Author: Mark

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Vendor Managed Inventory vs. Less Inventory

Almost every shop I have visited has, or is thinking about, initiating a “vendor managed inventory” program of some kind.

The pressure to do this is especially strong when there is a big push to improve working capital positions and increase inventory turns. And, to be honest, the way traditional accounting counts inventory turns, getting the inventory “off the books” is certainly one way to do it.

It follows, then, that vendor managed inventory can improve inventory turns, at least on paper.

In reality, though, unless the inventory itself is actually removed from the value stream, all that has happened is the valuation has been slid from one ledger to another. All of the costs are still in the system, they are just in different columns now.

It is the physical presence of inventory, not who owns it, that is evidence of some kind of problem. So “reducing” inventory by transferring ownership really doesn’t change the system at all.

The “documented cost savings” are often only an “on paper” artifact of traditional cost accounting, when the actual cash outlay of the organization doesn’t really change very much.

Then there is the added cost (often hidden) of managing distribution from a consignment stock, a tendency for supplier’s representatives to “sell” by stuffing bins as full as possible, and a host of other little things that can add up.

Don’t get me wrong, vendor managed inventory can, in theory, be done superbly and truly help. The problem is that it usually isn’t, and doesn’t.

Don’t push your problems onto your suppliers.
Solve them instead.

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The First Steps of The Lean Journey

“Where do I start?” seems to be one of the most commonly asked, and most intensely discussed and debated, topic on the various discussion forums over the years. Yet a clear consensus hasn’t really emerged.

Normally I don’t wade into those discussions when the question is asked generically. The reason is that without specifics about the situation, it is really hard to answer. There isn’t a clear set of step-by-step directions that say “Start here” followed by (2), (3) and so on.

Here’s how I look at it.

The theoretical end-game (which you likely never reach) is perfect one-piece-flow at takt time, with a perfectly safe work environment, producing 100% defect-free product, with no environmental impact, delivering it exactly when the customer needs it, without any wasted motion.

The practical end-game comes when the laws of physics and the limits of known technology become the limiting factors for further progress. (And even in that case, this is a usually a limit of human knowledge, which can be improved.)

The beginning is where ever you are.

There is no first step.
There is only the next step that moves you incrementally and tangibly toward perfection.

That next step is going to depend largely on what you are starting with.

The variation of starting points is what confounds the efforts to set down a formula. Any abstract attempt to answer the “Where do I start?” question must build in assumptions that answer the “Start from where?” question.

Here are a couple of examples.

If there is so much clutter and junk that people have to move things out of the way just to get work done, then absolutely, begin with the classic starting point – 5S. That can take anyone a long way as they learn to question why something is out of place, and come to realize that introducing new things into the workplace can will alter the way work is done. Best to do it on-purpose than randomly.

On the other hand, if the place is fairly neat, and most of the things are where they need to be, or close, and “looking for stuff” is not a huge impediment to the work, then I might be inclined to let workplace organization naturally evolve as part of the effort to establish some degree of stability.

If there is a hugely varying customer demand signal hitting the shop floor every day, calculating takt time is an exercise in frustration. If nobody believes it is possible to stabilize the demand, they aren’t much interested in hearing about takt. So the “first steps” might be to work on a leveling system so people have some solid ground to stand on.

It comes down to what is, right now, disrupting the effort to smooth out the work.

Maybe it’s quality and tons of rework. Then we’ve got to work on that. Or part shortages. Then at least contain the problem until a long-term solution can be put into place.

Sometimes it is leader’s knowledge. They don’t believe, or don’t understand, how improvement is possible. Countermeasure? Because “knowledge” is the next impediment to improvement, the “first step” becomes some kind of leader education, study mission, or other experience that is going to give them some confidence that they can do better (and it won’t be painful to get there).

If the organization has a lot of functional silos that are disrupting each other, it could be really beneficial to take a cross-functional team through a really deep exercise to understand how their system works and why it performs as it does. (this is a good time to use the current-state value stream map or a makagami.)

How do you know?
Ah – and that is why people ask the question in the first place.
As much as I hate to say it, I think the answer is “from experience.” This is one place where it might be worth your while to bring in someone who has done this a few times and get an opinion.

But if they tell you where to start without first personally assessing where you are, I’d question the quality of the answer. “There is no substitute for direct observation,” or, to use the Japanese jargon, genchi genbutsu. You can’t answer the question without first understanding the specific situation. At least I can’t, which is probably why I stay out of those debates.

I’d like to hear what you think. Feel free to leave comments.

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Lean Accounting’s Fat Problem – Forbes.com

Lean Accounting’s Fat Problem – Forbes.com

I am really encouraged when I see a mainstream business publication like Forbes.com begin to discuss how better flow can cause problems for traditional cost accounting. I would refer this little piece to any executive, at least as a starting point for a discussion.

Key points:

Unless the accountants understand the way that lean works, in the worst case it seems to them that lean produces losses, not efficiencies. In a typical case, they cannot see the cost advantages.

This is especially a problem if there is a lot of excess inventory in the system. Holding everything else constant, reducing inventory causes two problems. First, it cuts the “assets” side of the balance sheet, and can look like a write-down, when in reality, inventory is simply being converted to cash. (and in today’s economy, cash is a good thing to have). Another effect is that it looks like costs go up because there is less inventory to “absorb the costs.” That is more a problem with the absorption model itself which can report a “profit” even though nothing was sold.

I really liked this analogy:

One presenter at the summit used weight loss as an analogy. When dieting, standard cost accounting would advise you to weigh yourself once a week to see if you’re losing weight. Lean accounting would measure your calorie intake and your exercise and then attempt to adjust them until you achieve the desired outcome.

That is the heart of the whole thing. The Toyota Production System is real time. It is designed to detect and respond to problems immediately. Managing it requires clear undistorted information, not abstract models that include things that aren’t affected by the “right now” decisions. Absorbed overhead costs are not part of the manufacturing function, and often overwhelm the true costs of manufacturing.

The countermeasure?

Value stream accounting was suggested by Bruce Baggaley of BMA as a way out. The company’s revenues and costs are reported weekly for each of the value streams. The costs reported do not include allocations or standard costs, just the costs that actually occurred within the value stream last week.

How to fit this in to your kaizen plan:

Now you are looking only at the actual costs incurred by the shop floor operation. You should be able to look at your kaizen activity, predict the results you will achieve, and then use this weekly report as a CHECK in your PDCA cycle.

“What numbers should we see (as a result of this improvement)?”

“What numbers did we actually see?”

“Is there a difference?”

“Why? What didn’t we understand about our process, our improvement, or our costs?”

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GM.gov

Back on June 3 I went on record saying this would happen. Keven Meyer has captured it better than I could in Evolving Excellence. But, just for the record, here is my prediction:

No matter what the President wishes about maintaining “hands off” management, that isn’t going to happen once the corporate constituents realize they can use all of their lobbying tools to influence corporate decisions. I hope I’m wrong about all of that.

I still hope I am wrong. But I think this is going to look more like the military attempting to close bases (and being blocked by Congress) than it is a desperate auto company trying to to regain its footing.

Once government comes into the picture, government control, and then government politics follow. This can’t be good for GM, the USA, or the auto industry in general. As long as the .gov owns controlling interest in a hobby auto company, this is only going to get worse.

Now – is the UAW going to figure out that what remains of their pension and retiree medical funds (which are largely in GM stock) are being put at risk by the government  majority owners forcing an unsustainable cost structure onto the company?

It will be interesting to watch.

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Outsourcing Profit

This post on Kevin Meyer’s Evolving Excellence blog brings up some good challenges to the traditional “avoid fixed costs” rationale for outsourcing. The post (and the comments) point out Wall Street’s obsession with achieving a total variable cost model.

There is certainly a lot of appeal. Traditional cost accounting works hard to “assign” fixed costs  to individual units of production so that they can then pretend to calculate unit costs and unit margins. But rather than going into a long rant on accounting, I will just refer you to the experts.

Instead, I want to go beyond the cost accounting rationale that is usually put together, and look at some of the other issues with outsourcing.

Here’s a question for you: Where is the value added in your value stream?

That means what stage of the value stream has the steepest difference in value between what is purchased and what is transferred to the next stage? Put another way, if all you do is final assembly, what is the difference between what you pay for the parts and what your customers pay for the finished product? Keep in mind that this number is the most money you could make. All of your expenses come off this delta. Given any particular level of costs, it makes sense to add as much value as possible.

What is the difference between the cost of components and what you pay for your outsourced sub-assemblies? That is the value your supplier adds.

If, for the sake of argument, your kaizen activities made space and labor available – space and labor that you are already paying for today – how much more profit would you make if you used those resources to bring some of those outsourced sub-assemblies under your own roof?

Remember, in this little exercise, your labor costs stay the same. Your production area stays the same. Your overhead stays the same. The only thing that changes is this: Instead of buying completed sub-assemblies from a supplier, you are buying the components that the supplier buys and assembling them yourself.

If you would pay less for the components than you do for that sub assembly, your total cost of goods sold goes down, and all of that difference goes straight to the bottom line. (I am sticking with assembly here because the capital requirements, in most cases, are modest here.)

This is a different answer than you would get in a traditional make-vs.-buy analysis which assumed that all of the burdened direct labor costs would be shed with the work. It isn’t that clean in reality.

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NUMMI (again)

Toyota to end Calif. joint venture with GM – Yahoo! News.

The joint venture was developed to have American workers learn Toyota’s production methods, which were much leaner and more efficient. [emphasis added]

Maybe that was GM’s intention – to “fix” the workforce. This fits in with the judgment I developed about GM’s leadership over the last decade, and especially the last year – that they see their problems as something other than them.

Toyota’s intention in the plant was to determine the best way to teach Toyota’s methods to the leadership. The test is to see how well the leadership teaches the line workers. To that end, Toyota pretty much succeeded. They learned how to open a plant outside of Japan.

Who didn’t learn as much as this opportunity presented them?

Aside from GM’s top leadership (a topic which has been pretty well dissected here and elsewhere on the web and in print), I think the other big missed opportunity here was for the UAW.  What if their stewards and business managers were experts in coaching and continuous improvement? Think about the possibilities for them.

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leanblog.org: Measuring for Improvement

Mark Grabon’s latest post hits the key difference between metrics that help improvement, vs. management-by-measurement that destroys trust and possibly drives unethical behavior. He quotes a U.K. hospital administrator as saying:

“We’re trying to shift from collecting data for judgment to data for improvement.”

I agree with Mark’s assessment: “Brilliant.”

Metrics are a “Check” in Plan-Do-Check-Act.

The purpose is not to determine if people are “doing their jobs” but to assess if the plan is working as predicted.

“As predicted” means that not only is there an objective, but there are discrete actions which everyone agrees will cause the objective to be reached.

Note the words “everyone agrees.”

For that to happen, not only are objectives handed down, but the plan to reach them is discussed. The boss is keenly interested in exactly how his people plan to accomplish their objectives, and he has bought in after he is satisfied they have done thorough work. Think about that for a second. The boss now has his own “skin in the game” on not only the objective, but the way to get there.

There isn’t any space, at this point, for judging people based solely on hitting the numbers, because the boss has already agreed that the plan should work. The question now comes down to how well the team did putting together a plan and gaining consensus, and how well they executed. If the numbers aren’t hit, everybody has to reflect on why the plan didn’t work, what they didn’t foresee, and what they need to do better next time.

Management-by-measurement, on the other hand, is an abdication of leadership. It becomes an adversiaral rather than collaborative exercise and becomes a contest of politics and blame-shifting. This is why, I think, Deming finds the merit system and individual performance bonuses so destructive.

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What Is The Customer Really Buying?

Background: Frank’s still-under-warranty freezer stopped working. The service tech decided it would be repaired, ordered a new compressor and said “See you when the part gets here next week.” Frank and his wife, about to lose a freezer full of food, are not happy with the with this level of service, call “Customer Care” and are basically told that the repair will run its course.

The question posed at the end of follow-up #1 was:

“What, exactly, did the customer want here?”

I asked that question because occasionally it is good to think about not only the product we make or service we deliver, but to reflect a bit on exactly what value the customer receives from that product or service. Sometimes we confuse the technology we apply to get something done with what we are really trying to do.

Let’s look at Frank’s case. If, instead of Bellevue, Washington in July the freezer had broken down in Grand Rapids, Minnesota last December, this would not have been an issue at all. Take the food out of the freezer and set it on the porch where it was actually colder than in the freezer.

What the customer is buying is not a freezer, but an environment that keeps food from spoiling. Any environment that accomplishes that purpose will work. With our current technology, freezing the food by placing it in an insulated box with a vapor-compression heat pump attached is the best way to do that. But it isn’t the only way.

What upset Frank, and his wife, was not so much that it would take a week to fix the freezer, but that their food would spoil in the meantime. Any solution that solved that problem would have worked for them.

What, exactly, does the customer find valuable?

You press the button, We do the rest.

Sometimes the product or service simply helps the customer create, or recreate, an emotion. George Eastman “got that” and grew an empire from that idea by making photography simple enough for anyone to do. Prior to that, amateur photographers had to mess with mixing their own chemicals, glass plates, their own processing, and persevering to actually get a photograph. The value came from the technical accomplishment as much as the image itself. But that didn’t work for families that just wanted to remember an occasion, and share it with their friends. Kodak changed all of that forever. But their way wasn’t the only way, and a few years ago, a better way emerged. It wasn’t about the technology, it was about sharing the memories.

I have spent a lot of time in the construction equipment business. I recall a senior manager making a pretty insightful comment. “The only part of the crane that the customer cares about is the hook. Everything else just makes it work.”

Most construction equipment is actually is capital equipment for the customer’s business. The owner-operator of an excavator is selling a service: The customer has dirt where he wants a hole. The excavator is a tool that can fix that problem. The owner-operator needs to be able to deliver the service at a price his customer is willing to pay and still be able to make a profit. That fact, in turn, sets the prices for the equipment.

But it is important for the seller of that equipment to remember that, to his customer, it isn’t an excavator so much as a business. The seller that thinks “How can I help my customer provide better service to his customers?” rather than “I sell decent hardware at a fair price” has an opportunity to think of things beyond the hardware itself.

Look at your own operation. What value do you provide to your customers? Not just the product itself. What is the problem the customer can solve, or what is the source of pleasure he gains from your product or service? How would (or could) the customer solve the same problem, or gain the same benefit, without your product or service?

What is your customer really buying?   What business are you really in?

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Design Innovation Example

This post on the Fastcompany.com blog shows a clever desktop manufacturing invention.

But what really got my attention was the development process that starts at 3:40 in the video. It shows the process of developing it. They may not call it “3P” but, by and large, this is what it looks like.

As they develop ideas, they try them out in simulation, learn, improve, try, learn, improve. As the design matures in stages, they are moving forward, step by step, with concepts that are solid. This process is fast, flushes out problems early, while they are cheap to fix, and fun.

Contrast this with what might be created by a traditional process with the assignment of making a “tabletop NC cutter for cardboard.”

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Is This a Problem – Part 2

Last week I posted a story of a failed freezer, ruined food, and a customer support experience that could be summed up as “That’s how we do it.” I invited comments and asked:

“Is this a problem?”

And when I say “problem” I mean, is this a “problem” from the standpoint of the company’s internal process?

There are some interesting comments, some about the internal culture of the company, others about the support process itself.

But I promised to offer my thoughts, so here they are.

The key question is “What did they intend to happen?” While we can speculate, unless we have the process documentation or are otherwise privy to that internal information, we really don’t know what they intended in this case.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Frank’s experience was exactly as the company intended it to be. Then, from the point of view of their internal process, there is no problem.

“Wait a minute!” I can hear, “Nobody wants  a customer to never buy the product again.”

And here is my point. We don’t know. This company may be perfectly willing to accept that consequence, i.e. “fire the customer” to preserve their warranty cost structure. They certainly would not be the first. Whether that is good business or not is a totally separate issue. The question is “Did they produce this result on purpose, as a logical, foreseeable outcome of the process as they designed it?.” If the answer is “Yes, they did” (and only they can know), then there is no problem. It might be bad business, but the process is working just fine. (I acknowledge that “bad business practices” can result in unintended results – like bankruptcy. But my point is the results are the outcome of a process, and the process is the result of a decision, even if that decision was to “not care.”)

The key point here is that only after there is clarity of what should happen, can the process itself even be addressed. Until the intended result is clear, then there is no way to see if the process works or not.

Was there a problem here? I don’t know. But this is what I would like people to take away from this little story.

Whenever something in your company seems “not right” ask this really powerful clarifying question:

“Did (or would) we do this on purpose?“
If the answer is anything other than an unqualified yes then it is likely you have a problem.

Here is a tougher position: If something was unpleasant for your customer, and you don’t intend to fix it, then embrace the truth that you did do it on purpose. Take responsibility for your decisions, look in the mirror, and say “We meant to do it exactly that way, and will do it the same way next time.” If you can’t stomach that, then go back the the first question.

Here is an extra credit question for this little case study in customer support.
What, exactly, did the customer want here?