3P – the Production Preparation Process – is often used to develop a complete “reboot” of a process. The term kaikaku is often applied. Like many of the lean tools, subtle points sometimes get lost in rote application. Here are a couple of thoughts from some experience: Developing and Exploring Target Conditions One of the obvious [...]
“3P” is not a Toyota term. The workshop structure was taught by Shingijutsu and is now being propagated by people who learned it while working in their client companies. The most visible characteristic of 3P, the Production Preparation Process, is the idea of creating quick and dirty mock-ups of the product and the process. These [...]
A key point of Mike Rother’s book Toyota Kata is that the organization develops a very deep core-competency in problem solving. In order to develop competency at anything, there must first be a standard to strive for. What I am realizing is the precise method used doesn’t matter nearly as much as having a method [...]
27 months ago I wrote a piece about a “ firefighting culture” where I described the actual process used to fight fires – following PDCA. I have learned a few things since then, and I want to tighten my analogy a bit. What is the core thinking behind true firefighting? This is actually closer to [...]
A reader, Josh, sent me this link. Spilled coffee in 777 cockpit leads to inadvertent hijack warning, FAA-mandated sippy cups look likely The more compete, technical version, is here. The short version is: Airline pilot spills coffee on cockpit panel. Coffee (or scalded pilot) causes airplane to send out the HIJACK transponder code. Many people [...]
I have posted a few times about the “management by measurement” culture and how destructive it can be. This TED video by Daniel Pink adds some color to the conversation. Simply put, while traditional “incentives” tend to work well when the task is rote and the solution is well understood, applying those same incentives to [...]
I am looking at a visual status display board. It has all of the usual things, safety information, 5S audit score, quality metrics. The quality metrics display is pretty typical – there is a target trend line heading down, and a provision for bars representing actual. There is only one bar right now – it [...]
One of the issues Mike Rother says he has had with the coaching questions in Toyota Kata is question #5 “When can we go see what you have learned?” In the west, inevitably it seems, once the word “When” is uttered, everyone in the conversation leaps to hear “When will you be done?” no matter [...]
Michael Ballé’s recent Gemba Coach column drives home the importance of understanding that all of the so-called “tools of lean” are really there to drive problem solving. A well designed kanban system is (or at least should be) built to not simply provide a pull signal, but more importantly, to continuously ask, and answer: “What [...]
The teacher hasn’t taught. This article, titled “Why China is Not Ready for Lean Manufacturing” presents an account of trying to teach “lean manufacturing” in a Chinese factory. The experience is summed up in a couple of key paragraphs: The team arrived in Dongguan and went to work giving an overview class on Lean techniques. [...]