Jun 20, 2011 | Communication, Marketing, Operations
Experience is hard won, experienced people have an intuition built up over time that is not always obvious, and is certainly not a “by the list” analysis of all the factors, weighing up the relative importance of each, and reaching a conclusion. Somehow it is a cognitive process that happens really quickly.
Some years ago my daughter had an accident in a gym, and very badly broke her arm, to the point of being almost severed. Whilst it was treated as an emergency, and substantial resources immediately swung into action, 24 hours later it was an experienced nursing sister, someone with many years orthopedic trauma experience who noticed a couple of very minor inconsistencies, and demanded a specialist review. That saved my daughters arm from gangrene setting is as a result of Carriage Syndrome. When I asked her how she recognised it, when nobody else had, all she could say was that she “just did”. Experience. She knew enough through experience, had seen enough cases in the past with all the nuances that occur, to recognise cognitively what was going on, rather than just knowing what to do to apparently address the all the apparent problems of a severe compound fracture.
Psychologist Gary Klein has made a lifetime study of decision making, describing the impact of experience on decision making, and how it works in situations of stress, ambiguity, and time critical situations.
Considering the value of this experience should shake some of the corporations around who hire 30 year olds rather than 50 year olds, (and 60 year olds) because of a perceived “vim and vigor” benefit, but what about the instinct and intuition built of long experience? Experience covers all aspects of life, the positive impact of experience influenced decision making is just more obvious in some situations than others. Experience enables those who have it to instinctively see what is going on, rather than just responding to the more obvious what to do.
Jun 16, 2011 | Lean, Operations, Strategy
One of the reasons it is sometimes hard to keep a lean initiative alive, or indeed, get it past first base after the initial adrenalin has worn off is the manner in which the traditional accounting systems monitor performance. Often, accounting is the hardest function to win across, because their whole rationale is brought to account, if I may use such a bad pun.
Lets just consider a few of the more common things accounting does to (unintentionally) frustrate lean:
- Counts inventory as an asset, encouraging a build up of inventory, at best, not discouraging it
- Fails to monitor capacity, so simple improvements such as reducing downtime, reducing changeover time, speeding up throughput, do not get counted until a full bill of materials review is done, and often not then. Therefore, good work is not seen on the bottom line.
- Fails to monitor the performance, other than direct cost ,of individual steps in a value stream to understand the impact one may have on the whole value stream.
- Rarely is there a full value stream costing done, including sales and marketing costs, Accounting simply do not have the tools in their kitbags.
- Customer value is a foreign concept to accounting, “marketing takes care of that” (“by the way, what is it?”) making it easy to ignore anything outside the ledger
- Fails to understand that lean builds capacity, and the benefits start to flow only when the freed up capacity is utilised
- Fails to recognise that value streams are cross functional, and rarely fit comfortably into the common functional responsibilities and performance measures that are applied.
So, perhaps task No.1 in a Lean initiative is to get the “beenies” on board and thinking about how the impact of the initiative can be counted, made transparent, communicated, and improved upon.
Jun 5, 2011 | Collaboration, Leadership, Operations
Consider, what the people on the production line are thinking about right now, finishing work, the fishing trip on the weekend, the necessity to get the car fixed and registered by next Monday, how can they pay that huge electricity bill, the game last night?
Think how much more productive it would be if they were thinking about how to do the job better, quicker, with less rejects, less risk of injury, to tighter more consistent specs?
And then consider weather or not it is a failure of the management culture that they are not doing so?
Googles 20% time, the famous 3M time, works for them, why not for everyone?
It is not easy to engage employees in this way, very few are able to do it, which is exactly why it is worth doing, as it delivers a huge advantage.
May 24, 2011 | Collaboration, Lean, Operations
The lean tool, 5s, is often a starting point for lean implementation. It makes sense, as on the surface, it is relatively easy, “straighten, sweep, set, standardise, and sustain”, but it is this last bit that catches people out.
A clean, tidy workplace with everything in its marked place is great, a good start, but in itself, it is a bit like having your 15 year old son clean his room, looks nice, but doesn’t necessarily convert him from computer games to his poetry homework.
A lean implementation is hard, detailed, collaborative work requiring time, commitment and leadership, if it is to make an impact on work flow, changeover times, preventive maintanence programs, inventory management, safety, and all the other things that go to make up a lean workplace. Unfortunately, it cannot be sufficiently simplified to make any PowerPoint presentation any more than a superficial representation, an awareness builder.
So next time someone pulls out a slick presentation designed to part you from your money, consider the real work that needs to be done, and dismiss the hyperbole for what it is, hyperbole. You need to be prepared to knuckle down to some hard work to get anything useful and sustainable done, or just leave it all alone, save yourself some money and sweat, and just continue to bumble along.
May 18, 2011 | Lean, Operations
In a recent conversation I again found myself between two smart blokes, one who was a black belt 6 sigma consultant who believed the problems of the world could be fixed by some aggressive, numerical focus on process improvement, and an exponent of Lean, who was of the “build the right culture and they will come” school.
To my mind, they are both right, and both wrong.
Six sigma means defects of less than 3.5/million. This requires rigorous emphasis on elimination of anything that creates variation in a process, or series of processes, ensuring that the output is exactly the same every time. Good six sigma implementations take great care to ensure that the output of the processes that are so exactly the same are adding value to the customer, but this can become lost in the welter of statistics and process control mechanisms.
Lean, by contrast starts with the macro question of “what customer value does this process add? What would the consumer prepared to pay for it?” Anything that does not add value to the customer, inventory, rework, excessive movement, and others, is deemed to be “waste” and is rigorously targeted for improvement using the old “Plan, Do, Check, Act” process, the ultimate objective of which is “flow” through a process.
The tools of lean and 6 sigma are widely interchangeable. I have seen 6 sigma implementations going through a 5S process, essentially a lean tool, and Lean implementations using SPC extensively to identify and manage out waste in a process.
It can be said, as my conversationalists did, that 6 sigma is an analytical, quantitative tool box, and Lean is a Cultural, management alignment toolbox. They they are both right, and both have their place, indeed elements of both are essential to competitive improvement.
May 18, 2011 | Lean, Operations, Strategy
We humans like to do things in a consistent manner, each time we do something, it is comfortable to do it the way we did it before.
This is great if the way we have done it delivers the optimal outcome, but presents difficulties when the outcome is sub-optimal, and that is probably 99.99% of the time.
The management challenge therefore is not just to see a better way of doing things, but to institutionalise the process of identifying problems, and improving outcomes as a part of the way things have been done in the past, make continuous improvement so automatic that nobody notices.
