Author: Mark

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10 Days in The Netherlands

Over the weekend I returned from a 10 day visit to The Netherlands as a guest of Blom Consultancy.

I am still compiling my experiences, and will be sharing them with you as I do so. (You already have one of them in the previous post.)

However the purpose of this post is specifically to give a big “Dank je wel” to the people at Blom and several of their clients who made my stay something I will never forget.

A special thanks goes to Corrie and Margareth for making this trip happen, and to Corrie, Margareth and Anton for hosting me in your homes and allowing me to get to know you and your families that much better.

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Get Specific

A couple of days ago I had an interesting session with an improvement team in a fairly large company. They have been working on this for almost 10 years, and believe that while they have made some spot progress, they are clear that they have spent a lot of money but not yet established what they call a “lean culture.” Their implied question was “How do we get there?”

My question was “When you say ‘a lean culture,’ exactly what are you thinking about?”

What do people do? How do they behave?

“People find and eliminate waste every day.”

OK, so if they were doing that, what would you see if you watched?

There was a bit of a struggle to articulate an answer.

I see this all of the time. We rely on the jargon or general statements to define the objective, without really digging down the next couple of layers and getting clear with ourselves about what the jargon means to us. This is especially the case when we are talking about the people side of the system.

But the people are the system. They are the ones who are in there every single day making it all happen. It is people who do all of the thinking.

Consider these steps:

  • Define Value.
  • Map your value streams.
  • Establish flow.
  • Pull the value through the value stream.
  • Seek perfection.

This is the implementation sequence from Lean Thinking by Womack, Jones and Roos, that has been the guideline for a generation+ of practitioners.

Learning to See taught that generation (and is teaching this one) to establish a current-state map of the value stream, and then a design the future state to implement as flow is established. The follow-on workbooks focused on establishing flow and pull, and did it very well.

While not the only way to go about this, it does work for most processes to establish flow in materials and information.

But what do people do every day to drive continuous improvement, and how are those efforts organized, harnessed, and captured to put the results where they can truly benefit customers and the business?

Here are some things to think about.

What exactly is the target condition for your organization? Can you describe what it will look like? Can you describe it in terms of what people experience, and do, every day?

When your people go home to their families and share what they did at work today, what will they talk about? And I don’t just mean the engineers and managers. What will the front-line value-creating people remember from the workday?

How will they talk about problems?

If your target future state now includes changes in how people work, ask yourself more questions.

When, exactly, are they going to do these things you described? By “when” I mean what time, starting when, ending when.

What, exactly, do they do when they encounter a problem during production?

How, exactly, do you expect the organization to respond to that problem? Who, exactly, is responsible to work through the issue and get things back on track? How long do they have to do it? If the problem is outside their scope, what is supposed to happen? How, exactly, does additional support get involved?

If these new activities involve new skills, when and how, exactly, are people supposed to learn them and practice them to get better at it? Who is supposed to teach them, when, where, and how? How will you verify that the new skills are being used, and are having the effect you intend?

“If we do this, what will happen?”

And then what? And then what?

Think it through.

The “people” future state is far more important than future state of the material and information flow.

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Cool Email Mistake Proofing

My main desktop computer runs Ubuntu Linux. The default email client is called Evolution. A recent upgrade introduced a very cool feature. When I hit “Send” it looks for language in the email that might indicate I meant to include an attachment. If there is no attachment, it pops up this handy reminder:

screenshot-attachment-reminder

Maybe Microsoft Outlook does this too, I haven’t used the latest version, so I don’t know. But in any case, this is a great example of catching a likely error before it escapes the current process. I can’t count the number of times I have hit “Send” only to get an email reply “You didn’t include the attachment.” Obviously I was about to do it again, or I wouldn’t be writing this. 😉 Since I am sending out things like resumes right now, that is something I would really like to avoid.

When talking about mistake proofing, or poka-yoke, there are really three levels.

The first level prevents the error from happening in the first place. It forces correct execution of the correct steps in the correct order, the correct way. While ideal, it is sometimes easier said than done.

The next level detects an error as it is being made and immediately stops the process (and alerts the operator) before a defect is actually produced. That is the case here.

The third level detects a defect after it has occured, and stops the process so that the situation can be corrected before any more can be made.

Each has its place, and in a thorough implementation, it is common to find all of them in combination.

Related to this are process controls.

Each process has conditions which must exist for it to succeed. Having some way to verify those conditions exist prior to starting is a form of mistake-proofing. Let’s say, for example, that your torque guns rely on having a minimum air pressure to work correctly. Putting a sensor on the air line that shuts off the gun if the pressure drops below the threshold would be a form of stopping the process before a defect is actually produced.

A less robust version would sound an alarm, and leave it to the operator to correctly interpret the signal and stop the process himself. Your car does this if you start the engine without having the seatbelt fastened. (back around 1974-75 the engine would not start (see above), but too many people (i.e. Members of Congress) found this annoying so the regulation was repealed.)

Consider the question “Do I have all of the parts and tools I need?” What is the commonly applied method to ensure, at a glance, that the answer to this question is “Yes?”

If you answered “5S” then Ding! You’re right. That is one purpose of 5S.

A common question is how mistake-proofing relates to jidoka.

My answer is that they are intertwined. Jidoka calls for stopping the process and responding to a problem. Inherent in this is a mechanism to detect the problem in the first place.

The “respond” part includes two discrete steps:

  • Fixing or correcting the immediate issue.
  • Investigating, finding the root cause, and preventing recurrance.

Thus, the line stop can be initiated by a mistake-proofing mechanism (or by a person who was alerted by one), and mistake-proofing can be part of the countermeasure.

But it is not necessary to have mistake proofing to apply jidoka. It is only necessary for people to understand that they must initiate the problem correction and solving process (escalate the problem) whenever something unprogrammed happens. But mistake-proofing makes this a lot easier. First, people don’t have to be vigilant and catch everything themselves. But perhaps more importantly, they don’t have to take the (perceived) psychological risk of calling out a “problem.” The mechanics do that for them. It is safer for them to say “the machine stopped” than to say “I stopped the machine.”

Back to my email…

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GM’s Singularity

I am going to break my self-imposed rule against further comment on the automotive industry in general, even though it is more commentary about current events than it has to do with the Toyota Production System.

In physics, a black hole is a singularity – a point where time and space are collapsed to a zero-dimensional point. Any singularity in space has, at some distance, an “event horizon.” This is a point of no return. Once anything crosses the event horizon, it cannot escape. Not even light. Everything will end up being sucked into the singularity… eventually. Thus, no information about what is inside the event horizon can ever be known outside it. Because of this information blackout, the term “singularity” has a meaning in general language to define a point in time through which the past cannot be extrapolated to a prediction of the future. Such is Monday, June 1, 2009 for General Motors.

I don’t think there was any doubt to anyone some months ago (except, perhaps, Rick Wagoner and the board of directors) that Monday’s events were inevitable – the “event horizon” had been crossed.

The question is: When was the point when there is nothing they could have done?

I am asking because I look at Jim Collins’ model of collapse, and it is clear to me that GM followed the model, but it took decades, not just a few years.

This article in Business Week Online, How Rick Wagoner Lost GM is pretty damming of several CEOs, back to Roger Smith, and perhaps further. But Rick Wagoner is particularly called out. In the end:

Wagoner continually went before the American public and Congress unprepared and angry, demanding taxpayer support without ever being able to articulate why he wanted $25 billion, how the company would use the money, and what GM’s vision was for a future viable enterprise.

But the last few months’ theatrics aside, up to what point could they have pulled it out?

While our “lean” community has been busy comparing GM to Toyota, I want to suggest a different, more comparable, model: Ford.

Both companies dealt with exactly the same political landscape, the same union issues, the same cost structures. Their range of products was comparable, and by and large, over the years, they made many of the same mistakes.

But right now, Ford continues. Sure, they are hurting, but they don’t seem to be mortally wounded.  When did Ford say “Hey! This isn’t working anymore” or more precisely “Hey! If this continues, we are going to be out of business!” In other words, when did Ford get off the Denial track? And more importantly, are they beginning to develop a fact-based learning culture? It’s too early to tell, to be sure, how all of this is going to play out.

However, I predict that it will be no easier for Barak Obama to get-in-get-it-done-and-get-out of GM than it was for George W. Bush to do so in Iraq. Both jumped based on rationalized emotional justifications, with inadequate resources and no clear exit strategy . (And there, to be sure, the parallels end.)

The political quagmire is only just beginning. Whether anyone likes it or not, because “the people” are majority shareholders, the U.S. Congress is the de-facto board of directors. 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.

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John Shook: “A Technical Problem or a People Problem?”

John Shook dives into some of the messy issues of true root cause in his most recent post.

We touched on a similar issue here a few months ago. But it is always worth coming back around to people because because in this system (actually in any system) there are always two issues with people.

  1. People are the most fallable part of the process.
  2. The process cannot operate without them.

The reflex is often to go into total denial about #1 and expect people to be vigilant and perfect every time. “Weed out the bad apples, and everything will be fine.” Of course that doesn’t work.

In John Shook’s example, he traced through Ohno’s classic “5 Why” example.

1. Why did the machine stop?
There was an overload and the fuse blew.
2. Why was there an overload?
The bearing was not sufficiently lubricated.
3. Why was it not lubricated sufficiently?
The lubrication pump was not working sufficiently.
4. Why was it not pumping sufficiently?
The shaft of the pump was warn and rattling.
5. Why was the shaft worn out?
There was no strainer attached, and metal scrap got in.

Then Shook asks a really interesting question:

Why was no strainer attached?

Why not indeed? Isn’t that somebody’s job?
And now, as he points out, we have transitioned from “technical” to “people.”

Maybe the standard work for the maintenance worker or machine operator didn’t go far enough. Or maybe the standard work did specify changing the strainer but the worker failed to observe the standard. How was the standard developed, how was it communicated and trained? How easy was it to “forget” to change the strainer?

Coming, as I do, from mostly “brownfield” environments, the existance of standard work in the first place isn’t something that we can take for granted.

Nevertheless, Shook is making a critical point here. It does not matter whether there was no standard work, or whether the standard work broke down for some reason that we do not yet know (another “Why?”). This is still a process problem. We must start with a working assumption that the team member cares, and is doing the very best job possible, given the expectations, the resources, and his understanding at the time.

I am aware of a couple of cases where engineering change implementation pulled up short of actually observing the new installation and looking for unforeseen problems. One of them was quite subtle, and actually took a few weeks to find the basic cause, much less the root cause.

Another resulted in a bolt snapping during final torque. Messy to fix, but better in the factory than in the field.

These are additional cases where technical problems resulted from process breakdown, and in both cases, it was a case of unverified or blindly held assumptions, and not following through with the customer process.

Shook concludes with two really important points, and I can’t agree more. First:

…the work design must also include the “human factors” considerations that make it possible to do the job the right way, and even difficult to do it the wrong way.

I like to say “Make the right way the easy way” if you want things done in a certain manner.

Which brings us to Shook’s final point: You have to look at the total package – the human and the technical as an integrated system. You can’t separate them because. You can’t “take people out of the process.” All you can do is construct the process to give people’s minds the most opportunity to focus on improving the work rather than burdening them with making sure they get it right.

Always work to support people to do the right thing in the right way. If the organization carries a belief that it is necessary to force or “incentivize” people to do the right thing, then there is a people problem, but it isn’t with the workers.

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Jim Collins: How the Mighty Fall – Business Week

I am a big fan of Jim Collins. His book Good to Great outlines attributes that I have seen in every successful organizational transformation.

Now he has a new book out. I haven’t read it yet, so I am not going to offer a review, just tell you about it. But the title and premise is intriguing:
How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In

There is a great article and excerpt of the book on Business Week online, including  a video of Jim Collins describing the stages (preceded by a short advertisement).

In short, Collins’ research shows that a great company can fall, and when it happens, there are five stages of decline. According to Collins, Stages One through Three are invisible from outside. The company looks great, but it is rotting from within. It is only at Stage Four that things visibly go south, and they do so very quickly. But there is also good news: The company can recover and return to greatness from any of the stages one through four, but not five.

While this whole story is fascinating, it is the nature of Stage Four that brings things into pretty sharp focus for me.

The stages are:

Stage 1: The Hubris of Success. Things are going great, and the company acquires a sense of entitlement for that success. “We deserve this success because we are so good!” In Collins’ words:

When the rhetoric of success (“We’re successful because we do these specific things”) replaces penetrating understanding and insight (“We’re successful because we understand why we do these specific things and under what conditions they would no longer work”), decline will very likely follow.

I think this idea of “penetrating understanding and insight” is what characterizes the idealized Toyota Production System. It is also seen in every example that Steven Spear covers in Chasing the Rabbit.

When an organization shifts away from questioning its own success as thoroughly as its failures, and begins to assume that its continued success is simply a matter of continuing to do what they have been doing, the seeds of decline are sown.

This ship is unsinkable.

Stage 2: Undisciplined Pursuit of More.

Companies in Stage 2 stray from the disciplined creativity that led them to greatness in the first place, making undisciplined leaps into areas where they cannot be great or growing faster than they can achieve with excellence—or both.

This one really struck me. Is this the what Toyota went through in the last 5-7 years in their pursuit of #1? Clearly they overreached, even they say so. Even as early as 2003 they were seeing eroding of the TPS discipline in their North American and European plants. They shored that up, and continued their aggressive expansion of production capacity, got into big trucks, and in general seemed to bypass their traditional patient-and-relentless growth strategy.

Other industries suffered this as well. The last few years saw unprecedented (and it turned out, artificially generated) growth in sales across sectors. As one of my friends put it “When times are this good, everybody’s a genius.” Put another way, when there is more demand than supply, even a “supplier of last resort” gets great business, and it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking it is because “our products are great, and customers like us.” It is possible to carry that belief in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary – like customers telling you to your face that they bought your stuff because they couldn’t get it from your competitors.

Inventories start to grow, quickly, as nobody wants to miss a sale; factories are expanded, quickly, for the same reason. There is almost a fear of failure here, but it is fear of failure to get more rather than failure to succeed. If success is taken for granted (see Stage One), this one follows pretty directly.

We are going to set an Atlantic crossing speed record.

Here is a question: Who didn’t experience this to some degree over the last 5 years?

Things get interesting next.

Stage 3: Denial of Risk and Peril. There are warning signs of over-reaching, that things are not going to go this way forever. But what struck me more was the cultural aspect: Shutting out the truth.

In Stage 3, leaders discount negative data, amplify positive data, and put a positive spin on ambiguous data. Those in power start to blame external factors for setbacks rather than accept responsibility. The vigorous, fact-based dialogue that characterizes high-performance teams dwindles or disappears altogether.

When leaders start suppressing dissenting views, when they equate disagreement with disrespect or unhealthy conflict, they start insulating themselves in a cocoon of denial.

If the organization is pre-disposed to avoid conflict to begin with, then this stage is really easy to slide into. Vigorous debate is part of sound decision making. When that stops, or is never allowed to surface in the first place, the organization is self-centered and vulnerable.

When leaders start attributing the warning signs to anomalous, one-time, temporary factors – and believing they are exercising that penetrating understanding and insight when, in reality, the “analysis” is no more than the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion they have shifted from rationality to internal belief-based decision making. (also called “wishcraft.”)

Reports of ice ahead.

Stage 4: Grasping for Salvation.

The cumulative peril and/or risks gone bad of Stage 3 assert themselves, throwing the enterprise into a sharp decline visible to all. The critical question is: How does its leadership respond? By lurching for a quick salvation or by getting back to the disciplines that brought about greatness in the first place?

So things have gone to hell in a handcart, and the leadership starts looking around for how to get out of the spin. They have ignored all of the warning signs up to this point, but now they are undeniably in trouble. What to do?

As I said, this is where it gets really interesting from a personal / professional level.

There is no doubt that, at this moment, the proverbial “burning platform” exists. There is clearly a sense of urgency… Pick your clichés from “change management” literature here.

“Hey – I just read this book about lean. Let’s bring in this hot-shot consultant to lean us out.” And so it begins. The Search for the Silver Bullet – the magic that will fix everything. And it doesn’t have to be “lean.” It might be x-Sigma (put your favorite buzzword in place of the ‘x’). Maybe everybody reads The Goal and starts looking for constraints. Or the leaders leap from “program” to “program” looking for the solution. While each “initiative” is kicked off with great deliberate fanfare, in reality the leaders are panicing.

They fail to see that leaders atop companies in the late stages of decline need to get back to a calm, clear-headed, and focused approach. If you want to reverse decline, be rigorous about what not to do.

Here is my take on this. These leaders who leap from “solution” to “solution” are still in hubris and denial. They are still looking outside of themselves for the problem, and the solution.

My last post, How the Sensei Teaches, describes leaders who teach by being students. This requires humility, something totally incompatible with hubris. If they want to bring in that hot-shot consultant, they need to tell her “We really need help up here, please teach us” rather than “Go teach our people how to be lean.” They need that consultant to be a true sensei, not just a technician.

Oh – what is Stage Five? Collins calls it Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death.

My words are “The boat sinks.”

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How The Sensei Teaches

In a previous post, I talked about Steven Spear’s observation about how a sensei saw a process and the problems. Jeffery Liker, Mike Hoseus and David Meier have done a good job capturing how a sensei teaches and summed it up in a diagram in the book Toyota Culture. (for those of you following at home, the diagram is figure 18.9 on page 541).

I want to dissect this model a bit and share some of the thoughts I had.

This is the whole diagram:

How a sensei teaches

This diagram strikes me in a couple of ways.

Let’s zoom in to the left hand side.

sensei-do-loop1

I’m calling the part I’ve highlighted in red the “sensei do-it-loop.” That is, the sensei says “Do this,” the students do it, then the sensei says “Now, do this.” Repeat.

While this first loop is the starting point, all too often, it is also the ending point.

And in this loop, process improvement actually happens, everybody applauds at the Friday report-out. The participants may even prepare a summary of key learning points. And perhaps, as follow up, they will apply the same tools in a similar situation. (As much as I hope for this outcome, though, it doesn’t happen as often as I would like.)

A lot of consulting engagements go on this way for many years. Some go decades. I am sure processes improve, and I am equally sure it is very lucrative for those consultants. But even if they are extraordinarily skilled at seeing improvement opportunities and pointing them out, these consultants are not sensei in the meaning of this diagram. That distinction is made clear in the next section.

This is where the learning happens.

Sensei Learning

I have highlighted the learning loop in red.

The sensei is primarily interested in developing people so that they can see the opportunities and improve the processes themselves. He wants to move them along the continuum from “Do” to “Think” so that they understand, not only this process, but learn how to think about processes in general. When the sensei asks the questions, he is forcing people to articulate their understanding to him. He is really saying “teach me.” In this way he pushes people to deepen their own understanding from “think it through” to “understand it well enough to explain to someone else.”

Think about Taiichi Ohno’s famous “chalk circle.” The “DO THIS” was “stand here and watch the process.” He had seen some problem, and wanted the (hapless) manager to learn to see it as well. Ohno didn’t point it out, he just directed their eyes. His “test” was “What do you see?,” essentially repeated until the student “got it.”

The second leap here is from “Think” to “Self Learning.” At this point, people have learned to ask the questions of themselves, and of each other.  So when he asks his questions, the sensei is not merely interested in the answers as a CHECK of learning, he is also teaching people the questions.

These questions are also a form of “reflection.” They are a CHECK of what was planned vs. what was done; and what was intended vs. what was accomplished. The ACT in this case is to think through the process of improvement itself, not simply what was improved.

Until people learn to do this, “Self Learning” does not occur, and the team is forever dependent on external resources (the sensei, consultants) to push themselves.

But the sensei is not through. Once people have a sense of self-learning, the next level is capability to teach others. “All leaders as teachers.”

Learning to Teaching

Someone, I don’t know who, once said that teaching is the best learning. I can certainly say that my own experiences back this up. My greatest ah-ha moments have come when I was trying to explain a concept, not when it was being explained to me.

I would contend, therefore, that a true sensei is not so much one who has mastered the subject, but rather one who has mastered the role of the eternal student. It is mastery in learning that sets apart the very best in a field.

Thus the sensei‘s work is not done until he has imparted this skill to the organization.

As the leaders challenge their people to thoroughly understand the process, the problems, to explore the solutions, so do the leaders challenge themselves to understand as well.

They test their people’s knowledge by asking questions. They test the process knowledge of their people by expecting their people to teach them, the leaders, about the process. Thus, by making people teach, they drive their people to learn in ways they never would have otherwise. The leader teaches by being the student. The student learns by teaching. And the depth of skill and knowledge in the entire organization grows quickly, and without bound.

So Here Is Your Question:

If your organization is typical of most who are treating “lean” as something to “implement” you have the following:

You have a cadre of technical specialists. Their job, primarily, is to seek out opportunities for kaizen, assemble the team of people, teach them the mechanics, then guide them through making process improvements that hit the targets. This is often done over the course of 5 days, but there are variations on this. The key point is that the staff specialists are delegated the job of evangalizing “lean” and teaching it to the people on the shop floor.

Again, if it is typical, there is some kind of reporting structure up to management. How many kaizens have you run? What results have you delivered? How many people have been trained? Managers show their commitment and support by participating in these events periodically, by attending the report-outs, and by paying attention to these reports and follow-up of action items.

Now take what you have just read, and ask yourselves – “Are we getting beyond the first loop, or are we forever just implementing what is in the books?”

How are you reinforcing the learning?

Who is responsible to learn by teaching?

I’ll share a secret with you about a recent post. When Paul and I took Earl through his own warehouse that Friday night, neither of us had been in there before. While I can’t speak for Paul, everything I knew about warehouse operations and crossdocks, I learned from Earl. I didn’t teach him anything that night. Paul and I did, however, push him to teach us, and in doing so, he learned a great deal.

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Russia’s Factories Gear Up for Efficiency

This article in Business Week offers a glimpse into some of the opportunities, and challenges, facing Russian industry, both in dealing with the global recession, and their tremendous work to get out from under the legacy of a state run economy.

Two things really jump out at me. First, this particular CEO (other than the fact that he is 26 years old(!) is taking a proactive approach to the recession. He is taking responsibility for dealing with the problems, not simply playing victim and blaming the economy.

…Andrey Gartung, the 26-year-old CEO, believes the global economic crisis offers an opportunity to boost productivity. This year he is adding new product lines, ordering every department to trim costs by 15%, and asking workers to ferret out waste wherever they find it—with prizes of up to $300 for the best ideas. “The companies that will survive are the ones that are efficient,” Gartung says.

With that kind of attitude, I think Mr. Gartung will go far.

But the thing that really jumped out was the incredible magnitude of the opportunity.

Despite Russia’s 7%-plus economic growth recently, much of its industry is little changed from Soviet times. Factory productivity is just 16% of the U.S. level, according to Strategy Partners, a Moscow management consultancy.

That means, friends, that they have an 84% upside. If they can harness that, think about what it means in terms of competition.

Russia, of course, is not without its problems – political, social, economic. The little tidbit that the CEO of this factory is the owner’s son comes out about 2/3 of the way down, as does the fact that the owner is a member of the Russian Parliament. Though I am sure that Mr. Gartung is sharp and competent, in general, this kind of thinking is not going to help Russian industry as a whole.

But rather than focus on them, take a look in the mirror. What is your productivity upside? What is your attitude about these economic times? Do you honestly believe your operation is as good as it can get? Or are you satisfied with 15 or 20% of what it could be?

Consider Toyota’s response to their first quarterly loss in decades – essentially saying treating the loss as evidence of a problem.

Remember that old definition of insanity: “Continuously doing the same thing, and expecting a different outcome.” If you don’t like the results you are getting, then dig in and try something else.

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Evidence of a Problem

In most references describing the process of good problem solving, the first real step is to explain what actually is the problem.

It is easy to get tripped up at this stage and describe the problem in terms of the desired target, or in terms of “lack of” a specific countermeasure. That, of course, skips over the whole point of gaining a deep understanding of the situation before moving too far into intestigating causes.

I heard a great way to frame that first bit of description tonight from Richard.

“What is the evidence of a problem?”

That word, “evidence” does a much better job of conveying the point that this should be a description of the things that are observed, heard, felt, etc. rather than any kind of analysis.

In many cases a “big problem” is actually evidence of many small ones. “Too much inventory” is one of those. So is “defect rates” or any other aggregated measure. If you are running KPIs you probably know that, because they aggregate so much, they are often relatively insensitive until things are so far into the hole that it is a mess to untangle. Better to instrument your processes at much finer levels and get “evidence” in real time.

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Genchi Genbutsu in a Warehouse

Now and then something comes across that makes it all worth it. And nothing is more “worth it” to me than to know something I said or did contributed to someone’s insight or impetus to do something spectacular.

Yesterday Earl sent me an email that is one of those times. I was going to edit it from an email to me into a story about Earl’s experience. But instead, I decided to just publish it (with his permission) pretty much as I got it. But to be clear, this is about Earl, and his learning, not about me or my teaching.

Mark,

I received this email [see below] the other day from John.

John was one of the lean leaders working for me in Rochester when I was the Lean Director for Kodak’s Global Logistics team and you were the Lean Director for Equipment Mfg. He is now a professor at RIT teaching lean.

One of the things he does with every class is bring them through his old operation in Kodak. The operation is an outbound crossdock for all of Kodak Park where, through applying our lean principles, primarily “flowing at takt”, we have taken a 2,000,000 square foot (186,000 m2) warehouse and replaced it with an 85,000 square foot (<8000 m2) crossdock.

Along the way we reduced the costs by 70%, improved the reliability to +/- a few hours, and amassed an enviable safety record….and as you can see in his note, we’re making it better every day.

When I think back to how we got here, I have to go back to what started as an innocent Friday night, when you, Paul Cary, and I were sitting around his office and you and Paul were pushing on me that we weren’t really thinking about lean in the right way in Logistics, and I was pushing back that “you didn’t understand”….that we just move pallets around the warehouse.

I can remember like it happened yesterday, but it was actually a few years ago, you and Paul looked at each other, looked at me, jumped up and said “Let’s go see”, so we did.

Several hours later, we emerged from the warehouse, not tired and worn out, but energized and excited. You had helped me to see what was invisible to me (and everyone else around)….even though I was the local “lean expert”.

The approach was classic “Mark”, and I have to admit I’ve stolen it and used it as my own many times, although not nearly as effortlessly. At your insistence, we entered through the outbound dock door, as you pointed out, “closest to the customer”. As I started to walk through and into the warehouse proper, you stopped at the door, and made me stop and describe what I was seeing.

The “Five Why’s” were relentless, and I think it was something like 30-40 minutes before we even moved off that spot, but the seeds were planted right then and there. I had now started to see the whole warehouse as “waste” and totally unnecessary if we could only get product flowing at takt. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve relied on the lessons learned that night to guide me when I get in the middle of something unfamiliar to me.

Well, it took us a couple of years, but your invaluable and patient counsel over the next few years shaped a whole organization’s culture. I know better (now) than to suggest “we’ve arrived”, but the principle of using “flow at takt” and making waste visible to drive continuous improvement is firmly rooted in our DNA now.

Aside from the impressive performance statistics of the operation I know you’ll appreciate more that the things you taught me have been dutifully passed along from me to the manager of the area, and through him, to his successor, and now through the college to many more. All we have to do now is close the loop and get you to hire one of the RIT students somewhere!

I’ll not pretend that a couple of hours on a Friday night several years ago was all it took, and I’m forever indebted to the many hours you spent with me afterwards helping me to grow, but it was truly a life changing event, and I thought you’d appreciate seeing a snippet of what it’s led to. Thanks again for all your insight and support in our, and my, journey.

If you ever find your way back East, you have to stop in to see it, drinks are on me. It is pretty wild, but if you do, I might tiptoe carefully around the idea that you’re the guy that taught me to “physically constrain the process to force it to flow at takt”. It was an essential part of our journey, but obviously anyone that would suggest we can change a 2,000,000 square foot warehouse into an 85,000 square foot crossdock can’t be seeing the world the right way! (Of course I have to follow that up with one of my favorite quotes one of the VP’s here used….”If it wasn’t for the fact we already did it, we would have said it’s impossible”. Thanks again.
This is the email he is talking about:

Dave and Tony, thanks again for giving the walk through to my 25 advanced lean class students yesterday. Some observations:

I think the floor was about the cleanest I have ever seen it. It is always clean, but yesterday seemed even more so.

The evidence of continuous improvement is amazing. Yesterday I saw a number of things that I did not see in my last visit Feb 10 – new lane structures, hybrid cards, changes in box 2, clearer e-box sheets, new standard work sheets and visuals, etc.

I really appreciate you taking to heart the input I gave you based on the feedback from my last class on the tour structure/agenda itself. The last tour was very good, this one was awesome. The standard work sheet Dave showed me for the tour was great standard work – content, sequence, timing and outcomes were all vividly clear. I asked for more of a focus on the production control system and you delivered on that request. Dave, in your intro, you sounded like me teaching my class (maybe not a good thing?!?).

[…]I was pleased the students had more time to ask more questions. I keep preaching continuous improvement in class and you guys model it which helps give the message credibility in the minds of the students.

The other thing that struck me, which is not new but seemed different for some reason I can’t explain….. You are moving large volumes of freight, […] and the floor is just so calm. There is no panic, no arguing, no anxiety, just people following the processes, getting product from point A to point B, in a quiet, controlled, efficient way. I still remember when I brought the facilities class over last spring, and especially 2 of the folks with lots of work experience said “I never imagined that a warehouse type of environment could actually look like this.”

Your safety performance is stunning. I know the record when I was there was 534 days. Then we had 2 “old-age” repetitive motion injuries in 2 weeks, then you went 600 + days. Now you are at 200+ days. Absolutely remarkable in a tight space with fork lift trucks moving around. 3 OSHA reportables in 4 years, wow.

I clearly remember “that Friday night.” I think we were in there until 10:00 or later. Paul and I had a really good synergistic style, we reinforced each other, and it was an intense experience for whoever was on the receiving end. This was not the last time we took someone through this exercise.

To be sure, it was Earl and his team that did all of the heavy lifting. All Paul and I did was give him a sense of an ideal flow, and challenged them to discover, and overcome, the obstacles between the current state and that vision – one problem at a time, a couple every day.