Thoughts and Insights from the Shop Floor
Duke has posed an interesting question on the forum:
http://forums.theleanthinker.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=35
Actually a couple of questions.
They get to the heart of “When can you say something is actually a process?”
I have my views, but I want to hold back until I hear from some of you.
This could get as good as the 5S discussion.  🙂
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. The factory workers seemed attentive and interested in learning. The next day, the Silicon Valley Lean team gathered the people from the assembly line to begin the process of working on the quality problem. After 3 hours, the Lean team ended the session in utter frustration. No one participated. No one would identify problems on the line. No one knew how to approach gathering or analyzing data. No one volunteered.
So what happened? The training was adequate and the Lean principles and methods are sound and easily understood. Why weren’t the Chinese factory workers participating?
Why indeed?
The author’s conclusion is that Chinese worker’s culture and values conflict with the idea of collaboration and contributing ideas to improve production quality and efficiency.
But the article brought up two separate thoughts.
First, there is nothing magic about Western culture. These concepts can, and do, fall just as flat in the USA and Europe as they did in this factory. The problem in these cases has less to do with the national culture, and more to do with attempting to apply a rote approach to teaching.
Second, the result cited here was exactly the opposite of my own experience in a Chinese factory.
It took some persistence, and it took some deliberate steps to remove fear from the factory floor, but in the end we had these Chinese workers making some very innovative contributions.
This photo is an old boring mill. It was a slow old boring mill. We needed to squeeze cycle time out of the process to make the projected takt time. We showed the workers some photos of other teams’ efforts to mock-up fixtures so they could quickly try out ideas. The workers, after a few false starts, constructed what you see here, and ended up with a pretty good set of fixtures that could be loaded and unloaded quickly. After some trials, they figured out on their own that they could fit two fixtures on the platform, which allowed them to be unloading and loading one while boring on the other.
One of the machinists complained that the machine could run faster if it had a liquid cooling system. With encouragement, he designed and built a simple, but working, cooling system for the cutting tools. (The steel box in the foreground with a pump on it.) The clever part was the chip filter made from a bottle cap and a nail.
Another team was working on a welding cell. They ended up designing and fabricating more efficient fixtures than had been provided by the engineers. Then they set out to develop the most efficient way to get parts positioned, to load them quickly into the fixture, and weld up the part.
Â
Â
What was different?
First, we didn’t do any classroom education. Not quite true. We showed them photos of really good welding fixtures that had been designed by a sister company. That took about 30 minutes. We explained what features made those fixtures good. Then we continuously encouraged them to try things so they could learn on their own. And try they did.
We didn’t ask them to go beyond mock-up. We fully expected to take their ideas, turn them over to engineers to get them finalized and drawn up, then have the fixtures fabricated. But the workers took it on their own initiative to dig through the (embarrassingly large) amount of scrap metal out back, bring in what they needed, machine parts, scrounge others, and built their fixtures in steel.
A number of ideas were things I could clearly see would not work. I knew that heat distortion from welding would make a particular fixture design difficult (impossible!) to unload after welding. I could tell them it wouldn’t work, or I could let them try it on their own. I chose the path that would engage their curiosity and let them learn through experience. They became better welders for it.
Honestly – this was a slow time while we were working out other issues with market positioning, sales, design and sourcing decisions, and most of this activity was intended to keep people busy and engaged. But what we ended up with was production-ready work cells, all built upon ideas from the workers.
So why did I tell this little story?
First, I will admit that I was pretty proud of these guys. This was a few years ago now, but it was fun blowing away everyone’s stereotypes about Chinese factories and Chinese workers.
But I wanted to make a key point.
Instead of looking for cultural reasons why “this won’t work here” we kept faith that, if the initial response was silence and non-participation, there was something that we needed to address in the way we taught, and in the environment we were creating.
Indeed, what the Chinese culture brings to kaizen is a centuries-old tradition of improvising with what you have to get something done. This is a great strength that can be hard to find in cultures with longer traditions of wealth.
Just as we were encouraging these workers to try things so they could learn what did work, we had to do the same thing. We didn’t give up after three hours. Eventually we managed to remove the fear and bring out the best these people had to offer.
Classroom education is actually a very poor way to teach people how to study a process, understand it and improve it. Sometimes it kind of works, but I think that is because it is marginally effective if all of the other conditions are right. Perhaps in some cultures that starting point is past the limit of what classroom education can handle. That isn’t a problem with the culture, it is revealing the inherent weakness in the approach.
There is no cookbook. There is only a clear objective, and good faith effort to keep trying until a solution is found.
Epiloge: Yes, this factory got into production. However the parent company could never get traction in this market with this product and recently made a decision to close this plant and pursue a different strategic direction. That is not a reflection at all on the people who did the work in these photos.
In my review of Toyota Kata by Mike Rother, I suggested that the staff-level practitioners who are embedded in almost every company that is “implementing lean” could put those practices to work immediately, even if it was not an ideal “top down” teaching process.
This week I gave that a try.
I was coaching a workshop leader who was, in turn, leading the team I mentioned earlier. He was simultaneously reading the book, I referred him to “the coaching questions” on page 247 and we worked together to keep asking them as the team was doing its work.
Since the team was working to solve problems that were blocking the problem solving process, it got a little complicated to keep them focused on the right “immediate problem.” However what I observed, for sure, was that my workshop leader’s skills improved significantly as the week went on, as did the team’s understanding of the issues and countermeasures.
My working theory was that just asking the questions puts someone into “teaching mode” and, as I have said earlier, the best way to learn is to try to teach.
Was this the ideal approach advocated by Mike Rother? Nope. I will have to loop back and catch some of the foundational elements. But as I have experienced in the past, these practices are so powerful that even trying and awkward application gets significantly better results than following no structure at all.
Start asking the questions, and see what you can learn as you try to teach.
Many organizations have a centralized production planning function that would undergo a radical change in a transition to pull.
I know many of you have experienced this type of organization, some have transitioned it.
We have a fledgling exchange on the topic started in the discussion forum.
I would like to invite more participation there on the topic. If you have comments or insights, how about putting them there.
This week I am coaching a kaizen team in the first phases of implementing a process to respond to problems on the shop floor.
They clearly understand the objective, and are working hard.
The key is to keep them focused on working out the problem response process vs. getting distracted by the production problems they are responding to.
For my part, in an effort to accelerate the cycles of learning, I am trying to consciously apply “the five questions" of the coaching cycle as outlined on page 247 of Toyota Kata by Mike Rother.
They are:
This will not be my only opportunity – I have other challenges lining up in other parts of the company that I support.
I’ll tell you, though, it isn’t as easy as just asking the questions.
The first challenge is context. My actual condition is that this kind of rigor is new to even experienced kaizen practitioners out there. As Rother, and others, point out, most “kaizen events” simply aren’t structured this way.
There is a strong bias toward generalization and sweeping statements of "problems” and “what we need to do is…” I have to keep working to bring the focus back to what is directly in front of us as we try to work through this specific iteration. Yes, that other thing might be an issue, but it isn’t coming up NOW, so let’s keep working on what is actually stopping us.
This is important because it gives the problem solvers great power. If they can learn to stick to what is stopping them right now, they have an easier time not getting discouraged by all of the other issues that are out there.
One-by-one. Step-by-step.
Of course this iteration is complicated by the fact that we are working on a process designed to clear problems in another process, so it is easy to get sucked in to the production issues.
To their credit – we have a Home Depot technology andon light, and the team members who are the subjects of this experiment seem to be appreciating (for now) the fact that this group of people is swarming every issue they run into.
Over the decades, I have observed that it is quite common for organizational leaders to try to use the word “opportunity” when talking about a problem.
I can understand the desire to do this – we typically think of “problems” as something to do with people.
But I find the emphamistic language… problematic.
Â
Â
Â
There is a Honda marketing campaign in the USA that features a cartoon character named “Mr. Opportunity.” His tag-line is “I’m Mr. Opportunity, and I’m knocking.” The opportunity is an invitation to take advantage of discounted prices for Honda cars.
Words mean things.
An opportunity is something that I may, or may not, decide to pursue.
But in lean thinking, no problem can go unaddressed.
Rather than a friendly cartoon character knocking on your door, a problem has kicked your door in and is standing in your living room. It must be dealt with, and dealt with quickly.
It has to be contained, pushed back, and finally resolved to keep it from getting back in.
IF the process for doing these things is carried out correctly, there are opportunities for the organization to learn along the way. But in the vast majority of cases, the only way those opportunites get exploited is if the leaders insist on hearing what was learned. So even those “opportunities” shift to imperatives.
Friendly euphemism that soften the urgency do not help us. If we are to have a true problem solving culture, we have to be willing to call things what they actually are.
Tom sent this link to me, and I thought I would share it.
I can’t say much for the correspondent, but this is a decent view of a modern automobile assembly line.
The actual tour starts at around the 6:00 point.
When I look at a production line, one of the key things I am looking for is how they detect and respond to problems – both the mechanics and the strength of the problem solving culture.
I am curious to hear from any of my readers from Ford (I know you are out there).
I suppose, at some level, that makes emotional sense. After all, the idea is to keep production moving.
But the logical follow-on question is: “OK, so if the team member encounters aproblem that is going to force her to work around things, to do the work in a way that wasn’t planned, what do you want her to do?“
Â
I would like to thank everybody for a really engaging dialog in the previous two posts about 5S audits.
Now I would like to dig in and look at what an “audit” is actually finding, and how we are responding to those issues.
Our hypothetical production area is getting an audit. The checklist says things like “There are no unnecessary items in the work area” and “There is a location indicated for all items.”
If there are unnecessary things in the work area, or things are not in their designated locations, what happens?
Of course, the checklist is filled out and a score is assigned.
But what has been learned about the process?
In one of the comments, I asked something like “When was the problem first noticed?”
The core purpose of 5S is to establish a testable condition that asks the question: “Does the team member have everything he needs, and nothing he doesn’t, where he needs it, when he needs it, to carry out his process as we understand it?”
One of the primary purposes of marking out the locations is to indicate the standard so that someone can notice right away that the standard has been broken. What should happen right then and there?
Since we define a “problem” as “any departure from the standard or specification,” and we have taken the first step of removing ambiguity from the situation (by deciding what should be here, and marking it out), we want an immediate response to the problem.
Ideally this means that the team member would indicate trouble (andon call, or other means) as soon as he discovered that his air gun was missing, or didn’t work.
The back-up to this is the team leader’s standard work. His eyes should be scanning for situations where there is a problem that the team member hasn’t called out. This is why the standards are marked out, posted, etc. To make this job easy for him. His immediate response would be to (1) Seek to understand the situation – what pulled the team member off his standard work, where did the problem originate, (2) Correct the situation. Sometimes that’s it. Other times, there is another problem to dig into.
It could be that something about the work process or conditions has changed and the team member is improvising a bit. That would bring extra stuff into the area, for example. I recall a great example where we pulled all of the thread cutting tools out of assembly so we could better detect when assembly was getting defective fabricated parts. It worked by forcing the process to stop and an andon call since assembly could not proceed if the threads were not cut.
At the same time, if a thread cutter found its way back into the assembly area, we would know we had two problems. First, we had defective parts. But more important, the process of telling us about that problem had been bypassed.
The back-up to the team leader’s standard work is the supervisor’s standard work. She is looking two levels down, but her response is going to be different. Unless safety or quality is jeopardized, the supervisor is going to find the team leader and (1) Seek to understand what pulled the team leader off of his standard work, and (2) correct the situation.
If the next level up is spending any time at all out on the shop floor, it is the same thing – maybe once a day – seeking out verifiable evidence that things are working as they should be. In the lack of positive evidence of control, we must assume there are hidden problems.
Now, if the audit finds something like this (click on the image for a bigger one):
Then it isn’t about the tape being out of place, nor is it a question about where the screwdriver is. What we have discovered is that none of the checks have been made, or if they have, no one has done anything about them.
Someone said “If we don’t do audits then 5S deteriorates.” OK – but why does 5S deteriorate?
Simply put, it is going to deteriorate, just as your process does, a little bit every day. Disorder is always being injected into everything. Your process will never, ever be stable on its own. No matter how good you are, the next level of granularity will show up as deterioration.
This is the “chatter” that Steven Spear talks about.
The question comes down to your core intention for the audit.
If you are assessing how well the area manager is coaching and teaching his people to see and respond to problems so that you can establish a target condition for his learning, and then develop his capabilities accordingly… there are better ways (in my opinion) to do that.
If you are assigning a numeric score in the hope that, by measuring something you can influence behavior, it might work, but people can come up with ingeniously destructive ways to achieve the numeric goals. As a thought experiment – how might an area manager get a high score on his 5S audit in ways that run completely counter to the goals of 5S, people development or “lean?”
The bottom line is that “Audit 5S” is not something that you should accept as a given. Rather, it is a proposed countermeasure to some problem. But if you start with a clear problem statement like “Team members are bringing thread taps into the assembly line,” and start asking “Why” five times, get to a root cause to that problem, you are unlikely to arrive at a monthly or periodic 5S audit as a countermeasure – nor are you ever going to need one.
The problem?
I think we feel the need to do audits because we have no process to immediately detect, correct and solve the little problems that happen every day. These little issues are the ones that cause the 5S erosion. Because we don’t have a process to deal with them one-by-one, we have to have an elaborate process that disrupts our normal work flow and takes them on in big batches.
Does that sound like a “lean” process to you?
How might we relentlessly drive the “audit” process closer to the ideal of one-by-one confirmation?
That would be “lean thinking.”
Â
Â
I have seen this topic come up in forums many times, and seen wide ranging responses. If I were to summarize them all, it would be “I’ll know it when I see it.”
A couple of weeks ago I heard a great quote from a co-worker that puts things into perspective.
I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
And therein lies the crux of the issue, because at its heart, the Toyota Production System emerges as the leadership applies a specific set of mindsets, practices and skills to every decision, every problem, every opportunity.
Few leaders who have reached senior positions in any company outside of Toyota have acquired those mindsets, practices and skills, and fewer still rigorously apply them. This isn’t anyone’s fault. Â They simply came up in a totally different context.
Worse yet, they have been taught that “leadership commitment” means “deciding, budgeting and checking on status.” Thus, many companies have leaders who fully believe they exhibit complete “commitment to lean” when, in reality, it is just another initiative or program – managed like a new product development might be.
The process outlined in Mike Rother’s book, Toyota Kata, is one of learning these skills. And I would contend (as I believe Rother is contending) that unless these skills are being actively and deliberately learned and applied, no mater what else you are doing, it isn’t “lean.” (or, if you want to quibble about the definition of “lean,” it isn’t the Toyota Production System.)
Now we are at a core issue. While it is possible to learn these skills, mindsets and practices on one’s own, it is extraordinarily difficult. That isn’t because there is anything particularly difficult about these practices. But most people, if they truly want to learn something new, have someone to teach them.
If that senior executive wants to improve his golf score, he hires a pro to give him lessons, because it is an individual skill.
The skills we are talking about are also individual skills, further complicated by the fact that they are individual skills for interaction with others.
So what is “leadership commitment?” Is it a commitment to learn these skills?
Actually, I would contend that is not enough. My current working definition is one which overcomes Churchill’s reluctance. It is an acknowledgment that, not only is there something which must be personally learned, but that someone must be found to teach it.
Leadership commitment is demonstrated by the willingness to be taught.
If you think about it, every “business novel” out there follows this same format – a leader is confronted with a problem, realizes he cannot solve it with his current skill set, and another character emerges to teach those skills to him.
What are your thoughts? I am interested less in paragraphs and more in alternative short definitions.