March 2015 LMJ

$65 – £45 – €50

Issue 2 Volume 5

| M a r c h 2 0 15 | w w w . l e a n m j . c o m

ARE WE LEARNING FROM THE ERRORS OF THE PAST? Organisations and interviews featured in this edition include: Constellium, DDI, Hitachi Consulting, Tesco, Lean Competency Systems, Bill Bellows, NissanRenault Consulting, Cohen Children’s Medical Centre, and University of Nottingham.

IN THIS ISSUE: Tesco, lean retailer lost? Exploring where Tesco went right with lean before things started to go very, very wrong.

Developed a better process? Raising the complicated topic of how to implement a lean transformation and learning the lessons from the past.

Exploring lean in Malaysia: Analysing the results of a research project on the status of lean in Malaysia. What’s happening with the introduction of lean into this rapidly growing Asian economy?

Breaking through with situational coaching: Exploring the ideas of how lean coaching could be an effective tool in the workplace.

editor ’ s letter

Dear reader, It’s hard for us who work in it to imagine those out of the bubble who don’t even know what lean is. Most manufacturers in this day and age, if they don’t use lean, are at least aware of its existence. But often lean practioners exist in a shroud of self-perpetuating enclosed networking and referrals to one another.

To combat this we need to branch out and do our best to expand the horizons of lean. Not just to those who would use it, but to the general public at large, so no longer is lean written about in newspapers in sneery tones about how it’s a waste of money- with inverted comma around the words in Japanese.

E ditorial

Commissioning editor Andrew Putwain

a.putwain@hennikgroup.com

Managing editor Victoria Fitzgerald

v.fitzgeral@hennikgroup.com

Editorial director Callum Bentley

c.bentley@hennikgroup.com

D esign

Art editor Martin Mitchell

A great example of this is in this issue’s is student Edmen Tam’s research article about the status of lean in Malaysia. Malaysia’s rapid economic expansion over the past twenty years have seen it grow increasingly important amongst the Asian economies and with this idea of embracing modernism, Tam has taken on a project to see how lean sits in the country. Is it well known?

Utilised well? Who’s using it and what could be done to help it be better implemented in the future?

Other articles in Principles and Purpose this month include Darragh McNeil and Mark D. Hughes from Hitachi consulting; who explore the ideas of lean coaching as an effective tool in the workplace.

Ian Robinson of Renault-Nissan comes to LMJ with a retrospective on how to implement lean. The best ways of doing so and the importance of making sure a lean transformation becomes an organisation-wide change instead of operating in siloes.

m.mitchell@hennikgroup.com

Designers Alex Cole

design@hennikgroup.com In order to receive your copy of the Lean Management Journal kindly email lmj@hennikgroup.com or telephone 0207 401 6033.

Neither the Lean Management Journal nor Hennik Group can accept responsibilty for omissions or errors.

Terms and Conditions Please note that points of view expressed in articles by contributing writers and in advertisements included in this journal do not necessarily represent those of the publishers.

Whilst every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in the journal, no legal responsibility will be accepted by the publishers for loss arising from use of information published. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written consent of the publishers.

Whilst Russell Watkins expounds the ideas of the perfect spoon and how this fits into one of most underrated ideas of lean: simple is best.

And in this month’s case study Fred Ravat, talent management director at aluminium fabricator Constellium, talks about the importance of people in the lean process.

The sector focus in this issue is paediatric hospitals: industrial engineers Brian Belpanno and Christopher A. Pinna explore the challenges of how to implement lean policies in a busy and high pressure environment, in a large children’s health centre in New York.

Lean Competency System’s Simon Elias along with Barry Evans, presents this month’s special feature of how a massive corporation can go from lean to unlean. The idea of lean as a never ending journey has been something that has been hard to understand for many organisations who think they’ve ‘done lean’ and end up over complicating many of their product lines through diversifying and end up on the path to economic ruin. In this report, Elias focuses on Tesco; the high street juggernaut that’s hit the rocks.

As well as all this we have events, lean online and Bill Bellows returns with a Stephen Hawkings-inspired Lessons from Deming column, about the brief history of quality.

Andrew Putwain, Commissioning Editor.

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contents M A RC H 2015

contents

04 Lean News 05 Introducing the editors 06 Introduction

Nick Rich presents this month’s introduction on experimenting with improvement cultures.

P rinciples & purpose 07 Breaking through with situational coaching Darragh MacNeill, a director, and Mark D. Hughes, vice president from Hitachi Consulting, the specialist international management and technology consulting arm of Hitachi explore the ideas of lean coaching that will be an effective tool in the workplace.

10 Developed a better process?

Great. Now the real work starts

Ian Robinson specialises in strategy/policy deployment and lean leadership at RenaultNissan Consulting. In this article he gives us a retrospective look at the implementation of lean and the lessons learn. What can be done differently in the future?

13 Exploring lean in Malaysia

Edmen Tam and Christina Chin have compiled a research project on the status of lean in Malaysia. What’s happening with the introduction of lean into this rapidly growing Asian economy?

18 Simple is best

Russell Watkins, of Sempai Consultancy Services, looks to the ancient Japanese traditions for ways to best implement lean in our high-tech world and the glory of the simple solutions.

2 0 C ase S tudy Constellium: people and lean

Fred Ravat, talent management director at aluminium fabricator, Constellium talks about the importance of people in the lean process.

24 SPECIAL FEATURE Tesco: lean retailer lost?

Simon Elias of Lean Competency Systems and Barry Evans investigates Tesco-one of the UK’s most successful retailer’s recent problems.

How did it go from being a lean, profitable enterprise into a downsizing problem area?

2 8 S ector F ocus : P aediatric healthcare Using 5S and visual management techniques to improve productivity Industrial engineers Brian Belpanno and Christopher A. Pinna explore the challenges of how to implement lean policies in a busy and high pressure environment.

3 2 L essons from D eming A brief history of quality

Bill Bellows shares part one of Demings ideas on quality in this month’s supersized column.

3 7 L ean online

We bring you all the latest news and discussion from our LinkedIn and Twitter pages and the LMJ website.

3 8 E vents

Find out about the latest lean events coming your way.

Elizabeth House, Block 2, Part 5th Floor, 39 York Road, London, SE1 7NQ T +44 (0)207 401 6033 F 0844 854 1010 www.hennikgroup.com.

Lean management journal: ISSN 2040-493X. Copyright © Hennik Group 2015.

www.leanmj.com | March 2015

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LMJ Getrag Ford Transmissions goes lean Getrag Ford Transmissions’ Halewood plant, near Liverpool is going lean. Interroll, which manufactures key products for unit load handling systems, internal logistics and automation, recently installed a dynamic storage system to centralise and store palletised parts closer to production lines.

The firm is undergoing a lean project to centralise logistics operations within the plant, including a first-in, first-out storage for 228 pallet positions in rack structure, four pallets deep and three pallets high, with 19 lanes.

Saskatchewan flag, image courtesy of Gary Schotel on Flickr

Saskatchewan lean saga rumbles on

The system allows accurate stock rotation of parts. Fork-lift truck movements are also reduced, as the racking is confined within clearly market areas of operation.

Neil Hodgkinson, contract manufacturing engineer at Getrag Ford Transmission said, “The new Interroll pallet flow system has been located closer to our production area and has provided compact, space saving cubic storage, enabling identical products to be grouped in the same lane and bays. This in turn simplifies location and order picking of parts to support production of some 1,600 to 2,000 gearboxes daily.”

Getrag Ford Transmissions was established as a joint venture with Ford Motor Company in 2001. Getrag manages employees at six European sites, producing manual, automatic and dual clutch transmissions.

The company is now the world’s largest independent supplier of transmissions and drive systems for passenger cars and light commercial vehicles, working across 24 sites, with 13,250 employees.

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The introduction of lean into the healthcare system of the Saskatchewan province in Canada has taken another turn.

The provincial government is ending its controversial contract with the U.S. company that brought the lean programme there.

Health Minister Dustin Duncan said that more than 200 staff who have been certified as so-called “lean leaders” will take over training other staff now.

“We’re to the point where there’s enough of a foundation of lean within the health system in terms of our lean leader certification where we’re at right now that we’re ready to move out on our own,” said Duncan.

The $35 (£19.6m) million contract with John Black and Associates was supposed to end in June 2015, with an option to extend it until September.

But the Ministry of Health has decided to end it in March.

The government has faced criticism over the programme, with the opposition party saying it’s too expensive, uses too much jargon and is disliked by many front line health care workers.

Opposition leader Cam Broten said he doesn’t expect the spending to fully stop any time soon.

The opposition has quizzed the government about the large travel bills racked up by lean staff, including Japanese sensei flown in to do sessions.

Premier Brad Wall and Health Minister Dustin Duncan have defended the programme, saying lean has resulted in savings that more than pay for itself.

“Quality improvement work [will] continue on a day to day basis without the use of an overall consultant like John Black and Associates,” said Duncan.

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 Andrew Putwain: a.putwain@hennikgroup.com

I ntroducing

your

editors

Our experienced editorial board members contribute to the journal providing comment against articles and guiding the coverage of subject matter.

René Aagaard Telenor, Denmark

Brenton Harder Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Australia

Zoe Radnor Loughborough University, United Kingdom

RenÉ Aernoudts Lean Management Instituut, The Netherlands

Paul Hardiman Industry Forum, United Kingdom

nick rich Swansea University, United Kingdom

Jacob Austad LeanTeam, Denmark

Alice Lee Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, USA

Ebly Sanchez Volvo Group, Sweden

Bill Bellows President, In2:InThinking Network

Sarah Lethbridge Cardiff Business School, United Kingdom

Peter Walsh Lean Enterprise Australia

David Ben-Tovim Flinders Medical Centre, Australia

Jeffrey K. Liker University of Michigan, USA

Peter Watkins GKN, United Kingdom

John Bicheno University of Buckingham, United Kingdom

Torbjørn Netland Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway

wendy wilson Warwick Manufacturing Group, University of Warwick, United Kingdom

Gwendolyn Galsworth Visual Thinking Inc., USA

joseph paris Operational Excellence Society

Steve Yorkstone Edinburgh Napier University, United Kingdom

More information on our editorial board, their experience, and views on lean is available on the LMJ website: www.leanmj.com www.leanmj.com | March 2015

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INTRODUCTION WRITTEN

BY

N ic k

R ich

Experimenting with improvement cultures T

he outcomes associated with an effective implementation of lean are well known. Generically they include improvements to six key organisational capabilities. These capabilities are actually processes that pass through organisational departments (ignoring organisational chart boundaries)

When safety is improved by engaged staff then costs fall as wastes and harm is reduced

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to provide value to customers and service users. They include safety, morale, quality, delivery, flexibility and cost improvement capabilities.

The capabilities are built and layered to form a solid and robust lean system but, as we know, cost is somewhat of a special case – cost reductions are actually an outcome of mastering and gaining a proficiency in the other capabilities. Most managers will be more than aware of the consequences of making cost reduction the only focus for an organisation and how the prioritisation of costs over quality and safety have significantly hurt and perverted manufacturing and healthcare systems (to the point of organisational collapse for some businesses).

Polluting logic is a dangerous thing and catastrophe awaits those who attempt to speed up systems that are unreliable, lack robustness and are not resilient.

Mastering and controlling an effective lean transformation starts with development of a safety capability and is in parallel with the engagement of colleagues so that – even though they may be unhappy with the current state system – they are unhappy because they still care that the service or product provided is not what the customer needs, deserves or should be subjected to. When safety is improved by engaged staff then costs fall as wastes and harm is reduced.

At the next stage the improvement of end-to-end quality reduces defects and wastes again and is a second layer of robustness that reduces costs further.

As quality improvements impact on the process muda (waste inhibiting flow),

mura (unevenness in flow) and muri (overburden of the process) are reduced and the focus on flow can move to building a delivery capability and product/ service flow can be designed so that the system can compress time (and naturally less time results in less cost, fewer delays and the elimination of queues).

At this point, management and team decisions improve because ‘the system’ has reliable processes so it is possible to establish when an order or service will be performed and completed.

From this point it is possible to look at just how flexible a system can be by building a capability for single piece flow or personalised service provision with patient pathways or services designed for the exact needs of each user.

These generic processes describe the common lean journey of improvement but perhaps the most interesting of issues these days lies in the application of lean in settings that are far beyond the traditional where systems thinking and modern situational models of change management have yet to combine.

The most important lean experiments therefore include how national culture influences the adaptation of lean systems and how professional cultures impact on the transformation process (its rate of change and ways of engaging staff with the improvement and learning agenda). These new conditions and adaptations of lean offer many new and exciting possibilities to understand how culture influences lean system design, how culture impacts on capabilities, and how culture influences the leadership of the learning to improve organisation.

principles

&

purpose

principles & purpose

Developed a better process?

Great, now the real work starts Ian Robinson has been working in operational excellence for over 15 years. He specialises in strategy/ policy deployment and lean leadership and is part of the senior team at Renault-Nissan Consulting – the internal improvement arm of the Renault-Nissan Alliance.

READ ABOUT: Lessons, planning and making a sure-fire strategy actually works Making sure a lean transformation becomes a value stream-wide change instead of in siloes

I

n this article, Ian asks one of their trainee lean practitioners to reflect on the challenges of implementing their first sustained lean improvement project – applying lean principles to the roll-out of a new information technology solution that directly impacts the quality of customer experience.

It seemed so simple. The team proposed an improvement to an existing process, and planned its deployment. The original process was cross-department. The new process was single-department. The new process had 83% fewer steps, and

eliminated wastes in motion, transport and waiting.

The process involves updating a database using specific software. The new process required a roll-out of this software to empower colleagues around the building to implement data changes themselves, rather than log requests and wait for them to happen – improvement from the ‘teach-a-man-to-fish’ school of process design. The successful execution of this process directly affects the quality of the customer experience at various points of contact with the organisation, and successful implementation

www.leanmj.com | March 2015

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I an R obinson lean improvement

depended on effective roll-out of guidance, training and software in order to bed it in. These plans were presented to senior stakeholders, and proceeded to implement.

– are you prepared to delegate responsibility for delivery to anyone outside your project team?

Culture-shifts that facilitate processchange must be top-down – so the managers must be onside, and if you rely on them to deliver your message, ensure they get it. Similarly, training a trainer is efficient – if they deliver your message with the right attitude.

If you’ve had any experience of process improvement, you may have sensed a creaking at the foundations of the proposed implementation strategy. Perhaps you asked yourself: What does a more efficient process mean?

Who cares?

Who were the stakeholders? How were they determined?

How was the roll-out facilitated, and how was the effectiveness of the rollout measured?

How did you manage and control how well the new process bedded-in?

What steps were taken to mitigate the risk of colleagues failing to grasp the requirements of the new process?

The trainee lean practitioner and his team were so confident in the quality of this new process that they felt it would implement itself. What did they learn? Processes don’t implement themselves, no matter how logical.

Here’s why:

L esson 1 : P lanning a better process does not guarantee a better process

It may smell, sound and look obviously better to you – but is it to everyone else? If you’ve been asked to redesign a process, be aware that often no-one will have considered the process with as much intensity as you, as recently as you. Others may not even be aware, or agree, that there is a problem.

Better is subjective. Everyone will feel the quality or efficiency (and pin down what these nouns mean early) of a particular process differently. People may prefer the inefficiency they know over the efficiency they don’t.

Being told that changing working practises will benefit the company strategically may not help implement change at the coalface. Show don’t tell, and involve colleagues at all levels at the planning stage. Otherwise your stakeholders might not feel like stakeholders.

L esson 2 : C ascading communications ( or , C hinese whispers )

We presented the proposals to the managers of the colleagues who would be executing the new process, and then trained lead-users who were trusted to train their own colleagues. Remember that people’s first impressions will depend on how content is delivered

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This boils down to how your change has been presented. An opportunity to learn new software, or an unfair shifting of workload? Ensure that the right benefits are highlighted to the right people: administrators may care about personal development and learning new software; middle-managers like balanced workloads; directors want reduced costs.

Momentum and priority are two of the most powerful forces at play in pushing new tasks into existing workloads

Ishikawa teaches us that we must be bold in delegating authority. But authority must be managed and controlled to maintain drive by the time your message reaches the coalface.

Maintain the ratio of hoshin (direction) to kanri (control/management).

L esson 3 : P rocesses aren ’ t rolled out in siloes

As important as ‘how’, is ‘when’ your message is delivered. Consider the context of your implementation, politically, morally and emotionally.

What is happening organisation wide, and how will it affect how your improvement proposal is received? One driver for this process improvement ambition was a merger with a larger division – a desire to get the data warehouse in order. This was an admirable aim theoretically, but realistically positioned the change as one in many for our colleagues - and a relatively unimportant one at that.

A string of changes can cause fatigue, blinding colleagues to any wider strategic gains. It may be worth considering your long-term approach to change, rather than buffeting your organisation with incremental improvements – even when the advantages of the improvements you propose compel you to rush your rollout. Time your deployment strategically.

principles & purpose

L esson 4 : M omentum and priority

The improvement team were so confident in the quality of this new process, that we felt it would implement itself. What did we learn?

Processes don’t implement themselves, no matter how logical

Momentum and priority are two of the most powerful forces at play in pushing new tasks into existing workloads.

The effectiveness of the roll-out depended on colleagues having access to software. As per Hofstadter’s law, the software rollout, which depended on a third department, took many times longer than estimated. The software roll-out straddled the launch- extinguishing any momentum. Colleagues lost interest and became frustrated, dampening engagement.

As such we operated a transitional process for many months while technical issues were resolved, which was deeply unsatisfying for stakeholders. Any efficiencies offered by the new process were quickly forgotten. It is vital that you operate quickly to keep colleagues warm – otherwise the work you need to support your process will quickly drop down their list of priorities.

L esson 5 : B e strong

Define roles, empower people to fulfil them, and don’t waver from them.

Resolve was weak when responding to requests for help. It was vital to have a demarcation between assisting and guiding colleagues in the first phases of the roll-out, without doing the work for them.

Compromise in this area will lead to ineffective implementation. Roles

must be defined and understood.

Everyone must understand and accept phase-out and handover arrangements at all times. There must be tools (documentation, guidance, trained colleagues) in place to support your resolve. Don’t catch the fish for them, but make sure they have all they need to catch fish themselves.

S o what ?

These lessons sound awfully like the things that would normally be identified in a risk register. And many were.

Though there was a failure to predict all issues, the problems took a familiar shape: foreseen risks that came to bear as badly as predicted if not worse; and risks that hadn’t been identified. The outcome of the process implementation would have been better had the risk register been more realistic and had we acted more quickly to identify and stem new problems as they occurred. Further, a change readiness assessment would have helped us navigate the context of the rollout.

C onclusions

These reflections are not really a surprise.

Having long held the belief that successful change is roughly one third ‘what you do’ and two thirds ‘how you do it’, the challenges of momentum, engagement and stakeholder commitment are clearly not new. Sadly, they are often underestimated when people use a tool-based focus for applying lean.

Achieving true, cultural adoption of lean takes much more, both in terms of time and complexity of approach.

This is where the real breakthroughs are often made

Many organisations have made significant gains through lean. The real challenges come when the low hanging fruit have been gathered; achieving true, cultural adoption of lean takes much more, both in terms of time and complexity of approach.

This is where the real breakthroughs are often made.

This in itself is a great sign. In these post-recession times it is the clever organisations who inject renewed momentum into their improvement efforts. It pays to remember, however, that the challenges of implementing sustainable change at the gemba are critical in achieving sustainable cultural lean. This is nothing new, but it is important learning for both old and seasoned lean practitioners.

www.leanmj.com | March 2015

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Simple is best Russell Watkins, of Sempai Consultancy Services, looks to the ancient Japanese traditions for ways to best implement lean in our high-tech world and the glory of the simple solutions.

READ ABOUT: Karakuri and how tea relates to lean The idea of deselection Simplicity is the key to lean

A

s throwaway lines go, this one uttered by Jim Womack to a packed conference room in November 2014, is up there with the best:

“Hoshin is your discipline to deselect.” he stated.

Readers with experience of policy deployment will grasp the simple truth in Womack’s statement having, in all probability, lived the common mistake of overcommitting to a lengthy annual wish list. These six words started a train of thought, pondering the relationship between mastery and simplicity, that led to this article and thoughts of a forty-year-old spoon (but more of that later).

Many of our finest lean thinkers and do-ers have provided classic nuggets which, when explored, yield deep learning. Shingo’s “Time is the shadow of motion” also comes to mind in driving an understanding of waste elimination beyond simply learning to spot the seven wastes. Similarly it’s possible to forge an excellent career by relentlessly practicing Fujio Cho’s “Go see, Ask why? Show respect” advice.

The LMJ ploughs many furrows in furthering understanding of lean, not least of which is to explore ways to engage people more deeply. Picture our current crop of lean thought leaders like Womack, Jones, Shook, Dennis, Smalley and Ballé amongst others, expressed as a Venn diagram. In terms of engaging employees in kaizen, a clear intersection of the circles would be around the need to keep things simple. Many lean veterans have lived, breathed and driven the ethos “simple is best” and yet, as a lean community, we continue to make things too difficult to grasp, use and maintain for any number of reasons. Read anything penned from any of the names above and you’ll notice, firstly, the simplicity of the language used and, secondly, the text reads like a conversation rather than an academic textbook.

Why waste column inches on such a basic subject? Is talk of simplicity just a plaintive cry from lean purists pining for the good old days of vicious sensei and the earlier days of lean? The answer is a resounding “No”.

Our world is one of scarce resources and businesses staffed by multiple nationalities with multiple mother tongues. Solutions to problems, large or small, require simplicity. A simple countermeasure is easily understood by those who have to use it, easier to sell to those involved and easy to maintain and confirm. Easily understood + easily implemented + easily maintained = a stronger chance of sustainability.

This article explores why we make things more complicated than necessary, how we can shake the habit and where to look for those already leading by example.

But first, a couple of caveats about the Womack and Shingo examples above. Simplicity of thought and

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principles & purpose

Simplicity of thought and expression is hard won and emerges from the running of many PDCA style experiments over decades

expression is hard won and emerges from the running of many PDCA style experiments over decades with repeated failing and regular reflection.

Thus, one view of mastery is the ability gradually trim away extraneous fat and frills from a subject to leave the lean meat behind. Some day-long policy deployment courses would yield less benefit to a business than understanding Womack’s six word “Hoshin is your discipline to deselect”.

problem sprung from Anne’s habit of using the spoon to get sugar from the sugar bowl, depositing it in the tea before using the spoon to stir the sugar through the tea. The hot wet spoon would then be deposited back into the bowl to form a crust of sugar on the spoon, requiring some chipping off later. Household disharmony ensued and various nagging related countermeasures failed; a failure arising from problem framing.

Granted, the lengthy path to mastery offers no shortcuts but that’s no excuse not to make a start. Simplicity of thought and action rarely happens as a lightning bolt enlightenment moment, but develops gradually within an individual committed to practicing the scientific method regularly. An individual embracing the idea that whatever their role in an organisation, their job is not to do their job but to improve the way they do their job, to borrow a phrase.

The spoon represents an elegant subset of error-proofing devices that work at source to prevent an error becoming a defect whilst having no moving parts/ sensors to break down. The bends in the spoon are intentional to allow it to both sit at balance on the side of the bowl and eliminate the problem at hand. This improved spoon was still used to obtain and deposit sugar into the cup but not to stir, thus it never became wet. Why, because it wouldn’t reach the bottom of the cup to stir the sugar around without burning the bearers fingers. A simple low cost solution. Thinking costs nothing but all of us persist in making things too complicated. Why is this?

Equally, don’t be fooled into thinking a simple countermeasure is the same as a dumb solution. Simplicity is hardwired into the Toyota production system, a system that can conceive, design and build cars from a BOM running into thousands of individual part numbers.

The author remembers squirming uneasily in the driving seat of a car heading out of a Scottish client’s car park (after a moderately successful workshop) as the Japanese TPS sensei in the back seat chirped up “Russell-san, please, how to explain waste to a child?”.

Similarly, the job methods part of TWI encourages us to eliminate, combine, rearrange and simplify.

As an example of simplicity not equalling ease, take a look at my Grandfather Albert’s sugar spoon (see image on following page). Albert, a man bypassed by academic success, was a very smart naturally gifted engineer whose working life was spent toiling in the experimental shops of Ford Motor Company. The spoon below is a prime example of simplicity springing from a deep understanding of a problem.

Albert and my Grandmother Anne drank ludicrous amounts of stewed tea throughout their lives. This particular

Humans are pattern recognition creatures; it helps us get through the day without getting bogged down reinventing solutions that already exist. The downside is a tendency to see familiar patterns and jump steps to assuming a root cause is identical to previous instances. This copy-andpaste way of thinking runs the real risk of over-engineering a partially successful solution. Worse still is a tendency to become wedded to early, favoured ideas at the expense of giving consideration to rival solutions.

The lean world is full of practitioners locked into thought patterns like a monkey in a South Indian monkey trap grasping a handful of sweet rice.

A tendency persists in many corners of the developed world to celebrate the complex as an expression of intelligence. If something is tough to understand it must be clever, right?

The focus, subconsciously but quite wrongly, becomes “What is the solution that best expresses my hard earned expertise?” rather than “What

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R ussell W at k ins S imple is best

An individual embracing the idea that whatever their role in an organisation, their job is not to do their job but to improve the way they do their job

Error proof spoons offer a lean alternative

exactly is the problem I am trying to solve?”

Decades ago, Shingo complained bitterly of “catalogue engineers”, a breed of engineer fond of scouring catalogues to find off-the-shelf solutions rather than using their brains sufficiently. There is a laziness of thinking here possibly driven by increasing workloads.

The three pitfalls above can be mitigated by practicing the discipline to observe, frame and express the problem tightly to always ask “What exactly is the problem I am trying to solve?” The problem isn’t how to remove crusty sugar, the problem is the spoon becoming wet.

Perhaps the biggest barrier is summoning the courage and self-confidence required to stand in front of a simple solution and not flinch at the “Is that it?” snipe.

All is not lost, there are several movements in the world practicing simplicity on a daily basis, offering learning curves for the clouded mind to borrow. A trip through the poorer reaches of South East Asia or the Indian subcontinent reveals many gifted problem solvers reflecting Plato’s age old entreaty “Necessity is the mother of invention”.

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One such movement is termed “Jugaad”, a slang Hindi/Urdu word, referring to innovative solutions, fixes or work-arounds for a complex problem. Ten minutes on a search engine provides plenty of food for thought for engineers and nonengineers alike. Entire twitter feeds parade innovative low cost solutions from this growing movement.

Similarly, a long Japanese history of Karakuri devices stretches back to the tea serving doll. Karakuri devices are clever ways of simplifying operations by using wisdom, not money as a means of low cost automation. Typical examples are part transfer devices (using the weight of the part itself) and box changing mechanisms. They are motor-free devices, are easier to maintain, break-down less frequently and easy to fix.

In a more general sense, seek out and listen to those who express themselves simply but with weight, supported by a history of running experiments (not all of them successful). The toughest task may well be spotting the gems as they tend to be buried in throwaway lines like the initial Womack example. As ever, it’s probably best to pin your ears back and please, please, keep it simple.

principles & purpose

Exploring lean in Malaysia

READ ABOUT: The state of lean in Malaysia Where SME and large companies differ What they’re doing right/ wrong and what will happen in the future

F

or this research, an electronic survey was designed and sent to a total of 2390 companies in Malaysia of various manufacturing backgrounds. The manufacturing companies included metal, concrete, heating, ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC), electrical and electronic, medical and other materials manufacturing. The manufacturing companies involved in this study ranged from medium to large scale with a varying number of employees.

Former University of Nottingham (Malaysia Campus) bachelors’ student Edmen Tam and supervisor Dr. Christina Chin have compiled a research project on the status of lean in Malaysia. What’s happening with the introduction of lean into this rapidly growing Asian economy?

This article discusses the findings and results of the questionnaire that was sent out to manufacturing companies.

The survey questionnaire consists of five sections:

It is no surprise 5S is the most implemented tool in companies as cleanliness of the workspace are always emphasised and practiced

(a) Demographic data (year of establishment, products manufactured, number of employee); (b) 14 lean principles; (c) Quality management systems utilised by the company; (d) Benefits and disadvantages of lean.

The questions were designed in different style for each section namely; on a range of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ options and a five-point scale to measure the extent of implementation and agreement described by each of the items. The scale used ranged from 1 = not implemented, to 5 = completely implemented and also 1 = strongly disagree, to 5 = strongly disagree.

The following section discusses the results obtained from the survey’s five sections.

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E dmen T am & C hristina C hin E x ploring lean in M alaysia

Table one: Description of companies

L ean adoption status

Product(s) manufactured

Number (n=24)

%

Metals

10

42

Concrete

1

4.2

Electronics

2

8.3

Medical

2

8.3

HVAC

2

8.3

Automotive

3

12.5

MISC

4

17

A total of 67% of respondents utilised and practiced lean in their production lines. Of those 67%, 81% are large corporations whereas 19% are SMEs. Based on the result, it was evident companies which are less than 10 years of establishment are less likely to implement lean as opposed to companies which are more than 20 years old. Equally, larger companies are more likely to adopt lean principles.

Figure one: Adoption of long term philosophy

Quality management system adopted (companies are allowed to choose more than one) ISO9001

18

75

QS9000

2

8.3

ISO/TS16949

5

21

ISO14000

8

33

OHSAS18001

5

21

New (<10)

5

21

Intermediate (11-20)

4

17

Old (>20)

15

63

Company age (year)

Small (<50)

6

25

Medium (51-150)

5

21

This is apparent based on the studies conducted by Shah and Ward, and Bonavia and Marin, where smaller manufacturing companies are less likely to implement lean principles due to restrictions and barriers.

For instance the transition towards lean for a new company is difficult because the need to being lean is more than implementing a set of tools and principles. Being lean is a culture and philosophy on its own so much that a company must build an organisation where learning and continuous improvements are the norm.

Large (>151)

13

54

Table three: Implementation of lean based on company age and size

Company size (employee number)

Lean implementation (n=24)

Table two: Respondent profile Position in company

Number (n=24)

%

Yes

No

New (<10)

1

4

2

2

13

2

Manager

17

71

Intermediate (11-20)

Director

2

8.3

Old (>20)

Senior Engineer

2

8.3

Company size

President

1

4.2

Small (<50)

2

4

Medium (51-150)

2

3

Large (>151)

12

1

Management representative

1

4.2

Corporate advisor

1

4.2

R espondent profile

71% respondents are in manager positions, thus giving first-hand knowledge and experience from direct involvement in the implementation of lean manufacturing in the company, around 42% of the companies manufactured metal products. It was also found 75% of companies implement ISO9001 as their preferred quality management system. However, 63% were well established companies of over 20 years.

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Company age (year)

As a result, larger companies implement lean because they understand the culture of lean through experience. However, a few SMEs also implement lean principles as a preliminary practice, and will likely implement further as the company matures. For companies opting not to implement lean, the reasons for their decision were, for instance, the lack of expertise and general understanding in the subject at hand. Although, companies know which segment of their production line requires improvement, however due to the lack of understanding of lean, the situational problem in their production lines remains unsolved (see Table four).

principles & purpose

A doption of lean principles

To substantiate the extent of lean adoption in Malaysian companies, the respondents were asked to rate the adoption level of lean principles. 80% of companies agreed in practicing the long term philosophy principles in the organisation (see Figure one). While only 19% believed a larger inventory is preferred due to lack of lean knowledge. However, this majority disagreed with the philosophy, as it may result in overproduction and wastes in manufacturing. As a result of overproduction, opportunities for improvements and quality of products are reduced, increased of holding costs and most importantly, lead times will be longer which disrupts the flow of the production line.

Figure two: Adoption of lean tools

Based on the results (see Figure two), 5S were identified as the leading lean tool majority of companies utilised in their workplace with a mean score of 3.65. This followed by standardised workflows and pull production control with a mean score of 3.45 and 3.4 respectively.

This result is aligned with a previous research done, which suggests the most applied tool utilised by Malaysian industries is 5S. It is no surprise 5S is the most implemented tool in companies as cleanliness of the workspace are always emphasised and practiced.

5S also creates a well-organised, smooth flowing manufacturing process which ensures a safe and clean environment for the employees. Lean tools with mean

score of less than 3 were namely poka-yoke, VSM, kanban and singleminute exchange of die (SMED) which were implemented primarily in larger companies.

People and partner development was important, with a high majority of 90% companies ascertaining this principle is in place. Finally, in terms of problem solving, all large scale companies agreed they tend to observe as the key techniques for continuous root problem solving as part of their organisational learning principles.

A dvantages and disadvantages of lean implementation

In terms of lean advantages, results revealed that overall companies generally agreed and realise the benefits of lean implementation with a mean score of more than 3. They had rated the following top advantages of lean; reduces process waste, financial savings and effective labour usage with a mean score of 3.85 and 3.8 respectively (see Figure 5). Though a handful disagreed, it should be noted that these companies do not integrate lean principles in their production lines. As such, the key to lean implementation is knowledge and understanding of its implementation and effectiveness in the manufacturing line.

Figure five: Advantages of lean manufacturing according to respondents

Figure four: Adopting problem solving techniques

In view of leans disadvantages, an average mean score of 2.3 was obtained, whereby; large companies disagree on any significance of disadvantages lean would create. However, SMEs surveyed are in total agreement on some of the lean disadvantages. For instance,

www.leanmj.com | March 2015

15

E dmen T am & C hristina C hin E x ploring lean in M alaysia

Figure six: Disadvantages of lean manufacturing according to respondents

the cost of lean tools implementation required a large investment in equipment and facilities; subsequently requires the recruitment of lean consultants to aid the lean process.

As a result, SMEs and new companies feel intimidated by the scale of lean implementation thus provoking a higher level of resistance.

H ow do we fi x these problems in the future ?

There is no right way to become lean, as every companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lean journey begins under disparate conditions. In order to become a successful lean company, there are many factors that have to be taken into consideration. As a result from this research, one of its aims is to recommend methods and principles of lean that can be used by companies to improve their production line. Upon leveraging the literature and results collected, the following recommendations were extracted to guide companies in considering the importance and benefits of lean adoption.

Focus on long term results: The adoption of lean requires a long-term commitment from a company as it takes more than a year or two in order to harness the necessary momentum towards the lean journey. Even though a company utilises tools for swift and notable improvements, over time, the benefits gained from lean tools would deteriorate if the company does not employ a sustainable way of production.

Based on the data gathered, a majority of 86% of companies surveyed indicated that they focus highly on long term goals.

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Smaller manufacturing companies are less likely to implement lean principles due to restrictions and barriers

Embed a set of rules and principles: The success of lean requires a culture that embraces learning and continuous improvement as a second nature to both the employees and management. The implementation of lean tools should not only focus on the physical changes in the production line, rather sharing of lean philosophies and intended companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s goals with the employees as the essence. By embedding this principle, the company and its employee share the same ideology and work culture towards a common mission and vision.

Eliminate the resistance to change: As the company embarks towards becoming lean, the management must educate the employees on the necessary changes in order to move forward with the company. In order to minimise the resistance and fear, employees must comprehend and understand lean to be assured on the challenges ahead.

Training and development: Employees should be provided with the necessary training to develop their continuous learning and new skills in in order for a better and improved production line.

With such a scheme, the creation of a stronger working culture for lean would benefit not only the company in product flow and more efficient layout to the production line but equally to the employees as well.

I n the future

The majority of companies surveyed implement lean tools and principles and agreed upon leanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s benefits and importance more than its drawbacks.

In general, companies need to be aware that lean functions are more than a set of tools and processes, because Figure three: Culture of developing people and partnerss

principles & purpose

Table four: Reasons for not implementing lean Reason (companies are allowed to choose more than one)

Number

%

Lack of expertise in lean

7

58%

Lack the general understanding of lean principles

7

58%

Not viable for manufacturing

1

8%

Do not know where to start with implementation

1

8%

Companies need to be aware that lean functions are more than a set of tools and processes Even though a company utilises tools for swift and notable improvements, over time, the benefits gained from lean tools would deteriorate if the company does not employ a sustainable way of production

being lean is a culture on its own that involves the employees, management and suppliers as a whole to be successful.

of lean principles. Evidently, the indispensable factors a company must take for successful implementation of lean are:

The culture of lean dictates a company should always strive for perfection and additionally, continuous learning and improvement. A company that goes lean will never finish; fail to comprehend that the integration of lean is not meant to stop at a certain point. However, being lean is more about adopting a culture of continually seeking perfection rather than thinking of tools and processes alone. As such, this research project intimates that the most common barriers companies face in attempting to apply lean are mainly due to a lack of expertise and general understanding

(1) Strategic application of lean tools surrounding the production line; (2) Focus on strategic goals, and (3) Continuous improvement for perfection for the production flow and employees mind set.

The future direction of this research is to utilise the mixed method approach for more extensive data gathering and to conduct a comparative review of lean principles, adoption and practices in the South East Asia region.

FURTHER READING: An empirical study of lean production in the ceramic tile industry in Spain, International Journal of Operation & Production Management, Bonavia, T. and Marin, J. A. Lean manufacturing: context, practice bundles and performance, Journal of Operations Management, Shah, R. and Ward, P. T. A study on lean manufacturing implementation in the Malaysian electrical and electronics industry, European Journal of Scientific Research, Wong, Y. C., Wong, K. Y., and Ali, A.

www.leanmj.com | March 2015

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Breaking through the lean wall with situational coaching Darragh MacNeill, a director, and Mark D. Hughes, vice president from Hitachi Consulting, the specialist international management and technology consulting arm of Hitachi, explore the ideas of lean coaching that will be an effective tool in the workplace.

READ ABOUT: New ways of coaching and leadership training that will encourage engagement The roles of those in the organisation that need to be respected in order for responsibilities to be met

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N

o matter how you look at it, lean leadership continues to represent the biggest challenge for organisations attempting transformational change. It is challenging because fully realising the value of lean requires a change in how we think, work, behave and lead. Changing behaviours is a long process, and, just like with kicking a bad habit, an abrupt change or withdrawal is rarely effective over a longer period. As such, behavioural change needs to be approached incrementally, taking on one or two behaviours at a time. And because everyone is different, each individual will experience their own personal improvement journey on the way to the target lean leadership behaviours. All this requires a real time commitment, and the support of a coach can be crucial to creating and sustaining a continuous improvement culture.

W hat is a situational coach ?

In business, coaching is a key enabler for individuals and teams to reach their full potential. But just as in sport, where the most talented players do not necessarily make the best coaches, business leaders often need to develop the skills required to be good coaches to their teams.

Situational coaching is a key element of an effective transformational programme, aiming to provide a safe and supportive environment to guide leaders through their own personal development journey in the context of their daily activities.

The practice supports leaders to become role models for lean, giving leaders an opportunity to reflect on their own behaviours and identify key points that can make a difference.

principles & purpose

Figure one: Target lean leadership behaviours

Once a critical mass of new leadership behaviour is reached, the sustainability of a transformation programme is ensured even before full deployment.

Though lean thinking can be applied consistently, it is still important to remember that individuals at different levels have different duties, and as such also have different responsibilities with regards to implementing lean thinking within their organisation. Executive management need to be able to create a learning environment and translate the voice of customers and business purpose into policies, targets and standards.

In that way, situational coaching can close the gap between lean tools and lean thinking.

C ascading the coaching model

Situational coaching is a cascaded leadership coaching model used in consulting which deepens the understanding of lean, provides practical coaching and builds the overall leader competence in leadership and management aspects of their role. It ensures that improvements are passed down and tangible benefits are being realised.

It starts with deep and narrow coaching, with potential coaches within the Figure two: Cascaded coaching model

organisation identified based on both their knowledge of lean and their ability to coach and mentor others. Specific training and on-the-job support should be provided as required for client coaches to start to connect the layers within their organisation. Once the right behaviours are established in this narrow crosssection, coaching can then spread across the organisation, firstly adding more teams and then more departments until each leader in the organisation has received the required dedicated coaching support.

Once the benefits of lean leadership behaviour become apparent, the effect quickly becomes infectious and a pull is created within the organisation.

The management team should be responsible for defining key performance indicator targets, and must therefore be able to specify improvement processes, and then translate these into optimising the end-to-end value stream. Supply chain, or value stream, managers are responsible for implementing improvement processes and optimising cross-functional work flow. Unit managers must be able to lead cross-functional root cause analyses and optimise process flow. And finally team managers must be able to develop and support teams, facilitating continuous improvement. All of the aforementioned are key pieces in the puzzle to achieving true transformational change. As such, it is important that these different responsibilities are taken into consideration when cascading the coaching model through the layers within an organisation.

The cascaded coaching model targets rapid but long-lasting cultural change, wherein lean leadership behaviours become the norm, by focusing on developing the coaching capability of the leadership team. Key elements include strong executive leadership, expert coaching capability, trusted coaching relationships and situational coaching in a lean context.

When leaders are true role models for lean behaviour, this inspires everyone within an organisation to deepen their understanding of lean, fully engage with a transformational programme, and close the gap between lean tools and lean thinking to fully realise the value of lean.

www.leanmj.com | March 2015

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C A S E S T U D Y C onstellium

People and lean READ ABOUT: What Constellium undertook to achieve lean success The relationship that developed with management strategists DDI The Dutch-run firm has dozens of plants and ventures around the globe

Fred Ravat, talent management director at aluminium fabricator Constellium, talks about the importance of people in the lean process.

20

C

onstellium designs and manufactures valueadded aluminium products and components for a broad range of applications, primarily in the aerospace, automotive and packaging markets.

The lean journey for Constellium began in 2012, one year after its creation as a standalone company.

Constellium has some 8,500 employees and 22 sites across the world, including manufacturing sites in North America, Europe and Asia.

For a young company, we have a long history. In one sense, Constellium has been in business for over a century. It was therefore important to embed lean into the business and drive change and transformation throughout the company as a way of improving performance and efficiency. The aim of this massive transformation through lean is to make Constellium the best and most profitable company in our industry.

On the basis of a deep analysis of the company and its processes, we organised our change around three pillars: lean tools, organisational changes in our autonomous product unit manufacturing sites (or

One of the biggest gaps we identified was frontline managers did not feel in control enough of the day to day situation they and their teams were facing

CASE STUDY

One of the biggest gaps we identified was frontline managers did not feel in control enough of the day to day situation they and their teams were facing

APUs) and lean leadership. Our CEO Pierre Vareille and our lean VP Yves Merel were the driving force of this lean transformation at Constellium.

critical 350 frontline mangers in our business to drive the lean transformation process. These leaders are very important to us as they add direct value to our customers, so were prioritised accordingly.

Since the beginning of the process we have recognised our people were the key success factor in developing a continuous learning and improving culture. We consider every Constellium employee – independent of their role – accountable for the environment and the health and safety of our employees and everyone else on our sites. But we needed to reshape the mindset of our leaders – many of whom are excellent engineers and technical experts but uncomfortable or unfamiliar with the softer management skills. This meant changing the way our second-level managers and frontline leaders behaved.

Because of the nature of our industry, many of these were used to processorientated and technical work rather than human interaction and supportive management behaviours, but it was crucial they focused on this side of their role as well.

We partnered with talent management consultancy DDI to design and deliver a lean leadership curriculum to tackle the challenge. We wanted a developmental journey that would create a climate to better embed lean into the business, and create a common leadership language to give our managers the skills for coaching and communicating they needed. We also needed a delivery partner with a global capability, who could equip and certify our own people top lead training programmes but also customise their standard tools and training modules to fit our needs. Lastly, we needed development to be adapted for different cultures and countries across our business.

At the most straightforward level, this is about reducing waste and inefficiency in workplace interactions. Any conversation between colleagues or a manager and his team is important to the business, regardless of whether these are formal meetings or informal conversations about a project. When these do not go well, they impact the productivity of the business, and ultimately reduce the likelihood of achieving lean objectives; continuous improvement and improved performance. With effective training, sharing of values and practices, people can make the difference.

P rocess and programme

After a six-month analysis of the business and analysing the people needs coming out of this, one of the biggest gaps we identified was frontline managers did not feel in control enough of the day to day situation they and their teams were facing (and saw themselves as firefighters). What’s more, half of the frontline managers had difficulty positioning themselves as leaders. It was therefore crucial to change leadership behaviour of the

The programme was based on giving leaders better communication and “soft” management skills, such as structuring effective conversations, and engaging and challenging staff in a positive way. The development journey included structured tools within four modules to help our leaders increase their impact in areas such as: Effectiveness in delivering feedback Confidence when faced with having difficult conversations Better relationships at multiple levels, geographic areas and business units.

This resulted in significantly changed relationship between these managers and their direct reports.

“The implementation of the four training modules was critical to start the lean transformation and to support change. With these common communication tools, the daily work of supervisors as been greatly aided.

The fact those managers for APUs trained their teams allowed better collaboration in the factories.” Sylvain Künzi, director of human resources.

To achieve the biggest impact possible we adopted a train the trainer approach, where senior frontline managers and leaders in each APU were themselves trained as teachers in line with lean principles.

They were then tasked with taking their new communication and management skills back to their teams. This helped ensure people felt ownership and responsibility for the change, rather than it being perceived as an HR initiative.

www.leanmj.com | March 2015

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C A S E S T U D Y C onstellium

In total, around 50 leaders were certified as trainers by DDI through eight sessions around the world, and they took the training back to a further 350 key managers in the business between October and December. Combined with another training programme that has been cascaded to around 5,000 of our team, we have seen training hours in the business rise from 3,000 hours in 2012 to 10,000 in 2013-14.

Becoming a trainer for the first time to his or her direct reports is an engaging, challenging but also sometimes concerning change for an APU manager.

But the certification process and the easily applicable content from the courses helped increase their confidence. We knew our APU managers were not all starting from the same base level of experience, so gave additional focused support to those that needed it through a DDI certified trainer and paired them up when starting the process with their direct reports.

Initially, we were cautious about how enthusiastically frontline leaders would embrace their role as teachers, and how much they would enjoy coaching others. A positive surprise has been APU managers coming back to us and telling us how proud they are of this responsibility. They are more satisfied with their work than they were in the past.

To ensure sustainability, we completely integrated the leadership modules in the context of the lean transformation, using application examples from the day-to-day routines of our frontline managers. This customisation of the content is key to ensuring its relevance.

The backing of our CEO was also a critical success factor. He joined each of the eight train the trainer sessions for a live conversation and recorded a four minute film in four languages explaining directly to frontline managers what he expected of them.

I mpact

For us, the biggest impact has been giving APU managers training and development on non-technical concepts and processes. They have embraced

22

these soft skills and are much more effective at problem-solving and leading their teams. This is a far more efficient methodology and is driving the lean transformation of our business. We now see our managers being far more proactive with suggestions to help improve the business and problems that should be and can be solved at a lower level are now no longer being elevated further up the business. Our frontline APU managers are directly adding more value to our customers. This change of leadership behaviour is an essential part of our lean transformation process, as without it the rest will not happen.

The result of this work has been a four-point increase in our employee engagement and satisfaction scores, between 2012 and 2014. Training and development has become the second biggest lever for driving employee engagement in the business.

All this means we have become much more of a learning organisation. Learning and training are now seen as core parts of our management responsibilities, which was not necessarily always so before. We have to keep investing in the leadership skills of our employees, but the return on investment in an engaged workforce who are far more able to contribute actively to solving the day-to-day issues and problems in the business.

Creating a standardised set of tools and leadership principles has supported our work with lean. These are backed up by our leadership principles and values. At a corporate level, we have been able to set the ground rules of a lean leadership culture we wanted to implement by standardising the way to deliver feedback, increase confidence with challenging conversations and give managers a framework for communications.

This work hopefully illustrates successful lean goes beyond the parts of the manufacturing process that are purely technical or about workflow and system processes, and into the people side. The role of leaders is a vital part of ensuring efficiency and driving lean into the business; they set the culture and without them embedding lean principles into the organisation would be impossible.

One of the biggest gaps we identified was frontline managers did not feel in control enough of the day to day situation they and their teams were facing

11-12 March, No.1 Mann Island | Liverpool Meet the Supplier In the modern world of business, large companies are increasingly put under pressure to keep it local and keep it British. The demands, from consumers, to keep costs down adds to this pressure and as an OEM it is vital you get it right.

Supply Chain Connect puts you in touch with local suppliers, through the means of 1 to 1 meetings. Take the pressure off, spend 2 days at 1 event and make the right connections.

Meet the Buyer As a manufacturer you are constantly looking for buyers willing to pay the right price. It makes sense to sell within the UK and it could help you beat the competition?

Supply Chain Connect puts you in touch with OEMs, in 1 to 1 meetings, who are actively looking to buy from local and British manufacturers. Spend two days at one event and put your time to good use making the right connections for your business.

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• Cammell Laird • JCB • Jaguar Land Rover • Siemens UK

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S P E C I A L F E A T U R E T esco : lean retailer lost ?

Tesco: lean retailer lost?

Simon Elias of Lean Competency Services and Barry Evans, who worked for Tesco, in their supply chain development team implementing lean thinking into their process, present this argument on the state of one of the world’s largest retailer. Tesco, a company that was once lean has entered financial difficulty, with scandals and problems dogging it in recent months. This article explores what went wrong.

READ ABOUT:

Of course, Tesco is not the only retailer to be suffering, as, in an apparent polarisation of retailing, those in the middle market are feeling the squeeze – and recent consequences have included Morrison removing its chief executive and Sainsbury shedding 500 head office jobs. While Asda experienced its worst quarterly sales performance in at least 20 years in the 12 weeks to 4th January 2015, Aldi and Lidl increased sales by 22.6% and 15.1% respectively in the three months to January 2015. Waitrose’s sales at established stores grew 2.8% in the five weeks to 3rd January, with grocery sales via Waitrose.com surging 26.3%.

While the UK grocery market is forecast to grow 16.3% from 2014 to 2019 (source: Institute of Grocery Distribution) key structural changes have been taking place and future growth will be driven by three principal areas: convenience, online and discounters. The shift in importance is illustrated strikingly in the table below, which shows the channel share of each £4 of market growth.

Being able to anticipate market tends and changes in customer value has been central to Tesco’s success over the last two decades, so has Tesco lost its ability to Channel

Share of each £4 of market growth

Superstores and hypermarkets

-£0.42

Small supermarkets

£0.03

Other retailers

-£0.01

The history of Tesco’s lean practices

Convenience

£1.62

Where it’s gone off course

Discounters

£1.49

Online

£1.29

TOTAL

£4.00

How the wheel of retailing led to its afflictions

24

T

esco has long been feted as a lean retailer and an early exponent of structured continuous improvement outside of manufacturing, so does its recent tribulations indicate it has lost some of its lean sheen and indeed what does its experiences tell us about the nature of sustainable lean thinking in organisations?

SPECIAL FEATURE

understand such shifts in market forces?

It was the first major multiple to see the potential of two of these significant growth areas – namely convenience stores and online grocery sales and it began operating in these areas in late 1990’s. However, it appears not to have anticipated perhaps the most critical of these – the growth of discounting and associated changes in the consumer value proposition.

W hat ma k es a company lean ?

Unsurprisingly, there is no single measure that simply indicates a company is, or is not, lean - not least because lean proponents have a variety of definitions of lean thinking which makes the task difficult.

However, what is generally accepted is being lean is not about the propensity to use specific lean tools and techniques, the number of PDCA cycles undertaken or the number of CI experts or black belts employed, though these may be characteristics of lean companies.

Measures of leanness surely must be expressed in terms of value and the ability of the company to deliver maximum customer value with the minimum resources, closely linked to its core purpose.

It is also helpful to view leanness not as an either-or condition, but rather as a spectrum or continuum, along which companies can move one way or another depending on their behaviours and performance in delivering value.

A key point to note about the spectrum is it lies at an angle, suggesting a company will slide to the less-lean left if it does not maintain its ability to identify and deliver value and purposively adopt the right supporting behaviours.

Tesco’s lean credentials are evidenced by several factors. Driven by former chief executive Terry Leahy, it was an early adopter of lean thinking in the 1990’s, which was primarily focused on cutting costs and removing waste from its supply chain, which lead to significant savings and improvements.

It pronounced the seminal Womack and Jones book Lean Thinking was one

Figure one: The lean spectrum Negative behaviours

M ore lean value delivered

Company

L E S S lean

value not delivered

Positive behaviours

of three that informed its mantra, along with Loyalty

by Reichheld and Simplicity by de Bono. It adopted several lean techniques, notably the Tesco steering wheel as a policy deployment vehicle and perhaps most importantly developed a passion for driving customer value, illustrated by its better-simpler-cheaper test for any potential innovation or improvement.

However, its profitability, sales increase and market share growth over a prolonged period are arguably the critical indicators in its ability to deliver customer value and therefore meet the lean company test. From 1992 to 2011 its average annual profit growth was 12.5%, (which had slipped to -3.3% 2012 to 2014) with its comparative sales growth figures 12.3% and 1.5%.

Tesco, it is argued, has slid towards the less lean end of the spectrum, as it has become less effective in its ability to understand and deliver customer value. It has, no doubt, maintained lean activities, such as taking waste out of processes, deploying strategy, improving flow and solving problems, though these alone are not enough to arrest the slide.

T esco and customer value Tesco under CEO’s MacLaurin, and particularly Leahy, had an excellent track record of working tirelessly to understand and deliver what customers valued. They developed many mechanisms to understand customer wants, such as Clubcard data, customer panels and market research.

The financial crisis of 2008 ushered a return to prominence of clear value propositions rather than an overemphasis on retail theatre

Thus they strove to keep abreast of what customers wanted (or did not want) and crucially aimed to deliver this through focused company-wide change programmes, with all functions focused on what they had to do to deliver their part of it. No localised versions were permitted, but everyone was encouraged to feed in ideas for improvement – with the best chosen for development and company-wide roll-out.

www.leanmj.com | March 2015

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S P E C I A L F E A T U R E T esco : lean retailer lost ?

These were evaluated and the best were developed into operable methods and implemented company wide. This delivered huge benefits, as each operation in distribution centre store order picking, store shelf replenishment, checkout scanning of customer baskets and so on, is repeated literally millions of times each year, so a small improvement in each operation cascades through to significant bottom line gain. The better-simpler-cheaper failsafe ensured no unintended consequences, since improvements must have a positive impact on all three.

Of course, the delivery of customer value is very simple to describe, though not necessarily easy to deliver and making and keeping things simple takes hard, focused effort to deliver and sustain.

F actors underlying T esco ’ s slide

Customers keep changing their expectations, they often do not know what they want and buy on emotion as well as reason

26

The root causes of the decline in Tesco’s performance over the last two years and its ability to deliver value to customers are likely to be a combination of several factors, both external and internal. The relative importance of each is difficult to gauge and it is their interaction together that is important.

Externally, the financial crisis of 2008 had a negative impact on earnings and accelerated the rise of polarised custom – the discounters and high-end retailers – which ushered a return to prominence of clear value propositions rather than an overemphasis on retail theatre, such as promotions and three-fortwo offers. Changing consumer shopping habits, particularly the growth of online and convenience have also been important.

Internally, there are factors that may have contributed to Tesco losing sight of their customer. These include an over focus on technological changes and too much emphasis on extended supply chains, where low cost is chased through efficiency at the expense of effective provision of provenance and erosion of core values, which undermined customers’ trust. The horsemeat scandal was a case in point and the accounting issues and overstatement of profits a symptom of this malaise.

international retail expansion. If you accept, as Disraeli said, the “secret to success is constancy of purpose”, then the loss of clarity of purpose will inevitably lead to a range of problems, not least in maintaining an understanding of customer value.

T he road to lean redemption ?

The arrival of Dave Lewis, Tesco’s first ever externally recruited CEO in September 2014, has heralded a number of fundamental changes in direction. Under Lewis, who has a strong consumer brand pedigree, Tesco claims it will re-focus on what the customer values by taking it back to its core purpose and focusing on price, availability and service. It aimed to improve in store service by recruiting additional staff and has disposed of some of its technological offers.

Early indications of the impact of the new CEO’s approach on trading performance and share price have been positive and it is worth noting Tesco’s financial performance is still delivering profits in excess of £1 billion – the only UK retailer achieving this – so the level of crisis is relative and should be viewed in this context.

S ummary

On one level, Tesco’s recent story can be part explained by a well-known marketing paradigm termed the wheel of retailing.

Terry Leahy warned in late the late 1990’s - the years of plenty - that Tesco’s biggest enemy was complacency.

Being complacent, in lean terms, can be linked to a loss of clarity of purpose, so did Tesco fall into this trap? With a high market share in a mature core home market, inevitably it began to look for other opportunities, to satisfy stakeholder demands for even more growth and bigger dividends and not least provide exciting new challenges for ambitious executives.

This contends retailers enter the market at the low end and make immediate market share gains by offering low prices made possible by very efficient operations. Over time, these retailers become increasingly bloated by letting their costs and margins increase. Their success leads them to upgrade their facilities and diversify, increasing their costs and forcing them to raise prices. Eventually, the new retailers become like those they replaced and the cycle begins again when still newer types of retail forms evolve with lower costs and prices. Loss of core purpose and lack of understanding of customer value lie at the heart of explaining the cycle.

Consequently, there was diversification into a wide range of activities, including video-on-demand, financial services, brown and white goods, mobile phones, broadband and so on, as well as substantial

Tesco under MacLaurin and Leahy were very successful and the latter’s obsessive focus on the customer and what they valued gave a powerful system purpose

SPECIAL FEATURE

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Tesco followed. Many innovative changes were implemented and made possible by Tesco’s development of an increasingly capable supply chain.

At some point Tesco lost sight of the source of its growth, exacerbated by a number of self-induced and external factors, including, a purpose that became more opaque and thus less meaningful, technology-based priorities seen as more important than delivering customer service and possibly leadership complacency – deemed by Leahy to be Tesco’s greatest threat. In the BBC Panorama programme in January 2015, Leahy said he blamed poor leadership by his successors as the key factor, though it can be argued several of the seeds were sewn during his tenure at the top.

Undoubtedly, the revolutionary market change driven by the financial crisis and the consequent market polarisation had a major impact that exacerbated the effect of the negative internal factors that resulted in the recent difficult years for Tesco. This is when significant changes in customer value occurred that, in fairness, were very difficult to predict.

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14:46 The corporate graveyard is littered with the11/12/2014 headstones of once great companies that, for whatever reason, at some point failed to deliver value to their customers and shuffled out of corporate existence. Sometimes this was due to internal factors or short product life cycles, sometimes due to external forces such as dramatic technological, social or economic changes.

Of course, it is notoriously hard to always know what customers want; three quarters of new products are said to fail, customers keep changing their expectations, they often do not know what they want and buy on emotion as well as reason. Henry Ford knew this when he said “if I‘d asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”.

The point is occasionally companies will be faced with significant shifts in customer behaviour they did not, or could not, predict. The ability to adapt to such changes is therefore critical to survival. This adaption will involve restating its purpose based around its core competences so as to engage with its customers and recapture the ability to understand value. The indications are the new management at Tesco is returning to a customer-focused approach, getting back to basics and clarifying purpose. These, together with re-building positive behaviours, mean it has the opportunity to move it in the right direction along the lean spectrum and reconnect with its customers in delivering the value they demand.

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SECTOR FOCUS

MEDICAL

Using 5S and visual management techniques to improve productivity

READ ABOUT: The challenges of implementing lean in a high volume treatment centre with limited space Investigation and encouraging staff involvement in bettering workplaces

I ntroduction : C ohen C hildren ’ s M edical C entre of N ew Y or k

Cohen Children’s Medical Centre (CCMC) is a 202-bed children’s hospital which opened in 1983 as the New York metropolitan area’s only hospital designed exclusively for children.

Brian Belpanno is the industrial engineer for the Cohen Children’s Medical Centre in Long Island, New York State and Christopher A. Pinna is a certified improvement advisor and industrial engineer for the Improvement Sciences Team of the North Shore- LIJ Health System.

Here they have written about their approach to improving processes and standardising the staff techniques at a paediatric hospital.

Today CCMC are the largest provider of paediatric health services in New York State. CCMC serves 1.8 million children in Brooklyn, Queens, Nassau and Suffolk counties in New York. CCMC is part of the North Shore-Long Island Jewish health system.

W. Edwards Deming famously stated “… most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to proportions something like this: 94% belong to the system (the responsibility of management), six percent are attributable to special causes.” Dr. Deming’s statement is masterfully typified by the system of operations in the Ambulatory Surgical Unit (ASU) and Paediatric Ambulatory Chemotherapy & Transfusion Centre (PACTC) of Cohen Children’s Medical Centre (CCMC).

While both are distinctively different in terms of patient complexity and clinical specialisation, they are plagued by the same array of viruses; poor organisation, lack of standardised operations, and

28

To facilitate the solutions development the team followed the Lean+S3® solutions model.

The model recommends for solutions to be simple, sustainable, and source driven

SECTOR FOCUS

minimal inventory control. Such system practice ultimately results in excessive human and physical capital expenditure.

retrieve supplies from the clean supply room delaying patient care.

Division administration wanted the issues resolved quickly using sound improvement science methodologies. Keeping this in mind they were presented with the concept of lean. It was explained that unlike six sigma which focuses on defect reduction, lean seeks to minimise waste in a system and is rapid in solutions deployment via the kaizen. To facilitate the solutions development the team followed the Lean+S3ÂŽ solutions model. The model recommends for solutions to be simple, sustainable, and source driven (front line staff).

P roblem - P A C T C

5S is a lean tool used for workplace organisation. 5S originated with the TPS. To use the tool, a team must follow the five simple words below (in order), and apply them to their workplace: Sort - To separate needed items from the un-needed items; Set (in order) - To arrange for easy access and visualisation; Shine - To ensure the area is cleaned and kept clean; Standardise - To ensure sort, set-in-order and shine are consistently implemented.

S ustain - H ard - wire gains

In general terms, kanban is another tool originating from the TPS which focuses on inventory control through visual management. A basic kanban system requires each item to have a visible minimum and maximum inventory level. When stock reaches the minimum level it is reordered up to the maximum level.

5S along with visual management techniques, including kanban, are used extensively in lean manufacturing environments to eliminate waste by reducing time spent searching for items, avoiding stock outs, minimising downtime, and allowing managers to identify potential issues before they impact production.

These techniques can be translated to any process, in any industry, which relies on equipment and/or supplies/ materials, including healthcare.

P roblem - A S U

The CCMC ASU serves as a level two PACU for children receiving outpatient surgery. Each bay in the ASU contains limited storage space consisting of one six foot shelf. Each shelf holds the supplies required for the patients who will be brought to the bay throughout the day. Before going through the 5S process all the supplies were kept in one large bin with no dividers. Infrequently used items would become buried in the bin and large items would hide smaller items from sight. A time study showed, on average, it took a trained staff member 12.8 seconds to find an item in the bin. At times items could not be located in the bin and the nurse would have to

The Paediatric Ambulatory Chemotherapy and Transfusion Centre is a 15 bed outpatient setting that provides care to CCMCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s haematology and oncology paediatric population.

The vast majority of PACTC patients receive chemotherapy, blood product transfusions and fluid hydration.

5S and visual management are an important foundation in any lean implementation

Available space in the PACTC comes at a premium. Patient treatment areas are not large and are separated via a curtain. In order to create a sense of ease and privacy most supplies and medical equipment, albeit a small supply cart, are not kept at the patient bedside. As a result equipment is placed in corridors or aisles within the unit, obstructing the free movement of staff and patients. Nursing staff would frequently remove the items and place them in areas prohibiting line of sight.

When administering care to patients the nursing staff would utilise a small four drawer bedside supply cart. Similar to the ASU, infrequently used items would become buried, large items would hide smaller items, and restocking would occur without performing an inventory assessment. The same principles held true for the clean supply room. It is important to mention product labelling was not present in either the bedside cart or the clean supply room. Analysis revealed an average time of 217 seconds to locate items in clean supply and 116 seconds in the bedside cart.

T he A pproach - I E T eam

The first step in the transformation of the ASU & PACTC was to perform an evaluation of the area by the industrial engineering (IE) team. The IEs along with unit leadership, staff nurses, and materials management conducted a walkthrough of the area, identified opportunities for improvement and agreed on an approach to improve access to and availability of supplies. Baseline metrics were also collected via time and motion studies conducted by the IE Team The structured approach began with education sessions for all staff in the

www.leanmj.com | March 2015

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SECTOR FOCUS MEDICAL

ASU & PACTC. All staff participated in one of several 60 minute 5S learning sessions offered at varying times and days throughout the week. The learning session provided the team with the terminology and techniques used in the 5S process.

W hat we did - A S U

The nurse manager and the PCA, (the staff member whom was responsible for ensuring bedside stock) were provided with several options to replace the existing storage bins.

The final choice was a rectangular bin with custom dividers. Before the bins were placed into service a prototype was created with labels defining the location of all the supplies. The required quantity of each item was determined by asking nursing how many of each item they use per day and weighing that against the box quantity that was kept in the supply room. For example only a handful of adhesive strips are used during the day, far less than one box, but it would be very time consuming for the PCA to count out adhesive strips, so it made more sense for the entire box to be placed in the bin.

In addition to the new bins, 5S tape was placed on each shelf to outline the location of items too large to fit in the bin. A label was placed on the tape to identify which item fit into which location.

After one bay was complete the staff was given the chance to use the new setup for a one week trial period.

After the trial period the staff provided recommendations to adjust the setup to better meet their needs. Changes included switching item locations in the bin to move taller items to the back. Once the tweaks were made the final product was reproduced in the remaining bays.

In order to sustain the supply organisation, regular audits are performed on the area by management.

M easurement - A S U

A post implementation time study showed, on average, it took a trained staff member 3.2 seconds to find an item in the bin. That represents an improvement of 75% from the original study. In addition, the number of bedside stock outs which caused unneeded trips to the supply room decreased to zero.

It is estimated the ASU will save about $16,000 in labour costs which will be used to see more patients.

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W hat we did - P A C T C

Post 5S training a team was assembled representing both nursing and administrative staff. They were tasked with thoroughly examining the bedside cart to determine supplies required for delivering patient care SKILL

OLD BIN

NEW BIN

DELTA

IMPROVEMENT

Auditor

99 Seconds

18 Seconds

81 Seconds

82%

Unit RN

29 Seconds

14 Seconds

15 Seconds

52%

SECTOR FOCUS

utilised to keep products in designated locations.

and configuration for ease of use.

As part of the 5S methodology the staff gradually progressed through each of the Sâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s beginning with a red tag event.

Labels were placed on both the outside drawer and on the upper right hand corner of each divider. Per infection control, the bedside carts need to be sanitised after each patient visit resulting in the development of a cleaning schedule to remain in compliance.

Once complete the cart was configured using both demarcation tape and dividers.

The tape served as a visual guide for kanban inventory control while the dividers were

Visual cues for maintaining appropriate inventory levels were posted in the clean supply room. A 5S Board was placed at the nursesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; station for sustainment.

M easurement PACTC

As a result of this initiative the PACTC realised tremendous gains in efficiency and in cost reduction. The red tag event identified 12 items for removal from the bed side cart. The 12 products were high value items that expired. The cost of inventory on hand was estimated to be $2,486. The overall reduction in cost for the bedside carts was 35%.

A time study post implementation also reviewed an increased efficiency of 60% when locating items. Similar to the ASU, bedside cart stock outs were brought to zero and regular audits performed by management to sustain inventory levels.

C onclusion

5S and visual management are an important foundation in any lean implementation. When used appropriately 5S has the potential to deliver tremendous results and reshape the how an organisation thinks about their workplace. Management buy-in together with staff education is imperative to ensuring success in any lean project.

Both the ASU and PACT had strong leadership who believed in the techniques and dedicated resources to redesign the system. Their commitment allowed for solutions sustainment thus altering the culture of their work environment.

FURTHER READING: Deming, W. Edwards, The New Economics SKILL

OLD BIN

NEW BIN

DELTA

IMPROVEMENT

Van Patten, James, A Second Look at 5S

Auditor

217 Seconds

137 Seconds

80 Seconds

37%

Liker, Jeffrey, The Toyota Way

Unit RN

116 Seconds

46 Seconds

70 Seconds

60%

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SPECIAL FEATURE LESSONS FROM DEMMING

Brief history of quality: part 1 Variation there will always be, between people, in output, in service, in product. What is the variation trying to tell us?

W. Edwards Deming

S

Bill Bellows presents part one this supersized column inspired by Stephen Hawking and his seminal work, A Brief History of Time.

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everal years ago I had the opportunity to attend an hour-long lecture by Stephen Hawking at Caltech. He returns to Pasadena every summer for a one month retreat, a ritual he started in the 1970s. Several thousand attendees, sitting in both a lecture hall and outdoors on a lawn area, complete with a giant screen, were treated to an evening of reflection by the legendary Cambridge physicist. His focus was “My Brief History,” offering us a glimpse of his life through a twist on his treatise, A Brief History of Time. His introspective presentation revealed his genius, his humility, his search for black holes, and his passion for life, not to mention his dry sense of humour. It ended with questions from three Caltech students, the last of which came from a post-doctoral student, an inquiry Hawking had likely tackled many times before. He relayed the story of an unnamed physicist who once compared himself to both Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, each placed on a scale of one, lowest, to 10, highest. With this context, Hawking was asked where he would rank himself.

While I do not recall the relative rankings posed in the query, I will never forget Hawking’s abrupt reply, “Anyone who compares himself to others is a loser.”

-In reference to Dr. Deming, “Variation there will always be.”

What can be said for counting customers, suppliers, ideas, and black holes? Are they interchangeable as well?

SPECIAL FEATURE

Mindful of this natural phenomenon, Hawking’s reply admits the existence of variation, yet disregards the value proposition of a hypothetical ranking of legendary physicists. “We are all different…but we all share the human spirit,” is a common response from Hawking. Could it be he would prefer to accept both the variation and similarities between himself and others and have us move onward in our lives?

Could it be he would prefer to accept both the variation and similarities between himself and others and have us move onward in our lives?

Let me transition from Stephen Hawking to “A Brief History of Quality,” and begin this chronicle with three questions, for which the reader’s answers will provide a foundation for thinking about quality.

First, what do you call the person who graduates last in his or her class in medical school? The clichéd answer is doctor, the same title as the person who graduates first in their class, as all have met the rigorous academic and residency requirements. What about variation between doctors and, if so, where does it appear? Meanwhile, “goat” is the designation for the officer who graduates last in his or her class at West Point, the US Army’s military academy. In keeping with the Army’s commissioning protocol, all West Point graduates, whether first or goat, begin their military careers as Second Lieutenants. Whereas the use of the term “doctor” paints all of the medical school graduates as the same, without variation, use of the “goat” label implies not all West Point graduates are the same.

On to the second question, one involving numbers. Which two of these three numbers, 5.001, 5.999, and 6.001, is closest to being the same? While these values need not represent anything other than three rational numbers, they could also represent the measured values of hole diameters in an aluminium casting, the “0 to 100 kilometres per hour” acceleration times of a car, or the bacteria levels in a soap solution.

In asking this question, ideally with the numbers recorded on a slide, along a line, beginning at zero, the near certain answer is 5.999 and 6.001. The sole exception was the reply from a 12-year old neighbour. He replied 5.001 and 5.999, adding a devilish grin and this clever explanation, “I know which answer

you were looking for and I wanted to be different.” Different he was.

For the third question, I offer a wellpracticed thought experiment. Imagine a can of a fizzy drink, filled with to the top, but without a closing cover. Now, imagine a small flavour probe in the can, wirelessly connected to a pen in your hand, used to record a flavour profile on a sheet of paper, using flavour as the vertical scale and time on the horizontal scale. At the moment the can is sealed, the probe provides an initial reading of the flavour of the fizzy drink. From this starting point, what is the expected flavour of the drink over time? That is, does the flavour improve over time, as with a fine wine, or does it decrease over time, showing negative signs of ageing?

Or, perhaps, remain constant over time?

Other options are it decreases, then increases, or increases, then decreases.

All of these responses have been submitted from well over one thousand respondents, with a steady decrease over time as the most popular answer, followed by constant over time.

The answers to these three questions reveal assumptions about how we think, which initiated my interest in Deming’s views on management. In a very simple model, we think in terms of patterns, using both black and white and shades of grey. Hour by hour, we routinely use both modes of thought, as context demands, shifting from one to the other and back again. With no known originality, I refer to the former mode as category thinking and the later mode as continuum thinking.

Each is extremely useful. Awareness of the contrast between them could prove valuable. Knowing which is more helpful in a given situation might be invaluable.

The answer to the first question, “doctor,” shows strong evidence of category thinking, for one absolutely is or absolutely is not a doctor. Black or white.

Doctors represent one of many categories of medical professionals, which can be sub-divided into categories, from surgeon to paediatrician to anaesthesiologist.

So, too, can nurses and military officers, yet the use of term “goat” to label the bottom ranking officer at West Point is a distinct signal of the relativeness property of continuum thinking that allows us to perceive variation within a given category.

www.leanmj.com | March 2015

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SPECIAL FEATURE LESSONS FROM DEMMING

Category thinking is quite useful in allowing us to organise and simplify, much as we use a file cabinet or file folders on a computer or drawers and cabinets in a kitchen. Once we do so, and place doctors in one category or another, we rely on continuum thinking to differentiate those items in a given file. Might this be our thinking when we seek a recommendation for a heart surgeon, knowing heart surgeons have variation in experience, skills, and performance? Else, we ignore the variation within a given category and treat each item; doctor, officer, managing director, or customer; as an interchangeable bit. Such is the simple logic of interchangeable parts, a concept credited to French founders, including Honoré Blanc, in the late 1700s, and given great compliments for advances in world-wide commerce over the past two-hundred years. Might there be evidence of category thinking and interchangeable parts when our health insurance provider (in the US, not the UK’s National Health Service), in response to the potentially higher fees for our preferred heart surgeon, suggests a less expensive, yet potentially less experienced heart surgeon? Far afield from manufacturing, biologists follow the absoluteness of categorisation logic to make assignments with varied life and fossil forms when using genus and species. Innocently, these assigned terms leave us to think, whether counting Cheviot sheep on a sleepless night or the number of goals scored by Wayne Rooney against Liverpool, that each sheep is the same and each goal is the same, rather than a unique occurrence.

What can be said for counting customers, suppliers, ideas, and black holes? Are they interchangeable as well?

What can be said of the thinking behind the second question, with 5.999 and 6.001 as closest two numbers in the set of 5.001, 5.999, and 6.001? While each fits the category of being a number, if not a number greater than zero, there was no other implied categorisation. Absent a defined or implied category, such as the absolute requirements for being a doctor, the thinking behind the selection of 5.999 and 6.001 could easily be explained by the relativeness of continuum thinking and the inference that “same” implies

34

What is quality?

A product or a service possesses quality if it helps somebody and enjoys a good and sustainable market

proximity. They are a mere 0.002 units apart, far closer than any other pairing in this set of three numbers, hence the confidence with which these two numbers are the dominant choice, absent the mind of a precocious 12-year old.

Meanwhile, the margin between the first and last in their medical school class, no matter the overall disparity, is hastily erased when one adopts the absoluteness of category thinking and labels each a doctor. One might wonder if this haste creates waste, a conclusion reached by Edward de Bono in The De Bono Code Book (subtitled Going beyond the limits of language), which proposes, as a provocation exercise, we communicate in codes (numbers, such as 14.11) rather than words. According to de Bono, “Language has been the biggest help to human progress. But, ironically, language has also become the barrier to its own development. We are locked in to words and concepts that are limited and out of date. These force us to see the world in a very old-fashioned way.” An alternative strategy to the use of codes is to be conscious of our two thinking modes, to think about our thinking.

It might be apparent by now the majority of responses to the third question, regarding the flavour profile of a fizzy drink in a sealed can, are also expressions of continuum thinking.

As with the relativeness explaining the prevailing answer to the second question, all but three of over 1000 replies (across the US and UK) to the third question have been smooth, continuous flavour profiles. The three outliers revealed an initial flavour level for a short period of time, followed an abrupt, step change to a lower level, followed by a period of steady flavour. When asked for an explanation of this discontinuous profile, each participant made reference to “a point at which the drink goes bad.” Make that instantaneously goes bad (in zero time), as might be the thinking behind an expiration date for fizzy drinks, dairy products, or industrial chemicals.

Although a very small percentage of the flavour profile replies are indicative of the thinking of expiration dates, one need not look far to see them in operation around us-in a grocer’s shops or at work.

SPECIAL FEATURE

I have witnessed industrial chemicals in full use right up to the expiration date, and then banned from use and tagged for immediate disposal with the passing of the expiration date

It is not to say they are bad, or should not be used. Yet let us be mindful of the actions induced by category thinking; on more than one occasion, I have witnessed industrial chemicals in full use right up to the expiration date, and then banned from use and tagged for immediate disposal with the passing of the expiration date. Only seconds before, the chemicals were freely used. While they may rapidly sour, it is unlikely they instantly expire with a big bang, all in keeping with the sentiment of German novelist Thomas Mann’s observation about New Year’s Eve, “Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mere mortals who rings bells and fire off pistols.”

The predominant answers to the flavour profile inquiry reveal the majority of us do not think in terms of sudden changes in the flavour of a fizzy drink.

Would the replies be any different if the question’s phrasing replaced the “flavour of the fizzy drink” with the “strength of an industrial chemical”? This is food for thought for subsequent research.

The reason for phrasing the question in terms of drink flavour is to shift the participant to a framework they likely have never considered, unless, of course, they are employed in the business. From experience, it is easier for someone to answer questions such as the three I have shared, far from the familiarity of one’s daily work, and use their answers as a mirror to reflect on their mode of thinking in each reply. In turn, these thinking modes also reflect on the prevailing explanations of quality, from zero defect quality to six sigma quality, to quality defined by Genichi Taguchi and Deming. Their ideas are the primary focus of this review, as I have found both to have made contributions that offer explanations for the overall success of the Toyota production system that cannot be readily explained by the concept of mass production with interchangeable parts that remains the predominant quality construct of the lean community.

The word “quality” has Latin roots, beginning as “qualitas,” coined by Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus

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The aim of the five-day Forum is to continue to elevate the consciousness of individual and collective thinking. Join in order to learn, connect and improve how you work, learn and think together.

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Tullius Cicero, who later became an adversary of Marc Antony. Feared by Antony, his power of speech led to his eventual beheading, but long after he introduced his fellow Romans to the vocabulary of qualitas, quantitas, humanitas, and essentia. He is also credited with an extensive list of expressions that translate into English, including difference, infinity, science, and moral.

While Plato invented the phrase poiotes for use by his peers, Cicero spoke of qualitas with his peers when focusing on the property of an object, rather than its quantitas or quantity.

Two-thousand years later, when writing The New Economics, Deming wrote, “The basic problem anywhere is quality. What is quality? A product or a service possesses quality if it helps somebody and enjoys a good and sustainable market.” As with Cicero, Deming saw quality as a property.

Long after Cicero and well before Deming, quality as a property was the responsibility of a broad network of guilds, associations of artisans who controlled the practice of their craft in a given region, each with their own revered trademark. They were organised as professional societies, not far removed from the concept of today’s trade union.

These fraternities guided the development of textile workers, masons, carpenters, and glass workers, from an entry-level apprentice to a master craftsman. They also extended to include wool, silk, and money changers, each with its own high standard for quality.

www.leanmj.com | March 2015

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We want to hear from you!

As the Lean Management Journal progresses on its own continuous improvement journey, we understand how important it is for us to listen to the voice of our readers.

So we have set up our own suggestions box and would like you to tell us what topics we should cover in the journal and at our events in the next few months. What are the questions you want answered? What are the issues you are facing that you would like to read about? We believe in pull and will always welcome your suggestions and feedback.

We will try our best to address every request by providing helpful, thought-provoking case studies, interviews and features.

Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t forget that our Letters and comment section is open to anybody in the lean community who wants to share an opinion or an experience with their peers.

Your feedback is important to us as we strive to improve our publication, services, and overall reader experience.

If you have any suggestions for topics you would like the LMJ to feature in the coming months, please send an email to the editor, Andrew Putwain, who can be reached at a.putwain@hennikgroup.com or +44 (0)20 7401 6033.

lean online M A R C H 2 0 1 5

LEAN ONLINE

LeaN nline

LMJ’s social media pages are a great place to go for lots of networking opportunities and information on all things lean from around the web.

Find industry experts and exciting discussions on our LinkedIn page, and follow @LeanMJournal and @AndrewPutwain for news on upcoming events and ways to get involved with the LMJ. In a recent blog from the LMJ website you may have missed Dr Steve Chicken, of EEF, reinforced the ideas raised by Nathan Wilson in February 2015 (‘The language of lean’) that too much lean lingo can be offputting for newbies

Cut the ninja nonsense Dr Steve Chicken CEng MIED, manufacturing growth director at EEF, explores the sensitive subject of why the vocabulary of lean can hinder a successful implementation. Jargon and buzzwords have infiltrated lean and look here to stay-but should they?

In this blog he argues for simplification.

What are your thoughts?

“Cut out the ninja nonsense!” – That was the plea I heard from a senior line manager at a famous aerospace company. He was trying to explain why lean was proving so hard to implement across the organisation and I have to say – he had a point (and still does).

Although sometimes it can seem to be a new innovation, lean manufacturing has been with us for a long time.

Since the early 1900s there has been a drive to make manufacturing processes more efficient and effective. The fact that the Japanese at Toyota took the principles and concepts and refined them in to an identifiable, globallyrelevant manufacturing process is why we practitioners take the ostensibly Japanese lean vocabulary and attempt to shoe-horn it in to British organisations.

ROUNDING UP THE MONTH’S DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS ON LEAN As that aerospace manager pointed out, we continue to overuse these Japanese words to describe what we do in lean. Just a couple of second’s reflection conjures up jidoka, kaizen, andon, heijunka, poka-yoke, muri/mura/muda, gemba, kanban and the original 5S’s: seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu and shitsuke (see the mini-directory below for their meanings). So why are we so surprised when the guys’ eyes on the shop-floor glaze over?

In my experience, this is particularly relevant when implementing lean outside of the automotive supply chain. The Toyota language nearly always gets the reaction that it’s OK for automotive, but it won’t work here. The Japanese words get in the way.

At its heart, lean’s objective is to reduce waste and make the manufacturing process simpler, more efficient and more effective. It is basic common sense built on a set of tried and tested principles.

Done properly, it works – which is why it has been around so long. But there is a fundamental barrier – the complexity of lean vocabulary can actually inhibit employee engagement. If you are talking to your team in a foreign language (and one that many of us are not even vaguely familiar with) you are creating a barrier that effectively prevents them from engaging with the process, sharing your passion or contributing.

So please, when you are implementing lean in your companies use clear English; your boss may be impressed by the Japanese words, but the folks where it really matters won’t be. The reality is that if you switch them off you will be making it extremely hard for your company to enjoy the benefits of what is a highlyeffective and proven process.

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events There is currently an expanding pool of events available for the development of the lean community. They offer both general and sector specific opportunities to renew your enthusiasm and gain new perspectives through communicating with lean contemporaries.

U P C O M I N G L E A N events include :

L ondon L ean Kanban D ay 2 0 1 5

April 20, London, UK The London Lean Kanban Day is back. Following the success of the 2013 & 2014 events, the BCS Agile SG is organising another round of talks from some of the most respected figures in the kanban world.

The event will combine traditional speaker-led sessions, experience reports and an open space including an Ask a KCP/AKT session.

For more information please visit: www.bcs.org/category/18299

A M E / C M E C anadian L ean C onference 2 0 1 5

June 1- 4, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada The Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) is the premier organisation for education and networking in the manufacturing profession. Members come together to explore lean thinking, enterprise improvement methods, exchange best practices and network. AME has partnered with Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters (CME), Canada’s leading trade and industry association, to deliver a world-class national lean conference Conference attendees will experience six highly acclaimed lean experts and motivational keynote speakers, they can choose from 36 best practice practitioner presentations organised around four value streams.

There will also be over 18 tours to see hands-on application of lean techniques in action and 15 highly interactive workshops.

For more information please visit: www.cvent.com/events/ame-cme2015-winnipeg-lean-conference

I nternational L ean M anagement C onference June 16 – June 18, 2015, Wroclaw, Poland The Lean Institute Polska presents 2015’s International Lean Management Conference.

This year will have more than 400 participants and some of the world’s best lean practitioners and experts, inspiring case studies, workshops and factory visits.

Speakers include John Shook, Chris Vogel, Mike Orzen, Samuel Obara and José Ferro.

For more information please visit: www.leanglobal.org/events

Photo courtesy of Sebastiaan ter Burg on flickr

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2 0 1 5 E ngineering L ean and S i x S igma C onference Sept. 30 - Oct. 2, 2015, Atlanta, Georgia, USA This year, the IIE Engineering Lean & Six Sigma conference will be held in collaboration with the Lean Educator Conference. To take best advantage of the opportunities for networking and peer learning presented by the joint conference, the tracks include industry topics (with a non-exclusive emphasis on practices in segments new to lean six sigma), academic topics (in both research and education), and a special call for joint academic/ industry topics, including needs for new graduates, industry participation in learning in academia, and professional education and training.

The conference will offer facility tours that give an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at continuous improvement in action at various facilities in a variety of industries. Facility tours require preregistration and separate fees.

Keynote speakers at the event include Timothy J. Greene, Ph.D. provost and vice president of academic affairs at Western Michigan University, Lynne Herer Smith deputy director, investment workflow finance & strategy team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Jane M. Algee, programme manager, fixed wing programmes at Lockheed Martin - Missiles and Fire Control.

For more information please visit: www.iienet2. org/leansixsigma/

D A T E F O R Y O U R D I A RY : LMJAC 2015 The Lean Management Journal Annual Conference is rapidly approaching.

Contact events@hennikgroup.com for more information on the essential lean event of 2015.

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