Comments on: Why Doesn’t Daily Kaizen Happen?

By: The Essential Lean Blogosphere of 2008 | learnsigma

The Essential Lean Blogosphere of 2008 | learnsigma — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 14:12:51 +0000

[...] doing kaizen. That may be part of the answer to the question by Mark Rosenthal at the Lean Thinker, Why Doesn’t Daily Kaizen Happen? Speaking of which, Ted Eytan at Daily Kaizen gives practical advice on his Guide to Bringing Your [...]

By: Laura Colman

Laura Colman — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 03:18:37 +0000

Mark, you are sooo right. My mantra for my own work and for those I coach is ‘what gets scheduled gets done’. And I find this works 95% of the time. I recently started coaching a team who do prepare healthcare claims for processing. While 80% of claims are received electronically that still leaves a lot of paper to enter sort and enter in the system. If they don’t get them in system in a timely manner the rest of the processing cycle doesn’t have any chance of making expected processing times. They were routinely running a backlog of several thousand claims (some weeks old). So we started by calling any claim they were waiting to process that was over 5 days old a defect. Every day the team took time to work on the causes of the defects and eliminating those causes. We started in July and as of today that team is consistently processing 99.9% of their receipts within 2 days. Thanks for your suggestions. This stuff works when you actually DO it. The ‘Knowing-Doing Gap’ is alive and well in most organizations.

By: Jim Fernandez

Jim Fernandez — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 22:16:05 +0000

Mark:

Your right on the button with this.

I have created 20 6S teams and 20 team leaders. Everyone in the plant is on a team. I have asked them to have a team meeting every two weeks to discuss improvement ideas. I go around every two weeks to collect the ideas.

I asked for a stop work time for 15 minutes every other week for team meetings. Managemant said no. Currently the teams have to find the time to meet on their own.

Guess what; I have three teams that are actually having the meetings and coming up with ideas.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:34:24 +0000

Hi Gabriela –
Thanks for commenting!

Yes, some improvements can be done while the lines are running, but who is supposed to do them? If there is good takt / cycle balance, then the production workers do not have time during the course of their regular work. SOME office / administration tasks are just as busy, others have more slack in them, so in those cases, this is less of an issue.

The main thing is that the workforce cannot become engaged as long as someone else is making all of the improvements on their work.

To be sure, I would fully expect a supervisor or a team leader, if there is an opportunity, to make an improvement when there is time. But if they do so at the expense of missing an opportunity to teach the production team member how to improve their own work, that team member is disempowered in the process, and the number of people who make improvements is reduced by a factor of 5 or 10.

Planning need not be elaborate or cumbersome. It is acknowledging that if I expect someone to do something (in this case, the production workers to make improvements to their own work), then I need to make sure they have the time, resources, skill and guidance to succeed vs. simply telling them “they are empowered” and wishing they would find the time I haven’t allowed them to have.

By: Gabriela

Gabriela — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:25:31 +0000

Some improvements can be done while the production lines are running. There is so much to improve and some things can be done on the run, too; we don’t need to always plan, just do it as we have a few minutes. Surely, if it’s more involved, we need to carefully plan for it.
I think sometimes we talk/plan too much and do too little.