The Lean
TOP25 Produced by:Produced by:
2016
The LMJ is a provider of lean and continuous improvement news. The journal offers in-depth analysis, comments, case studies and reviews to give insight into the most important issues facing the lean community.
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A WORD FROM THE EDITOR Fred Tongue Editor, The LMJ The Lean Top 25 celebrates inspirational people from varying organisations, in a wide cross section of sectors, who strive to instigate change, as well as influence others to achieve their very best in the workplace. Quite often, project teams and change groups are celebrated as a whole for their endeavours in lean, however, those people who levy for greater change, instigate it and continue it, do not always get the credit they deserve. It’s easy to continue with the status quo, where the outcomes are predictable and comforting. However, to strive for change and to actively seek it, is something that requires strength of purpose and clarity of thought. Irish playwright Bernard Shaw said of change, “progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” Lean is not about sticking to the book and only using pre-existing parameters. It is about experimenting, about finding that extra value in an unlikely place, or cutting waste that was always perceived as part and parcel of an organisation. Each of these exemplary figures is practising this everyday. Each with their own unique adaption of continuous improvement. Whether they use the traditional Japanese terminology or something more relevant to them, these individuals are driving their organisations forward. Clarence Barron, the famous financial journalist who many see as the founder of modern financial journalism, once said, “Everything can be improved.” This report comprises 25 lean pioneers who carry that sentiment like a talisman, and continue to find innovative ways of adding value and eliminating waste. Happy reading!
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Mark Amphlett General Manager Amtek Plastics Lean and continuous improvement are designed to make our customer the happiest customer on the face of the planet; it’s all about customer satisfaction. It’s not about the costs; it’s about getting the service right and getting it right first time. There are a lot of companies out there competing on price and we don’t want to be part of that. We want to have the best communication and deliver the best possible result, so when a customer orders something, it’s on time and right first time. It’s the most important thing, you can lose a customer quite quickly if you don’t do it right. We want to make sure we are doing things right time and time again. However, no one is perfect, so we’ll make mistakes. Continuous improvement is about making those mistakes and learning from them. We’ve recently spent a lot of time and effort in a new ERP system, so our back office system is fully integrated in the business, providing a direct line of information for our customers. Our belief is that success comes from effective communication with the customer. We keep a track of customer feedback. Our aim is to achieve zero customer complaints in a month. If I look at that Key Performance Indicator from a year ago, we were no where near it. In 2016, there have already been a couple of months where we have achieved that. That is a fantastic achievement for us. I want Amtek Plastics to be the biggest and best at what it does in the country, that’s my driving force to continue to improve.
“It’s not about the costs; it’s about getting the service right and getting it right first time”
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Mike Antochow COE Deployment Leader Akron Children’s Hospital I got into the American Healthcare system, as I heard there were patient safety events, long lead times, and skyrocketing costs. I knew there were some very smart people in the industry, and together we could solve the issues if we focused on them. My role as a deployment leader is to empower the people looking to make lives better for our patients by coaching and leading staff through lean process improvement activities. Since staff members are the ones who live with the changes long after I have moved onto the next activity, the improvements are conceived and implemented by them. As we have been making good strides here at the hospital, we’ve come to realise there are other non-profits in the community that need process improvement as well. The customers of our partners are our patients too. With just a little effort on our part to empower our partners, we can make an even bigger difference in the community that we serve. Lean is about respecting others to make the changes our organisation needs. Lean is looking at the entire value stream and improving all portions. Finally, lean is about making the experience for our patients and community as good as we can make it.
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Luke Benton Managing Director MNB Precision Ltd Luke is a huge advocate of identifying and working to eliminate waste and champions operational excellence, both internally to his management team and staff, and externally through promoting the impressive journey MNB Precision has gone through. In just over two years, Luke has taken a business spread across four separate sites spread in a rolling Coventry industrial park and relocated the entire premises into one single 36,000 sqft building in March 2015. The transition removed the logistical and workflow challenges MNB previously encountered and allows the company to efficiently manage jobs from start to finish. As a result, the average lead-time for a job has dropped from 18 weeks to just four weeks, a drop of more than 75%. The increased efficiency has also created project cost savings of up to 10%, savings Benton has elected to pass onto his customers. Since the relocation Benton has continued to focus on business improvement, and is an ardent believer in implementing small, incremental changes to leverage an overall efficiency benefit greater than the sum of its parts. Something, he believes, every company is capable of achieving – regardless of size, budget or sector of activity.
Colin Boughton Operations Director Fujifilm Speciality Ink Systems We dabbled in lean for a bit and adopted 4S as a starting point to keep the plant tidy, nothing serious because we didn’t know the terms or what they were called back then. When we were taken over by FujiFilm in 2005, things really began to ramp up. Our chairman said “learn it, upgrade it and get people to invest in it”. I visited the Japan facility a few times, at the their plant they called it Lean Six Sigma, but we didn’t adopt that name, we adapted it. We started our lean journey a long time ago but in dribs and drabs, there wasn’t really any plan to it. Before I was involved in lean, I was known as a bit of a change agent anyway. I don’t want to settle for the status quo. In my personal life, I am always looking to change and make things better. I have always altered the houses that I’ved lived in and I own a classic car, which I like to work on. I’ve always been that way, I never accept the current state.
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Susanne Clarke Finance Professional Driving Excellence and Value for Money in Higher Education Bournemouth University Susanne has led several large cultural change programmes at Bournemouth University. With a background in service excellence and lean, Susanne uses business intelligence and analytics to drive improvement. Through her work, she strives to instil a culture of change and ensure the organisation is always ready to move forward and adapt. Her work has included setting up an ethos of service excellence across all departments at the university. As well as her endeavours at the institution, Susanne has worked with e-procurement and a data warehouse project that has since set the standard. Susanne began her tenure at the university in the finance department, where she delivered savings of £275,000 in one year and also reduced costs by 15%. Since then, she has transitioned to service excellence, ensuring excellence is achieved across all departments.
Martin Cox Business Improvement Director Shoosmiths I am delighted to be nominated as one of The Lean Top 25 and am very humbled at being recognised by other people for what I have done. Like many on their lean journey, I still believe there is so much for me to learn, so it’s a real honour to be included. Lean is very much about people to me; the people who use or buy products and services and those who produce or deliver them. While tools and techniques will generate improvements, what really makes a difference are two things: thinking about the customer, their needs, their experiences; and engaging, involving and growing the people who serve them. We all have different customers with their own needs and expectations. Lean, at its best, demonstrates that it is adaptable and flexible but consistent to its principle of delivering value. I have worked with many people in different industries with diverse backgrounds, experiences and motivations. They have made lean work best when it is easy to understand and easy to get involved. Lean must be inclusive and accessible to all to be really successful. If I could make one change, I’d like to see our community talk up value and improvement. I have always felt that saying “lean creates value” sounds more positive than “lean eliminates waste”.
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Dr Nigel Davies Manufacturing and Technical Director Muntons PLC While at Muntons, Nigel has led the organisation to numerous environmental and sustainability accolades and has also developed a CO2 calculator specifically for growers of malting barley. By his own admission, he looks to drive change in organisational structure through better communication, support and enthusiasm. He said, “Lean is doing what we do now in the most cost effective, sustainable and resource efficient manner possible. “We see lean and sustainability as two peas in a pod. We look to address sustainability in terms of the triple bottom line: people, profit, and planet. A lean approach addresses all these by setting easily understood performance metrics that enable routine review and target setting. “Sustainablity is important and lean is not just about looking for new technology to apply. In many ways this clouds the issue of efficiency. It diverts focus away from improving current working practices to trying to find an application for new technology, which may not be the root cause of inefficiency.”
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Dr Paul Donnellan Head of Operational Excellence Capgemini Consulting UK I have enjoyed 25 years of operational experience in industry and consulting, where I have been fortunate to work at the forefront of the operational excellence movement. Being named within The Lean Top 25 provides a further opportunity to network and learn from like-minded individuals. During my 12 years in consultancy for Celerant and Capgemini Consulting, I have seen the positive impact of lean systems thinking in both the private and public sectors. Organisations I have worked with come from market leaders in the UK and beyond, such as BT, Shell, Thomson Reuters, Kellogg’s, Zurich Financial Services, Heathrow Airport and the DWP. Throughout, I’ve witnessed the evolution of the approach and the increasing use of digital tools and operating models. However, as much as things change, the fundamentals remain – the ability of great operational transformation to achieve increased efficiency, improved staff morale, and greater customer focus. This triple win can only be achieved by taking a sustainable approach to change and lean is unique in its ability to do this.
Josh Dudley-Toole Business Development Manager Frank Dudley Ltd To me lean is adapting the way you do things to make sure you’re ahead of your competitors and constantly challenging the norm. As part of the family business, I’m really invested in the company. It’s about making a sustainable future and not just a business for today. It’s important to engage the team, if you’re constantly changing and improving what you do, the team is more likely to support you in facilitating change. If they see you’re a progressive company and you want to move forward, they’re more likely to be there in 10 years. Keeping them engaged and up to date with the business is a massive part of what we believe. My main role is sales and business development, so to attract new customers we need to do new things. As well as this aspect, I also love the problem solving side. Weekly, we have a review meeting, where everyone gets challenged on the responsibilities of their role. I tend not to tell people directly that they need to change something, it’s about challenging the way we do things as a group, not as a section or department. You have a picture in your head of what you want the company to look like, what you want it to be doing and how you want to get there. It’s about realising that picture, but that often changes daily because of the way business is. So we don’t really have an end goal, because the goal is continuous improvement, it’s never ending. It’s the problem bit I love, I love fixing them and then finding new ones.
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Adam Garbutt Director of Production Kohler Mira Everything I do is driven by a deeply held belief that there is always a better way. I had the opportunity to work in an environment that allowed this belief to flourish. I spent the first decade of my career as a manufacturing engineer at Nissan. During this time, I built an understanding of not just what true operational excellence looks like, but the thinking and culture that delivers it. Since joining Kohler Mira in 2012, I have driven lean processes and thinking, supporting my progression to production director. For me, operational excellence is about the customer; giving the customer what they want, when they want it, is why we exist. I firmly believe operational excellence starts with culture. Our focus at Kohler Mira is engaging the whole team to build an environment for success. Being recognised in The Lean Top 25 gives a great opportunity to reflect on how much progress we’ve made as a team, and energises me to keep driving forward. It’s also a great chance to look beyond my own organisation to see the great work going on across the lean world.
“...there is always a better way”
Christopher Guerrera CEO Pace Impact Lean is a core idea to maximise customer value while minimising waste. Lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources. A lean organsation understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste, this creates a culture that embraces positive change. My attraction with lean starts with the ability to make positive change to processes and people. Customers only want to pay for value and value-added. Lean techniques help eliminate waste and remove obstacles that create unnecessary steps, like walking or moving in the work flow, wasting time that a customer is not willing to pay for. Lean puts in disciplined processes that enable and empower employees to streamline the entire business, from the taking of the order right through to shipping the product. Lean drives positive change in culture, people’s lives and delivers great results to organisations. I find it very rewarding to bring sustainable change to a company or a person. I truly believe in the 3 P’s: purpose, process, and people. This continues to motivate me to improve every day and be the absolute best at whatever challenge I take on. In the end, developing “business athletes” to carry out positive change creates a world class environment for everyone to succeed in.
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Roy Howarth Head of Quality Assurance, UK Airbus Defence and Space I started using lean in 2005 when I was working in production. We decided we needed to do things in a different way. We had a member of staff in another part of the business who was really knowledgeable about lean practices and we also employed some consultants to help get us started with basic flow, value stream and 5S. I realised I had been doing lean for a long time. I was in the Royal Navy, and if you want to see a lean workplace, go to a Navy ship. Lean tools are in practice there; they just aren’t called the same things. It’s difficult to say what got me into lean. There is always an easier way to do things, so I always looked for that, going back to when I was in the Navy, just so that I could have more time in the bar. I have a desire to see things work perfectly. If it doesn’t, then I want to take it apart, understand what it is, why it isn’t working perfectly and then make sure that it does work perfectly in the future.
“I have a desire to see things work perfectly”
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Paul Jepson Technical Engineer Brother Industries (UK) Ltd Paul has been involved in a project at Brother to improve the automation equipment and processes, as well as maintain a healthy overall equipment effectiveness figure across its site. By successfully implemented a strategy to achieve these goals Paul had a key role in reducing downtime and putting in place processes that sought to improve the maintenance cycle times of their automation equipment, which in turn improved the efficiency of the plant. By incorporating lean systems and visual work stations he was able to make the business case for bringing their future automation projects in-house. Paul and his colleague Kevin Parker worked on the project to help improve the conditions at Brother Industries UK. The LMJ has chosen to celebrate both individuals for delivering such an important project to the organisation, which led to huge change.
Pat Kealy Operations Manager Abbott Vascular A previous associate of mine once described lean as “the best team sport in the world”. This has always resonated well with me, as it truly reflects what it takes to be successful in a manufacturing business. Everybody has to play their part fully, take their share of responsibility and fulfil their commitments. This commitment, when coupled with the use of good tools and systems will ensure that everybody is working on the right things, with minimal waste. Initially, I liked the structure and process that lean systems bring. When this is coupled with the cultural changes needed to create a continuous improvement mindset, it only served to strengthen my belief. Our site has worked with the Shingo Model to develop the cultural aspect of continuous improvement and as we adapted our site to align with this model, we found ourselves doing things that just make sense. The Shingo principle is to “seek perfection”. I am always looking for the opportunity to do things better, knowing that we might never get to perfection. Within this belief I find motivation, but if I don’t, it usually finds me!
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Mike Lewis Innovations Manager Lambert Engineering To me, lean means continually assessing what you’re doing, looking at the technologies that are out there and not accepting the status quo. Just because something was reviewed in the past and a decision was made previously, it doesn’t mean it is the right thing for the future of the business. It’s a pursuit of perfection, a desire to please the customer and a desire to come up with something innovative that’s not been done before. Our ambition is provide value for innovation and it’s great I can be a part of that in the role I have, always looking at new, novel ways of doing things to improve products and productivity, and better serve our customers. I was a design engineer in my previous job and in that role I was able to design new, innovative solutions, but there was always a certain amount that was prescribed to me. In the role I have now, I have more influence on what we do in the future and the next generation of solutions around new technologies and new opportunities. I was surprised and honoured when I found out I had made The Lean Top 25. Although, what we do is lean practice, I wouldn’t necessarily equate it to lean. Traditionally, that might be an advance in an existing system, more incremental changes. We generally provide fundamental changes, overhauling and replacing an existing system with something new or embedding a solution that didn’t exist before.
Louise McCarthy Transformation Director BBRD For me, continuous improvement is continually looking for cost savings and enhancing performance in everything that we do in our day to day. I started my career as a finance director and at that time I was doing things like business process improvement and automation. I had that sort of thinking instilled in my DNA, looking at the algorithms of processes and ways of automating, measuring and being able to improve on that year on year. The number one thing I have in my kitbag, whenever I’ve been involved in a lean transformation, is a continuous improvement and performance measurement structure that I have created. I’ve been lucky enough to learn about the engineering side of lean, but more so in the IT that accompanies automation. What motivates me is that you can clearly measure success. When you first implement it people run away because they’re scared of being accountable, but once people see it working and witness it taking them and their organisation forward, then everybody starts to get excited about measuring the success. I love watching people I have mentored, picking it up and running with it as well. When you actually show people that it works and they see it working, it tends to spread across an organisation.
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Kevin Parker Automation Engineer Brother Industries (UK) Ltd Kevin has been involved in a project at Brother to improve automation equipment and processes, as well as maintain a healthy overall equipment effectiveness figure across its site. By successfully implemented a strategy to achieve these goals, Kevin played a key role in reducing downtime and implementing processes to improve maintenance cycle times of automation equipment, which in turn, improved efficiency at the plant. By incorporating lean systems and visual work stations, he made the business case for bringing future automation projects in-house. Kevin and his colleague Paul Jepson, also celebrated on The Lean Top 25, collaborated on the project to help improve the conditions at Brother Industries UK.
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Dr Daryl Powell Lean Program Manager KONGSBERG Maritime AS Lean is continuous improvement based on three Ls: learning, leadership and the long-term. For a programme to be productive it needs to be a long-term focus. It doesn’t happen overnight and you can’t stop learning, otherwise you stop being lean. Originally, I undertook a degree in automotive engineering, in particular, motorsport. I had dreams of being involved in F1, but when I graduated, there weren’t many jobs in motorsport. Instead, I stayed on at university to do a master’s in lean and agile. I worked for a Toyota supplier and studied for my master’s part-time, so I learned a lot in academia and in practice. Working with it and studying it made it a passion of mine. Seeing another team achieve change for the better is what keeps me going.
Ben Salder Lean, Change Management and Organisation Development Senior Leader To me, lean is about how you lead, develop yourself and others. It is how you win business, deliver to your customers, how you design and develop new solutions in the market place and how you ensure your whole organisation is ready to deliver the customers’ requirements. As soon as I started to become aware of lean, it helped me make sense of what I did naturally; always looking to make small improvements and remove the waste from what I was doing. Fundamentally, it matched my mind-set and value-set. I first came across lean as part of my studies at university. The concepts made sense, but I couldn’t get my head round some of the finer details of its application. As I started to meet people who worked at Toyota, I gained a greater understanding. There are so many ways to use lean to help organisations and individuals develop and improve. It really excites me to be able to challenge my thinking and understanding in so many different ways. I am also motivated by all of the times that lean has been poorly applied because it is not fully comprehended; normally because it is seen as a set of tools and nothing more.
“It really excites me to be able to challenge my thinking”
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David Tindal Senior Operations Manager Amazon David has worked in process improvement across a vast array of industries, including food manufacturing, fast-moving consumer goods, and new change and international business management. With 32 years’ experience in business and a background in engineering, his career has seen him study manufacturing engineering at the University of Cambridge, as well as business administration at Harvard Business School. David has transitioned from the shopfloor, where he started as a production engineer, to his current role as senior operations manager at Amazon. His motivation has been engaging people and forging multi-functional teams to achieve excellence. Some of his past experiences include Mars, Courtalds (now part of AkzoNobel) and Bain & Company, and has proven himself time and time again in delivering change and improvement over a range of different industries and disciplines.
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Thomas Van Eimeren Global Lean Sigma Continuous Process Improvement Leader Arrow Electronics Thomas has been the global lean sigma continuous process improvement leader at Arrow Electronics for 20 years. Thomas’ long tenure is impressive, but in a role that requires constant evaluation of the business and regular new input into the organisation, is a terrific achievement. He has led more than 200 continuous improvement events during his time at the firm, in departments ranging from electronics, distribution and production to warehouse, food and beverage, and recycling. Thomas tirelessly engages with employees to foster process improvement in the workplace. Thomas is a member of three other organisations, including the Lean Benchmarking Council, Society of Manufacturing Engineers and APICS, which is a non-profit organisation that offers certification programmes and training tools to increase workplace performance.
Prof Vincent Weigel Professor of Lean and World Class Performance University of Applied Sciences As a professor, Vincent is involved in lean education and conducts research aimed at exploring the effectiveness of lean. He focuses on lean product development, lean in healthcare and lean in nonmanufacturing environments. One of Vincent’s beliefs regarding lean is that “there is always room for improvement”. He is both an economist and a philosopher, and as a professor he encourages businesses to develop lean capability and use that capability to drive continuous improvement. As a lecturer he focuses on philosophies and methods associated with world class organisations, as well as enabling organisations to do more with the same resources and same people. Vincent is director of the European centre for Quick Response Manufacturing (QRM) and partner in Volant Groep, an organisation that scouts and recruits lean talent. The collaboration works together to support organisations in developing lasting lean capabilities. In addition, Vincent has published a book in his native Dutch, entitled Successful Lean. The publication advises how to effectively implement lean culture initiatives and instil the correct change management techniques to eliminate waste and add value.
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Bryan Windus-Smith Capabilities and New Technology Lead Philips AVENT Bryan heads up the New Technology team at Philips AVENT and has been working on a project to eliminate the need for a full product line turnaround. By innovating the manufacturing process, Bryan has formulated a method of switching between different products being produced on the same line with zero waste or defective articles. The full project is not available for public consumption but does enable Philips to reduce downtime of equipment, as well as eliminate all waste of one of their production lines. Bryan has been at the forefront of innovation during his time at Philips-AVENT. He is a chartered mechanical engineer and has had experience in military aviation, hand held industrial and ride on industrial products to pharmaceutical devices and high volume consumer products. Some of his notable accomplishments from his current role include: developing a road map for the introduction of new manufacturing technologies; implementing the firm’s new technology centre to accelerate prototyping and reduce development lead times; as well as introducing a new sterile product line that was ready for imediate use within the NHS.
Stuart Wood Head of Operational Excellence Oxford Instruments A few years ago Oxford Instruments plc launched Business Excellence (BEx); a programme dedicated to supporting our businesses around the globe to adopt and imbed best practice. Our Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) is to make Oxford Instruments “as recognised for our Business Excellence as we are for our technology”. The BEx programme seeks to embrace the very essence of lean thinking by engaging and respecting our people, a relentless pursuit of process excellence, and delivering the greatest possible value to our customers. Today, in many of Oxford Instruments’ sites, the foundations and green shoots of the BEx programme are there to be seen: an advanced and embedded 5S programme underpinned by more than 1,000 audits per year that take but a few minutes per day: visual management and SQCDP boards driving throughput and C.I.; a simple kaizen programme where hundreds of implemented improvement ideas can be seen on a wall of fame; kanban-driven pull systems, daily Gemba Walks, etc. This nomination is recognition of the commitment and enthusiasm of Oxford Instruments’ employees in embracing Business Excellence.
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Gil Woodward Manufacturing Manager Accolade Wines For me, the customer orientation of the organisation is the key thing, that’s what enables us to differentiate between what is waste and what is not. It’s the customer’s perspective that matters, a lot of what constitutes operational excellence is trying to get the company mindset in the right place. It isn’t about any one of us individually, it’s whether the customer experience from our service is up to it or not, if an aspect of it isn’t, that’s where we make our improvement. Ultimately, that’s the part that really matters because it will drive whether you’re commercially successful or not. Quite rightly we’re fixated on waste, but it’s waste from a customer’s perspective. There’s always a danger that if we make our own assessments of what is waste, we’re going to do it through our mindset and that can lead to a degree of arrogance and ultimately, bad decisions. You don’t know what a customer thinks about you unless you actually talk to them and listen. I like lean because it’s an opportunity for innovation. It is something creative and there’s an intellectual challenge that comes with it, and that is an end in itself. That drives my enjoyment and compels me to continue. When you are doing it right, you are going to be solving many different problems and that provides satisfaction in what you’ve achieved. How did I get in to it? With some luck and happenstance, I taught secondary science in a comprehensive school in South East London. It was part of a contract that I did with a charity, the charity promised to put me in a school that couldn’t recruit a teacher. It also promised to give me business training in one of the MBA modules I completed at Imperial. The charity introduced me to lean, and I thought “that sounds fun”. Luckily, GSK were one of the charity’s sponsors and the firm was good enough to take a punt on me. It made me a continuous improvement expert and gave me loads of excellent training while I was there. It was a bit lucky.
“When you are doing it right, you are going to be solving many different problems and that provides satisfaction in what you’ve achieved”
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