Do not get bogged down on A3 and VSM . . .

A3 Thinking, and I am contemplating including VSM, is the Toyota story board for documenting problem solving. And I do want to stress documenting. The real context of the A3 and VSM is to Gemba, to involve the stakeholders, so a satisfactory ending to the story can be accepted and supported by all.

When you do not understand something you spend time trying to understand. However, when forms are used some people seem to get bogged down on the mechanics of using the form rather than the intent of problem solving (including myself). Probably because at the end of the day you want to document your findings in a format others can understand, sometimes thinking this is the only important thing. However, for A3 and VSM you need to keep reminding yourself you are uncovering and telling / painting a story for others to follow. It does not matter if you change technique between stories, as long as the individual story is understood by all. 

And I will now add, it is not about paper size when we are talking about A3 thinking. However, I do agree a 1-page document does force you to be concise. And it just so happened that A3 paper, close in size to the 11x17", was the size that was practical for electronic transmittal at the time Toyota started all of this.

A3 and VSM requires you to be a sleuth, investigator, probing and asking why, getting others involved to provide bits of information. These bits by themselves do not mean anything, however when put together they tell the true story of what happens(ed). Knowing the details addresses true root cause. Not knowing the details is jumping to conclusions. What is needed is a learning experience for all through involvement at some level. This gained tribal knowledge then keeps the continual improvement wheel turning.

Do not expect to get an A3 or VSM right the first time. It should and will take several rewrites. Though I have not produced many A3's, I can speak of my process development experience where I had up to 23 revisions in my process project for one flow chart. I do not expect an A3 or VSM to be revised or rewritten so many times, however I am open to the opportunity. 

Ownership is very clear in an A3. The person working the A3 is the responsible party, no matter what their rank is within the company. This holds the responsibility with a single source, rather than leaving it unclear or a result of groupthink. The owner follows and learns the PDSA cycle (Deming Cycle or PDCA if you still prefer). The owner learns the true value of A3 and VSM; Gemba – the real place, or Genchi Genbutsu – Go see the problem. This is the belief that practical experience is valued over theoretical knowledge. You must see the problem to know the problem.

A3 and VSM are about the research and uncovering all that can be uncovered, and to develop a reasonable countermeasure to improve the situation1. It is not about the format and fitting information into pigeon holes. As with anything involving change, this will be a struggle. The goal should be to use constant effort to embrace change, making it easier to do A3’s as you move forward.

As I had been VSM trained, and now realize it was with intent, I am not going to go through how to use the forms. You need to go beyond the forms first, learn for yourself, become a different person for yourself. You need to do the hard work of Gemba, Genchi Genbutsu. It will become a form of enlightenment, freeing you of the burdensome day-to-day status quo culture and toward kaizen.

Do not get bogged down in the mechanics of A3 and VSM forms. Explore, become a sleuth, involve stakeholders and keep them informed of your progress. Compile the true story from short stories of others. Make sure the end of the story has a positive outcome toward kaizen. And I will state here, keep the customer in mind.

For the best information on A3 thinking read the book "Managing to Learn".

1. John Shook, Managing to Learn: Using the A3 Management Process (Cambridge, MA: The Lean Institute, 2008), 2.

Standardized Work . . . What is it?

In the Lean world many are confused on what Standardized Work is and what it can do for you.  Do realize this came from Toyota.  The definition I use from Toyota is:  Work that is organized around human motion that creates an efficient production sequence without Muda.  (Click here for Toyota’s exact definition.)   It is made up of three elements:  Takt-time, work sequence, and standard in-process stock.  The definition is simple, yet many complicate it.  Also note my training from TSSC (Toyota Production System Support Center) and their Toyota representatives, specifically went out of their way to state “standardized work” and not to say “standard work”.

Standardized work is not a guarantee you will produce quality.  What you are doing is base lining the process for problem solving, and improving your chance to repeat the process.  Variation is always present.  Your aim is to understand and minimize the variation in the widest process window possible that produces something acceptable to the customer.  Standardized work is a repeatable process that assists in controlling variation in the process.  Standardized work helps in identifying waste.

I have watched some of Deming’s lectures on DVD.  I have a few more to complete.  One thing I keep walking away with is Deming mocking Standardized Work and Work Standards as providing quality.  This is because “true values do not exist”.  If it happens, it is random.  It is not repeatable.  Deming also has stated “uncontrolled variation produces low quality”.  Standardized Work does help control some of the variation.

“Where there is no standard, there can be no kaizen.” – Taiichi Ohno

Standardized work is the base line, the bench mark, for continual improvement, and I will add I use the concept in problem solving.  In problem solving we need to know the base line condition in order to determine if we have a problem or not, and whether we are “improving to” or “improving from”. 

The definition of a problem I like to use is: The difference between what is and what should be.  There is way to look at a problem too.  Are you correcting something or improving something (the “to” or “from”).  And yet there is also a way to look at the problems potential.  Is it sporadic or chronic?  Each of them shares similar if not the same problem solving techniques.

Generally we look at problem solving as “what went wrong”.  Sometimes we may need to ask “what needs to go right”, is standardized work still in place?  In either case, we need a bench mark to compare, to do a gap analysis from “what it is” to “what it should be”, or “current state” to “future state”, or “where I am now” to “where I want to be”.

Standardized work does involve some forms, time studies, calculations, charting, however you go to the extent necessary to visualize waste.  At the initial start of standardized work I recommend you start at the high level activity within the cycle of work.  There will be plenty to keep you busy, developing the work sheets and training personnel on how to standardize their work sequence, and then for the personnel to question “why did I do that out of sequence” in order to identify problems.  As you improve the process, you can then drill down into more detail, uncovering more waste in the process.  I would like to highlight that the forms are important, however I am not mentioning them here because more important is the philosophy of a repeatable process, one that you can see waste as it happens, and to kaizen out that waste.

So what is it? – Work that is organized around human motion that creates an efficient production sequence without Muda.  It is that simple.  Oh, and also add it is a good baseline for problem solving.

Be a novice and report mistakes . . .

Reporting mistakes or near misses are an important topic to me, yet it is the least discussed in the business world. Why is there not a cultural environment allowing reporting of mistakes or near misses? What brought this to mind was an article on poka-yokes titled, “It’s Not Rocket Science” by the Old Lean Dude of GBMP (Bruce). This was also brought out in the book, “The Nun and the Bureaucrat” by Louis M. Savary and Clare Crawford-Mason, which was accompanied with a documentary CD titled, “Good News . . . How Hospitals Heal Themselves”. The point being made was, how can we improve our processes if we keep wanting to point blame for mistakes and near misses?

My experience has been, when team members tell me they inadvertently induced something into the process to create a bad part (caused variation), or just plain mixed up the sequence, I would say out loud “Cool, there is something I can improve!” And I thank them for giving me this opportunity (yes, I really do that). The team member now becomes my customer whom I have to satisfy.

As the Old Lean Dude pointed out, hassles create stress for the employee. Think of it as employee harassment if you will. We have been educated on harassment and how it can affect people. In harassment you do not say or do certain things that can be construed as offensive, making the other person uncomfortable, making the other person wanting to stay away from you, work in another area, or sometimes just plain quit the company. In other words, stress. Punishing team members for mistakes becomes stressful too. The environment for reporting should be the opposite of harassment, meaning you Want to report you did something wrong that created the defect or defective product / service / information, and without ridicule or fear of a write up.

The nice thing about a team member reporting a mistake is that they made it, they can tell you about how they made it, and most likely they have a solution to prevent it from happening again - a poka-yoke. Is their suggestion always the best one? Sometimes, and sometimes not, however Never say No to their suggestion. Think about it, ask yourself why would they choose such a solution, how does it affect safety, the process, quality, the human side of standardized work? Can everyone else use the poka-yoke with the same success? Does it add too much cycle time or perhaps reduce cycle time? There are many questions to ask. As you ask, use that team member as your sounding board, weighing the pros and cons, developing a better mouse trap by piggybacking of the team member’s solution to developing perhaps a better solution. Do not revert to the 8th waste - under-utilization of human resource.

Another piece of information from both the above references was “near misses”. It seems all of the team members know about the near misses, but never the supervisor. I agree. Near misses are caused by the process, and the team members have learned how to deal with them because the supervisor does not want to. These near misses may be a greater portion of waste than we realize. It causes the team member to develop work arounds. It burdens the team member with more responsibility/hindrance to meet TAKT. This is where production boards need to be put in place and the team members allowed to write in misses and mistakes that caused missed pitch/cycle/TAKT in the process. This should be a “no blame” board. It is then the supervisors Standardized Work to review this board, assign responsibility to resolve these issues, set the due date for closure, and to report to management.

Communication is the most sought after tool, yet it is one of the lower skill sets each of us have. We may talk well, persuade well. But do we listen well, empathize well, show concern in our posture, facial expression, and eye contact. Why are team members afraid to report mistakes? Is it because supervisors do not care or not wanting the added responsibility? Or, is this totally different in that the team member is tired of reporting and seeing nothing ever done? Most likely both.

One other credit I want to give to the Old Lean Dude is the quote he cited, “Creativity comes from involvement” by Rollo May. And as the Old Lean Dude wrote, “No one cares more about the quality of a job than the person doing it . . .” Mistakes are good. We learn from them. I have made plenty and will make plenty more, and will be very vocal admitting when I do. How else do we (or the process we work within) improve?

I would like to leave you with the following quotes:

“Motivation is everything, tools and methods are secondary. Any tool or method will work if people are motivated. And no tool or method will work if people are not motivated.” – Michinkazu Tanaka (What I learned from Taiichi Ohno)

“People working together with integrity and authenticity and collective intelligence are profoundly more effective as a business than people living together based on politics, game playing, and narrow self interest.” – Senge

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Edison

And lastly:

“Never listen to the shop veterans . . . wisdom is born from the ideas of the novices.” – Taiichi Ohno

The Golden Bee-Bee

Most understand what we mean when we say “critical path”.  To help us keep focused and in context for this blog entry, the critical path describes the longest path in duration that needs to take place, which in tern becomes the minimum time line of a project.  To expand the thought a little further, also think about it as a bottleneck in a process causing it to be the critical path.

Lean manufacturing, Kaizen, TPS, look for incremental improvements.  It does not really matter what part of the process you apply it to, because your intent is to eliminate waste of all forms and in any process.  Most of this is accomplished through observation, or perhaps observation and data.  This simplistic concept of incrementally eliminating waste is to sustain the improvement once it is proven and accepted.  It takes effort from the team or individual who observed and defined the problem, who gave it proper scope and planning, successfully implementing (the most difficult part), confirming the problem is corrected with any supporting tools in place, making it a Standard.  This is the PDSA (plan-do-study-act) cycle (or PDCA for check if you still prefer).

A LinkedIn post (which linked to a presentation) caught my attention and frustrated me when I read it.  I jumped to a conclusion that someone was preaching once again “This Is The Way”.  I am not too far off in that, and even I can be that way at times in my own preaching.  What the reader (meaning you and I) need to remember is the person writing it, whether the post I read or what I write myself, most likely has a target point to make.  One that is specific in example and solution, that indeed will work every time or almost every time.  Whether we convey it properly in clear thought or writing can be another story.

The presentation I am referring to is titled, “Let’s Retire the PDCA Wedge; What really keeps performance from slipping back?” by Mike Rother and Jeff Uitenbroek, August 2011.  The intent (and correct me if I am wrong when you look at the presentation) is that something is throwing a wrench in the works, keeping us from moving forward with continuous improvement.  The thought is our definition of a Standard may be the cause.  It was also mentioned that no matter how well a Standard is implemented and maintained it will go through entropy (degrade and become a waste of energy).

The presentation then sited some information on Deming’s PDSA, suggesting that the cycle needs to keep turning for never ending improvements.  The presentation also mentions Toyota and the difference between Standard and Standardized work.  Standard meaning something you want to achieve, and Standardized work as operating as specified by the Standard.  It also implies that in “wedge”¹ thinking, when we slip backwards we believe we lack discipline and want to blame someone, whereas the Toyota way of thinking recognizes an abnormality that we just have not figured out yet.  Sort of like a Kanban being an admittance you do not know how to go 1-piece flow yet.

For me the Deming cycle is about continual improvement.  However Deming's focus is generally on reducing process variation.  There is not a guarantee you will produce quality.  That is dependent upon the how the process was setup and maintained (another form of Standard).  There is never a focus on the team member who is willing and able, because we know he cannot affect the output of the process.  The process is the process.  However continually improving will guarantee uniformity (good or bad) at a low cost.

Toyota has gone to great lengths to specify what they do is Standardized work, and not Standard work.  I have gone through Toyota’s supplier training where this was drilled into me.  Toyota defines Standardized work as, “. . . organizes all jobs around human motion and creates an efficient production sequence without any “Muda”. Work organized in such a way is called standardized work. It consists of three elements: Takt-Time, Working Sequence, and Standard In-Process Stock.” They went out of their way in class to discourage the use of the word Standard.

I have seen the “wedge” graphic with and without the wedge, and really never put any emphasis on it or used it in my education of others.  I do know that when QS-9000 converted over to TS-16949, there was an emphasis to change “continuous improvement” to “continual improvement” (as stated by the AIAG personnel who educated me on TS).  The purpose was to get away from the mind set of continuously improving without checking that you sustained first.  The graphic was a straight line ramp for continuous improvement vs. a stair step process of continual improvement. 

The “wedge” presentation did suggest that one reason we use this mindset is to comply with audits.  I would rather hope the audit system changed their process to meet what we need to be doing in our process.  The presentation also suggests we do need a Standard in order to satisfy the customer, however the Standard itself will not stop entropy.  So the suggestion is, the Standard needs to be a target, a set of conditions to be met in order to satisfy the customer.  This is what others and I call “positive tension”.  You put enough spring force (improvement) pulling on the PDSA wheel to keep it rolling at a given velocity (so that you do not become cyclical), resulting in it going up the incline indicating continual improvement.

I do agree with the “wedge” presentation that there is never “steady state”, but “constant change”.  Whether we like it or not this is very true.  However, it is also human nature to not want change, or to view change as a bad thing.  To me this is because life, for the most part, moves slowly for us.  We do not see the changes per se because it creeps up on us.  This gives us time to absorb, condition, and make it a norm or Standard in our lives.  Business is different.  In the never ending quest to bring in more revenue, to increase margins, we choose to want to do better than the Jones' as it were.  If they have it, we want it and we want something better, all to maintain current and to attract new customers.  Change is quick, requires thinking, requires revised processes (continual improvement), requires us to work, looking at an ever changing target, rather than taking life slow in increments to yesterday’s Standard.

I do contend that maintaining a Standard will keep the process from slipping back. (Similar to the stair step graphic for TS-16949.  Once sustained on the step you do not roll back.)  The only entropy taking place should be when the Standard becomes outdated through Kaizen.  The high complexity of business makes this so variable that we cannot draw a line in the sand and say “removing the wedge is the way”, or even “using the wedge is the way”.  You need to see Your problems and solve Your problems.  Can the “wedge” presentation be Your solution?  Sure.  Can it be the wrong solution?  I am just as sure.  One application I believe the “wedge” presentation will always work is in marketing.  You will need to continually innovate to not only satisfy, but also delight the customer.  Where it will not work is automotive Tier 1 supply.  Having a Standard (which I should really say "Having Standardized Work") helps maintain a statistically controlled process, and enables you to problem solve when the process becomes out of control and to Kaizen.

I also want to point out you cannot just continually improve willy-nilly.  If you do not improve on the critical path, you will not increase the velocity of the process, which is generally where our problems lie.  (Will using the Standard as a target necessarily put us on the critical path?)  If you incrementally improve, eliminating waste, there is a cost savings and some increase in velocity.  What should happen as you continually improve along the non-critical path is that the “bottleneck” in the critical path will expose itself, indicating your next continual improvement event.  As you improve you will have a shift in the bottleneck within the processes, and you attack that next.  Is the bottleneck always seen?  No.  Can the bottleneck be calculated?  Yes, if you have all the variables.  Observation is generally easier because of all the variables.  VSM (value stream mapping) also helps to find and see all the variables.

Using the “wedge” can help you determine if you worked on the bottleneck in the process or not.  What is your goal, your target?  If you stopped to observe the new Standard, has the system improved?  Whatever the Standard is, plateau or target condition, it should have removed the problem, satisfying and attracting customers through a system that is aligned to the customer, and through processes that support the system.

So, “This Is The Way” will never work across the board.  However you can “Choose Your Path” to make it work.  Be specific in your quest to solve a problem.  Do not look for the Golden Bee-Bee.

¹ The “wedge” thinking is the PDSA wheel going up an incline, using a wedge to keep it from rolling back.  As you continually improve and move forward, Standards are put in place as a wedge to keep the PDSA wheel from rolling backwards.

Who's the Customer? Are your priorities set right?

Okay, I’ll say it again, “Who’s the Customer?”  Should I repeat it?  It is a simple thought.  Did I get you to drill down to whomever consumes the product / service / or information?  I may have.  If not, then good, because there are many customers to satisfy, with the primary one being the end consumer.

In this blog entry I want to emphasize the support needed from management to provide the product / service / or information to the consumer through VA (value added) activities.  Along with the VA there are many NVA (non-value added) activities.  Then there is the in between, the gray area, the “incidental work”.  It is NVA but essential in conducting the business.  I am not going to define each here because that is not the purpose of this blog entry.  I will, however, defer you to this link should you have questions:  “Where to Begin with Lean: A3 Analysis” by James Womack

Value is added at the contact point of the product / service / or information.  As the contact point proceeds through the process, it carries the same level of importance at each VA activity.  When that activity is upset in any way, it now becomes the focus, to resolve whatever issues that made it go awry.  This is where the accountability board needs to be placed to log the issue and to assign a time and date, along with who is accountable, to permanently correct it.  Supervisor Gemba walks need to frequent these boards (along with shift pre-start meetings at these boards) to understand missed timing and to get things on track through problem solving countermeasures.  The department manager needs to daily Gemba walk these boards (and initialing), making sure there are no barriers to resolution and to verify accountability (that the countermeasure is in process or completed).  The department manager also enhances any countermeasures or ads to the supervisor countermeasures, along with answering to upper management as to how this happened.  Upper management needs to Gemba walk these boards weekly to assure adequate resources were given, accountability has been met, and that permanent corrective action is in place.  This is what industry terms "leader standardized work".

Let us refocus from leader standardized work back onto the customer and priorities. Look at just the VA activities from the beginning to the end of the process.  The people performing these activities are your internal customers.  Can you prioritize which of these customers is the most important?  If you have a normal, stable process, one that is on track, the answer is “no”.  If something has upset the VA activity anywhere along the value stream, then that activity or customer takes priority.

The point I want to make is, the further away from the VA activity, with respect to your own activities, the more you become “support” to the internal customer that needs help.  Many times people will say they need to finish a report or take care of a broken sink (something to that affect).  How is that aligned to the True North of customer satisfaction?  So what are your priorities?  It should be any VA activity that needs help, at any time.  We are all service to that end.  Once the process is again stable, then we can re-direct some of our energy to the incidental work, and never to the waste unless we intend to eliminate it.

Management needs to step back and observe, asking “are we satisfying the system or the customer?”  Too many times I see we have layered on processes or reasons to do things for the sake of the system, and the customer ends up suffering whether they are internal or external.  The sad part is, we never see the suffering of the internal customer because we maintain our silos first, rather than aligning our activities to the internal customer needs, which intern are aligned to the value stream of needs including that of the end user.  This is why people preach that you need to understand your process, inputs, outputs, and to identify bottlenecks in the process.  This is where we VA, which ends up adding waste if problems are not addressed.

So I will ask again.  Who’s the customer?  Are your priorities set right?

Whether to Weather the Storm, or Peel Back and See

Running a business is basically the same, whether big or small, whether product / service / or information.  You have a process with inputs and outputs.  Multiple processes are linked through a value stream if you will.  The value stream extends from the raw material suppliers like mining iron or growing cotton, to the end user of this product / service / or information.  The question that needs to be asked is, “how aligned to True North is your value stream to the customer?”

How smooth we communicate those hand offs from inputs, through the process, to outputs converted to inputs to the next process, is what Lean manufacturing is all about.  It does not matter what size, color, religion, or political view your product / service / or information is.  What matters is how you communicate the inputs you need, so you can process, and provide the correct output to the customer.  You tell you suppliers what you want, when you want it, how much of it you want, and at what price.  You process the input by adding value.  The product / service / or information is transformed to the output to the customer.  This can be one process, several processes, and with as many inputs and outputs as needed.

What is the point here?  The point is, no matter how you look at business, you are satisfying the needs, wants, and desires of the customer through a thought out process that has inputs and outputs.  Do you have an established process?  Have you defined the output requirement to the customer (internal or external)?  Have you defined the inputs to the process that will give you the needed output?

I know if I were to provide the product / service / or information just by myself, that I could provide the correct output from my process(s) given the correct inputs, and in the correct sequence of events that need to take place in the process, with less waste than an entire company would.  Problem being, it would take me forever compared to an entire company.  So our need is to take that single person value stream thought and convert it to a multi-person task through the value stream.  Making sure we well define the process, outputs, and inputs.

Realize I have steered you to the thought of process, outputs, and inputs.  This is typical Six Sigma practice: knowing what your process is capable of, then what is the process to output to satisfy the customer, and finally what inputs do you need to do that.  What breaks that mold is when a process does not exist to provide the product / service / or information.  Then you would start with the output and work backward through the concurrent design of process and inputs.

The concept is simple.  Having everyone buy into the execution seems to be what creates the storm.  The silo mentality of “I need this first before I will let you do that”, which typically does not fully align to True North to satisfy the customer, gets in the way of our performance.  This causes gusts of delays.  This causes the missed “pitch” or “lead” if you will, making someone think that they can squeeze in a different project while they wait.  This intern begins the roller coaster of more unintended missed pitches in the process, turning the process into a hurricane.  Hence my leading paragraph into these blogs that we need take the risk of peeling back the layers of work around and to do it right the first time. 

Is it a bad thing if someone waits?  Can you not visually see them waiting?  Would you not ask yourself “why are they waiting?” and do something about the process?  It seems like waiting is a good thing if you can see problems as they occur.  The trick now becomes managing solutions to those problems as quick as possible, incrementally correcting the system and its processes. If the person instead of waiting filled in the time with another project, you would have never known you had a problem until it was too late. It is the worker that is being driven by old school supervision, creating an environment that “if I look busy I won’t get yelled at”, or in the supervisor’s case “if they look busy everything must be working fine.”

Whether to weather the storm, or stop and peel back the layers of work around, seems to be the decision.  Storms within your process, or incoming to the process, will create waste with a great potential of defects or defective products / services / or information to the customer.  As you allow the storm to take you away from True North, the competitor who can better steer True North will always make it there first, in a manner of speaking.

Quality Control - Before or after?

A LinkedIn forum question asked for a laymen’s explanation as to why QC Inspection is not a way to ensure accuracy of the end product.  As usual, responses from others were lengthy and not necessarily directed at answering the question.  This includes one I had posted approximately 30 days earlier, when I must have been upset with some of the responses.

If a defective product was made, inspecting it at the end of the process does not make the product any less defective.  So now it has to be scrapped (or if a simple defect reworked).  Who is paying for this?  Is this not one of the forms of waste?  Is this not what we are suppose to be continually improving, the elimination of waste? When waste is created, in any form, the true value is lost and the customer ends up paying for the value + waste through higher selling prices that cover the accepted projected loss of the manufacturer.  This is what opens entry to market, giving competition room to squeeze between you and the customer, eventually taking your business away.

The purpose is to make it right the first time.  Quality at the source and the responsibility for that quality comes from the person adding the value which is the operator.  And I must emphasis here, WITHIN THE PROCESS THE OPERATOR WAS GIVEN. If your process has been setup to manufacture the product to customer specification, and the process is statistically in control, then there is no need to inspect the end product right?  The process is the process, good or bad.  The process data is what "speaks" back to the operator indicating whether the process is in statistical control or not, and the operator is to react when it is not in control, eliminating the chance of defects.

Now, if you are saying defects will still occur in a statistically controlled process, then so be it.  That is what the process was designed to do.  You need to change the process to reduce (eliminate if you can) the defects.  You need to identify the defect and root cause.  You may need to reengineer the product for manufacturability so defects cannot be made.  You may need to revisit the PFMEA and add a poka-yoke on a value added feature the operator has difficulty maintaining.  You may need to revise the standardized work to add quality check points.  There are many things you can do, however realize it comes from the process and that is what needs to change.  Please understand what you want to do is to change the system or it's processes to aid the operator in creating the value and reducing (if not eliminating) waste.

As I read the aforementioned forum question and responded as best I could in laymen terms (there is always room for improvement), I thought of problems with processes I have encountered in automotive.  I would estimate 60 to 75% of the process issues were caused by variance from incoming material, which the process was not designed to handle.  As I usually do I asked Why? maybe 100 times (okay, perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, however subconsciously I have drilled down through a lot of Why’s and I am zeroing in on root cause before I consciously think of the second or third Why?).

As I thought through this I realized, during product development companies hand make parts, do one off samples, 200 or 300% inspect prior to shipment, basically producing the perfect part.  Even through the different build events special qualified personnel are making the product.  Eventually the product is made off production tooling, still then by specially trained production personnel for pre-builds and line fill.  When mass production hits all of the “special handling” goes away, and you merge into the “true process” from not only your process but also from your suppliers.

What is supposed to protect the customer after product launch is the PPAP (production part approval process).  This is a warrant that the supplier process is capable of providing what the customer is paying for, whether it is volume of product or any fit/form/function of the product as specified by the customer.  How does this tie back to material creating havoc with the process and the potential of defects at the end of your production line?

Discussing this with my son Nick, one possible cause might be that during the initial trials and preparation for PPAP, not all of the supplier variations in the process were uncovered.  Perhaps the FMEA was not detailed enough.  Perhaps the supplier did not understand the process well enough to even contemplate a potential failure to put in the FMEA.  Perhaps the supplier kept making the "perfect part".  Whatever the case, when variation occurs that upsets the process, it must be identified and eliminated.  The intent should always be to provide materials that maintain a stable, statistically controlled downstream process.  If during mass production something is uncovered, fix it.  Don’t accept from the supplier, “Well it was PPAP’d that way and you accepted it.”  Go back and review the process, the FMEA, and update it with the new information so changes to the process take place that accommodate “the intent” of the PPAP, which is to make a defect free product from the process.

Quality control does not take place at the end of the line, nor at the beginning whether incoming material or something else.  Quality control is a constant effort in maintaining a statistically controlled process, identifying variance that was not originally considered in the process, and eliminating process variance that creates defects or defective products.

Okay, now let us get back to reality.  We all know quality inspections at the end or any other part of the process are not going away.  Why is that?  Quality inspections at the end of the process is just an admittance you do not understand the process nor if it is in statistical control.  This is no different than using kanbans.  A kanban is an admittance you do not know how to go to once piece flow yet.  You know one piece flow is what you need to do.  You just do not know how to get there yet.  So the purpose of all this writing becomes a "strive" for no inspections at the beginning or end of the process.  A "strive" for one piece flow, a "strive" toward continual improvement.  If you do not set the bar for "no end of line inspection", "no kanbans", then you will always fall short and the next company that figures it out will be more than happy to close your business for you.

Is it time to add value?

Is it Lean anymore?  Have we over Leaned?  Is it time for adding more value?

I recommend to everyone that you read the Forbes article titled, “Why Amazon Can’t Make A Kindle In The USA”.  After reading it I do agree that for the sake of accounting and I will add the Westernization of Lean, we are outsourcing to show short term profits.  This outsourcing, as it takes away from our manufacturing, service, and information base, leaves companies with a shell that they can no longer develop in, because the guts were outsourced.  Hence perhaps a new spiral of declining value.

As we outsource we are also educating the companies we are doing business with.  As we outsource more and more, they become more capable of producing a competing product on their own.  So the marketing strategy of the outsource company would be, why pay the mark up when you can buy it direct . . .

As the article suggests this is not always the case.  If you have a tight control on outsourcing, that you are handling the design specifications yourself, you may have control of the process “so far” as the article put it.

This is sort of basic economics.  You must understand the equilibrium point and causes that can make it shift.  There will be times that you should outsource.  Most believe it is when it is outside your expertise.  There are times when even outside your expertise you may need to keep it “in house”.  Understanding what the customer values should determine this.  With reference to the Kano Model, we need to shift “delighting the customer” to “expected performance” to “the basic need” at a quicker pace.  If outsourcing does not conflict with that, then outsource.  Otherwise, keep it “in house”.

How does Lean Manufacturing fall into this?  Is it possible we have reached the end of Lean to where accounting says all we have left is outsourcing for profitability?  Or, is it more likely we have defined Lean Manufacturing incorrectly (Westernized) and that it should have been defined as the strive for continual improvement?

Let us make this "Common Knowledge" - Part 3

Okay, perhaps we cannot call it common sense, which was the title of this blog series until now.  I was in another LinkedIn forum started by Professor Peter Hines.  His question was, "Something's puzzling me, why are we not doing better with implementing Lean when there seems to be so much common sense talked about in the Lean Business System Linked Group?"  The forum in general was pretty good (and still is at the time of this post).  However, one response has made me think, and it was from Mr. James E. Mitchell.  I suggest you find his entire response in the above linked forum.  Let us just say, I thought there was a large gap between our views, however after thinking some more, it is a much smaller gap than I thought.

Mr. Mitchell stated he is on a personal mission to “eradicate the term common sense”.  I took exception to that right away.  However what he wrote made sense (pun was not intended here).  He went on to suggest common sense was “mostly learned by experience”.  Yes, I agree with that.  He went on to also suggest “it can be intellectually arrived at”.  Yes, I agree with that too.  And then he went on to suggest most of what we call common sense “is still foreign to people”.  Yes, I agree with that even more.  So now Mr. Mitchell suggests if we do not teach what common sense is so that it becomes “common knowledge” throughout an organization, we will always keep saying is it not common sense.  And on the flip side if common sense was really common sense, there would not be a point to the forum, or in my case to my old blog title. (Title was,  "Can We Call It Common Sense?".)

Can we call it common sense?  After contemplating what the forum response was getting at I would have to say no and agree to “eradicate” the term.  However, does 2+2=4?  Why?  Would not someone say this is common sense?  Why?  Just because we were taught this in school?  Why?  Did we not just take this on blind faith because our teachers said so?  Why?

Okay, many questions.  Here is my answer.  No, it needs to be common knowledge.  Leadership is at fault here as Mr. Mitchell later on suggested.  Nobody wants to fail.  Nobody wants to back the “flavor of the month” because should it fail, that would be a sign of personal failure.  Hey, does 2+2=4?  Why?  Does Lean Manufacturing work?  Why?  Does Six Sigma work?  Why?  Does it take a leap of blind faith to say “2+2 does indeed equal 4”, or does it take the backing of someone you respect?  I say this is now common knowledge.  What is preventing Leadership from accepting "common knowledge" is the failure of Lean and any other quality system practitioner to teach Leadership.

As Mr. Mitchell pointed out (and I will embellish a little here), it also takes leadership to Gemba so they can see, touch, breath, and listen to the reality, and to decide what the “common knowledge” needs to be.  For once they do, they should, with the continued help of practitioners, continually improve.

After I wrote this today I kept thinking.  Yes leadership needs to Gemba, but why?  Why does that work?  Then I came to a conclusion based on my knowledge.  Today's leadership still operates from the top down.  They read the numbers and set the goal in a statistically controlled process, where (as Deming would put it) an able and willing body puts all their effort in working to standardized work to maintain that statistically controlled process.  Follow orders, keep you nose clean, and we will continue to make parts, and by the way, meet the new goal that is near the bottom of that statistically controlled process.  This is top down management where there will never be success.  So perhaps common knowledge is still above the equal of leadership and will never be reached.  Once leadership understands the bottom up approach, perhaps common knowledge will come forth.

8/29/2011

My original writing (above) did not mention Mr. Mitchell because I wanted his approval to be sure I did not over extend his point, or leave anything out.  With his permission I have included his name and quotes from his original post.  In fairness and with support of his position, I will post a portion of his E-mail reply to me.

Your question "why does 2 + 2 = 4?" and isn't the answer common sense?, I would argue that the answer supports my premise.  2 + 2 = 4 because it can be proved, and that makes it common knowledge, but only if it is taught.  Even a kid who can count to four does not know that adding two to two more will create four.  Even though "everyone knows the answer", it is not common sense.  Herein lies the problem with most uses of the term "common sense".  The person who inveighs the term usually means that it is such common knowledge that anyone with any sense will already know it - a demonstrably false statement; one you can easily come up with examples of.  One other problem I have with the term is how often it is use as a thinly disguised way of calling someone stupid, or maybe not all that bright, very often because of a lack of learning or inability to infer an answer from the existing evidence.

I hope you find this link interesting as well:  Changing Education Paradigms

(Common Knowledge - Part 1)    (Common Knowledge - Part 2)

Interview question: "What are your metrics?"

Let us say you walk into a company for a visit and it turns into a job interview.  During this time you assess the company, their goals, and how they measure performance.  So you ask, "what are the company metrics?"  You expect to hear “on time delivery”, “30 day warranty service”, perhaps “12 month warranty service”, and many others.  What do you think when you hear your potential employer state, “we do not operate like that, we are different”?

My first thought would have been, “okay, we are in trouble here”.  The company is successful, is known for quality which you pay a slight premium for, has been around for almost a century and a half, and has a range of employees from those with a lot of white hair to those perhaps just out of college.  And note, there is a strong correlation as to the older you are at this company to the years of service with this company.

This morning I read a LinkedIn forum discussion created by Pedro Burgos who linked a YouTube video of Dr. Deming that was made in 1984.  The title, “The 5 Deadly Diseases”.  Anything I write at this point will only dilute the message, so I apologize for not having a greater insight.  I strongly recommend you view it.  It answers the question posed above, in that you need to build quality more than reading it in charts and reports.

Obviously you still need to back check performance of the system with numbers.  You do not want to wake up one day and find you went in the red and are closing the doors.  However, it is just that, a back check.  Knowing you need to satisfy the customer by providing a quality product, service, or information is at the forefront.  Having targets to back check are at the end.  In the middle is control of the process that was planned when you selected the type of product, service, or information to meet the customers, needs-wants-desires.

So, to say the company does not have metrics may be correct, and also incorrect.  They may not have the traditional metrics people work to meet, setting up silo processes of “I made my numbers”.  However, the metric that counts, that grows the business, is customer satisfaction, building quality as defined by the customer, then following up (back checking) that you indeed succeeded in customer satisfaction.  And of course continually improve.

Food for thought . . .

There is an aspect of business that I believe gets lost in the shuffle.  Business is created and sets off with good intention, however does business constantly remind themselves as to why they are in business?  I believe there is a question to be asked periodically when reviewing the "plan".  And that is, "Why are we in business?"

Without customers there is not a business.  If we do not develop customer loyalty there is not a business.  And finally, if we do not satisfy the stakeholders (notice I am not stating shareholders), the employees who create the value, then there is not a business.  I cannot help but reflect on the show Kitchen Nightmares.  I see the restaurant owners basically stating “I know what the customers want better than the customers do.”  Nobody to my recollection has stated it just like that, however after each episode I come away with that.  Remember, the person with the money determines the value.  You can try all you want to persuade them, but probably at the sacrifice of customer loyalty.

The next question to ask is, "What are we doing to maintain the Why?"

I am not suggesting the above is a necessity or even all inclusive.  Let us just say all of us think of these at times.  (I unintentionally left out improved delivery - will integrate that later.)  Notice the odd one in the group is “increase profit”.  If you do not increase profit you cannot grow the business.  If you do not grow the business you stand that chance of being overrun by the competition.  To be better than the competition you need to provide quality.  By eliminating waste you improve quality.  As you improve quality you increase profit.  So now you see the connection.  


And to be successful we need Tools to help solve some of the problems in the What.

The above is not an inclusive list.  There are many tools to choose from and I would like to hear from everyone as to the tools they believe should be noted and are not.  The key to any tool is to know where they came from, why they were developed, and the context they were meant for.  That is right, meant for.  Once you understand that you can play with it and adapt it to your needs.  

In simpler terms, what was the problem being solved at that time the tool was needed and developed?  To understand that you need to know who the Gurus were / are and how they defined the problem and developed the solution.  Much can be learned from them.  You do not need to reinvent the wheel, but rather understand how the wheel turns and put it on something that needs to move.  Oh, and once again, remember to choose the right wheel for the terrain.  So, who are some of the Gurus?

The bottom line is, we are in business for the customer.  Without a focus on satisfying the customer we will fail.  Stay focused if you want your next meal.

Let us make this "Common Knowledge" - Part 2

In an earlier blog titled “Can we call it Common Sense?” (now called "Let us make this Common Knowledge") I commented on how the “flavor of the month” pops up at times within a company or an industry claiming to be the “cure all” for your pain.  My argument being all of the flavors share the same values if they are worth the grain of salt they claim to be, and that the only difference is the degree in which they emphasis a particular view on quality.  Okay, perhaps what I wrote was not in that exact thought, however I am trying to clarify here.

Systems Thinking, Lean, Six Sigma, BPM, TQM, TPS, and more I consider quality models that have been successful for the industries that developed them.  All of the models, like Six Sigma, were adopted by other industries.  For any of these to succeed it takes knowledge of the customer, support of management, and execution from the people who add the value.

My contention is choose one, or better yet choose them all.  If your industry is so focused one may do.  If you are in a dynamic industry, your customer changes, competition is driving change, then perhaps more than one is needed.  After all, is it not common knowledge to satisfy the customer, to meet and/or exceed the customer’s needs and wants?

I have created a basic 4-circle Venn diagram to illustrate the relationship between TQM, TPS, Lean, and Six Sigma.  You can add more, leave the four circles and change the title, it doesn’t matter right now.  The important thing to note is that IF all of these are customer centric, they will have to overlap at some point at the VOC (voice of the customer).

Now, if you take a given industry, say healthcare, you will find some hospitals may follow Six Sigma while others TPS.  This does not mean they do not stride into TQM or Lean because they do.  They just do not know it.

Call it what you want.  I now believe this should be "common knowledge".  You choose from the tool box what you need to solve Your problem.  It does not matter what flavor it came from.  Just know how to apply it and that you are applying it for customer satisfaction.


8/12/2011 Update
Reading through some LinkedIn forums I came across a post "Six Sigma in 3 words is?" by Lee Jones.  It was Very nice to see the responses were coinciding with my "Common Knowledge" approach, in that everyone was covering all of the possibilities that overlapped or maybe even engulfed areas like TQM, TPS, Lean, and more.


(Common Knowledge - Part 1)    (Common Knowledge - Part 3)

You need to "See" to make change . . .

Someone asked me the other day would I hire someone with a TPS background who had worked in a Japanese owned company for 12 years, or would I pick someone with Lean or Six Sigma certification.  My quick response: I would hire a person with a TPS background and only 5 years experience working at a Japanese owned company over anybody.

Now, I am not knocking certification.  I have several degrees myself that I obtained late in life, and this person has an MBA I believe.  A formal education combined with TPS experience should put you at the top of the list in my book.  However when you are out job hunting or looking to change career paths, it is very challenging trying to understand all the why’s and what fore’s a potential employer may look down on someone that is not certified in Lean or Six Sigma.

For me the basic traits to hire a Lean engineering type person (and this may count for other professions as well):

• Communication
• Problem Solving with any PDSA format
• Understanding Value
• Being a Change Agent never accepting status quo
• Seeing with “New Eyes”
• And understanding the closer a person is to the customer, meaning the people touching the product creating the value, the more they are your true internal customer, and that the further you are away from the customer, the more you are there to serve.

People from a TPS environment, whether absorbed through osmoses or hands on application, learn to see waste in the value stream.  Bottlenecks jump out at them.  They treat Kanban as a necessary evil because one-piece-flow has not yet been figured out.  They see a problem from the visual factory and resolve it.

The dissatisfaction I have with Lean/Six Sigma is the project time.  TPS is incremental improvements, looking for and eliminating waste.  People in TPS are not fearful of pilot studying what might happen if you remove one level in the Kanban (with predicted outcome - not tampering) in a moments notice, so you can observe interruptions to the flow, the process, the value stream, and either correct them on the spot, or put the Kanban level back until you have a fix.  Value added is still value added.  It does not add up any other way.  You add to the bottom line when you focus on eliminating waste and leaving the value.  Consider it a law of nature.  Or can I call this the "Law of Wes"?

This is not to take away from a Lean or Six Sigma certification.  I am an ASQ Certified Six Sigma Green Belt and want to become proficient as a Master Black Belt.  I find many of the tools beneficial.  However, I find TPS gets the job done quicker and with, in my opinion, greater customer satisfaction and bottom line return.  “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today”, as Wimpy would say.  People holding the money do not want to wait for tomorrow.  Nor does TPS.

Case in point:  A heart failure hospital had asked me to help them with their outpatient department. This facility embraces Six Sigma, as they should.  I have to step back for the moment and say there is a push to reduce the number of patients readmitting within 30 days of discharge.  The medical insurance industry is driving this.  Think of this as the insurance industry looking for a warranty. If it breaks within 30 days, you fix it for free.  So the hospital had a Six Sigma team that included a Black Belt heading the project as to why patients were readmitting for heart failure within 30 days after discharge.

Here was the interesting part.  The Six Sigma team consisted of all the department heads or head nurses.  They were all on a mission to collect all the data on patients to look for a correlation to the re-admittance within 30 days.  Let us just keep this short in that they were following the DMAIC process and it was taking time.  I was invited to one of their meetings several weeks after I had made some observations of the outpatient department.  After hearing all this discussion I had to ask, “Are you telling me the patient symptoms were not managed at the time of discharge?”  Something to that affect anyway.  I knew this was not the case however I wanted them to stop and listen to what they were saying and how it related to the problem they were trying to solve. Nobody got the hint.  There focus should have not been on their process with respect to managing symptoms if they truly believed the patient was being discharged correctly.  It should have been what was taking place between discharge and readmitting within 30 days.

After those few weeks, before I attended the Six Sigma meeting, I realized there was a huge lack of customer focus.  Everyone in the system was satisfying the system, but doing nothing to change the patient’s outcome or experience after discharge.  When the patient was readmitted, the patient was just put back through the process again.  The bottom line was the patient not being compliant with their own healthcare after discharge.  A lot of it being enablers you and I would tend to surround ourselves with when we are not feeling well, meaning family, friends, perhaps a different doctor.

This sort of gets back to my “Poka-Yoke or Not to Poka-Yoke” blog.  We see so many ads on television for medication, weight loss, and whatever else is out there relating to personal health, that we tend to not believe the information because it never seems to work.  We believe we know better.  So we ignore the information given to us and move on.  (Obviously much of the ads on television we do need to ignore.)

The biggest example was the outpatients who kept coming in after having a high sodium meal, drinking lots of water in the belief it would flush out the sodium.  Not true.  The actual result is much more stress on your heart because of fluid retention caused by the sodium, hence the requirement for heart failure for a low sodium diet and restricted fluid intake.  For the normal public this is against what we believe we know.  Hence the patient does not follow it, and with the support of their enablers.

Trying to make a long story short, the department and I developed a patient quiz.  This quiz asked the questions that would be asked during the outpatient visit.  It was also what they need to be doing at home for themselves.  It gave the patient time to reflect on the truth and the nurse to understand what the patient was not doing.  The focus was put back on the patient, not the system, with the intent to change the patient’s outcome and experience.  As we tracked the grades on the white board for all to see, the grades improved along with the patient’s outcome of managed health.  The patients that would typically readmit seemed to reduce. (The department closed so I could not collect the data to give you a percent change.)

The Six Sigma team was still doing their thing, evaluating their internal process, not making a connection to our findings in outpatient, and when they heard we developed and started a quiz they were a bit upset because they wanted us to hold off on all of our improvements for a roll out later, when their Six Sigma project was ready.  Hmm, what was wrong with that picture?

So, yes I would hire a TPS person that has at least breathed the air even in a 5 year period, over most of the certified people out there.  If for nothing else, a TPS experience allows them to “see” and make immediate change.

Move Yourself into Excellence

I chose to write this blog for two reasons.  First to laugh at myself and second because there was a very important point someone made in an article that came up in an Internet search.

I was Internet searching this afternoon to see how my wesbushby.com and wesleybushby.com was doing (just linked it to my blog yesterday), along with finding out if I could Internet search on the blog I just wrote titled “Where do you start Lean?”  The dot com link worked, and my blog title was nowhere in the search.  However one finding in the search jumped out at me as potentially interesting so I read it.  The title, “Where to Begin with Lean: A3 Analysis”.

I have to pause here and state that I view myself as being able to “see” problems in processes whether visual or hidden, whether manufacturing, service, or information. I “see” waste.  I “see” broken processes.  What I do not “See” is what is right in front of me.  So let us now move on.

As I read the article, I heard a clear voice and thought in the writing.  Every sentence I read added more excitement, thinking “someone seems to have gotten this right, about time.”  One key point right at the beginning, to describe where to begin implementing the Toyota Production System, was a quote from someone at Toyota, “Start by analyzing the work to be done.”  I truly believe this.  And will support that belief one more time by quoting something Dr. W. Edwards Deming once said: “If you emulate Toyota you will always be less than Toyota.”  You need to solve Your problems.  Do not implement a “canned solution” to your problems.

The article went on to define the 3 categories of waste.  I must say I was impressed.  In the back of my mind I could not help but think this person copied from someone, because it was too correct.  The article then went on to describe how in manufacturing it is easy to place categorized steps from a manufacturing environment onto a value stream map, and how today Lean thinkers try to apply their manufacturing experience to service and information and loose their Lean as it were.  That today’s Lean thinkers can easily become confused given the dynamics, constant change in direction, which service and information throws at you.  Meaning, claims of “creative work” now pop up and that the outcome of steps is not predictable.

I am not here to re-write the article.  I am here to say the thought in the article is stupendous.  At the end of all this “seeing” the statement was made, “. . . we need to use the standard process of value stream mapping with A3 analysis.  This is the real role for creativity at work.”   That statement blew me away.  During my short experience in healthcare I found myself solving problems in that same fashion, never realizing that given my manufacturing background, I was doing the right thing in applying what I felt was the obvious for healthcare.

Here is the big laugh at myself.  The last two sentence of the article hooked me.  I wanted to read more from this person.  And the person was . . . drum roll . . . (wish I could put this on the back side of the page so you could flip it over and be surprised) . . . James Womack!!!  (The person who coined the word Lean and the phrase Lean Thinking.)  All I could say to myself with great respect to Womack was, “it figures” and then laugh at myself.  (Click here to see the article.)

I believe James Womack to be one of the Guru’s of our time.  At least I think there are others currently out there.  As I find out more from Womack I find he “sees” with clear thought as I do.  He is a hell of a lot more experienced than I am.  So I cannot even think about being in his realm of genius.  The top of my list is still Dr. W. Edwards Deming.  To me it is because Deming had revolutionized the focus in quality, greatly challenging the status quo in his era.  I, and perhaps we, have a long way to go to take what these two gentlemen have given us and to move it forward, let alone understanding the many changes that take place over time and to improve upon their thought.

What you should take away from all this is that you need to solve Your problems.  You need to “see” Your waste.  Though I am not experienced at value stream mapping (want to be), I am an experienced problem solver and believe in PDSA and A3 analysis.  Value stream mapping and A3 are common tools that crossover from manufacturing, to service, to information.  However you need to “see with new eyes” and solve Your problems.  Not apply solutions found by others.  How else are you going to move yourself into excellence?