ‘logical’ needs for bottom-line improvements. The initiative helps blend corporate responsibility for increased sustainability with the need to manage expenses and increase performance.

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How do you feel that improved ecological practices would most benefit your business? (select all that apply)

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i t ’ s a wast e ful w o rld D e r e k Ko b e r

What are some of the drivers and pressures that may cause your company to embrace the Think Eco-Logical mantra? (select all that apply)

However, although Kober’s research raises an important alarm, there is no clear offer of a way forward. What exactly do the new technologies Kober refers to entail? It is easy to make a call to arms but harder to formulate a battle plan. This needs to be progressed from noble intentions to concrete actions!

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Derek Kober’s article is a wake-up call to the business community regarding the imminent damage to corporate profitability and to the global environment caused by the soaring energy demands required to run IT data centres. Most industry leaders lack a plan for how to deal with the fact that data centre energy expenditures continue to double every five years.

P rinciples and

Brenton Harder comments

purpose

More and more, an organisation’s viability depends on how that entity addresses environmental sustainability. But the reality is that most organisations have a long way to go towards achieving comprehensive and meaningful advances for sustainable technology infrastructures. As the findings of multiple IT environmental studies reveal, the noble intentions of the majority are overshadowed by the inactivity of the many. E N D

Simply sustainable Louise Nicholls, head of responsible trading for food at Marks & Spencer explains why lean is integral to embedding sustainability in the company’s supply chain.

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arks & Spencer (M&S) is one of the UK’s leading retailers with over 21 million customers visiting its stores every week. This translates to the sale of 2.7 billion clothing, home and food products, and everything is sourced responsibly from 2,000 suppliers around the world.

The company was founded, back in 1884, on five core values of quality, value, service, innovation and trust. Springing off these qualities M&S launched the sustainability initiative, Plan A, in January 2007 which set out 100 commitments to be achieved within five years. Last March (2010) M&S extended Plan A to 180 commitments to achieve by 2015, with the ultimate goal of becoming the world’s most sustainable major retailer. By April 2011 90 of the original 100 commitments will have been achieved and M&S has gone from a position where the plan cost the business £200m to a point where it has generated £50m savings in a single year.

Lean thinking in its simplest form is about greater resource and process efficiency. M&S first established the link with ethical trade and lean thinking when trying to build a business case for Bangladesh Textile factories tackling the issues of low wages and much needed investment in training for managers and workers.

Using three factories the programme had three elements; Productivity training consisted of tutoring the industrial engineers in line balancing (assessing the correct number of workers and machines are in the right places), time study and standard times to make a garment, worker rights training and supervisor and middle management training.

Plan A: Because there is no plan B

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Richard Gillies, director of Plan A comments on what sustainability means to the M&S business plan, p36

After 10 months all the factories had improved significantly.

Productivity had increased between 20% and 61%, average wages increased by between 8% and 42% based on a standard 8 hour working day, excluding any overtime payments or incentives.

In addition absenteeism reduced from 9% to 1% and migration decreased from 8% to 3%.

In a similar way when looking at supply chain mapping we have been able to show strong links between applying lean manufacturing and significantly improved environmental performance. In an extended supply chain improvement project, representatives from across the supply chain were put together to map an end-to-end ready meal chain from raw materials to the shelf. This has indentified considerable economic and environmental potential for improvement that will reap benefits. More importantly however, it showed how well established lean improvement techniques can be adopted to identify green synergies.

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Simply sustainable Louise Ni cholls

M&S has introduced a scorecard for its food suppliers that gives equal value to measures in five areas: commercial, technical, new product development, service and sustainability. The sustainability measure called ‘How we do business’ consists of lean manufacturing, ethical trade and environment. The lean manufacturing measures integrate Professor Peter Hines’ (SA partners) comprehensive model for creating a sustainable lean enterprise.

M&S has committed to getting 25% of their food from sites who achieve gold on

sustainability measure by 2015. This will be a major step towards sustainable sourcing for M&S and can be considered a radical improvement in the retail sector.

Marks & Spencer views lean as more than just an economic tool. The company aims to achieve a symbiosis of the lean, ethical and green objectives by drawing on the continuous improvement culture long advocated by lean thinkers. To achieve sustainable manufacturing and business for the future, lean, environment and ethical performance need to be given combined attention. E N D

Keivan Zokaei comments

There is some very important learning to be taken from the M&S approach to lean and green. M&S has introduced lean thinking, not just to realise commercial benefits, but as an ethical and environmental tool. For M&S, lean, green and ethical trading are part of the same strategy which expects investments in one area to enhance all. Furthermore, by investing in Plan A, M&S have raised the bar for competition.

M&S’s success with Plan A makes a strong business case for ‘going green’ and yet again proves that there is a real market out there for greener products and greener brand names. Moreover, it proves that, given the right understanding and a suitable implementation strategy, lean has the potential to simultaneously improve the organisation’s economic, environmental and ethical performance.

Peter Watkins comments:

Overall reflection points A systematic approach to supplier development is key. This must actually support them in doing and learning to apply lean and green – not just measure them on it ! We should learn from the lessons of Toyota here. Toyota admitted that they have failed at sustaining an improvement culture with some of their supply chain in NA and Europe (addressed by Steven Spear in “Chasing the Rabbit”). Any approach with suppliers has to address changing the thinking and doing of their senior leaders. Leaders must be teachers otherwise improvements will not be sustained.

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P rinciples and

UK bribery laws New, stricter, bribery legislation is soon to be introduced in the UK. There are some concerns that this might make companies responsible for supplier activities as well as their own. It might be worth considering how the new bribery laws could influence sustainability score cards like those used by M&S.

purpose

Further challenge points Extended Value Stream Analysis Using EVSM as a method for partnering with suppliers is crucial, but we should also focus on risk, environmental impact ,cost , lean flow and ethics . Risks include a range of influences including political, logistical, importing , currency , transportation and so on. If risk is high the whole supply chain can break down. This needs to be integrated into EVSM activities.

Jon Alder has been director of group lean enterprise at Rexam for 10 years. Here he explains how a decade’s worth of lean thinking in the group is accelerating a new imperative to leverage green capabilities for competitive advantage and to enhance its bottom line.

Lean equals g ‘ reen’ R

exam is a global consumer packaging company. We make beverage cans and a range of rigid plastic packaging for a variety of applications. Our turnover is more than £4.5bn and our operating footprint places us in almost every part of the world.

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Rexam has a long history of applying lean principles to its operations, and for over a decade, has been on an exciting improvement journey. The global organisation is fully aware of, and engaged in, using lean thinking and the culture of operational excellence is well embedded.

In recent years there has been an increase in customer and end user expectations in terms of packaging and the environment and, in order to meet these expectations effectively, we have placed operational excellence at the heart of our sustainability strategy. We believe that as we become leaner, we reduce our impact on the environment by using our raw materials and energy inputs more efficiently. There is also a cost benefit, which is very important to us in a largely cost driven industry. That is not a difficult strategy to pitch to any of our stakeholders, as you can imagine.

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L e a n e q u a ls g r e e n J o n A l d e r

Putting lean thinking at the heart of our sustainability thinking has many advantages: in a company like ours with nearly 100 facilities which are focused on manufacturing excellence, it is easy to get consistent understanding. The lean activities resonate: they are instantly recognisable as part of the continuous improvement programme that has been the very backbone of Rexam for over a decade. Furthermore, the measures of success we are using are consistent with what we have always striven for – improvement in energy efficiency, reduction in water consumption, improvement in material efficiencies.

All of which help us reduce our carbon footprint. It is that simple!

Recycling

As we mentioned earlier, part of our sustainability strategy is predicated on reducing our inputs. Year on year Rexam consistently delivers in the region of £30m in cost and efficiency savings.

This is, of course, the area where lean enterprise and particularly 6 sigma excel.

It is through the constant and consistent application of their principles that we have been able to make these significant savings year on year, for example, reducing electricity consumption through applying best practice on air compressors, lighting systems, efficient electrical motors and injection moulding technology. Also significant savings have been made in the gas consumption of the ovens that dry cans after the washing and coating stages, by applying better TPM techniques and by using 6 sigma to optimise burn profiles.

Overall our energy consumption per tonne of production in 2010 decreased by 14.6% and our carbon footprint shrank by almost 5%.

We can also show significant reductions in product lightweighting driven by our 6 sigma program. Currently, an average beverage can weighs approximately half of what it did 25 years ago. The thickness of the metal in its sides is less than the width of a human hair. Of course, this is getting harder and harder to improve on, yet lightweighting still remains a significant economic and environmental opportunity – and let’s not forget the cans have ends as well - so we will continue to apply our lean methodology to make advances.

Going further

Our sustainability agenda does not only focus on manufacturing operations. If it is really going to permeate the company culture and the way we do things day in

P rinciples and

As we go forward our aim is to ensure that we understand the value stream potential

Reducing

purpose

Packaging has a key role to play in helping society live more sustainably. It is a crucial part of the system for delivering products from their point of production to their point of consumption. But like many other industries, there is mounting pressure to improve our sustainability performance.

In Rexam’s case that includes helping improve recycling performance of the products we manufacture. In the case of cans, this represents an opportunity to directly offset the use of primary aluminium or steel, which has both economic and environmental benefits as it saves up to 95% of the energy used to create primary material.

of all of our waste streams and, through effective mapping, we can extract back the maximum economic and environmental value.

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To give some scale to the opportunity we have for improving our sustainability position through applying lean enterprise; we make around 60 billion cans each year.

End to end they would stretch for 5 million miles, or approximately 200 times around the Earth. It is clear in our minds that if we continually improve the way we make our products, then the leaner we become. And the more cost efficient we become.

day out, the agenda has to extend to include all operations within Rexam including our offices. There are many simple things we can improve on such as fitting motion sensors that turn off lights when rooms are empty, recycling paper, double sided copying and promoting “turn off/switch off “ campaigns – in additon to recycling the packaging that we use at our sites. These may seem all simple and obvious things but they will help to embed a philosophy and culture of sustainability and further link sustainable thinking to lean thinking.

Green governance

Our sustainability and lean enterprise strategies are now inextricably linked. The director of group lean enterprise sits on the Sustainability Working Group, a cross functional forum for all matters that relate to the sustainability of Rexam which reports to the Company’s executive managment team and the board.

In effect, our sustainability approach is predicated on a ‘triple bottom line’: environmental responsibility for our planet; economic performance for our prosperity; and the wellbeing and progress of our people. This translates operationally into Products, Operations and People, and it will be no surprise that the Operations element of this approach is exactly the lean enterprise strategy. No need for rebranding or for the introduction of another new programme for employees to assimilate!

So, in summary, lean enterprise is a critical element in helping Rexam become more sustainable. Our track record shows the less we use, the more we recycle, the less we waste, the greener we become and the more successful we become, and it is not often that strategies can be quite so complimentary and agreeable to all our stakeholders. END

Ebly Sanchez comments

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Going green is a trend more manufacturers are beginning to recognise as important in an era of environmental responsibility. The most obvious benefits of green and lean are cost savings which are coupled with value creation opportunities .This article gives a good general idea of Rexam’s environmental philosophy and a high level description of the main tactics that are being, or will be, used to develop the lean and green culture further.

However, it would be beneficial for the readers to understand in more detail the specific role played by lean enterprise and 6 sigma in reducing inputs and corresponding costs.

Going forward lean and green will be increasingly influential in organisational strategy and there is no doubt in my mind that the progress Rexam have already made in this area will stand them in good stead. The imperative now is to use continuous improvement techniques for further development.

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Diagnosis before treatment Paul Walley

Diagnosis before treatment Paul Walley, associate professor of operations management, Warwick Business School, shares insights into a lean healthcare implementation in Canada to demonstrate the value of truly understanding current state before forming a lean improvement strategy or attempting to implement change.

M

any of us have probably had the same experience when visiting organisations embarking on a lean initiative. Senior managers can be very fired up with the notion that “we need lean” and have clear expectations that lean working will soon start to yield cost savings and other benefits.

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P rinciples and

I was recently part of a team invited to tackle a whole system improvement challenge in a healthcare community in Alberta, Canada,

purpose

But when you start to dig deeper into their motivation for lean, the answers are seldom satisfactory. Not only is there a very poor vision of what outcomes they want with little reflection on the key strategic challenges for the organisation , they have no real understanding of where they are, as an organisation or as a management team. In this situation I find that the first attempts at lean working try to address the wrong problems, or apply the wrong tools. We must ask that classic A3 question “What are we trying to achieve?” at an organisational level.

and I was determined to take time to understand what the fundamental organisational challenges were right from the start. This determination quickly yielded a number of observations: Primary care employees did have some prior experience of system improvement Secondary care employees had very little exposure to improvement work or methods Almost the entire workforce was capable, enthusiastic and receptive to change There had been no prior large-scale change programmes and so leaders were relatively inexperienced in this type of change work There was almost no useful demand and capacity information to see what work needed to be done and how it flowed through the system Performance and process data did not exist in any useful form There were several perverse incentives that distorted the system in a way that did not support lean working The system was not in crisis These observations proved crucial to the decisions about the first steps in the journey. It would be a mistake in this situation to jump straight into a complex piece of flow work. The immediate frustration was our inability, in the short term, to deal with the perverse incentives.

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In this part of Canada GPs get paid more if one of their patients is in hospital – therefore can you imagine the resistance to discharging someone? Similarly, transfer prices across provinces are capped at C$5,000 for episodes of treatment, removing any incentive to be good at high value-added work, in case patients cross borders looking for expensive care.

We decided to focus in the first instance on the possible we coordinated three priority actions:

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1. Leadership roles The entire senior management team had to be organised to provide a consistent and coordinated strategy. It was important to establish the clear aims of the activities, especially as there was no single crisis that could set the theme. The visibility of senior support was something that really had to be worked on because, culturally, managerial roles tended to be relatively hidden.

2. Missing data This community shared a problem seen in many places – there was no real process data on quantities of work flowing through the system and other useful data such as quality or journey time measures. This data had to be established as a first step before any evidence-based change took place and it became one of the project’s biggest challenges.

3. Improvement capability Since most of the teams had no prior experience of improvement we gently introduced them to improvement cycle methods, deliberately focusing the first attempts locally, to avoid complex projects or the need for too much coordination.

We used the experience of the primary care staff to help educate others. The early work was almost entirely devoted to working out demand patterns and understanding how their systems dealt with this. Over time staff process knowledge started to improve.

Next steps

Gradually, the work started to evolve. The leadership work was successful because natural leaders emerged, enthused by the new challenge and the new ways of working.

It was great to be able to see how these people grew into their new roles. Once demand data was in place teams became more ambitious about the ways in which the system could improve. The advantage of a capacity and demand-driven approach was that they learnt where the bottleneck and

Diagnosis before treatment Paul Walley

pinch points in work flow were. This allowed them to address the flow issues accurately rather continuing the unfocused attempts to improve anywhere. The improvement capability was also developed, with changes eventually structured around A3 plans. At this point the work could be coordinated across the whole system by setting up a number of supplier-customer activities to join up the flow.

Middle-phase challenges

Part-way through, the healthcare system was restructured by a Government initiative and the whole Province of Alberta was merged into one single health system. Consequently the attempts at lean working in other sites became more visible. We found there was an over-supply of lean tools and methodologies that other sites brought with them, threatening the clarity of our own work. To keep our own work on track we had to limit the toolkit and also reinforce our own ways of working. The other complexity this merger brought was that our own local leaders got higher-level jobs working at the provincial level, partly as a consequence of the improvements they had championed. It really highlighted the need for the entire workforce to have improvement capabilities to maintain continuity.

Lessons learned

The end of our project, in March 2010, coincided with an independent government survey on the performance of local health communities.

In Lethbridge the median admission time to the right bed was three hours compared with over 14 hours for the province as a whole. These results put the spotlight on our project and we were asked to provide an explanation to other sites of how and why the approach had worked.

Universally our reaction to this question was followed by the caveat: “Don’t simply copy us”.

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Paul’s article highlights again the importance of not focusing on lean tools but instead on creating a real understanding. This can only be done by changing the way staff within the organisation view the process or system and by making use of the data and information which has been generated to drive improvements. The article also indicates the importance of leadership in supporting and driving change, fostering it, not only in the current leadership team, but also in the next generation to sustain the work carried out.

P rinciples and

Zoe Radnor comments

purpose

We had to explain that we had made a lot of effort to understand the challenges at a local level. The practical changes were local solutions to local issues, not universally applicable, magical ideas. Our key achievement, in the relative short span of time, was to embed and sustain a real improvement capability in a highly engaged, enthusiastic team of people. The work they had done was carefully directed to focus on a number of key issues and allowed to evolve over time. I think this message is very important for all new attempts to move towards lean ways of working, to ensure that we all know what problems we are trying to solve before we throw a toolkit at the situation. E N D

may 11&12

Event partners:

sem

inar

ea

rly Reg bird istr £34 Visu atio 5 offe al W n als +Va o in T orkp r c lu lace – Vi des a c sua l Th opy of inki ng.

Day One: WeDnesDay, May 11 (09:00-17:30)

aT The One-Day seMinar yOu Will:

Leading American visual thinking expert, Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth, will share the principles, concepts, methods, and tools that show what a visual workplace is, how it works, and why it is important. Gwendolyn will identify the key step to take for sustainable results. She will address the role that people play in this and identify over 100 real visual solutions from employees who have learned to think visually — including executives and engineers. Learn about the triumphs and pitfalls of a visual workplace conversion.

Day TWO: ThursDay, May 12 (09:30-15:00)

sieMens planT TOur, cOngleTOn, cheshire

Siemens produces the variable speed drives that control the speed of motors driving production lines and baggagehandling systems for export around the world. The Congleton plant employs over 350 people in its production of Siemens drives range and in research and development into drive technology. The tour will include presentations on its production methods utilising lean tools and techniques and small group tours around each value stream. Using the learning from the previous day’s seminar, delegates will be asked to assess and then discuss the site’s current level of visual competency, and compare their findings with that of the other teams.

Group size for the tour is limited to 25 people, first come, first served. Tour attendees must participate in seminar.

Gwendolyn Galsworth, PhD, is president and founder of Quality Methods International and the Visual-Lean® Institute (QMI).

A Shingo Prize and Malcolm Baldrige Examiner, Dr Galsworth has helped companies all over the world to accelerate their rate of visual transformation, strengthen cultural alignment, and achieve long-term, sustainable bottom-line outcomes through workplace visuality. In the 1980s, Dr Galsworth was head of training and development at Productivity Inc. where

seminar Only: £395+VaT – early bird £345+VaT seminar and Tour: £545+VaT – early bird £495+VaT Book three places, fourth is free – for seminar only for further information call Ben Walsh on 0207 401 6033, or email b.walsh@sayonemedia.com or visit www.leanmj.com/events

• Discover the ten core visual workplace technologies and the key outcomes for each • Learn how visual and lean work together to create significant bottom line results • Learn to assess visual workplace maturity and competency in your own company • Discover the three biggest mistakes a visual initiative can make and how to avoid them • Learn to energize and unite your workforce through visual functionality, even in a multi-lingual/multicultural work environment • Learn the vital difference between measures that monitor and measures that drive

aT The facTOry TOur yOu Will: • gain access to the siemens automation and Drives’ plant. employing over 350 people and manufacturing drives and motors that are exported around the world • get insight into the impact that visual and lean thinking has had on specific value streams • experience firsthand the visual workplace that supports lean at siemens • Meet the teams and individuals who work with the system’ every day • Discover siemens’s next steps on its visual-lean journey.

she worked closely with Dr Shigeo Shingo to develop, among many things, poka-yoke as an implementation methodology for the West.

Dr Galsworth’s most recent book Work That Makes Sense/Operator-led Visuality (2011) shares over 500 actual visual solutions, along with a step-by-step process operators follow to convert their own work areas to visuality. Galsworth’s 2005 book, Visual Workplace – Visual Thinking, was awarded the Shingo Research Prize.

She is a frequent keynote speaker on visual systems, strategic leadership, and cultural conversions.

yOur regisTraTiOn incluDes a seMinar Manual anD a cOpy Of Dr. galsWOrTh’s BOOk, Visual Workplace/Visual Thinking.

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Visual WOrkplace-Visual Thinking seMinar, cOngleTOn, cheshire

Let the

workplace speak Gwendolyn Galsworth, founding member of the Visual-Lean Institute, writes about the value in building tangible lean environments and recapturing the potential so many organisations lose through allowing visual information deficits.

H

ow many times in the last decade have you heard company executives—even yourself— proclaim that people are your organisation’s most valuable resource or that employees at the value-add level are the experts of their work and that they must be allowed—empowered—to organise their own work, and work area, to better suit their needs and the needs of high performance? This, you were told, is the doorway to a spirited, engaged, and aligned workforce—and to the empowerment indispensable to enterprise excellence.

But what does this really mean? How does a company create an empowered workforce while

strengthening the bottom line?

In nearly 30 years of research and implementation, I have never discovered a more dynamic, creative, and complete conversion strategy than workplace visuality, starting on the operator or 5S on Steroids. The visual thinkers on this value-add level. And what does that line didn’t just make a ‘place’ for these conversion look like? Work areas cabling reels. They designated the exact aglow with tangible intelligence and location for loading the material easily and accurately, interchangeably — reducing reel coherency, speaking with precision change over time to practically zero. and relevance—thanks to the visual language that value-add associates have learned to diligently and inventively imbed through thinking visually and implementing visual devices.

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Visual devices: letting the workplace speak

In a visual workplace, information is converted into simple, commonlyunderstood visual devices, installed in the process of work itself, as close to the point of use as possible. The result is the transformation of a formerly mute work environment into one that speaks — clearly and precisely — about how to perform error-free work safely, smoothly, reliably, and on-time.

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Let the workplace speak Gwendolyn Galsworth

Expertise at the Point of Use. This precise information used to be tucked away in a binder—and in the brain of a master machinist. Then a supervisor decided to make the detail visual, and with the help of area associates, created visual standards (visual SOPs) for all key operations.

What happens when the workplace speaks? What happens when formerly voiceless work stations, equipment, tools, machines, and material can communicate freely and precisely with us? What happens when we can know vital information — the details of work — at a glance, without speaking a word, without asking (or answering) a single question?

When a company becomes a fully-functioning visual workplace, each employee has instant on-demand access to information vital to one’s own work and the enterprise is infused with intelligence you can see — intelligence, furthermore, which echoes and drives forward corporate intent. The result is benefits you can take to the bank, as well as a more closely aligned work culture.

The problem: chronic information deficits

What happens when this vital information is hard to access, incomplete, inaccurate, or simply not there?

People ask lots of questions and lots of the same questions, repeatedly.

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P rinciples and

ECNs* at a Glance. Visual Displays like this one for tracking the day-to-day release of ECNs are the glue that hold the company (and supervisors) together during the transition from traditional manufacturing to the new excellence (some call it “lean). *Engineering Change Notices.

In the pre-visual workplace, everything and everyone is forced to exist within a narrow definition of their capability. The physical work environment is devoid of definition or conveyed context. It is difficult to create common purpose and attempts to improve processes invariably fail because even the smallest gains disappear overnight. A pre-visual workplace has no means to sustain gains, however hard-won.

purpose

An information-scarce workplace is the opposite of a visual workplace. When key information is not instantly available, the company will pay in long lead times, late deliveries, poor quality, accidents, low operator and managerial morale, and runaway costs. When workplace visuality is not firmly in place, these unhappy occurrences will happen all the time and struggle becomes a way of life.

there isn’t plenty of data. Data can be found everywhere — in quality reports, SPC graphs, management briefings, in team meetings, and weekly and annual reports. Data floods the workplace.

But compiling data is a fruitless activity if it is not translated into information and the information is not translated into meaning.

It is meaning that we are after. Without understanding the meaning of the data, we cannot make sound decisions and move the company and the people who work there forward. We cannot perform.

The corporate intent – visually. The new excellence is about alignment and unity in all its many forms. This Operations Roadmap makes area goals and expectations visually explicit, even as it connects the corporate intent across the enterprise — not just on the production floor but in marketing and administrative offices as well.

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Far too many offices and production floors are flooded with questions — but many more experience a worse condition: questions that remain unasked. When this is the case all too often people simply make stuff up. They invent or imagine an answer.

Occasionally this results in surprise benefits for the company, but all too frequently it works against it. People make stuff up and accidents happen, material is lost, defects are produced, delivery times are missed, and customers flee.

Working in an environment without visual information sharing is like trying to reach a destination by driving a hundred miles without a map, on a with no signs, traffic signals or lines down the centre. You can probably make it but you are likely to pay a terrible price. In the vast majority of companies, accurate, complete, timely, relevant information is unattainable or hard to come by — and the truth is even harder to locate. That is not to say

26

The purpose of the visual workplace is to convert data into information, information into visual meaning, and visual meaning into precise, repeatable, reliable, aligned, and sustainable performance. If the enterprise is to improve, stabilise, and grow, this must happen on micro and macro, local and strategic, levels.

A gigantic adherence mechanism

Visual devices translate the thousands of information transactions that occur every day at work into visible meaning.

This visible meaning doesn’t just impact performance; it creates it. Visual devices can show status (on time, process running, help needed); share work priorities (as in a work priority display board); prevent defects (from simple signage reminders to complex mistake-proofing systems); and provide order (through clear borders for WIP and deliveries); and of course much more.

A visual workplace is made up of hundreds — even thousands — of such devices, created by the workforce that needs them. Added up, these devices create a language of excellence in the enterprise — a language that speaks to everyone and anyone who wants to listen.

Is your workplace speaking the language of excellence to you? E N D

Let the workplace speak Gwendolyn Galsworth

The first question is free

Questions are so commonplace in most companies that some people (especially managers and supervisors) sometimes think that their main job is to provide the answers — day in and day out, all the time.

The first-question-is-free rule is a simple process that can minimise such endless interruptions and have a profound effect on workplace stability. Futrthermore, this applies at all levels in the company, whether you are supervisor, value-add associate, marketing representative, technician, doctor, nurse — or CEO. Here’s what you do: 1. When someone approaches you with a question, answer it politely and clearly.

And as that person walks away, make a mental note: “That’s one.”

Fewer questions, more value add. As with all great visual solutions this exceptional office device makes it easy to imagine the endless questions that preceded it. Now all the answers are visually available at-a-glance to anyone and everyone who needs it. Great visual thinking!

P rinciples and

This modest approach can be highly effective in all work venues — perhaps most powerfully in such administrative areas as accounting, HR, sales, and purchasing where the level of tangible abnormalities seen on the production floor are not as noticeable.

Making missing answers visible can open huge communication possibilities in offices. Just remember this is a tool, not a methodology and therefore cannot, alone, produce an authentic visual conversion.

purpose

3. The first question is free. And the second time you hear that same question from the same person or anybody else, it’s time for you to create a visual device — so you never ever have to answer that question again and no one ever has to ask it.

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2. Then wait until you are asked that same question again, either by the same person or someone else. Again answer the question politely and clearly; and as that person walks away, make the mental note: “That’s two.”

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Process focus

The role of HR in

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lean deployment

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LMJ’s editor, Jane Gray, talks to lean practitioners in manufacturing and financial services to discover how the growth of lean in large enterprises is necessitating a new approach to the engagement of HR departments in lean implementations.

W

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hile enterprise-wide lean cultures with the backing of senior management and grass roots participation across all business processes may be an ideal for lean practitioners, in reality most lean implementations start as disparate projects and, particularly in large enterprises, often without knowledge that lean champions exist elsewhere in the organisation.

Talking to numerous readers from a variety of work environments, it has become clear that progressing from this stage, where islands of excellence and understanding exist but cannot talk a common language with key colleagues, is extremely challenging. It is also disruptive

28

to the establishment of a lean culture or flow of work form end-to-end of the organisation.

Furthermore, the sustainability of gains made in lean project areas is often threatened by non-lean practices and thinking in the rest of the business. For example, remuneration and reward systems that are not aligned with lean behaviours.

To inform this article, which investigates how to engage with HR and educate the department on lean and their role in embedding it, I spoke to Philip Holt, director of customer collaboration online at Philips Consumer Lifestyle, and to the head of operations excellence at a major high street bank.

The role of hr in lean deployment process focus

The importance of HR to a successful and sustainable lean enterprise seems, on one level, to be obvious and intuitive. If lean is approached as a methodology for improvement, owned and implemented by people then the understanding of the department within your organisation responsible for recruiting, communicating with and developing your people must be a prerequisite. Holt explained: “I have become convinced over the last couple of years that, at its core, any successful lean deployment is about people engagement.”

However, the fact of matter is that, as lean pilot projects grow in number, only a few organisations are recognising that doing more projects will never bring the same results as establishing an institutionalised lean culture. Holt continued: “You can gain quick wins and worthwhile improvement simply through applying lean tools and techniques but this will only ever be project based improvement.

If we want sustainable, ongoing improvements we have to think about how we engage with and train people.”

HR is critical to bringing credibility behind a lean competency framework.

What must be avoided is creating a situation where lean competencies are seen as parallel to ‘normal’ business competencies

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Holt agrees that having the engagement of HR in this competency management is essential. “HR is critical to bringing credibility behind a lean competency framework.

What must be avoided is creating a situation where lean competencies are seen as parallel to ‘normal’ business competencies. They must be integral and they must link, in a real and readily understood way, to an individual’s ability to develop themselves within the business.”

process focus

For HR this means engagement with competency management. Our banking representative warns: “For us this meant we had to educate, from fresh, HR professionals about how lean thinking impacts work and changes job descriptions. HR needs to understand that lean will change expectations around job roles.”

For the bank in question this meant a rigorous HR education programme and the improvement of communication between the lean deployment team and HR. Once a common understanding of lean principles and terminologies was established, the two teams worked together to re-engineer the balanced scorecards used to monitor performance. The new scorecards include lean related expectations around demonstrating an understanding of waste, engaging in team based problem solving, and quality standards. The bank’s representative says: “In short we had to change expectations from ‘do your job’ to ‘do your job and improve your job’.

The role of hr in lean deployment process focus

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This was observed as a critical point within the lean banking

environment where traditional remuneration and reward structures were geared toward individual performance on traditional business metrics. Our lean banker says: “HR can have a real influence in changing this to support the much more team-oriented ethic of lean improvement.” ????????????????????????????????? ????????????????

Of course changing expectations around job roles and altering ???????????????????????????

reward schemes to drive lean behaviours is likely to raise issues around organisational restructuring and personnel redeployment.

Again these are challenges that can hardly be taken on without thorough understanding and support for an organisation’s HR department. Rewriting job roles and adjusting pay packets to reflect a new dispersal of responsibility are actions which should be taken in order to give legitimacy to a lean implementation and earn employee respect for lean principles. To the same ends, these are actions which must be carried out by the established authority of the HR team, particularly in large organisations with less flexible structures.

What is made clear here by both our lean advocates is that while the human resources function is just as much a part of the deployment as any of the other functions in a business, it’s participation in deploying and giving a mandate to lean can bring an increased level of potency to implementations. Indeed, both in a manufacturing and product support business and in financial services, it is clear that without the support and understanding of HR, lean deployments cannot ever hope to gain the status of ‘the way we do things’ nor be recognised as central to both individual and organisational development. Holt clarifies the symptoms of a company failing to leverage the influence of its HR department for lean implementation: “What you see is project-based, ad hoc

What this article tells us

HR needs to understand lean principles and objectives and the way in which they impact work.

HR can support and strengthen a sustainable lean deployment by:

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Communicating changes to staff at all levels Validating new capability frameworks Enforcing organisational redesign

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Operating Unconventionally

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The history and evolution of...

value stream D

o you create value stream maps to identify problems in flow and surface waste as part of a project based approach to value stream improvement and lean implementation?

Are you using value stream mapping as a tool to help your organisation transform its culture to one of employee engagement and continuous problem solving?

Most of those in the lean, 6 sigma, and continuous improvement (CI) community would say, yes, to the first question. A smaller number would answer, yes, to the second but the fact is that only a very few organisations are tapping the full potential of the tool that value stream mapping tool has evolved to become.

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What is this thing called value stream mapping, where did it come from and where could it be used?

According to John Shook, the first North American to work for Toyota in Japan, value stream maps have their origin in the material and information (M&I) flow maps that the Toyota Production System (TPS) specialists in Toyota’s Operations Management and

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Jim Luckman and David Verble, faculty members of the Lean Enterprise Institute, contribute the next instalment in LMJ’s History and evolution series. This article traces the origins of one of the most widely used of all lean tools, value stream mapping, and explains the evolution of mapping techniques as they have expanded into new industries.

history and evolution value stream mapping

A typical value stream map.

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D/T = 0

%C/A = 50% Eric’s Avail = 50%

%C/A = 100% Ann’s Avail = 20%

%C/A = 75% Ann’s Avail = 25%

60 min

5 min

7 days 2-10 days 5 days 50%

Supplier Input: 13 claims per day

3 min 5

99%

75%

Value-Stream Metrics

From Mapping to See, © Lean Enterprise Institute, 2007

Process Time = 75 mins Lead Time = 26-39 Days Percent Complete & Accurate = 29%

Consulting Department (OMCD) created to bring plant floor layout drawings to life. They did this by showing where the people are in the process, how things move, and especially, how information – not just the product – moves.

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histor y and

M&I maps made their way to the US in the early 1990s as the Toyota Supplier Support Center (TSSC), the North American arm of OMCD, began training its staff to use the tool. Shook and the other CI specialists at TSSC learned to use M&I maps to identify problems in flow and critical areas of waste in supplier operations. In the mid-1990s Shook left Toyota to become director of the Japan Technology Management Programme at the University of Michigan, where he and Mike Rother

evolution

The mapping tool has two primary uses in Toyota. Managers create M&I flow maps of their process as part of their annual responsibilty to improve the performance of their operations in response to business priorities. The maps are also created during jishuken activities in which groups of managers conduct week long kaizen blitzes to improve the performance of part of an operation.

????????????

???????????????????????????? frequently used M&I flow mapping to analyse work flow and plan CI efforts

in the companies they supported. Soon client companies were asking to have their employees trained to create the maps and workshops developed by Shook, Rother and Chuck Ward, another TSSC alumnus, to address the need. ?????????????????????????????????

In 1996 Jim Womack and Dan Jones???????????????? published Lean Thinking, the book that launched lean as a CI practice in manufacturing. In the book they ??????????????????????????? urged readers to “map the entire value stream for all your product families” as part of their transformation process for implementing lean.

In 1997 Shook and Rother published a workbook, Learning to See, which introduced the M&I mapping tool to lean practitioners in North America and eventually the world (it has been translated into 15 languages).

Through Shook and Rother’s relationship with Womack and Jones, M&I flow mapping itself was transformed into value stream mapping and became the primary tool for helping lean practitioners see flow and recognise waste in manufacturing.

Value stream mapping entered the next phase of its development in 2003, when General Motors asked John Shook to work with the company to explore ways to use lean tools and practices to improve business processes in its non-manufacturing functions. Shook pulled together a team of nine lean coaches, some of whom were already with specialised applications of lean in office environments and in functions such as: product development, human resources and sales and marketing.

Shook’s team, working with GM Production System staff, drew on General Electric’s Go-Fast engagement process and combined it with the value stream mapping and improvement process from Learning to See. The focus of the new process was a project based approach in which the people working in a value stream were engaged in mapping to identify the problems affecting performance and to design a future state value stream that would address the problems.

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They were also responsible for planning, implementing and confirming changes to improve the flow and output or the performance-topurpose of the value stream. The role of management in the process was to select the value stream and scope of the project. They also realised the need to deploy responsibility for the problem solving and implementation and provide coaching support beyond the scope of the project team.

The nine lean coaches continued to work together, using the team based value stream improvement process in a variety of other organisations including healthcare, product development, finance and investment, construction, service, processing industries, higher education, government and non-automotive manufacturing. Over the next few years they found that value stream mapping was even more powerful as a tool for making the work flow and waste visible in non-manufacturing settings

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history and evolution value stream mapping

and further developed the team based process for conducting CI projects. These techniques were captured in a facilitator guide called Mapping to See, published by the Lean Enterprise Institute in 2007.

The Mapping to See process extends the original Learning to See mapping process in several significant ways: 1) Upper management breaks down business issues and defines related value stream performance problems as a basis for chartering projects and deploying problem solving 2) Facilitation of the mapping and plan creation processes is standardised for group problem solving and engagement from the value stream owners 3) Employees in the mapping group design a leaner future state value stream, focusing on four critical dimensions: i. Delivery of value to the customer and the business, ii. Optimisation of flow in the value stream, particularly at hand off points iii. Improvement in work efficiency for individual process steps iv. Creation of tools and systems to manage, problem solve, learn and continuously improve value stream performance 4) Goal clarification, planning and the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle are used for problem resolution, reflection and learning during and after implementation.

With the CI process detailed in Mapping to See, value stream mapping has entered a new phase and in a way come full cycle back to its origins. It is once again becoming a tool for management problem solving and CI. However, the use of value stream mapping is different from that of M&I flow mapping in Toyota in one major way.

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histor y and

One of the chief benefits of this approach is that people who make the changes see the problems, own the changes and ensure that improvements are sustained at the job site and performance is further improved where possible. That makes value stream mapping an invaluable for helping companies make the transformation to a problem solving culture. E N D

evaluation

In current practice managers engage those who work in a value stream in creating the current state image, designing the future state work flow, and in taking responsibility for achieving the changes planned to improve the performance of the value stream.

The manager’s role is now one of problem solving or CI leader with responsibility for seeing the right problems get solved rather than solving them him or herself.

LMJ commissioning editor, Jane Gray, reports on findings uncovered at SA Partners’ Lean and Green conference 2011.

Lean and green in conference a report

S

A Partners, the lean consulting firm founded

by Professor Peter Hines, author of the Shingo award winning book Staying Lean, has devoted considerable time and expertise to investigating lean and green synergies. This might seem, to some at least, to be something of a platitude, an act of ‘greenwash’ in itself since it creates a consulting angle which appeals to the environmentally concerned while also giving more productivity-focused business leaders a sap for eco-conscious colleagues and customers.

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However, following this conference I came away convinced that there is also something more. It is easy and obvious to say that lean and green concerns can unite when it comes to eliminating waste. Turning lights off saves money and also carbon hungry power, reducing movement waste can cut CO2 emissions and clearly any business methodology that maintains a factory is not at optimum efficiency or effectiveness when all its machines are running full throttle is going to be more openly embraced by environmentalists than one which encourages every piece of equipment to be in use all the time.

I would say however, that this way of thinking about lean and green synergies, which tends to portray environmental wins as spin-off benefits, is missing a trick. We need a more fundamental admission that the business model and assumptions most of us work on, still driven by principles formed

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in the industrial revolution, are unsustainable in the fullest sense. This is where the real opportunity lies for lean and green; in using the techniques, tools and principles to redesign our systems and processes so that they respond to a newly recognised value flow and take inspiration from natural systems – for example, in the way that InterfaceFLOR have used bio-mimicry to create their highly competitive product, Entropy, and myriad support services, material exploitation and recycling ideas around it.

At Lean and Green 2011 delegates were faced with the following statistics: By 2030 the world’s population will rise 33% from 6bn to 8bn Demand for food will increase 50% Demand for water will increase by 30% Demand for energy will increase 50% (Statisitics quoted by John Beddington, chief scientific advisor to UK government.)

Below are a few of the reactions which this challenge, and others discussed at Lean and Green 2011, provoked with regards to the ability of organisations to adapt and the role of lean methodologies in allowing them to do so:

Plan A: because there is no plan B

This brand and tagline for Marks & Spencer’s lean and green agenda expresses an uncompromising commitment to lean and green. Richard Gillies, director of Plan A at M&S made it clear that this is not a CSR issue or a public relations stunt for M&S but a measure of how well the organisation can respond to predicted rapid market change.

An experienced lean practitioner himself, Gillies is now leading M&S through their realisation that if they want to continue functioning as a retailer and service provider, against a back drop of increasingly scarce global resources, they are going to have to be clever about it.

lean and green in conference a report

“Argue about the science in the bar – the route to prosperity is through tackling the sustainability challenge” Hunter Lovins, author of Natural Capitalism.

Tara Garnett of the Food Climate Research Network

Hunter, among the first lean and green thinkers, shows in Natural Capitalism how the five lean principles of Womack and Jones, reflect, almost exactly, the core principles of sustainability. She does however, see possible turbulence ahead on the lean and green journey. Having identified innovation as crucial to the creation of the next generation business model, Lovins cast doubt on the ability of lean continuous improvement techniques to create the kind of radical, revolutionary pace of change that will be needed.

Other presentations detailed how lean techniques around performance management, KPI setting and financial recording could better capture the value of green business.

One of the strongest arguments made for unifying lean and green, was made by Andy Wood from Adnams Breweries. His presentation showed clearly how putting environment and community at the heart of operational improvement made a dedicated stakeholder out of every employee and meant that the company had not suffered the trials, that so many face with lean programmes, of gaining employee buy-in or engagement.

Not all delegates agreed with this, many suggesting that accumulated small changes were the source of revolutionary change.

Perhaps it is the structure for continuous improvement which is most important here, as Stephen Spear argued in his LMJ article ‘Relentless Discovery’ (LMJ issue 06) Lovins recommended reading Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb alongside Adam Smith’s works in order to better understand the limitations of our current business and economic thinking.

This brief report offers no answers on the potential of lean and green.

However, what becomes obvious when relaying some of the comments made at this event is that there is more than meets the eye to the possibilities and challenges, for both lean theory and practice, when attempting lean and green integration. E N D

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Lovins challenged delegates to forget possible scepticism about the validity of global warming theories and look at case study examples that indisputably showed how companies tying their operations to ethically sound structures were out-performing their competitors. Goldman Sachs in 2007 saw that: “Companies that are leaders in environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies are leading the pack in stock performance — by an average of 25%. Seventy two per cent of the companies on the list outperformed industry peers.” The same report went on to say “Companies with the highest share price growth over the past three years paid more attention to sustainability issues… those with the worst performance tended to do less…”

unfolded the complexities of food production and demand for delegates. A challenging outcome for lean thinking from Garnett’s presentation lay around our definition of value creation. A set of startling sustainability statistics around food production and consumption prompted questions as to whether commercial entities could or should play a role in engineering value streams which give the customer what they need, not what they want.

Would such an approach detract from an organisation’s ability to follow the lean tenet of creating value from the customer’s perspective? And what might the knock on consequences for the rationale of lean improvement be?

etters

a n d

c o mm e n t

Raise a glass to green Dr Andy Wood, chief executive of Adnams, the Suffolk-based brewer and retailer draws on his experience to make the case for a lean and green revolution in business

T

here’s a lean, green revolution been brewing here at Adnams for some time. Our long term approach and natural respect for our environment was evident when we started out in 1872 and, more recently, our focus has been to combine this approach with efficient business practice and continual innovation. In our opinion, being lean and green makes perfect business sense.

Adnams’ journey over the last decade or so started with the determination of a set of organisational values, one of which is based around managing the impact of our business on the natural, social and built environment.

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Over the years service levels also became a determinant of success with us and we have looked at how we can forge stronger relationships. This is where the first elements of lean came in as we captured demand close to the customer, rationalised our depot infrastructure and improved the visibility of inventory.

Stabilising customer service and seeing success gave us confidence to invest further.

In 2006 we opened a purpose built ecodistribution centre a mile outside Southwold and in 2008 we added a new brewery which is one of the most energy efficient in Europe.

The list of efficiency savings of these two new facilities goes on and on, but to give a couple of examples the distribution centre saves 54% gas and 67% electricity per sq metre compared to the previous building. Meanwhile our high-tech brewstream recovers 100% of the heat from each brew to heat the next.

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Some time ago we realised that fossil fuel bills were only set to rise and keep on rising, in fact we’ve seen a 14% increase in our diesel bills alone over the past year. The likelihood of increased sanctions for businesses that don’t operate responsibly in terms of their emissions galvanised our long term view. In short we believe the polluter will pay.

In 2010 we were proud to announce our latest innovation, with the addition of an anaerobic digestion plant adjacent to the distribution centre. This converts brewery and food waste from pubs and hotels into bio gas for injection into the National Grid and it is our intention to order our first biomethane fuelled commercial vehicles this year.

The plant diverts waste from landfill and prevents the release of highly-polluting methane gas to the atmosphere. The facility will have a major impact on the reduction of carbon emissions in our local area and on the production of renewable energy. Processing food waste alone through the facility will save an estimated 50,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalents.

We think strong ethics and values allied to operational effectiveness will be a key differentiator for business success in the future. Our advice to other companies wanting to start their own lean, green revolution is to adopt a progressive view and factor in the likely long term costs of fossil fuels together with the cost of pollution, whether that be CO2 or some other form.

Lean and green can go hand in hand as part of successful business and I would encourage any business to follow this path. E N D

? ?e ? ?t ? ?t? ?e? ?rs ? ? ? ? ?a ? ?n ? ?d ? ? ?c? ?o? ?mm ? ? ? ? ?e? ?n? ?t l

Determination of destination Jeff McGowan, sourcing manager at Johnson and Johnson LifeScan writes on the challenge of getting a balanced approach to lean. His comments are in response to The Long and Winding Road, featured in LMJ issue 08

A

lean journey may be a long and winding road, however where is it leading to? As many embark on journeys of change in response to the global financial tremors and upheavals we are all experiencing, we are keen to see real results that ensure we are responsive and competitive. Embarking on a lean journey just because it’s the right thing to do will not necessarily work, we need to have a destination.

I’m a keen proponent of systems thinking and believe it is not just central to understanding lean, it is also crucial to understanding your whole business. Many systems thinkers indicate that we must start with purpose, be that a goal of providing the best customer service, shortest lead time, lowest cost or whatever. Unless we have a clear idea of what we are about and where we want to go there is little context and meaning to your lean journey. I would like to think that the days of pushing lean consultants out into your business and blindly applying lean tools to ‘become lean’ are over. Perhaps this shift from blind application of tools to continuous improvement with a purpose and framework in mind is a key contributor in the change at Corus.

Frameworks such as those used by Corus can be a great communication tool and method of sharing a wider strategy however a purpose and framework alone won’t be enough. There are many other elements involved, Fraser Wilkinson identifies other important elements such as the role of senior management and understanding the market and these are relevant.

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letters and

The ‘C’ of the PDCA cycle has a clear purpose designed to understand whether any change is having the desired effect or not. Either way, this is an opportunity to rebalance if necessary. The Shewhart or Deming cycle is often understated however it sits at the heart of lean thinking. Listening to the voice of the people and process has to be central to our lean journey. E N D

comment

When it comes to deployment, lean requires a balanced approach where consideration is given to many aspects of the system including; the people that work within the organisation, customer value, flow and cost. There will be a level of internal tension that forms when we look to balance these elements, as Ebly Sanchez comments; assessment is crucial.

Back to basics Chris Galante, lean coach at CDG, part of Boeing Commercial Airplanes responds to the ‘lean extremes’ theme of the last issue and shares his view of the priorities and demands within lean programmes.

L

et’s break this question over balanced approaches and sustainability up in to several parts.

It takes several key endeavors to maintain a focused and balanced approach to lean work. Taiichi Ohno tells us that: “Lean is a journey, not a destination.” It is easy to get sidetracked and lose balance when driving lean in any industry but I believe you can keep moving forward if you consider: Culture change and people: One of the greatest challenges organisations face with lean journeys is culture. We are focused on changing processes and the way deliver products or services to the customer, but we often neglect the impact of our most reliable and trusted resources… our employees. Lean is a team-spirited engagement from all levels of the organisation. It takes time, effort and education, but the payoff is immense. It costs a lot to layoff and rehire with the hopes that each time you do, you will have your knowledge base willing to return. Don’t be short sighted about an immediate need to shrink you workforce. Take the time to develop and maintain your people, they will deliver.

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The cost of dependency on technology versus proper business intelligence: Time and time again, we see organisations quick to jump at the latest technology or buy software after reading a white paper on how much money it will save. Then, after it is purchased and installed, the cost of training, unexpected workarounds, glitches and hardware upgrades actually add cost.

Simple training in office applications or running a profiler on machines, with the use of Total Preventative Maintenance and Business Intelligence can go a long way.

Keep to the basics and don’t abandon progress for the new shiny object or business terminology.

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l e t t e rs a n d c o mm e n t

Consistency is key. It is good to experiment with new methodologies, but there is a time and place. You have to stay focused on your goals, keep your vision challenging but attainable, definable by all.

letters and

Chris Galante will be speaking at IQPC’s BPE for Pharmaceuticals, Biotech & Medical Devices, April 6-8, London: This Forum provides opportunities for senior executives to compare and discuss best practice, tools, methodology and strategy to deliver efficiency and bottom line rewards. LMJ subscribers receive a 20% discount on attendance. For information and booking visit: www.bpe-pharma.com

comment

To conclude, my secrets to a balanced approach are to remember the basics, use the tools in the way they were meant to be used and remember that although not every situation is going to be the same, there are often great parallels. Be ready to learn lessons from across your organisation and from

outside it. Above all I would say that personal experience has shown me the easiest way for lean to fail is for the leader to underestimate the influence that preconceived ideas existing in the organisation can have on the balance and direction of lean work. E N D

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Consistent language around improvement: Another great derailler to continuous improvement, whatever banner you use to describe it within your organisation, is the fickleness of senior management in being drawn to the latest business lingo. You start on a journey, put the right methods in place engage with your workers and the supply chain and then a new buzzword touches the ears of your senior leadership team and suddenly there is a new language and maybe even direction.

B OO K

R E V IE W

Owen Jones, Cardiff University, reviews The Lean Games Book by John Bicheno

o w e n

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icsie books and have established a fine reputation for publishing clear, definitive and practical books for those who are responsible for improving processes and performance within organisations. The Lean Toolbox and Six Sigma and the Quality Toolbox have become standard reference books within the field and these offerings have now been augmented by the Lean Games Book.

Lean Games is not aimed at the general lean practitioner, but at those who are responsible for facilitating Lean Learning.

Explaining the reason for the book John Bicheno argues persuasively that: “Most people working in lean are visual, participative learners. Seeing is believing.

Although no substitute for experiencing the Lean Process, games have great impact and often bring out far more than the nominal focus of the game.�

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There is little doubt that learning by doing is far more engaging, fun and effective than learning by listening. Where learning takes place in a classroom environment participative games are probably the closest it is possible to get to doing and as such represent an invaluable training resource. Experienced lean facilitators will probably already possess a stock of tried and tested games which can be used to explain particular lean concepts. The Lean Games book gives those new to facilitation access to proven games and provides an opportunity to the more experienced to refresh or extend their repertoire.

The book describes 32 lean games. Each has a set of detailed instructions, learning objectives and notes for facilitators.

Player instructions are provided as an

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appendix which can be copied and, more usefully, in power point and PDF formats available from links at Picsiebooks. The games themselves cover an extensive range of themes including 5S, waste, flow, capacity scheduling, standard work and line balancing. While the primary focus is on lean in manufacturing environments there are games which are oriented towards service (failure demand and administrative lean) and many of the games are applicable to both sectors.

Most of the participative games have durations of between thirty minutes and two hours, although related games (for example the airplane group of games, intended to demonstrate concepts around waste flow and quality, and the dice games which are excellent for illustrating issues in line balancing, managing variation and throughput under different pull systems) could of course be connected in order to explore the themes they illustrate in a more comprehensive and sustained manner.

They have also been selected on the basis that they can be delivered with a minimum of specialised materials. Facilitators looking for longer and more structured games with formalised outcomes might be disappointed by this, but such games (for example the Beer game or the Buckingham Lean game) are available from other sources and, in any case, fulfil a different role to the games here.

John Bicheno warns that the book is not intended to operate as a standalone resource for facilitators. This is an important point as I believe the book will only be of real value to those who are proficient in facilitation and have a sound knowledge of the lean concepts they wish to communicate.

Those caveats aside, The Lean Games Book represents a useful resource to those who wish to deliver engaging, interactive and successful lean learning. E N D

EVENTS Look out for upcoming events from LMJ’s expanding event portfolio!

Lean Management Connect

The LMJ Annual Conference

A dynamic event putting delegates in touch with a diverse range of lean service and training providers.

This key networking and resourcing opportunity will allow delegates to plan internal capability building and identify the right external support for their lean programme whatever its maturity.

A thought leadership event for the readership community. The event will be chaired by Dr Nick Rich, Cardiff University and key speakers will include Dr Zoe Radnor and Peter Watkins of GKN. Attend to see how the latest thoughts on lean principles, tools, deployment methodologies and training methods can help your organisation to avoid lean stagnation.

March 24, Ansty Hall, Warwickshire

Lean Management Connect will be chaired by Jeff McGowan, sourcing manager at Johnson and Johnson LifeScan and keynoted by Keith Copeland MBE, Nissan.

Other participating organisations include BAE Systems, Constellation Wines and Lloyds Register. More information on this unique event, will be available soon.

Book the date in your diary now.

For delegate enquiries please contact Benn Walsh (b.walsh@sayonemedia.com) on 0207 401 6033.

June 16, Warwickshire

For delegate information on all LMJ hosted events please contact Benn Walsh (b.walsh@sayonemedia.com) on 0207 401 6033 or see the LMJ website for more details:

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Other forthcoming events from LMJs partners include:

The Lean Office

Profit through process week

IQPC ask offer the chance to further explore the potential of lean thinking for office processes and spreading the use of continuous improvement for value creation and greater bottom-line savings. Addressing issues from organisational realignment through to identifying stumbling blocks and value-add measurements this event will encourage discussion and provide varied case-study investigations. LMJ subscribers will receive a 20% discount on this event.

Building meaningful vision for change management and process excellence.

This event includes the prestigious IQPC Process Excellence Awards and links process improvement activity to tangible productivity gains. LMJ subscribers will receive a 20% discount on events taking place during the Profit through process week.

Lean Thinking in Services

April 28-May 3, Los Angeles, California

March 28, Novotel, Cardiff

This five day course will examines the application of lean thinking in service organisations, covering the lean principles, systems thinking, key techniques for lean practice and the framework required for effective strategic integration and sustainability.

This event is suitable for those in service organisations who are considering how they should implement lean related approaches or for those who want to understand the difference between lean manufacturing and lean service. This course will also be re-running on the following dates: Weeks commencing July 11 and October 10.

April 4-8, London

IN2:IN Thinking Annual Forum

This tenth annual forum, themed Exploring Opportunities: Imagine…Define…Lead…will be hosted by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, home organisation of LMJ editor Bill Bellows. The forum is free for improvement professional to attend and aims to expand the way in which these individuals and their organisations “think about thinking”.

For more information or booking details at all LMJ’s partner events please visit www.leanmj.com

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March 21-23, London

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