The third element of this organization’s successful drive to eliminate part shortages was a systematic approach to problem solving. They made it a process, managed just like any other process, rather than something people did when they had time. Even though this is “Part 3” of this series, in reality they put this into place at the same time, and actually a little ahead, of kanban and leveling.
The idea of the “morning market” came from a chapter in Imai’s book “Gemba Kaizen.” He describes a process where the previous day’s defects are physically set out on a table and reviewed first thing in the morning – “while they are fresh” hence the analogy to the morning markets.
This organization had been trying to practice the concept of a morning market for a few weeks, and was beginning to get it into an actual process. Because supplier problems constituted a major cause of disruption, they set up a separate morning market for defective purchased parts.
That process branched yet again into a morning market for part shortages. And this evolved into a bit of a mental breakthrough.
They started looking at process defects.
Every shortage, every day, was recorded on the board.
Each morning the previous day’s shortages were reviewed. They were grouped into three categories based on knowledge of the cause – just like outlined in the book.
- “A” problems – they knew the cause, knew the countermeasure, but had some excuse reason why it could not be implemented right away.
- “B” problems – they knew the cause, but did not have a good countermeasure yet.
- “C” problems – knew the symptom (parts weren’t there) but didn’t know why.
The mental breakthrough was systematically investigating the reason each and every shortage occurred. What they found was that in the vast majority of cases it was an internal process breakdown, rather than some problem at the supplier, that caused the shortage. This was a bit of a revelation.
They began systematically fixing their processes, one problem at a time.
Over time things got better. Simultaneously they were implementing the kanban system. Kanban comes with its own set of possible problems, like cards getting lost. Once again, when they found problems they went into the morning market and were systematically addressed.
After a few months into their kanban implementation, for example, they started turning in card audits with far less than 2% irregularities, and then it was not unusual for a card audit to find no problems at all. Why? They had addressed the reasons why cards end up somewhere other than where they should be. Instead of blaming people, they looked for why people acting in good faith would not follow the process.
This was also an attitude shift – assume a flaw in the process itself, or in communication, before looking for “who did it.”
Eventually the warehouse team had their own morning market. As did the receiving team. As did the parts picking team. As did assembly. Each looked at any case where they were not able to deliver exactly what their downstream customer needed.
About 8 months into this, another group in an adjacent building, was trying to work through their own issues. They came over for a tour. One of the supervisors, visibly shaken, came to me and said
“Now I get it. These people work together in a fundamentally different way.”
And they did. They worked as a team, focusing on the problems, not on each other.
And that, readers, is the goal of “lean manufacturing.” If you aren’t working toward that, then you aren’t really implementing anything.