Normally when I get an email from a company pointing me to the great lean resource on their web page, I find very little worth discussing. But Creative Safety Supply in Beaverton, Oregon has some interesting material that I think is worth taking a look at.
First, to be absolutely clear, I have not done business with them, nor do I have any business relationship. I can’t speak, one way or the other, about their products, customer service, etc
With that out of the way, I found their Kaizen Training and Research Page interesting enough to go through it here and comment on what I see.
What, exactly, is “PDCA?”
The section titled Kaizen History goes through one of the most thorough discussions of the evolution of what we call “PDCA” I have ever read, tracing back to Walter Shewhart. This is the only summary I have ever seen that addresses the parallel but divergent histories of PDCA through W. Edwards Deming on the one hand and Japanese management on the other. There has been a lot of confusion over the years about what “PDCA” actually is. It may well be that that confusion originates from the same term having similar but different definitions depending on the context. This section is summed up well here:
The Deming Circle VS. PDCA
In August of 1980, Deming was involved in a Roundtable Discussion on Product Quality–Japan vs. the United States. During the roundtable discussion, Deming said the following about his Deming Circle/PDSA and the Japanese PDCA Cycle, “They bear no relation to each other. The Deming circle is a quality control program. It is a plan for management. Four steps: Design it, make it, sell it, then test it in service. Repeat the four steps, over and over, redesign it, make it, etc. Maybe you could say that the Deming circle is for management, and the QC circle is for a group of people that work on faults encountered at the local level.”
So… I learned something! Way cool.
Rapid Change vs. Incremental Improvement
A little further down the page is a section titled Kaizen Philosophy. This section leans heavily on the thoughts / opinions of Masaaki Imai through his books and interviews. Today there is an ongoing debate within the lean community about the relative merits of making rapid, radical change, vs. the traditional Japanese approach of steady incremental improvement over the long-haul.
In my opinion, there is nothing inherently wrong with making quick, rapid changes IF they are treated as an experiment in the weeks following. You are running to an untested target condition. You will likely surface many problems and issues that were previously hidden. If you leave abandon the operators and supervisors to deal with those issues on their own, it is likely they simply don’t have the time, skill or clarity of purpose required to work through those obstacles and stabilize the new process.
You will quickly learn what the knowledge and skill gaps are, and need to be prepared to coach and mentor people through closing those gaps. This brings us to the section that I think should be at the very top of the web page:
Respect for People
Almost every discussion about kaizen and continuous improvement mentions that it is about people, and this page is no different. However in truth, the improvement culture we usually describe is process focused rather than people focused, and other than emphasizing the importance of getting ideas from the team, “employee engagement is often lip-service. There is, I think, a big difference between “employee engagement” and “engaging employees.” One is passive, waiting for people to say something. The other is active development of leaders.
Management and Standards
When we get into the role of management, the discussion turns somewhat traditional. Part of this, I think, is a common western interpretation of the word “standards” as things that are created and enforced by management.
According to Steve Spear (and other researchers), Toyota’s definition of “standard” is quite different. It is a process specification designed as a prediction. It is intended to provide a point of reference for the team so they can quickly see when circumstances force them to diverge from that baseline, revealing a previously unknown problem in the process.
Standards in this world are not something static that “management should make everyone aware of” when they change. Rather, standards are established by the team, for the team, so the team can use them as a target condition to drive their own work toward the next level.
This doesn’t mean that the work team is free to set any standard they like in a vacuum. This is the whole point of the daily interaction between leaders at all levels. The status-quo is always subjected to a challenge to move to a higher level. The process itself is predicted, and tested, to produce the intended quality at the predicted cost, in the predicted time, with the predicted resources. Because actual process and outcomes are continuously compared to the predicted process and outcomes, the whole system is designed to surface “unknowns” very quickly.
This, in turn, provides opportunities to develop people’s skills at dealing with these issues in near-real time. The whole point is to continuously develop the improvement skills at the work team level so we can see who the next generation of leaders are. (Ref: Liker and Convis, “The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership”)
Staging improvement as a special event, “limited time only” during which we ask people for input does not demonstrate respect, nor does it teach them to see and solve those small issues on a daily basis.
There’s more, but I’m going to stop here for now.
Summary
Creative Safety Supply clearly “gets it.” I think this page is well worth your time to read, but (and this is important), read it critically. There are actually elements of conflicting information on the page, which is awesome because it gives you (the reader) an opportunity to pause and think.
From that, I think this one-page summary really reflects the state of “lean” today: There IS NO CANONICAL DEFINITION. Anyone who asserts there is has, by definition, closed their mind to the alternatives.
We can look at “What Would Toyota Do?” as somewhat of a baseline, but ultimately we are talking about an organizational culture. Toyota does what they do because of the ways they structure how people interact with one another. Other companies may well achieve the same outcomes with different cultural mechanisms. But the interactions between people will override process mechanics every time.
Hopefully I created a lot of controversy here. 🙂
Because of reduced product lifecycle time it would of been interesting to get Deming’s perspective or potential iteration. I was at one his last talks in Denver and it was great. But the dynamics of business are accelerating and new breakthroughs in these processes will be further needed. Getting to ‘First Time Right” has to happen much sooner than when I was listening to Mr. Deming. A great man indeed.
Don – Good insight.
On an MIT webinar that has long since vanished from the web, Steve Spear had a similar observation. The idea of a “stable period” in a product life cycle is quickly vanishing. In terms of Deming’s product iteration cycle, I think it means speed it up – but without cutting corners. In a lot of cases, I think it means you are simultaneously continuously upgrading the current product, while ALSO working on the next generation (and maybe the one after that as well).
It could also mean multiple tiers, like Canon does with their DSLR line – where the newest technology is actually introduced first into the lower-end consumer lines, and only after it has matured is it then moved up-line toward the high-end press grade EOS 1D line. This seems counter-intuitive but makes sense when considering the needs and purchasing habits of the various customer segments.
The key, though, is it STILL has to be right when it is released. Pretty easy with software products – early releases have limited, but *fully functional* feature sets. Later releases add features. That’s harder to do with hard goods, though we do see firmware upgrades doing the same thing in electronics.
I thought that this piece really highlighted the core values with lean which is constant improvement. The last part about how there is no one way to implement lean made me stop and think about that for a second. This is because I am a student at the University of Rhode Island studying Supply Chain Management. There is a heavy emphasis on lean and Six Sigma in the program and we are, like most things in education, taught that there is a way to do it. To think of lean as a concept that has no defining boundaries, to be adapted to individual situations in a company is, I think, consistent with the idea of lean, which is to think outside of the box and consistently find a way to improve. That includes the process of lean itself.
Joseph – Just to add a bit.
While there is not “one way” I absolutely believe there are ways that almost never work. One of Deming’s elements of “Profound Knowledge” was a knowledge of psychology. We have to understand the organizations’ dynamics and interactions and what drives them. Ultimately we are working to improve *that* with process improvement as a favorable outcome of more effectively engaging people.