Lean Reflections

Hybrids save fuel? Just askin'

2012-01-12T13:31:00.000-05:00

I was reminded today about the value of hybrids when I caught this article from Industry Week: Detroit unsure over the future of green cars. Because really, do they save fuel? So it has a battery -- how do you recharge it?

Resources Graphics.com

It's a coal- or natural gas-powered car. When you plug it into the wall, the juice comes (mostly) from an electric utility, and its power plant probably burns coal or natural gas, generating waste. It might be nuclear energy, generating fear along with radioactive waste. What's worse, the loss of energy in transmission is waste.

You can make a couple of arguments here. Some energy can be generated by capturing diverted energy when the driver brakes -- not an engineer, so can't describe that well, but I think it can be done.

You can generate some of the power from solar or wind farms. Or generate it from your solar-paneled roof or garden wind turbine. Frack a gas well and run your own generator. Realistically, though, how much electricity can you get that way?

Yes, you save on fuel made from imported petroleum. If everyone bought an electric car.

This sounds like alternative-energy bashing, which it's not. It's bashing promoting a let's-pretend world. Maybe burning coal or natural gas is the right way to fuel mobility, but if it is, let's be clear that we are making that choice.

Just sayin'.

2011 Management Blog Roundup: Business 901

2011-12-28T03:26:00.005-05:00

Joe Dager

In an organization's lean transformation, getting sales on board is not always easy. They are used to a tug of war over winning business and fulfilling it and seem to speak a different language. You may be looking around for a new way to present lean that will finally catch their attention.

Joe Dager, author of the Business 901 blog, is the guy who can connect the two worlds. Joe spent one lifetime running a couple of companies that manufactured industrial equipment, so he gets the shop floor issues most lean implementers grapple with. To stay in business and put food on a lot of tables, he also needed to work the revenue side, and seems to have a gift for sales -- he's just the kind of guy you want to be friends with.

A few years ago, Joe started thinking about how lean applies to sales and marketing and now has a budding empire sharing his knowledge in books, podcasts, marketing services, training, and his blog.

What can you gather from reading the Business 901 blog? Joe's one of the Blog Carnival players, so right now you'll see what he recommends you take a look at. I like his picks, and intend to delve into all three of them.

Let's take a look at Joe's own post, Lean sales and marketing works because of leader standard work. Leader standard work seems to be the big thing right now, usually focusing on what an operations manager will do in the plant. Joe looks at how the layers of responsibility in a marketing group can be coordinated with SW, making sure that each has regular sharing with the others, deploying everything from call scripts to campaigns to budgets.

In If less than 1% of companies are successful with lean, why are we doing it? Joe reckons with this assessment from Jeff Liker, one that sounds pretty discouraging when you are putting all your energy into getting your organization to move along the path. Joe sees it another way. What works for the one percent...

...is the same thing for both people and organizations. It is the scientific process of trial and error. You don’t get it right at first, you have to break habits, personal habits as an individual and company cultures as an organization. Successful companies do it a little bit at a time. In Lean, we call this scientific method PDCA. We plan, do it, check the results and adjust. It is a purposeful experimentation.

To me, this is the excitement of Lean, is this empowering aspect that is not easy. You teach people, rather than solve people’s problems for them. And in doing so, they learn how to make better decisions which leads to better performance.

Dr. Michael Balle stated in an interview with me, “Lean gives you an ideal; it’s a commitment to an ideal.”

So take Joe's inspiring tidbits from his blog, add them to his podcast interviews with influential thinkers, and blend with some of his books and slidecasts and you'll begin to see how lean operations can partner with sales, share practices and a philosophy to make a company more competitive and fun to work in.

The complete Management Improvement Carnival list

2011 Management Blog Roundup: The Lean Thinker

2011-12-27T03:46:00.005-05:00

Mark Rosenthal

My second pick for a great blog that might be new to you is The Lean Thinker: Thoughts and insights from the shop floor by Mark Rosenthal.

Mark's got plenty of experience in the trenches, including an 11-year stint in the military getting maintenance operations processes straightened out. He has since led front-line change at Boeing, Genie Industries, and Terex, among other companies known for their strong lean capabilities. I have been fortunate enough to meet Mark and have some thoughtful discussions about what improvement thinking is in the right direction and what is off target.

And he fully qualifies as a thinker, considering many of the post he writes in his blog. A few examples:

'TIS THE SEASON FOR MANAGEMENT BY MEASUREMENT
Mark dissects the folly of thinking that KPIs and incentives are going to lead to real improvement. He points to a couple of credible sources that puncture the idea that incentives do much at all for motivating performance.

THE ANNUAL OPERATING WISH
Adding to his criticism of incentives to reach goals, Mark takes on the whole goal-setting process in the annual plans most companies kick of the year with. First of all, he says, they are inflexible when conditions like demand don't turn out the way you predicted they would. I've asked groups before, "What is the first thing we know about a forecast?" Surprisingly they rarely respond, "They are always wrong." Nice to have Mark's agreement on that.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS
Looking at work and identifying decision points can be a key to improving processes. Mark asserts that because mental bandwidth is finite, having people make decision after decision every day, no matter how small they are, is not a good idea. Indeed, if you look up "brain" and "decision fatigue" you'll find out that it is true -- and when you think about your own day and how tired you are, that's why it can be so hard to decide what to have for dinner.

And while Mark's blog's title implies that he is the lean thinker, he's always ready to have great discussions with lean thinkers like you when you comment on his posts.

The complete Management Improvement Carnival list

2011 Management Blog Roundup: The Mistake Bank

2011-12-26T04:37:00.003-05:00

I don't know about you, but when I make a mistake, I tend to cringe and hope it doesn't get noticed. I have a strong preference for being perfect -- which is a recipe for failure.

If there is one thing I've learned from lean folks, it's that a mistake is something to learn from. In our ideal lean world, surfacing a problem will not bring blame upon me, but will result in some help in fixing and preventing it. But openness to mistakes is not a widespread attitude. Acknowledging and discussing them is not an everyday experience.

John Caddell, however, is changing that climate with his blog, The Mistake Bank. For my first episode of the John Hunter's Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival Blog Roundup this year, I thought I'd share this blog with you.

In The Mistake Bank, John Caddell scans the book, video, and news world for stories people tell about their mistakes. Every few days, he finds an instructive reflection from people who learned important lessons from discovering they had been doing something the wrong way. John usually adds his own experiences or ideas about the excerpt he has given us (with permission, I might say).

One of my favorites is a quick one from Daniel Lubetzky, the founder of the snack food company, Kind. He started with a product, but no idea how the snack industry worked, particularly when it came to sales. But, he says, when he showed up to stores with his samples and was told to get lost, he took advantage of each mistake with his approach to his potential customer. He would not leave the store until the owner would teach him what he was doing wrong.

Another great find was a TED Talk by Kathryn Shulz on the importance of regret She focuses on the inevitable emotional experience of regret, which can't be erased by our rational thinking about how did it happen and what can I do about it?

With The Mistake Bank, I get an email every few days that gives me the opportunity to spend a few minutes accepting that I have a few mistakes to reckon with, and the encouragement to go ahead and see if I can do something about them. Or I get to see how fallible everyone else is, including great leaders of industry who discover they also have feet of clay.

Scoop.it - Why I started curating

2011-12-16T14:07:00.001-05:00

http://www.scoop.it/t/lean-reflections

Every day there's a new internet application whose developers are hoping to hit it big. Some do. Some just disappear. It becomes a blur that is best ignored.

Lately I have become captivated by Scoop.it and started up a Lean Reflections Scoop.it page. Why? It lets me perform a service that I think has value for you, it's easy to use, and it does some things I can't do easily in the blog or Twitter.

(Forgive me if this sounds like selling - I'm just excited. I've got nothing to sell anyway.)

With Scoop.it, when I see an article I think really fits the interests of my friends and colleagues, I can grab it in one click, caption it, and plunk it into a newspaper for you. You know that an article I think is worth reading is worth more than one that purports to be about lean or improvement.

This activity now has a label: Curating. Is that much different from "sharing"? It sounds much classier and reflects the expertise a curator applies in making a collection for a museum. We're moving past the hype around "aggregating." If you use any aggregator tools like Google Alerts, you know how much garbage you have to sift through to get something worth reading. Even having subscriptions to industry magazines requires a lot of decisions about what to read.

Have you ever heard of decision fatigue? It seems the brain has to exert a lot of effort to make even the smallest decision. That may be why at the end of the day, you can't decide what to have for dinner. I don't think you should have to waste your powers making dozens of decisions every day about what to read.

I also have a lot of choices about how to arrange my page, which is not true in Blogger. I like to tweet and share article links, but tweets have a half-life of about 20 minutes, and a lot of people don't use Twitter at all.

So I invite you to check out my Lean Reflections Scoop.it page. You can follow it, or catch some of my updates on Twitter or LinkedIn. I promise not to send an update every time I add something, but only when I think you might want to take a second and refresh yourself with some news that relates to your lean journey. Enough bragging -- Bye for now,

Karen

Intellectual property can be a liability in China

2011-11-27T10:54:00.002-05:00

There are a lot of things wrong with intellectual property law in the U.S., Canada, Europe and elsewhere that similar systems are used. Patents take a long time, litigation is common, and lawyers prosper as much as innovators. In a country like China, however, the political and legal system can be rigged against people with critical knowledge in ways we can hardly imagine. In "Engineer's return to China leads to jail and limbo," today's New York Times reminds us of things we take for granted.

Hu Zhicheng is a naturalized American citizen, an engineer educated at MIT, with 48 patents and deep experience designing catalytic converter systems. Mr. Hu saw an opportunity to help China with its pollution problems if he returned and applied his knowledge there. He went to China in 2004, bringing his family there in 2006 as he went from success to success in manufacturing, eventually becoming president of the company that supplies catalytic converters to half of China's cars.

Then he declined to accept a company as a supplier, Hysci Specialized Materials. Retaliation was not long in coming, according to Mr. Hu. Tianjin public security officers arrived in response to an accusation that Hu had stolen trade secrets, though the technology was public information in the U.S. The shady part was that buying from Hysci would make the charges go away. Mr. Hu was jailed for 17 months, at times being made to sleep on the floor of his cell. He was released after prosecutors withdrew the case.

The Hu family was able to leave China when the situation became dire. Now that Mr. Hu is at liberty, whenever he tries to board a plane for the U.S., he is stopped by immigration officials who have unsubstantiated claims that he is wanted for crimes in Tianjin.

Although Thanksgiving in the U.S. is past, perhaps we should be grateful for a business and legal system that is imperfect, but not a threat to life and liberty.

Hierarchy or wider-archy?

2011-11-17T12:33:00.001-05:00

We're used to seeing pyramid organization charts with the CEO at the top and the workers down at the bottom, with varying numbers of levels in between. It's popular now to flip the pyramid and show the leader at the bottom supporting the workers at the top.

But are we stuck with a vertical model in our heads? Even if a cross-functional horizontal set of connections is added, it still has a top and a bottom. And we hardly ever see pyramids in real life.

We have no trouble seeing a map as a flattened out representation of reality, with centers of power and critical channels of communication radiating - waterways, roads, railroads, airways. You can drive a car to just about any gemba.

We have no trouble seeing a ceiling or a window with a hub-and-spoke design with the center holding the structure in place.

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Why then do we so rarely see organization charts represented this way?

My brain told me

2011-11-06T11:29:00.002-05:00

Some rights reserved by gruntzooki

"How did you know that?" we asked a 3-year old. His answer? "My brain told me."

Yesterday was one of those weird days where I kept hearing about the brain and how we behave. The fundamental fact is that we have an organ in our head, related to the rest of our body, where our actions, thinking, stories of ourselves, beliefs, relationships, feelings, and temperament come from. It's hard to think of it as a separate entity from our "self."

Emerging neuroscientific and psychological research may be important to our understanding of lean as a culture and management philosophy. So much of the discussion is about why the people driving the management bus don't "get it," about why cultures don't change, and why so few organizations have been able to sustain lean if they even made a try at implementing it. These issues all boil down to why human beings in organizational systems have a hard time moving together to a different way of doing things.

Let's look superficially for a moment at what Dr. Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California, Santa Barbara, tells us about what's going on in the noisy brain. He says there is a constant narrator telling us a story of ourselves and experiences. Anyone who has tried to meditate or has become "lost in thought" knows that. But the stories are often laced with fiction, false memories, and faulty beliefs. (New York Times, "Decoding the Brain's Cacophony")

The manager who doesn't get why lean thinking may be better than traditional thinking is telling himself or herself a story about being rewarded because of doing certain things in certain circumstances despite experiences where those actions don't work well at all. The story may be filled in by believing that the problems are someone else's fault, or because the economy is bad, or the planets are aligned unfavorably. What to do next is part of the story too -- get someone fired or hired, put pressure on someone, buy a new IT system or machine, borrow money. Walking through workplaces and asking what's going on, leading an improvement event, re-examining a value stream rarely fit into the story. Though painful, it's coherent. The person may tell the story to others and explain the belief of how things should work, or complain about why things aren't working.

Gazzaniga's study of people with brains "split" by surgery to treat epilepsy or by stroke show that when they "see" things with only one eye, they may not be able to "know" that it is there. It doesn't make sense to the part of the brain telling the story. In such cases, the storyteller will make up some explanation that may be completely irrational but will make the story coherent.(The Neurontal Platonist, Journal of Consciousness Studies.)

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aye_shamus

The self is the hero of the story. I am doing things right. I have the right skills. Things going wrong are not my fault. I'm not here to make friends. I compete with my peers for power or money. My [boss, wife, children, husband, employees, parents...] don't understand me. You know how it goes. You have a similar storyteller in your head.

Doubt about the way to do things doesn't easily enter the story, unless enough ideas have penetrated to compare his or her current predicament to something that might be improved through fundamentally changing behavior about how people and processes should be managed.

That's just one example of why a person may resist new ideas with great force of will, especially if they mean facing the realization that everything you believed about cause and effect are simply not true, and that you don't have the skills to do your job. Humility and our cultural history don't go together.

I think it's important to understand that resistance or opposition come from the very way the brain works. It is not that person's "self" resisting or opposing. You can't blame someone for the way the brain works any more than you can blame someone for having a vascular system that produces high blood pressure. (If only the intervention was as easy as taking a pill.) But maybe you can help that person rewrite the story, become the hero another way without having to believe they are stupid or wrong. Maybe some people can accept that as a revelation. Most people aren't going to want that. Perhaps participating in an event that makes a difference helps write a new story of personal heroism, as a member of a team rather than as a lone ranger.

Would understanding more about the brain help us spread change -- what we call "lean" -- more widely and strategically? Let's think about it.

Be the product in the process

2011-11-03T11:17:00.000-04:00

Pigs with room to move around

When she spoke at the 2011 AME Conference, Temple Grandin did not talk a lot about engineering process flow in the livestock industry, but it would have resonated with the process improvement zealots at AME's conference.

As a visual thinker and someone who felt that animals a processed experience the same way, she was pained and distressed to see how they were treated as they moved from pasture to meat market. It wasn't that they were destined for death that bothered her. It was the suffering and fear they were experiencing along the way.

She went on to study the process and product through detailed direct observation --go and see, gemba walk). She noticed little things that caused sensory alarm to the animals, and believed that it mattered. This was in part because a symptom of her autism was great sensitivity to sensory input -- light, noise, motion, abrupt change.

The right way to unload cattle
from trucks

As she watched cattle and other animals moving from truck, to disinfecting baths, to that ramp, to the stun gun, she saw every little detail. She was able to walk the process in her mind as though she was the product. She may even have walked through the process as though she were one of the animals.

At one site, the proud American flag waving in the air was spooking the cows, but who knew that it was part of the process as far as the cow was concerned. An unnoticed detail interrupted process flow. Besides slowing down movement through the process, floods of fear hormones in the animal weren’t going to improve the quality of the meat. Neither would bruises sustained by the animals bumping into barriers or being prodded by workers. Unnoticed factors like the flag were introducing defects as well as slowing flow.

Other factors she noticed included a difference between the animal's reaction to being made to turn a corner or a circular path, whether people were moving around in their peripheral vision, or whether they saw reflections on pools of water. If they could walk into a bath sure-footedly they would remain placid, but balk if they were caused to slip and slide. Shouting disturbed them.

After decades of persistent work, Temple Grandin has seen her process design principles transform an industry. All because she could imagine herself moving through a process.

How often do we think of ourselves as a piece of metal moving, waiting in line, or dropping on the floor? Or an invoice being filled in, waiting in digital darkness to be electronically stamped, pushed, cursed at, until finally being paid and payment accepted by the customer? We do become the material in the process when we shop or go to the hospital. When we are made to move through a system that was not designed for flow.

Maybe we can try visualizing ourselves moving through the process we want to improve and see what we learn.

All kinds of minds

2011-11-01T14:28:00.000-04:00

For those who don’t know, Temple Grandin is a gifted engineer and advocate for people who are different. She is also a woman with autism, or perhaps Aspergers, but definitely “on the spectrum” as people are beginning to say. Dr. Grandin gave a keynote talk at the recent AME conference and described how her mind works differently from most other people. She calls it thinking in pictures.

Using her example, when she says the word “steeple,” most of us see a picture of a generalized steeple, something pointy at the top of a church. We might accompany the picture with a verbal sort of description, and may have memories of being in a church with a steeple or watching a movie where someone falls out of a steeple.

In contrast, she says she sees pictures of all the steeples she has seen, not an identification of a category that they belong to. Her mind just works that way.

Which comes to her point -- we need all kinds of minds in our world, and many kinds in our companies.

She sees a problem right in a child’s early years, when schools are increasingly labeling children and channeling them in special ed -- kid who would have been in the classroom in the past. One driver she mentioned is the need for schools to pass assessment tests. They need a set of students who are good at remembering things and performing well on certain kinds of tests. It’s serious. The fate of the school and careers of teachers really do depend upon these scores.

Which kids are on the autism spectrum and which are on the “typical” -- we don’t say “normal” anymore. Well, if a spectrum is a statistical representation of a population, we’re all on it. Each of us is just a little more up the scale or a little more down it. Then there are all the other spectrums (spectra?) we can imagine:

Artistic
Social
Mathematical
Musical
Introspective
Sensitive
Athletic
Energetic
…and so on.

Some children with specialized talents are not well-endowed with those measured on the tests. If they can be excluded from the test-taking population by labeling them, schools and teachers will be assessed as satisfactory or exemplary.

Of course, some children have needs so specialized that they truly need intensive support of a different sort. The topic of mainstreaming -- putting special ed kids in the regular classroom with a support person -- is a big one.

The wrong metrics can drive the wrong behavior -- we know that. Now how can we help the school improvement process develop better ones?

Let’s not stop here. Are our preconceived notions about employees excluding people whose talents might add value we couldn’t get any other way? If we’re now calling human resources “talent management,” where are we looking for talent? How are we rewarding people who are different? (John Robison's book, “Look Me in the Eye,” shows how difficult it is to accept some people in an organization if the organization can’t adapt.) Of course, there is a point where a business cannot function well if behavior diverges too far from what gets the right things done.

Challenge yourself to look at the humans in your organization in a new light. How does your organization fit people who are different? What are you missing when some people can’t thrive? Do you have an opportunity to stretch your boundaries and those of your organizations?

YouTube shares knowledge and draws customers

2011-08-21T11:22:00.000-04:00

We've talked before about using social media for knowledge sharing in a way that enhances your company's value and reputation. There's plenty of information out there about consumer marketing, but what about business marketing -- the right way?

Kelley Dodd

LeanCor, the logistics company, is using social media for both marketing and employee communication. I asked Kelley Dodd, Marketing Specialist, to give us a peek into what they are doing and learning and what it has to do with lean.

KW: I see you recently joined YouTube - what led to LeanCor's decision to do that?

5S at LeanCor on YouTube

KD: We wanted to create a more interactive experience for those engaging with our marketing content. Making things visible is a foundational concept in lean, so it only made sense to showcase our capabilities and tools through video. We just finished a corporate capabilities video, as well as some lean warehousing videos. YouTube provided a user-friendly platform with higher audience reach and exposure.

KW: What are the purposes? What is the role of knowledge sharing? How does it contribute to marketing, if it does?

KD: Because prospective customers are often seeking information about your industry, your business must produce content that is educational and builds trust. You want to provide value which will make visitors more likely to remember your business when seeking your products or services. Knowledge sharing will add to your credibility and position you as a thought leader in your industry.

KW: How are you connecting customers and potential customers as viewers or subscribers to the YouTube channel?

KD: In regards to YouTube, we are relatively new to the game. Just putting the videos out there has been our first step. In order to increase viewers, I link to our YouTube channel through other marketing outlets such as our website, e-newsletter, Twitter, and LinkedIn group.

KW: It can be hard to get people to do these videos. How do you do that? Do you have any feedback from the guys who were involved that would motivate or challenge lean professionals in other companies to do similar videos?

KD: One of the biggest challenges within our organization is to be on the cutting edge not only of lean, but creativity. Our goal in our facilities is to create the ultimate visual factory and we had the opportunity to showcase some of our lean tools via the videos. Another major reason for developing the short clips was to connect internally and share best practices. Not every LeanCor employee can be here on site in our facility and the more lessons, experiences, and tools passed on internally will only strengthen our company.

Another tip is to find creative and different ways to produce the videos. Like producing other content such as blog posts, you want to find an interesting angle that will appeal to your audience. For example, we are going to film student testimonials at the upcoming course, Building a Lean Problem Solver, and the Georgia Tech Supply Chain and Logistics Institute. AME takes a similar approach in its attendee testimonial videos used to market the upcoming national conference.

KW: How are videos produced? Professionals? Just other staff members? How do you set up for production?

KD: Our videos are produced in house by our Creative Specialist, Liz Cooke, as well as program managers at our Lean Logistics Center. To set up our video production, we purchased a camera, tripod, and video editing software. We typically spend a lot of time planning out a video before shooting - writing scripts, drawing storyboards, and creating shot lists.

KW: What help do you provide to the people making the videos?

KD: In addition to group collaboration in the planning phase, our team members also take turns as actors, dolly operators, sound specialists and controlling the teleprompter. Although only one person is necessary to run the camera and edit the footage, it takes a team to help in all areas of video production.  

KW: If someone was totally unfamiliar with setting up channels in YouTube, what would you advise them to do?

KD: Setting up and using a YouTube account is easy, and using a few simple guidelines anyone can be successful.

    •    Choose a username that incorporates your company name and/or the products you represent.
    •    Make your first 30 seconds exciting and draw your audience in. People will generally tune out of a web video quickly if they're not engaged.
    •    Keep videos in the 3-5 minute range. If you simply must make it longer, split it up into segments. (I.e. How to implement 5S in the workplace: Part 1, How to implement 5S in the workplace: Part 2)
    •    When uploading your video to YouTube, fill out a concise and informative description. When searching for videos, users will see two things: a video still and the description. Make it interesting so people will click on your video.
    •    Keywords are your best friend. Keywords are how search engines pick videos to recommend. In addition, after watching a video YouTube will offer suggestions what to watch next, these are based on keywords— so choose words that relate to every facet of your business and you can't have too many. However, don’t choose extraneous keywords that have nothing to do with your video. Your viewer will figure it out quickly and resent the misleading information.

KW: You are using lots of other channels. Briefly, what is your approach to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, e-newsletters?

KD: We have a LinkedIn group called The Lean Supply Chain that just reached over 1,000 members. We use this group as a collaborative forum to share news, articles, events, job positions, and best practices. Supply chain professionals post inquiries about workplace topics and to gain insight from other members.

We started the Lean Logistics Blog in January that now averages 2,500 view per month. Posts are written by LeanCor team members and posted every Wednesday. We use Twitter (@LeanLogBlog) to mainly promote the blog.

The Lean Supply Chain Digest is our monthly e-newsletter filled with tips, tricks, news, and events. We recently started a series in the newsletter called The Adventures of Lynn Lean and Tommy Traditional. It’s a running story about two conflicting managers within the same company and their journey of continuous improvement. We just posted the first issue in July’s newsletter and are anxious to see readers’ responses down the road.

We are not active on Facebook, as I do not yet see the value for B2B companies that do not offer product coupons/promotions.

KW: What have you learned? Are you seeing results yet?

KD: I have learned that social media and content marketing takes time and persistence. It takes time to grow a social media following – whether it be blog readers, Twitter followers, or LinkedIn group members. You need to be dedicated to constant content creation, engagement, and keeping current with industry. Social media is here to stay in the business world, and the logistics and supply chain industry is no exception. We have seen major growth in website traffic, database growth, and general network growth. Our current strategy seems to be working.

For more social media networking tips for leaders, check out my new Lean Reflections page

test your standard emails

2011-08-05T09:12:00.001-04:00

I ordered a lamp last night from a store I have not shopped with before. Order acknowledgements are great for automation, but here is part of what I received:

"In-stock orders ship from our warehouse in Kentucky and typically arrive anywhere in the continental U.S. within 710 business days, while White Glove deliveries typically arrive within 23 weeks from the order date. All orders shipping to Canada, Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico may take longer."

The shock was lessened because I had read the shipping policies on the website before ordering and knew that they meant 7 to 10 days and 2 to 3 weeks.

I don't know what happens between their e-mail generator and my gmail account via Comcast, but apparently some hyphens were dropped. A systems analyst once reminded me that when detailing a value stream for communications, all the databases, programs, hardware, channels, along the way need to be considered. There's a bunch of coding and decoding, bits and bytes, electrons and microwaves between you and me.

There are always oddball email processes, but I'm surprised that one as common as my method of receiving a message hasn't been tested and bullet-proofed.

In the meantime, I sure do hope I don't have to wait two years for my lamp. I think I will check on it if I don't get it a year from now.

TEST, TEST, TEST!

Andrea Kozek on social media, Part 2

2011-07-13T11:08:00.000-04:00

The AME Social Media Council also talked with Andrea Kozek (see Part 1 of my report on our conversation) about trade shows, since we are looking ahead to the AME fall conference in Dallas and deciding on our approach. We know our exhibitors are doing the same thing, and maybe we have some opportunities to collaborate with them. Everyone wants to know how much it will cost and what the ROI will be. Andrea warns that it’s hard to quantify.

What do conference attendees want that social media can deliver? Social media may allow exhibitors to leverage onsite resources by talking to customers in real time, as more people use social networking apps on their phones. Live tweeting is growing.

Hashtags* are becoming extremely important. They organize Tweets about a topic. For the AME conference, it’s #AMEConf2011. If you have a hashtag search in Twitter or an app like Hootsuite, you can meet people or have a conversation online as if you were sitting at the same lunch table. Or you can arrange to sit at the same lunch table. The hashtag should be heavily promoted on the website, in brochures, in email promotion, etc., and used on all your relevant social messages.

We know that people who attend our conference are excited about their experience and place a high value on what they learn and who they meet. We want to spread the excitement through social networking to more people so they want to share the experience this year.

A conference creates a captive audience and social media is one more way to get individuals to seek you out and pay attention. Whether you’re an exhibitor, the conference organizer, or perhaps a workshop leader, Andrea suggests that the secret may be to give the social media users something that other attendees can’t get. Some possibilities?

• VIP seating at a keynote address.
• Dinner coupons at local restaurants. Check with the local business liaison to conference. Unique content available to social media users.
• An exclusive place to go like our planned Social Media Lounge. Andrea suggests requiring a code or password for entry that will be shared socially.
• Form a user group at the conference

For followers not at the conference, there might be live video clips, professionally produced or not. Questions might be relayed to speakers. You can remind people of upcoming keynote and technical sessions, and tweet inspiring ideas and tips. Sharing the experience may bring some of those people to next year’s conference.

I’m grateful to Andrea Kozek for sharing her time and experience with our council. She’s a social media maven to watch, and Brady Corp deserves kudos for devoting resources to experimenting with social media to learn how it can benefit the company. If nothing else, it should be proud of being an early leader in the social media race.

Would you like an invitation to one of our exclusive Social Media Council conference calls? Email me at Karen.m.wilhelm@gmail.com and I’ll see what I can do. No promises, however.

Details
Brady Corp www.BradyID.com
Twitter @BradyNASocial
Facebook: Brady North America www.facebook.com/BradyNorthAmerica
Association for Manufacturing Excellence Annual Conference sponsor and exhibitor
Andrea Kozek, Social Media Manager

Vocabulary
*Hashtag - prefixing a keyword with a # sign on Twitter in a tweet.

Andrea Kozek on social media at Brady North America

2011-07-11T16:45:00.000-04:00

I started paying more attention to Brady Corp, manufacturer and distributor of many things for creating a visual workplace, when Brady answered questions I asked on the AMEConnect Facebook site. I also saw retweets* and #FFs** from BradyNASocial in Twitter. There seemed to be a real person behind the logo who made me feel good about the company, who was using the relationship-building approach to social media. Our social media efforts were getting a boost from theirs. This was someone I thought I could learn from.

I sent a Twitter direct message*** and asked if the person behind the messages might be willing to join one of our AME Social Media Council conference calls. Andrea Kozek replied that she’d be happy to. We chatted on the phone and I told her more about the council and AME; she told me more about Brady Corp and her approach to its social media. Andrea has years of experience with PR and social media in industrial companies as well as with coaching executives and celebrities.
I was right about her being someone we could learn from. [This is an example of what I call escalating a social media relationship: Follower/like, to comments, to direct message, to phone meeting, and so on… networking.]

On our call, Andrea talked about social media as a way to develop relationships with customers and potential customers, not to push promotion on them. She cites a few of her principles:

Pursue online visibility
Avoid “shiny objects” (because it’s hot or popular doesn’t mean it’s the right fit)
Be selective about channels (Twitter, Facebook, etc….)
Become a trusted business advisor to your audience

She says she’s found that people in manufacturing are somewhat slower to engage in social media. (We found that 30% of AME’s members don’t use any social sites at all.) Two obstacles for both internal users and customers are access to a computer during the day, in some companies, blocking of channels. Smart phones are changing the game, however.
What Andrea is aiming for is more people from her company representing it online, because that reflects favorably on Brady. That echoes my point that leaders in any organization should bite the bullet and get into the conversation, any conversation.
Increasing and sustaining meaningful activity also tends to increase page rankings on search engines, if that’s one of the goals you are pursuing.
Brady is now taking the temperature of the most-used and some up-and-coming social networking tools, Andrea told us, trying to see what happens. Here’s how it looks now:

· Twitter: observe people, share a little bit of knowledge, gather opinions

· Facebook: Fewer people join (“Like”) their Facebook page, but the number is growing. Facebook has helped employees learn about what’s going on in other parts of the company.

· LinkedIn: Focused on people rather than companies. Collaboration with key individuals at Brady with expertise in using their products to build profiles and to understand how to use relationships to advance the company’s interests.

Andrea Kozek's
LinkedIn profile

· YouTube: Brady is looking for link building and information sharing. The focus is on adding value, with videos on how to do a better job with lean and solve specific problems with items Brady sells. The emphasis is on “how to” rather than selling the products.

Flickr: Image searches on the web are growing, which is why this photo sharing site is growing as well. Brady is creating galleries showing examples of visual workplaces, something that many of us want to see and get ideas from.

Brady Visual Management Slideshow on Flickr

The company wants to get information on trends, competitors, or leads. To do this, a company must give people the time and ability to monitor channels to pick up on issues rapidly.

Next post: Social media, conferences, and trade shows.

Vocabulary
*Retweet - Prefixing someone’s message with RT to forward it to your followers to share something especially appropriate or interesting. It helps them by expanding the number of people who become aware of them.
**#FF - “Follow Friday” On Fridays, people use the #FF hashtag before a list of twitterers (@AMEConnect for example) you think are notable. Helps them and you

What's in a name? Success or failure

2011-07-07T15:25:00.001-04:00

Do you call it lean, operational excellence, or continuous improvement? Does it matter?

Yes, it does. You will live with your choice for a long time, and it had better connect with your "market" positively. If you don't think about what resonates with the people you need on board, you will have already picked an uphill battle.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Small successes in manufacturing showing up

2011-06-12T16:16:00.001-04:00

My daily sweep of manufacturing news brought in quite a few signs of strength in smaller companies in the U.S. Many of you know that I feel we need manufacturing everywhere in the world for the greatest potential for prosperity. At the same time, I'm especially happy to see good things happening to my neighbors.

A hearty appetite: The local food and beverage industry grows despite the recession
Lane County, Oregon -- where my sister Diane lives, by the way, is holding onto jobs because of innovative food manufacturers, seeing opportunities in changing consumer needs such as lactose-free frozen desserts and chocolate.

Bloom's price and reliability questioned: Fuel-cell maker promises up to 1,500 jobs
I have lots of family in Delaware. It was a blow when Chrysler shuttered its plant in Newark but Bloom Energy has promised they will add back 1,500 jobs to make fuel cell boxes. Realistically, we know that jobs like that take a long time to materialize, and sometimes fail to appear at all. This article shares good news, tempered with some skepticism.

Indiana an island of growth
Michael Hicks, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University, has studied the data and feels good about Indiana. He says, "In the two years since the recession, the U.S. economy has lost 2 percent of its manufacturing employment. Indiana has not merely bucked the job loss trend, but added 4.6 percent more jobs in manufacturing. This is astonishing because the sectors of manufacturing that Indiana is most concentrated in have continued to lag nationally." And, yes, I have cousins living outside Indianapolis.

DE wants energy industry jobs;
CT has them

Made in Torrington: The face of the city's manufacturing community
Since the 18th century, Connecticut has been a manufacturing center. While its history-making machine tool industry has been slammed in the last couple of decades, don't count the New Englanders out. Local companies are turning out furniture, chains, fuel cells, wind turbines, brushless motors and industrial adhesives. Rick Thomason's interviews with leaders of these companies show why manufacturing is an exciting business.

(when you click the following link, scroll down the page a ways to see the whole article...)
Pasco business fosters reputation for innovation
It's not all about the advanced energy industry. I like this story of one guy in Washington State starting with one machine in a garage, and now running a company making thousands of hydraulic jacks a year.

Companies Spend on Equipment, Not Workers
One reason why better business isn't pushing up job numbers is that manufacturers are finding lots of reasons to make capital investments with that extra cash we've been hearing about. Some people point to the mismatch between workers and job requirements I've discussed before, and some point to really good deals on automation and software. It's good news for someone (maybe elsewhere in the world) manufacturing that equipment or writing that software, not as much here where people are hurting. [As an aside, Mr. Dunkelberg's statement about having no unemployed farmers is just silly. We had them and still do ... where does he think industrial workers have come from ever since the first agricultural equipment was put to work?]

How will you live your manufacturing story this week? How will you make your company worth writing about tomorrow?

Blaming lean for closing sausage factories

2011-06-10T14:22:00.000-04:00

A food producer and restaurant chain released its financial statement yesterday explaining a couple of items that cut into profits. Here is a quote:

"$2.8 million in restructuring charges [mostly severance payments] related to lean manufacturing productivity initiatives in the food products segment during the second quarter, including the discontinuation of fresh sausage operations at two facilities."

Leaving aside joking about lean sausage and lean manufacturing, it's obvious that lean initiatives in remaining facilities will face more employee resistance. Workers have seen what will happen if their facilities get too productive.

Is this a case of a difference in understanding between the manufacturing function, human resources function, and finance? Or the company's complete lack of understanding of what lean is about?

President Obama Shines Spotlight on Skills for America's Future

2011-06-08T09:58:00.000-04:00

visit to GE 01/2011
http://scottwykoff.wbal.com/2011_01_01_archive.html

As I wrote a few days ago a manufacturing workforce shortfall is already hampering recovery of some companies. Among the solutions is the Manufacturing Skills Certification, a portable credential which brings standardization of curriculum and measurement to training. Much of what follows comes from a White House press release, and you may hear it on the radio or see it in the news.

Seeing the light
Jan 2011 visit to Orion Energy Systems

Today at Northern Virginia Community College, President Obama will announce expansion of Skills for America’s Future, based on industry partnerships with community colleges, with a nation-wide emphasis on workforce development, job training, and job placements.

The President's speech says, “Last year, we launched Skills for America’s Future to bring together companies and community colleges around a simple idea: making it easier for workers to gain new skills will make America more competitive in the global economy. Today, we are announcing a number of partnerships that will help us make this a reality, by opening doors to new jobs for workers, and helping employers find the trained people they need to compete against companies around the world.”

The President's remarks boost the importance of manufacturing, in words that will sound familiar to many readers of Lean Reflections:

While the manufacturing sector has faced real challenges in recent years, it continues to be the lifeblood of the American economy. The manufacturing sector currently employs over 11 million Americans, and by itself it would be one of the 10th largest economies in the world. Manufacturing is also critical for our continued innovation; manufacturing companies account for two-thirds of private sector research and development and roughly 90% of all registered patents. Most importantly, manufacturing has long provided good-paying jobs for millions of families and serves as the anchor employer in communities across America.

For that reason, our ability to win the future will depend in large part on our ability to train the most productive manufacturing workers in the world. This effort is especially important at a time when 2.7 million manufacturing employees are 55 years of age or older and likely to leave the labor force in the next 10 years.

One of the challenges in today’s manufacturing sector is the lack of a standardized credentialing system that manufacturing firms recognize as useful preparation for their unfilled jobs. Students can spend time and money on training of little value while employers are unsure which credentials should influence hiring and promotions.

The Manufacturing Skills Certification System, developed with manufacturing firms at the table, is portable and valued by a range of employers. Partners include the Manufacturing Institute, manufacturing firms, the Gates Foundation, and the Lumina Foundation, ACT, the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, the American Welding Society, the National Institute of Metalworking Skills, and the Manufacturing Skills Standards Council. The last-named have been developing and improving their certifications and bodies of knowledge for decades and its high time that work is recognized.

The manufacturing credentials and pathways will be available in community colleges in 30 states as a for-credit program of study.

People on the Skills for America's Future board, include Greg Brown, chairman and CEO, Motorola Solutions; William D. Green, chairman, Accenture; Penny Pritzker, chairman and CEO, Pritzker Realty Group (Chair); Brad Keywell, co-founder and director of Groupon, Inc.; Nick Pinchuk, chairman and CEO of Snap-on Incorporated; David Zaslav, president and CEO of Discovery Communications; Ellen Alberding, president, The Joyce Foundation; and Walter Bumphus, president and CEO, American Association of Community Colleges. Learn more about Skills for America’s future at www.skillsforamericasfuture.org.

The Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) will jump in and promote a curriculum based on NAM’s advanced manufacturing skills certification system. The 60 centers will educate local manufacturers about the value of the skills certification system so they use it in recruitment and hiring efforts. The MEP also feed back skill needs of manufacturers in their local areas and industries.

High schools: Global manufacturer Air Products is partnering with SkillsUSA to encourage 3,500 member high schools and 200 colleges to adopt these credentials.

Finally, the excitement and opportunity of manufacturing for students will be reinfoced by “Discover Your Skills,” a Discovery Communications initiative designed to raise awareness of career opportunities including PSAs, on-air talent, their media properties and Discovery Education.

Jobs for America’s Graduates’ is adopting a five-year goal of helping 30,000 high-risk youth obtain professional credentials for careers that include manufacturing. Archer Daniels Midland Company is JAG’s National Business Partner.

All-important mentorships will help 5,000 young people with the aid of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME), the SME Education Foundation and the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering and the National Academy Foundation.

The Department of Labor has already released an updated advanced manufacturing competency model outlining necessary the skills identified by industry groups.

Speeches can be just air, and programs can start with high hopes and fade into obscurity. Let's hope that these take root and support the learning we need in industry, and provide models for more.

Buried inside some of the skills and credentials we would hope to find plenty of problem-solving and continuous improvement skills. They have been proclaimed as needs even where lean thinking has not taken hold.

In addition, if you are a leader in a manufacturing company and near one of the community colleges taking part in the high-profile programs, it is a perfect time for you to get together with their manufacturing departments and contribute with internships and the revival of apprenticeship programs. If you are not there at the end of the pipeline, none of the training will do much to solve manufacturing's problems. Being involved will also help you influence programs tailored to your industry if it is not traditional metalworking, which gets most of the attention.

Inventory - need I say more?

2011-06-02T10:40:00.000-04:00

Threadless is a T-shirt design, production, and marketing community sort of company. I found a photo on their blog but you'll have to research the company yourself if you want to know more. Obviously they have just learned something about inventory:

Here's what they say:

Threadless inventory complete - hidden tees revealed

"We've spent the last few days exploring the rarely seen depths of the Threadless warehouse. In our exploration we discovered tees long since thought gone. Here's your chance to score these tees if your brave and clever enough to find them. Good luck to you all and beware the cursed tee of Warehouse Manager Eddie Gobbo."

Although they discovered a problem, they did act quickly with a way to unload the excess in exchange for cash.

Manufacturing workforce shortfall

2011-05-30T10:25:00.001-04:00

A visit to local sheet metal fabricating firm Corry Contracting Inc., showed them the CAD software the firm was using. I don't mean to write an ad for a specific product, but one company deserves kudos. Doug Kafferlin, president of the company, tapped the Siemens Global Opportunities in Product Lifecycle Management (GO PLM™) for help. GO PLM is an example of a program that can entrance students who live for video games and let them experience the challenge of designing and manufacturing a real object. It gives schools free software, including SolidEdge. By developing advanced CAD skills, said Corry contracting estimator Paul Kraft, “Corry students will be among the first to lead us into the next generation of mechanical design and implementation.”

2010 Winner - Thomas Hall
Southwood High School

Students in the technology program at St. Francis High School in St. Francis, MN,build an entire V-twin chopper from the ground up. With help from local businesses that offer parts and accessories, tool grinding services, and lessons on bodywork, painting, and metalforming, students feel the excitement of manufacturing a finished product while they gain skills local employers need.

GO PLM also sponsors a student design contest. A few winners:

2011 Winner - Alan Day
Brigham Young University

Unfortunately, there are far too few cases like these to fill the manufacturing workforce needs of today. And as experienced workers retire and knowledge walks out the door, the future is an even greater concern.

Research backs up the anecdotal evidence. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) surveys manufacturers regularly about workforce issues, and its 2009 report, People and Profitability: A Time for Change, [this updates the oft-quoted pre-recession 2005 report] said employers are most worried about two general categories:

51 percent reported moderate to serious shortages of skilled production workers (machinists, operators, craft workers, distributors, and technicians) today, and the vast majority see increased shortages ahead.
36 percent reported moderate to serious shortages of engineers and scientists today, and again, the vast majority see increased shortages looming.

Interestingly, when NAM compared more profitable firms to those that were less successful, differences in talent management attitudes emerged. Sixty-one percent of the most profitable firms, compared to only 43 percent of the least profitable, said a highly-skilled, flexible workforce was among their top three priorities for the future.

Manpower conducts an annual global survey of employers. In the 2010 Talent Shortage Survey, skilled trades tops the list of the top ten workforce categories that employers in the United States and Canada are having problems finding. Technicians ranked second, and engineers ranked eighth. These same job categories are among the most difficult to fill all around the world.

Advanced technical skills are hard enough to find. Worse, employers consistently report that applicants for job openings lack even the most basic skills. One contract drug maker in Cleveland said it received 3600 job applications for 100 job openings, yet could hire only 47 that fit their needs. The problem — too many fail basic reading and math tests.

Working on Solutions

To address the problem, NAM and the testing company ACT have developed a two-part system: an assessment tool called WorkKeys paired with a National Career Readiness Certificate, both relating to real-world workplace skills reported by employers and manufacturing associations as critical to job success. These are basic knowledge and thinking skills like problem solving, critical thinking, reading and applying work-related text, using math for work-related problems, and using graphical information.

When the National Career Readiness Certificate is required of applicants, employers do not waste time evaluating potential hires who do not meet the threshold. The WorkKeys assessment helps individuals understand what skills they need to improve, and the National Career Readiness Certificate gives them a goal. The system also aligns with high school and community college curriculum development and outcome goals.

The American Welding Society (AWS), the Manufacturing Skill Standards Council (MSSC), the National Institute for Metalworking Skills (NIMS), and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) understand the workplace skills their members need and are partners in the program. They are also helping to develop other technical skill assessments and certificates.

Many professional and trade organizations offer resources to schools and scholarships to students to help meet workforce demand. The American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) helps educators interest children and young adults in engineering and technical careers and prepare them for that future. AME Alliance Partners APICS, ASQ, IIE, and SME have robust programs for educators and students, as do the AWS, SAE, and ASME. Associations also offer members lifelong learning opportunities and professional certifications to maintain and update their skills.

The leadership qualities required to support workforce development both within and outside their companies, as well as to drive lean transformations, are being addressed by the AME Institute, which is partnering with Arizona State University to create an intensive program called “Leadership Development for the Innovative Enterprise.”

Partnerships

In addition to students, unemployed and incumbent workers must be helped to update their skills and supply the talent manufacturers need. People devastated by the loss of jobs want to work, but just don’t have the right skills for today’s jobs. Economic development organizations, community colleges, and grant-making agencies in some states are realizing that the quality of the local workforce can make or break their ability to compete for new manufacturing investment in their communities. They go so far as to foot the bill for recruiting, screening, and training job-ready workers for new plants being built.

Local job loss is exacerbated by uncompetitive companies that shrink instead of grow. The same partnerships that up-skill the unemployed often support local manufacturers by helping them train their workers in basic skills, advanced manufacturing technologies, and continuous improvement. So-called incumbent worker grant funding for retraining is available from states, but smaller manufacturers need the grant writers, grant managers, and affordable training that good local partnerships can provide.

Much has been said about the root causes of the manufacturing skills crisis; there is no single solution. There are contributions that one person or one company can make, however. Lean leaders are problem solvers, team builders, and strategists, and Target will be sharing resources, ideas, and examples in the coming months to help our readers develop countermeasures for snags in the manufacturing talent supply chain.

Is our government listening? President Obama has said, “When it comes to workforce development, one of the most important things that we’ve all learned is how important it is to get businesses in early with the universities and the community colleges — a hugely under-utilized resource — to develop the actual training program so that young people have confidence if they go through this training program, they’ve got a job; businesses have confidence that if they hire these young people who went through the training program, they are trained for those jobs.”

Readers know how daunting it is to convince local schools, businesses, and families to get the picture. No need for another rant on that subject. I thought I'd do a bit of fact-checking for those of you who are raising your voices to spread the workforce message.

A version of this article I wrote was previously published in Target magazine, from the Association for Manufacturing Excellence.

Companies doing a good job with lean

2011-05-26T10:59:00.000-04:00

Some rights reserved by apdk

With real lean seeming like a matter of high hopes and subsequent disillusionment, it's good to hear from some folks in the trenches about what they see that is encouraging. I asked for recommendations of companies excelling at lean from the Association for Manufacturing Excellence LinkedIn group, and thought I'd share the tips with you.

Jeff: You may consider contacting MSI Mold Builders of Cedar Rapids, IA. I can likely give you several more - from both the US and Canada. Most of the shops that have survived have been very innovative with using the latest technologies available to them.

Tucker: we have several here in Illinois. Let me know if you want to talk.

Ron: The ZF Lemforder Axle Plant in Tuscaloosa is a close to a Toyota plant that I have seen. They are also a Shingo Prize winner.

Joe: If you would like to feature a small company I believe that Systems2Win in Nashville, TN is great example. Their take and practice of PDCA is excellent. It is embedded in their culture and practice exactly what they preach. Also Praxair and Sonoco are other companies that are getting along in their journey and have had some remarkable success.

Tom: We are working with the one of the last drapery and decorative window hardware manufacturers in the United States. They have fully embraced the methodology and are finding great success.

Fermín: I worked several years for Milliken and they were very focused in lean manufacturing in all the plants I visited in the States and in Europe.

Jeri: Another one would be Andersen Windows, Menominee WI Assembly facility. They are well on their way and the culture is quite evident.

Thanks to everyone who nominated a company. E-mail me at karen.m.wilhelm@gmail.com if you would like introductions.

Lean assessment basics

2011-03-25T16:58:00.001-04:00

I spent a “Learning Friday” morning with some colleagues from the Michigan Lean Consortium at a session about lean assessments led by Debra Setman of Johnson & Johnson. Debra’s been involved lean assessments for 20 years at hospitals, manufacturing companies, IT organizations and J&J, and had a brisk, interactive, and fact-based introduction to them.

Debra says she doesn’t even like to call these 2 ½ day visits “audits” or “assessments.” They are coaching opportunities for the visiting team and learning experiences for the site being visited. The key is to have valid and consistent criteria that can be used to characterize a level of lean … what should we call it? Implementation? thinking? … for the purpose of sharing recommendations and recognizing strengths.

J&J uses a maturity model, starting with Stability, Flow, Pull, and Integration stages (as defined by J&J) of a number of categories of lean practice and thinking. For “Site Leadership Attitude,” for example, the evidence of a site’s stage of maturity is:

Stability: Excited and proactive about lean in the lean pilot area (LPA)
Flow: Excited and proactive about lean throughout the site value stream
Pull: Excited and proactive about lean throughout the value stream and at the key external partners
Integration: Excited and proactively involved with lean throughout the extended value stream. Servant-leader mentality exists throughout.

Debra emphasized that your organization could have different categories and definitions, depending on your company’s goals and understanding of lean. In fact, as requested beforehand, several people brought their own examples of assessments. Mike Taubitz from Lean Journey LLC had a simple Yes/No inventory checklist. Murray Sittsamer of The Luminous Group shared a fairly quick and easy scoresheet on a “worst practice” to “best practice” scale for a number of lean hallmarks.

It’s easy to get the criteria underlying several recognized awards-related assessments:

The Shingo Prize

The Manufacturing Awards of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence

The Baldrige Award is more oriented to classic quality objectives than lean, but many companies like using it for evaluation. It has versions for education and healthcare.

For assessing your personal lean maturity level, you can review the AME/SME/Shingo Prize Lean Certification criteria that have been adopted by NIST and by many companies. There are a lot of related documents on the SME website: www.sme.org/leancert. (Go to the two lower boxes in the right-hand column for the links.)

What’s the value for the company of going through an assessment? Michael Bremer asked that question on the AME LinkedIn group -- you can add your thoughts to if you go to “AME just sent out a call for applications for its Manufacturing Excellence Award -- What do you think are some of the benefits a company gets when it applies for the award?”

Not giving you the usual lengthy article about the presentation today -- if you want more information contact me at Karen.m.wilhelm …. At …. Gmail.com or dsetman … at …. its.jnj.com.

LinkedIn marketing secrets and strategies

2011-03-01T16:00:00.000-05:00

Marketing events through LinkedIn groups

A problem AME Region leaders talk about is how to improve attendance at workshops and seminars. (Most other professional and training organizations are struggling with the same thing, so substitute the name of your group wherever I've used "AME.")

LinkedIn groups and communities...
...Make it personal...
attract, don't drive, people...
...through relationships and trust...
gradually...
...influence a network of professional connections...
allowing them to...
...pull what they need.

Let's explore using LinkedIn groups to lift workshop activity. Before you start, get all the details about the event, the marketing messages, and registration process onto a website. That's your anchor for what comes later. Test it -- often.

Most of us have heard that to sell something you need to show WIIFM: "What's in it for me?" Social marketing adds emotion -- WIIWM: "Who's in it with me?" Groups are all about who's in it with me, so consider emotion in your discussion of an event.

Some thought starters for you:

Where's the pain, and does this workshop help people remove its cause?
What do you strongly believe in, and how does the workshop relate?
What's going on now -- are you talking to the speaker about what's going to happen in the workshop? Tell us about it. Ask for ideas.
Move the discussion to the group page by asking the speaker to get into the mix.
And build networking into the event. Let people registering know about the group, for advance workshop-related discussions, and talk about it at the event to encourage post-event discussion about what people did and what they learned.

As a leader in AME, you should be part of the AME LinkedIn group, and support a regional subgroup, if you have one. The group includes people who are dues-paying AME members, and many more who are not who but have chosen to affiliate themselves with us. They may know a lot or a little about AME, lean, Toyota, jargon, etc. They are likely to be in manufacturing, but many are in other industries. We have thousands of people here who can be influenced to see that AME is a network of people engaged in the pursuit of perfection and ready to listen, chat, and help. We need to see the smiling faces of AME leaders and hear what you have to say. When you are recognized as a real person who believes in AME, your invitation to an event means a lot.

Discussions

The value of a group grows when members ask questions, share experiences, get help with problems, and help one another on the discussion page.

If you were at a party of business meeting, you might drop a hint that you were involved in an upcoming workshop, but you wouldn't ask someone to read a brochure and get out their checkbook. Framing a discussion as a straight-out marketing message is just as out of place. Even twisting a marketing pitch into a question and adding a link is cheesy - a link pulls the reader away from the page and defeats the purpose of discussion.

So what would be a good question?

Greg framed one nicely: "Chad from ATTC Mfg is preparing a Jishuken event at the upcoming AME workshop at ATTC in Tell City, IN. Would anyone like to share their Jishuken best practices?"

What I liked:
1. Greg talked about Chad, not himself, and gave Chad credit for his work.
2. He asked an open-ended question, with real curiosity.
3. He left time to add details later in the discussion.

What I wished:
1. I couldn't remember what Jishuken meant, so asked Greg if he'd like to expand on it in a follow up comment.
2. Chad, other region leaders, and other folks participating in the event would come to the page and start discussing it among themselves. This would take some behind-the-scenes orchestration, but would bring others into the act. Even if it didn't, the workshop would start off with people who were better acquainted and primed to start learning and sharing. It would also be cool to have people stay with the discussion after the workshop. How could Greg encourage them to do that?
3. That there were more members in the Great Lakes subgroup. If the discussion had been placed in the 3,200-member AME group, the chances for involvement would be greater. That tells us that we either have a lot of work to do in growing our regional groups. It's a learning process.

In her question a few weeks ago, Ellen Sieminski moved up the "pull" value stream by asking the group about workshops they would like to see at the October AME Conference. She got eight good suggestions for designing the product to fit the needs of the customers.

A significant few

Should she be disappointed that there are only eight responses? The rule of thumb of community behavior is the 90-9-1 rule -- or perhaps the Pareto distribution -- if roughly 10% of the group's members are visiting (or lurking), that's 300 people. If one tenth participates somehow, that's 30. Too few? It's 30 more than would be acting if we did nothing. Those eight people we heard from have been nudged a little to attend now that they have read the question and chimed in with their ideas.

Member email updates

Questions that appear in the groups will appear as email updates members have opted to receive. Those who don't hang out regularly on the group will have a chance to see the message. Some percent of those will open and read the email, some fraction of those will click to the discussion, and some fraction of those will take another action while they are on the group page.

Announcements

We don't have to depend on members making the effort to visit the group page on LinkedIn. The group admin can send an announcement to the members as often as once a week. For a group like AME's, with a natural reason to promote AME events, I think it's OK to be more direct in an announcement email. If the admin is an AME leader, it's an opportunity for him or her to show commitment to the organization and say why the event is noteworthy. We've underutilized announcements. Leaders, we could develop a strategic schedule of them.

LinkedIn also offers a couple of other tools: Events and Ads. We'll take them up in a future post.

Don't discount email as a social media tool

2011-02-28T09:58:00.000-05:00

Social media attracts workshop attendees

I got into a conversation with Greg Bruns, AME Great Lakes Region President, about how social media fits into the need to promote region events, when I got this email he sent to members:

Hello -

Event Alert!

Greg Bruns (Yours Truly) has queued up a excellent "Making the Abnormal Visual" workshop at ATTC Mfg (Tell City, IN).

There are a few seats remaining for the event.

http://www.ame.org/events/making-abnormal-visual-hosted-attc-manufacturing

Just announced! Folks who are planning to arrive the night before will be invited
to a dinner (with drinks) at no additional charge (Hosted by Perry County Development Corp.and ATTC Mfg).
Plan is to have an "Open Mic" night to share best practices.

Also, attached is the electronic flyer for your review.

Thanks in advance ...

Regards,

Greg Bruns
AME Great Lakes President

I replied to Greg and asked how the approach was working -- after all, e-mail is the social medium we're all most comfortable with. He replied:

One hour after I sent out the email, received response from a few and sold several seats to the event (On Saturday!).
Few weeks ago the sales for the Bimbo Bakery tour needed a boost. Along with everything else our team was doing, I sent the email blast, it sold out.
Received a few emails recently from the member base that they appreciated the fact that the
AME regional president took the time to send them a personal invite.

What I am finding out from the member base is that they care about AME and will participate if they
know that the president cares and that the president participates.

Cool stuff... So much fun...

Greg

Greg makes some important points:

It worked in two different cases
Members appreciated hearing from a real person
The message is personal and informal, not marketing-speak
Greg's position as President was a factor
Members care if they see the leaders care
Members participate if they see the leader participates
Greg had fun doing it

We're going to talk later this week about how to add LinkedIn to the process. I say "add" because it's not more effective than the e-mail -- there is no "one best way." It just accomplishes different things. More on that tomorrow.

Prescription refill process fails ... over and over again

2011-02-05T15:31:00.002-05:00

I know I am truly fortunate to have health insurance that includes prescription drug coverage in this day and age. Not everyone is so lucky. But that's not the subject of this post.

The process of using my insurance today to refill a prescription was stressful enough to make anyone sick. But let me discuss the sucky process calmly, instead of going into my usual diatribe.

Catalyst is the company that won Ford Motor Company's prescription management away from Medco. The overall manager of the health benefit is Blue Cross (if any of my friends from BCBSM read this, make a note). Medco had fairly good processes for managing prescriptions and ordering online.

My first experience with Catalyst was when the transition from Medco had just taken place and I had not received the information about the change (confession: I might have put it into the "to read when I get a chance" slush pile. The Medco website wasn't working. I eventually called Medco's customer service and they sent me to Catalyst's customer service representatives. I got all sorts of conflicting instructions for changing over and using the Catalyst website. It was weirdly cumbersome but like a bad dream, I've repressed most of the memory.

Today I attempted to refill a prescription that I had almost run out of. Medco used to send me e-mails. I went to the website. It wanted me to use my member ID, birth date, and Rx group number. Of course, my card was in my wallet, which was in another room. OK, got it. Several times I tried to login by filling in the member and group ID information and each time it failed. Error messages said to put in the right information from my card. Ummm, that's what I was doing. Either the terminology on the card was not the same as the website, or it was tied to some card other than my Blue Cross card. Don't ask me, I DID replace my old Blue Cross card with the new one I received last December. The letter I got said that the same card worked for prescriptions and medical services. Why couldn't the website let me create a username and password when I registered last time. I might have remembered it.

I attempted to call the 800 number from the "contact us" page on the website to order by phone. Well, it's not the right 800 number. Automation lady referred me to a different 800 number, but I wasn't ready to write it down. Did she repeat it? What do you think? The refill customer service option should be right there on the website, wouldn't you say? How hard would that be?

I found the phone number and automation lady #2 took over. I had 3 prescriptions to refill. (I only planned to do one, but decided I'd better get more in if I had the chance. All this time I was carrying the phone up and down stairs to get med containers and so on.) The third Rx number would not go through. Automation lady transferred me.

I then talked to a very nice person named Amy. She had to start all over with the three prescriptions. I told her what I thought of my experience so far, but of course it wasn't her fault, which I told her. I knew she couldn't do anything about it. In addition, all three meds were at their last refill. The third had actually expired, meaning I have to call the doctor soon. Medco always gave me the option of having them fax the refill requests directly to my doctors. Amy said Catalyst couldn't do that. She gave me the doctor's fax number -- I said I'd just find it in my printed information but she wasn't too confident that I'd find it.

If there is a plus side, it is that each action in response to a process failure kicked in as probably designed, and I experienced every one of them. That is, unless something goes wrong with actually filling and shipping the prescription.

Unfortunately for them, the general email addresses for Catalyst customer service, sales and marketing, and webmaster WERE on that website's "contact us" page, so they got a message from me much like this post. I told them, "Each of your departments should feel totally embarrassed to be working for a company with such poor processes. You can send me your apologies, which would be gracious, but won't fix any root causes. If you really cared, you would look into joining the American Society for Quality (ASQ) or some such organization and learn a thing or two. I will let the Ford Retiree Benefits people know that I think they made a REALLY BIG MISTAKE selecting your company to administer our prescription benefits." I figured no use in mentioning lean or six sigma, if they were as clueless as they seemed.

I also mentioned that I would tell you, faithful readers, about their poor quality. I find myself feeling completely entitled to perfect service, which is the symptom of a growing malady that might be called "lean fever." Is there a medication for that?

Management Improvement Blog Carnival -- Exploration

2011-01-06T01:26:00.006-05:00

The theme of my selections for the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival is exploration. While we learn by following lean and continuous improvement thinkers, we grow by going outside the boundaries.

The Lean EDGE
The idea of the Lean EDGE is to bring together an all-star cast of lean authors who share their thinking and engage in dialogues about key issues. Recent contributors include Jamie Flinchbaugh, Art Smalley, Daniel T. Jones, Michael Ballé, Mike Rother, Steven Spear, Mark Graban, Jeff Liker, and Jean Cunningham.

Art Smalley has been showing and explaining concepts from the original Toyota book about the Toyota Production System, most recently in A Continuing Definition Problem. I always rely upon Art to identify Toyota principles that have been misunderstood over the years, especially as concepts meant to apply to efficiency in production operations are extrapolated to the whole organization. Here he discusses Toyota’s approach to training people, based on his own experience at the company.

Pascal Dennis reflects upon value as opposed to waste in Aim for Delightful Value . He reminds us about the Kano model of value, in which delight is the third dimension. And how do you determine if an activity like play is going to lead to the delight of Walt Disney animators producing a Pinocchio or Apple’s designers developing the iPad? It might look like waste, but is it?

Most of us don’t have time to read all the books by all these authors, so we get to sample quite a range of their thinking. If we need to dig deeper, the books can be purchased through the website on Amazon.

I’m a bit disappointed that comments on the blog seem to be disabled. It makes it more awkward for the contributors to keep a discussion organized into a thread, and I can’t add opinions or questions. Even so, I picked the Lean Edge for the carnival because of the authoritativeness of the authors and the high quality of the information they share. It shouldn’t be missed.

Design Thinking

Tim Brown

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO and TED speaker, shares his thoughts in the blog, Design Thinking. IDEO is the innovation firm behind the Bayer Contour blood-glucose meter, MyFordTouch, media:scape furniture for Steelcase, and the Human-Centered Design Toolkit for NGOs and social enterprises. (The Toolkit is free and has been downloaded more than 44,000 times.) Brown has been a TED speaker.

Looking over Tim Brown’s shoulder is too good an opportunity to miss. One recent post, Checks and Balances, was a cogitation over a friend’s question: Why can we design huge buildings with only rare failures, but not a reliable economic system? Brown wonders how we can apply design thinking principles to abstract and intangible things as well as physical objects. And he offers a few lines of inquiry for how to someday do it.

In Design Nations, he ponders about what it takes to provide an innovation infrastructure, and how countries like Finland and Singapore have made strides in that direction. “I have been wondering whether top down government policy is what really makes the difference or whether instead there are emergent characteristics that determine a nation or region’s success in the global innovation economy.” Does Brown have answers? More often he poses questions in a way we may not have thought about before. And isn’t that how new thinking is often generated? Posts are short and pithy, so this blog is well worth adding to your RSS feeds or email subscriptions. You can read them quickly and not take a big chunk out of your day. And because of Tim Brown’s broad followership, comments are many and insightful. I’d like to see more of our lean thinkers’ names showing up there.

Pascal

Thinking for a Change
Pascal Van Cauwenberghe is a Belgian consultant who says he tries to solve more problems than he creates, and transform work into play. He teaches extreme programming (XP) to development teams and customers with the XP Game. A recent post shows an example of his innovative work -- a Business Value Model that teams can use to keep projects focused on the reasons the business exists, not the way they perform functions. For me, looking at posters covered with sticky notes is a fascinating way to see into how people work and think. In this case, Pascal shows and quickly describes each model, which are amazingly different considering that they started with the same exercise. Then he adds, “To make it perfect…” a few quick coach-style comments.

I like it that Pascal gives us a diary of the evolving definition of business value and how he finds venues to try out the games. These are not seminars or workshops, but prototyping sessions that allow his own team to develop the next iteration of the learning experience. That’s agile development in action.

In the lean world, we’re only tangentially exposed to agile and XP. Those who are married to lean doctrine may find fault with this convergent evolutionary cycle in IT development, but I think that’s a mistake. Now that recognition that lean needs to be applied in IT, rather than working around it, we need more than ever to promote dialog between the two worlds. That’s why you should subscribe to this blog (RSS only).

Set aside learning time
What if you subscribed to all the blogs in this year’s Management Improvement Carnival? You’d do nothing but read blogs. I manage this problem by setting aside a certain amount of learning time each day, and catch up on a few blogs, make a few comments, and go on to other things. At least that’s what I would do if I were more disciplined about my life. But give it a try, so you continuously expand your exposure to new ideas and shine a new light on your current problems.

Other Blog Carnival posts: Jamie Flinchbaugh reviewed Lean Reflections, and A Lean Journey by Tim McMahon, Tim wrote about Jamie Flinchbaugh’s blog and Got Boondoggle by my friend Mike Wroblewski. Mike featured Lean For Everyone by Jon Wetzel in his Carnival selections. In Evolving Excellence, Kevin Meyer highlighted a few great blogs, including Gemba Panta Rei by Jon Miller Jon will tell us what he thinks about three blogs on Jan 7, including Daily Kaizen, by Lee Fried, one of my favorites. I’m honored to be part of the Management Improvement Carnival, and hope you’ll look at Jamie Flinchbaugh’s take on John Hunter’s Curious Cat blog.

Does this roundup sound a bit recursive and inbred? Well, aside from the audiences each of us has developed, many of us have gotten to know and respect each other. In social networking terms, blogging -- and commenting -- has created strong virtual relationships. Thanks for being a Lean Reflections reader -- hope to see you become part of the circle with comments here and on the other great blogs in our Carnival.

Santa's KPIs

2010-12-24T09:53:00.000-05:00

If Santa had a KPI dashboard, what metrics would he be watching?

Some answers from friends on Twitter:

@jorgekravitz - leadtime get gift

@awille - ratio of good to naughty, trended against last CY and target :-)

@ stevenleuschel - For his N pole fctry: safety, quality, productivity, human dvlpt and cost. What would this mean specifically? hmmm....

@qualiahr - Santa wouldn't have an KPI dashboard because he is good :)

Santa does have GPS and logistics monitoring --

Track Santa's progress on Google maps or on Google Earth. Follow Santa on Twitter at @noradsanta. Shopping? Search "santa" on you mobile phone's Google maps app. Thanks NORAD!

AND...
-Are there feeder sleighs for rapid resupply?

-Flexible factory for last-minute changes to mix?

-Is there a process for missed deliveries?

-Does he take cookies home to gain-share with the workforce?

-Has Santa ever applied for a Shingo Prize or Baldrige Award?

If anyone has made a site visit and can answer these questions, we want to hear from you!

Toyota Europe acts on corporate safety strategy

2010-12-20T09:40:00.000-05:00

My last post, Toyota's workplace safety philosophy is part of sustainability, and this one will look at how that plays out in Europe.

In 2010, Toyota Motor Europe created a Safety Promotion Committee made up of representatives from senior management that will set direction on safety throughout European operations.

Safety improvements are made at other workplaces besides factories. For instance, parts centers, logistics, and offices had their share of improvements.

In the parts centers, the global strategy to reduce STOP 6 accidents (see the previous post) resulted in a significant improvement. New STOP 6 risk assessment tools and check sheets revealed improvements that reduced risk. There was also a focus on separating human work and machine work, avoiding falls from heights, and developing a safety awareness plan.

Formula: No of LTI/ Work hours x 1,000,000

Note: TPCE included

The vehicle logistics group worked with rail partners to prevent falls during rail transport. People must be able to get on the top of the rail transport units, but fixed safety barriers would not fit under bridges. Working with our rail logistics partners, the vehicle logistics team came up with a system of adjustable barriers.

Adjustable barriers fixed to rail carriages

Facilities including offices, garages, workshops, and laboratories in Brussels and Zaventem, Belgium established a system for risk assessment system of chemical products from purchase to disposal.

Manufacturing
In FY09 there was improvement in Toyota Europe’s Lost Time Injury (LTI) rate. (Ergonomic injuries are now reported separately.)

    * Toyota Peugeot Citroën Automobile data integrated from FY07
    * Ergonomic injuries are reported separately from FY09, previously they were integrated into these statistics.
    * Formula: No. of LTI/ Work hours x 1,000,000

Throughout the European organization, an Ergonomics Working Group (EWG) of safety specialists share best practices, working with the Safety Working Group.

UK
Daily pre-shift meetings make safety the first agenda item. Depending on their jobs, people go through some physical exercises to warm up and avoid injury. In addition safety checks are carried out on equipment.

The attention is on safe processes and equipment, safety kaizen, and training and confirmation. To help employees develop a “safety mind,” hazard awareness training is provided. Near miss reporting also triggers safety interventions. Following genchi-genbutsu -- go, look and study -- senior management can spot safety related issues and raise awareness of health and safety issues.

The number of lost time accidents and incidents of muscular skeletal symptoms (MSS) at UK manufacturing plants has been going down:

Turkey
Using the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle approach, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Turkey’s (TMMT) started production of the new Auris with extra improvements.

Poland
The importance of employee communication in identifying and reducing risks was the focus of Toyota Motor Industries Poland (TMIP)'s annual safety month. They even stopped production to find improvements. So far, more than 80% of improvement points have been addressed. Reportedly, 70% of employees said they would like to do it again. A more robust system for employee safety suggestions is in the works.

Overview of line stop activity at TMIP

Toyota's strategy of having each workplace drive improved safety, described in my previous post, can be seen in the differing details of safety improvement in Europe. The overall goal for each is zero accidents and injuries.

Sources:
Toyota Motor Europe Sustainability
Toyota Motor UK About us: Our people best in class
Toyota Motor Manufacturing UK, Workplace, Global Vision 2010, Respect for all people

Toyota's workplace safety philosophy is part of sustainability

2010-12-16T16:22:00.000-05:00

As everyone knows, Toyota's been hard at work reducing vehicle safety risks, but it has also continued to emphasize safety improvement in its workplaces.

“Safe work is ‘the door’ to all work. Let us pass through this door,” Eiji Toyoda was quoted as saying in the 2010 Toyota Corporate Sustainability Report (CSR). The report stresses that Toyota’s fundamental belief is that safety is essential for sustaining and developing the company, and that placing safety first is everyone's responsibility, from senior executives to every employee at the workplace. To Toyota it is a universal value that is “unaffected by the times.” Furthermore, Toyota believes that no employee or team member should be put at risk of suffering a work-related accident.


Safety and Health Culture - Toyota Sustainability Report 2010

Beginning in FY2008, the approach has been “building a culture that enables all employees/team members to think for themselves and practice safety and health.” Each workplace is to be a driving force behind a company-wide effort.

The three pillars of this approach are:

1. Improving the system for an “independent” or “interdependent” type safety culture where the workplace takes initiative for safety and health and promotes relevant activities,

2. Promoting the Occupational Safety and Health Management System (OSHMS) continuously and thoroughly and

3. Creating a structure for global implementation.

Through this workplace-driven approach, total accidents decreased by about 16% over the previous year, the number of lost workday cases decreased by 35%, and the number of STOP6-type accidents decreased by 14%.

STOP6 accidents:

Being caught in a machine,
Collision with a heavy object,
Collision with a vehicle,
Falls,
Electric shocks, and
Contact with a heated object

Its Occupational Safety and Health Management System (OSHMS) promotes safety and health activities. Emphasis on basic rule observance and interdependent bottom-up initiatives involving the whole company will be implemented in FY 2010.

Toyota Occupational Safety and Health Management System (OSHMS)

The aim is that when all employees understand the benefits of an interdependent safety culture, they will make progress toward achieving and maintaining zero industrial accidents at each workplace.

Sources: Toyota Employee Relations
Corporate Sustainability Report (download PDF from this page)

Getting social at the AME Conference

2010-11-23T11:48:00.002-05:00

Time to reflect on the AME conference last week. Here are a few social media musings:

Twitter: Tweeting was fun and produced some relationships that I hope continue into the future. Maybe that’s enough. AME is an audience that doesn’t twitter much, so I’m going to watch closely through the year and into the next conference before concluding it’s a trivial pursuit. @AuburnNate became a new AMEConnect twitter friend, and is convinced that twitter has untapped power for us, and he graciously agreed to join the council. You can follow @AuburnNate, @AMEConnect, and many other cool folks by searching for #AMEConf2010, and start watching for #AMEConf2011. Use the hashtag for ideas if you have them.

LinkedIn: We had about twice the usual number of new members join the Association for Manufacturing Excellence LinkedIn group. Hope they like what they find and jump in. Next year it would be nice to have more discussion questions emerge from conference sessions.

Facebook: I’m not sure about Facebook’s role in a professional organization, but I’m a Facebook Neanderthal, so what do I know? We had a few picture postings, and might have had more if I had practiced using my new smarter-than-me phone. (Note to self…kata makes perfect.) Seems to me like the AMEConnect Facebook page is a good way to share the fun and elation we pick up every year at the conference, and we did have some comments and likes from our 135 friends.

Social media in other organizations:

One person I talked to was my friend Jim Garrick, who told me that Fedex employees were getting a lot of encouragement to twitter and otherwise shout out to other Fedex employees AND customers. It sounded unusual for such an operations-oriented company and I’m dying to know more. Oddly, it was hard to find social media on the Fedex website - I ended up on the press pages. Fedex Citizenship blog Fedex on Twitter

Kevin Meyer’s Specialty Silicones is a source for his Evolving Excellence blog. He had tweeted to me that he sent five people, and I managed to meet four of them. That included Standup Cy, who fabricated the standup desk Kevin blogged about a while ago. He’s become a social media celebrity since then.

Old-fashioned in-person social networking:

Social Networking Café: Bob Hafey set up a cookies and milk reception on early check-in night for social media denizens, though most of the people showed up because they saw the word “networking” on the sign Bob had set up in the registration area. Which was fine. People looked like they were having fun, and I met folks from Uganda, England, the Lehigh Valley in PA and down the road to the Eastern Shore in MD. Next year I’d like to have a couple more gatherings. In the bag given to people attending, there was a very nice brochure announcing the Café, with other social media tips for the conference. I don’t know about you, but I don’t pay much attention to those brochures.

Not our table, but could have been
Some rights reserved by veni markovski

Meetups: We tried getting twitter followers together in the Baltimore “Dine-Around” but there were only two new guys who came for that reason. I also tweeted an “I’m here” at breakfast on Thursday to see what would happen. @Auburnate appeared as I was chatting with a chance table-mate from Chicago. Then @MartinGHerrera from MI-Swaco in Argentina appeared. We had been trying to get together since he first started following and using our hashtag before the conference. Martin, Nate, and John quickly began to discuss how to spread lean in their companies and each went away with a new thought and new friend. Did we need Twitter to accomplish that? Maybe not, but it broke the ice. And that’s where Nate shared his enthusiasm for social media and ideas for what to do next year. Can’t wait to hear more about them.

Sessions: We had 20+ people in each of our sessions on social media/networking, which I thought was amazing considering the topics and speakers in sessions competing with us. More people were interested in marketing aspects of social media than I expected. I still think that we should focus on social media as a support to lean journeys, but next year maybe we should add a social media marketing session. We had great questions from the group. Should we try to do some webinars?

Presentation: Collaborating with AME’s Social Media Council members Jason Semovoski and Ashley DeVecht produced a much better presentation than I would have produced on my own. Wonder if they feel the same way. Regardless, you can find “getting started with social media” and “ “ in the AMEConnect SlideShare space.

Home base: We didn’t really have a spot for people to find each other. It was like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The too-big-and-busy booth for next year’s Dallas Conference wasn’t the right place, and the little table with AME brochures on it wasn’t prominent enough. Maybe next year we will have a space that’s just right. And tables at mealtime with visible signage. Nate thinks we can fill at least three.

That’s the social media roundup. There was also a lot to learn about lean and continuous improvement in many industries and functions, the real reason why people take a week out of their lives to go. Many say that the AME annual conference is the best place to learn and get charged up. Follow us at #AMEConf2011. The website is http://www.ameconference.org/. Tip -- everything about the Baltimore conference is in red. Everything about next year’s Dallas conference is in blue.

Healthcare facility, little consideration for people with disabilities

2010-11-19T13:38:00.000-05:00

My 84 year old mother told me a story this morning. She had been to the clinic to get a vascular evaluation and had to make a six-month follow up appointment. In front of her line was a man in a wheelchair who was missing a leg. He and couldn't get close enough to the window behind which the hospital employee was speaking to him. They were having trouble hearing each other. The problem was made more difficult because of the glass security barrier at the window.

Mom stepped up and started relaying messages between the woman employee and the man. He needed an X-ray and asked if he could just have it then while he was at the clinic. It was difficult for him to get to the hospital. The woman asked how much time he had. Only an hour, because the special public transportation service made fixed appointments to pick up disabled passengers. That's not enough time, she told him. Mom says she could see his fatigue, and at her age, knew exactly how that felt. Finally, with mom's help, he made the appointment for the X-ray.

Then he asked how to get out of the office. The door was not wheelchair accessible, so mom went and helped him through it. Mom went back and the woman thanked her for helping. It turned out that she often had trouble hearing patients because she wore hearing aids. She wasn't allowed to make exceptions in scheduling, and the workstation didn't permit her to move closer to the man. She felt bad that there was nothing she could have done to make things easier for him.

After she made her appointment she left the office, and the man was still there, so she started to chat with him. He was a veteran, he said, but didn't say more. He told her there are people where he lives who have problems like his, and that's just their life. They mostly accepted it.

While the state provides free transportation for them, they have to make arrangements the day before and must be picked up at specific times. Sometimes there are not enough busses when needed. She asked how he let the transportation service know he was finished at the hospital, and he pointed to the valet. Mom wasn't so sure about how that would work so went over and asked the valet if he had called. Fortunately, he was able to assure her that he had called for the bus and he would see that the man got his ride.

Mom had to recognize that she needed to place limits on how involved she got with people who needed help, so she made herself disengage and went home. She explained that her propensity for helping -- and I could tell you a dozen stories of other things like that she has done -- came from her family's life as homesteaders on the Nebraska prairie, where every farmer kept an extra straw mattress for someone traveling and needing a bed for the night. They helped each other at butchering time and haying time. They took turns boarding the teacher of the one-room school they had built. They all made it through the Great Depression.

How have we lost the ethic of hospitality and mutual help? How did the designers and managers of the appointment desk fail to consider the special needs of patients and employees? How did the hospital fail to have someone on hand to support people in such a situation? Is there always a prairie-reared woman in line to handle the problem?

How many ways can you think of that the clinic could have prevented the distress that these three people experienced that day?

Bits and pieces from the WIP file

2010-11-11T11:37:00.000-05:00

Here's a quick list of what's been inspiring me lately:

The Lean Nation

Congratulations to Karl Wadensten and Linda Kleineberg on the one-year anniversary of The Lean Nation on radio 790 AM in Providence RI. Every day Karl interviews lean leaders from his informal and hands-on perspective. Karl has not only led an impressive lean journey at his own company, VIBCO, but has brought company presidents, politicians, and all types of folks into VIBCO events to see lean in action. Karl will be broadcasting the show from the AME Conference in Baltimore November 16,17, and 18th, plus telling his story on Wednesday, Nov 17, at 10:30.

On their anniversary show, Karl and Linda said that what surprised them both about taking a chunk of their time every day to do the broadcast is how much they learned by engaging with their guests and their call-in listeners. If you can't listen in, there are a number of podcasts on the Lean Nation website. Also check out K-Dubs Lean Nation Radio Show on Facebook.

Toyota Kata

Mike Rother

I bought the book when it first came out but only skimmed it. Then I had the chance to meet its author, Mike Rother, at the IQPC Process Excellence Leaders meeting in Chicago in September, and to be part of the audience for his keynote address. My friend Mark Rosenthal called it the best book on Toyota in -- did he say a long time, or in all time? Regardless, it's one of those books that takes several readings to begin to get the depth of what a "kata" is at Toyota and why it is at the heart of an organization focused on long term survival and the development of capable employees. Mike also is publishing a website that enlarges the book's message and places the ideas in varying contexts. I think the website is essential for getting Mike's full message.
Mike is conducting courses and workshops on Toyota Kata. He and Bill Constantino will do a workshop at the AME Conference Nov 15.

The Remedy

Pascal Dennis

In The Remedy, Pascal Dennis continues his story begun in Andy and Me of Tom Papas and his lean journey at a fictional auto manufacturer. Now Tom has been asked to fill the role of Shusa (roughly translated as "chief engineer") for a new vehicle. In this role, Tom seeks to connect the silos of design, manufacturing, supply chain, and so on. He fights the battles most of you are completely familiar with. Being fictional characters, Tom and his crew prevail.

The book covers a broad scope thinly, where it would take 10 - 15 excellent books to explain properly. That's its value and drawback. Overall, it's a good introduction to beginning to spread lean thinking in the extended enterprise. It's not enough, but I think Pascal knows that it's just starting lines of thinking that can be continued through reading his carefully chosen references at the end.

It resonates with Toyota Kata in many ways, particularly in the principles of solving small problems continuously by building capability into the people in the organization, articulated well by Steven Spear in The High Velocity Edge (a better title than the earlier one - Chasing the Rabbit - read my review.) The three books read together would be an education right there.

Escape the Improvement Trap

This new book by Michael Bremer and Brian McKibben is a fresh look at what happens in the real world, where most organizations that try to implement some "transformational" method eventually get stuck and call it a failure. The missing "ingredients," described in Escape the Improvement Trap are customer focus, engaged people, key metrics, process thinking, and executive mindset. "I know THAT," you say. And you do. Except that you probably can't explain how to supply those ingredients in as clear and useful a way as the authors do. The book uses a combination of the fictional company and case examples of real companies to illustrate what they see as the way to avoid getting stuck in an improvement process that doesn't go anywhere.

Michael Bremer

They also do a good job with diagrams and worksheets. The one they keep returning to is a statistical "improvement maturity" curve of companies. Michael and Brian say that most leaders overestimate their stage of excellence and provide a quick estimator tool.
Michael will also be conducting a workshop on the five ingredients at the AME conference on Nov 15.

I apologize to everyone for giving short shrift to their work. Maybe readers can round out my comments with their own.

Book review - Target Cost Management: The ladder to global survival and success

2010-10-14T08:41:00.000-04:00

by Jim Rains

This book disappointed me greatly. The author did convince me he was an expert at the type of target costing performed by Toyota, but did not succeed in explaining a coherent management theory based upon it. An attempt to explain too much and a tendency to ramble and sometimes to rant defeated the book’s potential to help people understand and apply the method.

The publisher didn’t do the author or the reader any favors. The developmental editor’s job was to critically appraise the book from the reader’s perspective and help the author craft a vehicle to convey usable and valuable knowledge clearly and logically, however, it needed a thorough reorganization. It also needed more competent copyediting and book layout. Publishing the book in its current state was like manufacturing an automobile full of design defects.

As Jim Rains says, few North American companies use real target cost management (even when they talk about "target costing"), yet it's a critical tool in many admired Japanese firms, those we’d consider “lean.” The reasons for its neglect won’t surprise you: it is detailed, it takes deep experience, and it takes a long time to build up. Rains is the right source for this guidance on improving profitability. He has studied long and hard with the best in the world, and has helped companies move along the path. Early in his discovery of how Japanese firms manage costs, he tried to bring the knowledge into GM, which had immunity to it. The concept of target costing The book reveals the importance of a structured cost management approach in the earliest stages of product design. In the best companies, this is a given. In most companies, however, designers and engineers are not expected to think about cost. Manufacturing gets judged for managing costs that are largely frozen into the products they are expected to make.

You probably already know that typical companies think that

price - cost = profit

but that admired companies think about

price - profit = target cost.

Traditional companies think profit is what’s left over after price and cost vary, so profit can vary wildly. If you reduce your price to drive lagging sales, profit will be lower. If you badger suppliers into reducing cost, profit goes up -- maybe. Admired companies set price based on what a customer will pay for the perceived value delivered, then it sets profit targets based on what will support growth and return on investment. That determines what cost must be, and design and engineering have to achieve that.

Rains argues that target cost management is less about managing the costs, and more about managing the company by thoroughly understanding cost, enabling the company make the right strategic choices to achieve price points and ensure profitability. The company must understand that the task will require a lot of work to develop the knowledge and data it will need to help product design manage costs effectively. The secret weapon is the cost table. Cost tables go into great detail about what to expect for the cost of every material, every process right down to boring a hole in a piece of metal of a certain size with certain machining properties, every bit of scrap, and every minute of labor. The tables are modularized and parameterized for reuse. The people who maintain the tables must know their stuff, continue to learn, and continue to improve the value of the cost tables, which become knowledge assets of the company.

The book itself
If you performed a value analysis for the reader, this core information is what should have been organized and explained. That would take about 100-125 pages of this 200-page book.

The first 60 pages are, to my mind, largely waste. The author digresses about what’s wrong with the way manufacturers look at costs. Anyone who has gotten interested in target costing has probably already heard all that.

The author had a structure in mind -- the ladder -- for how to approach target cost management. Models are nice, but in this case, he seemed to get married to the model -- and the publisher let him -- and it got in the way of the core concepts of the book. It would be enough to say that unless certain practices like lean manufacturing, value analysis, six sigma, and a bunch of three- and four-letter acronyms are in place, the company isn't fully ready for target cost analysis. Using 60 of 200 pages for superficial descriptions of the tools before getting to target costing itself puts up a barrier for the reader.
The next 50 pages set the stage for getting started with target costing and setting up the organization. With more judicious editing, this could have been done in perhaps 30 pages.

The real value of the book is delivered in the next 40 pages. The real core concepts are well explained. Good diagrams examples help develop the idea.

Next is a 15-page chapter on a company called Alpha Brain that built software for target costing, before succumbing to the dot-com meltdown. Jim Rains shares its story with an extremely valuable, complete with screen shots, of how a machined part could be costed effectively. I would have liked to see this made part of the explanation of target costing, not set off by itself.

Finally, we have 20 pages of accounts of how several Japanese companies have used target costing in their management processes. The cases have varied levels of usefulness for the reader. Several are more than 10 years old. Some are more detailed than others. They shed light on what target cost management can do, but it would have been better to have integrated them into the flow of discussion rather than to set them off as a separate chapter.

The publisher’s shortcomings
[Caution: rant ahead]
Besides the lack of developmental editing, the book was flawed by poor execution of fundamental publishing production processes. The book design muddied the presentation. In the "ladder" diagram, the illustrator placed the words loosely around the rungs, making it difficult to tell at a glance which rung a concept belonged to. Then when a rung was illustrated within a section, there was not enough space around the "Figure" to set it off. That made it looked like a formula placed within the text of a math book, but it wasn’t in the proper place in the flow of the text. Let me not belabor the point. Unless you look, it's hard to understand what I'm describing. Still, it was an example of thoughtless book design and the editor should have demanded a change. The copyediting shows me more evidence of the publisher doing the job on the cheap. There are mistakes that make me wince. If the editorial staff had the proper style sheet process, "takt" would not appear as "tact," nor would Aisin Seiki be spelled "Aisen" Seiki throughout the book. That a publisher of so many books about Toyota and lean could let that happen is nothing less than embarrassing.

Publishing is costly, not for the printing, paper and ink, but for the human knowledge applied to the ideas the reader wants to find. Most writers of manufacturing books come from manufacturing, and shouldn’t be expected to be authors. The publisher must provide the resources to shape the book and help the reader find the core message, accurately. The lowest-cost editor doesn’t have enough subject matter knowledge. The process may be collapsed into too few review cycles in a wrongheaded pursuit of “lean” or just by cost-cutting mandate.

The publisher should be willing to spend a few thousand dollars more for subject matter reviewers who will criticize the work in detail and editors who know the scope of what lean means. I don’t see evidence of that in this book.

Recommendation
Pay $50-60 for this book if you are willing to accept that only about half of it is useful. But if you compare that price to the value of improving your company’s cost management or your own capability to understand it, the expense is trivial.

I checked Amazon for other books on the subject of target costing to see if there is a better choice. There were a few, including one by our old friend Yasuhiro Monden, but no useful reader reviews. Not having seen any of them, I can’t help you there. You may also want to look at books on value analysis/value engineering (VA/VE), which is a foundation of target costing.

Target cost management is a subject that lean thinkers should study, but haven’t. Maybe as lean penetrates into product design and supply chain planning, the interest will grow. When that happens, I’d like to see Jim Rains get the chance to share his knowledge in a better book.

Leaner office processes at BCBSM

2010-09-28T12:08:00.000-04:00

A few years ago, I read about a manufacturing company helping a hospital begin to look at lean. I asked an acquaintance at the company whether he thought that reaching out to healthcare by manufacturing lean experts would reduce the burdensome costs that employers bear for healthcare coverage. He said no, not until the insurance companies did something about their wasteful processes.

Now we have good evidence that insurers are getting in the game. The Michigan Lean Consortium had a chance this month to learn about how Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBSM) is conducting its continuous improvement program. BCBSM seems to have been smart about taking in some of the extraordinary improvement leaders who were shaken from Detroit's manufacturing industry. Phil Berry, after a career of continuous improvement leadership at Textron, joined BCBSM last year as Senior Director of Lean Continuous Improvement. He's building an able team of leaders, coaches, and learners who are taking processes apart and putting them back together.

The central staff group of BSBCM CI experts has now trained 230 change agents, usually group leaders and managers of operational groups. BCBSM is different from other insurers in that many of its employees are unionized. This means that they can't work on any activity that may result in decreased employment, although there are many other projects they can participate in. While we didn't hear from union representatives, we were told that conversations with union leaders started early in the process and that the union was on board, within the constraints of its duties to union members.

BCBSM offered buyouts a while ago and more people than expected took advantage of them, actually leaving open positions for which people could be hired. Despite being shorthanded, some departments working on lean focused on eliminating the need for the work itself. That motivated team members to eliminate overload caused by short staffing through improvements, and took away the fear that people would be faced with layoffs.

Now that teams were motivated by the need to reduce work to fit the resources available, they were ready to attack processes, with the support of their change agents and backed by the CI experts. The team that services the State of Michigan account is one example. Delays in responding to customers result in "aged cases," which contribute to the possibility of financial penalties for not meeting performance guarantees. Short one person due to the buyouts, the team was struggling to keep up. They attacked waste and bottlenecks, reduced reporting, improved workflow and consolidated responsibilities, which all added up to reduced turnaround time and saving $75,000.

The emphasis at BCBSM, however, is not on event-based improvements, but on culture change. I'm often bothered about what "culture change" means exactly, but we heard consistently what this meant. Training objectives were geared to a beginning stage of lean, but there is a longer term plan. The idea is to introduce principles, tools, and a common language, and a forum for practice. This evokes the definition of kaizen ("rapid improvements" at BCBSM) that I like best - a way to train the mind to constantly think how to improve. Teams do want to produce actual savings and improvement, and that's what helps get attention from traditional thinkers, but they are also building engagement and changing minds.

One practice used by all teams was a daily huddle in front of a team-created huddle board. Not only does this deal with daily issues, but it also works to sustain the team's forward motion. Cindy Lewis told us they are visual, 15-minute, tightly managed, crisp, well-prepared, and positive. Recently the CI team went through and evaluated teams' huddles and identified issues and training needs, feeding the findings back through managers.

BCBSM is also beginning to reach out to the providers -- the physicians who heal us and get payments from the insurer. They are no happier about coding confusion, rejected claims, and high costs than we are. They are beginning to hold joint projects to help on both sides.

The CI leaders recognize the importance of high-level buy-in, and the reality that it is hard to get. While the initiative has received strong support from on high, it will soon be time to start more training and education for VPs, presidents, and C-level executives in functions other than operations. We know that it is harder to bring them on board, but BCBSM seems to have a plan for that. Seeing how well-planned their strategy has been so far, and how carefully it is being deployed, I have a good feeling about that stage of development.

Better than the restroom checklist

2010-09-17T08:47:00.000-04:00

We were passing through a small town in Delaware and stopped at a local gas station, not one of the big chains. But inside the ladies room door was an excellent visual control for how the owner expected the restroom to look when the cleaner finished.

Choosing online collaboration tools for teams

2010-08-29T10:47:00.001-04:00

some rights reserved by schwa23 on flickr

We know teams are the way to get things done, but it’s hard to collaborate when we’re geographically dispersed. Working together at a distance seems to cry out for technology, but which one? I thought I’d ask a bunch of smart IT guys about it. After all, they have teams trying to get work done too. Here’s some of what I heard from the experts at the LinkedIn group, CIOs.com: Chief Information Officer Network

E-mail is still the default collaboration tool -- it’s familiar and effective to a point. It becomes unwieldy quickly, however, when more than a couple of people are involved. How often have you struggled to make sense of a long email thread with non-chronological messages crossing each other? When you use e-mail to send documents for comment, keeping track of versions gets crazy quickly. That’s when you say there must be a better solution. Naturally, Microsoft and Google appear, as if by magic, each with their own supporters.

SharePoint from Microsoft is a big favorite. Ten of my advisors said they used it -- though not all were enthusiastic about it. Companies with broad Microsoft licenses tend to choose it as part of a package. It stores documents, schedules meetings, includes chat… On the downside, for any complex implementation, outside resources may be required. Some say it needs to be supplemented with more communications and social media tools. Jive SBS was mentioned as an option for adding rich social media features for internal (and external) collaboration. Yammer didn’t come up in the discussion, even after I asked about it, so let’s assume it’s not gaining much ground yet.

In support of Sharepoint, Linda says you can't beat using something that integrates with the rest of the Microsoft tools and Office suite. It saves on training and removes the need to have people learn new tools -- she says she’s seen it work for companies with 95,000+ users with a Project Management portal featuring business intelligence/dashboards pulling data from diverse systems (MRP, ERP, CRM, SaleForce, financial systems, etc.), even creating forms that work with legacy systems.

Google apps were mentioned by four people. I work on volunteer teams that use GoogleDocs, which allow any of us to update a document or spreadsheet. (You can work with .ppt files, but we haven’t so far.) Google Docs are good for users who need the cloud because they have no home server platform.

In the other camp, Mike is a fan of Google Apps Premier (GAP). His company has a number of facilities, and one had a fire last year. With a major proposal due, his team used Google Docs and Google Sites with online chat without missing a beat, he said.

Richard also likes Google Apps because it’s on the web, not dependent on internal factors, and collaboration is real time, as several people can work on a document at once.
And Android has the potential to bring Smartphones into the picture.

Some of the other tools mentioned were:

Microsoft Groove
ActionBase
Cisco WebEx
ExpertChoice
Wikis
MS Project
SmartSheet
Tableau
IBM Lotus Notes

Joaquim has a new iPad and is trying apps. He reports that TODO lets you manage projects, back them up on your desktop/notebook, and share activities with your team, via e-mail. He wonders if tablets will change the game.

It's not the tools but the thinking

The anti-tech solution came from one person -- cutting off access to computers to get people to talk to each other. It’s true that it’s too easy to e-mail people who work a few feet from us rather than taking time to talk face-to-face or to have a quick stand-up meeting. As Patrick said, “If your people sit next to each other but never peer over cubicle walls to talk to each other, all the Sharepoint, clouds, unified communications, etc. will do nothing to change that fact.” Shelwyn said that if you have a collaborative team, almost any tool will probably do.

David echoed what many lean professionals already know -- “Collaboration is more about mindset than it is about the tool. A collaborative culture will leverage any of the tools mentioned above. Likewise, a siloed culture will let them go to waste. Focus on changing corporate mindset and the tools will help the process. They'll never drive it.”

Tom likes to get team leaders in a room for 10 or 15 minutes every morning to understand what is on the agenda for the day and where team members can give or get help. He said it helps build a culture where team members openly discuss concerns/issues/opportunities with peers, and the synergies benefit the overall team performance immeasurably.

These comments are apropos to teams that are geographically close. The issues that come up with distance are more complex. Either way, getting people comfortable with the tools, so that the tools don’t get in the way of people interacting, depends on thoughtful choice and implementation.

Gian said tools need to be very easy to use, and interconnected with the applications that people use every day to do their work. They also need to be customized to business unit or clients they serve, he said, and require a dedicated resource(s) to administer and edit content to ensure that there is enough value that people want to use it.

Addressing the need to collaborate before you automate, Madhu shared his favorite ways to break corporate silos and get employees to collaborate:

A common goal, challenge, or interest motivating employees to come together for a common cause.
Reward or encouragement during the early adoption stages - This need not be monetary but need to have something to encourage and go the extra mile.
Feedback once the common goal has been achieved leaves everybody with a good taste and encourages them to do it again.

Afzal pointed to a need organizations often forget about or skimp on: training. While some would disagree, he sees an age disconnect in the acceptance of tools and technology as a catalyst and facilitator for collaboration. “The generations who did not grow up in a world of global communication have a tendency to feel less at home with using SMSes, instant messaging, video and even audio conferencing, not to mention white board applications, distributed file systems, etc.,” he said, adding, “Any CIO who goes into the deployment of tools without understanding the nature of their user base, and their readiness to accept the tools, is looking for trouble!”

Many thanks to the folks who chimed in to answer my question on the CIOs.com: Chief Information Officer Network on LinkedIn.

Baby invents social networking strategy on iPad

2010-08-14T11:21:00.000-04:00

I was riding in the back seat of a Jetta in Chicago traffic, with my 18-month-old granddaughter in her car seat on my left and my son on my right. He had handed her his iPad with an app for babies -- by touching the pad she could make letters and numbers show up, and make them bigger or smaller or dance around by touching them in different ways.

She seemed to have accidentally exited the game, so she handed the iPad to her daddy, who touched the game's icon, opened it up and gave it back to her. After that happened a few times and they passed the toy across me, I decided to help her. It didn't take long to see how to swipe the icons across, find the distinctive and recognizable one for the game and return it to her. Yes, the iPad is indeed very intuitive to use. But I asked my son why the game kept closing on her, and he showed me the spot on the iPad frame that exits apps.

Then I caught on to her strategy. She was closing the game on purpose, so she could get dad's attention and involve him in her own iPad social interaction strategy -- apparently one that was much more satisfying than playing a silly alphabet game some geeky educator had designed to keep her occupied.

Babies invent new strategies constantly. I wish it was easy to get to that state of open play where new ideas are the best.

Saturday afternoon with Captain Karl's Lean Nation

2010-08-10T09:36:00.001-04:00

Captain Karl

I spent part of Saturday afternoon 5S-ing old files, and decided to make it even more productive by catching up on podcasts of Karl Wadensten’s Lean Nation radio show. If you haven’t heard it, you’re missing something remarkable. Every afternoon at 4 pm Eastern time, Karl, president of VIBCO, interviews someone with an enlightening story about lean, current authors like John Toussaint, and influential thinkers like Jamie Flinchbaugh, Andy Carlino, and Don Dinero.

Karl also talks to people like Bill Hodge and Paul Bonin from UPS and Kenn Fischburg, President of Consumer's Interstate Corp (also known as Toilet Paper World) about his company’s experience with these supply partners and how they helped folks at VIBCO make lean improvements. Hodge, Bonin, and Fischburg were all knowledgeable about lean, willing to visit VIBCO and see what they could offer to streamline processes, and well aware of what the impact on VIBCO’s operations would be.

Starting with shipping, which Karl rightly recognizes at the critical link between you and your customer, the focus was on common problems and not a sales pitch for “what Brown can do for you.” VIBCO’s processes were like those of many companies, requiring rekeying of data when shipping costs were found and handoffs to UPS took place as well as lookup of specific orders -- and VIBCO ships a lot of items. In customer service, representatives had to flip through web pages to tell customers what the price differences would be if they shipped UPS ground vs. next day vs. other options. These were multiple daily transactions, all waste.

You don’t have time to keep up with new services from all your vendors, and VIBCO didn’t know everything UPS could do for them. By being on site, observing what was happening, and identifying frustrating little obstacles, Paul was able to help people solve problems. New abilities for data linking from UPS could add actual shipping status and cost to order records without rekeying, and tracking data could be made visible to customers automatically. (Don’t you love it when you order from an online vendor like Zappos and can see when your order gets on a truck, makes it to Louisville, to Toledo, and on another truck to you, all from a link in an automated order acknowledgement.) Wow, now VIBCO’s order shipping people are moving their customer’s equipment and parts to them, not typing.

In customer service, the rep can enter the order while on the phone with the customer, flip through the various options based on the shipping weight and not have to change pages once. It saves more than time. For customers on the phone, that long pause when the customer can only wait is gone. It’s a better buying experience.

Karl also talked about how UPS helped out when an urgent order just couldn’t be ready by the standard UPS pickup time. Paul happily shares his cell phone number, and he’s ready to arrange whatever he can to handle an exception. Not only will Paul help VIBCO, he offered to hook up any listener with a rep in their area who would do the same good partnering that he does.

At the other end of the value stream -- purchasing -- Kenn Fischburg’s Toiletpaperworld.com applies the lean model to buying office and operations supplies. His website makes it easy to place a credit card order for any number of categories of common products, which will be shipped, usually within 24 hours, from one of TPW’s 26 warehouses. Kenn talked about an early “aha” moment, when a customer asked, “Do you sell candy too?” Kenn’s answer was, “If you want me to sell candy, I’ll sell candy!” That’s grown to a proverbial one-stop-shop for busy purchasing employees.

Toiletpaperworld has a jump on a lot of companies in bringing a friendly social media side to its relationship with customers. It’s capable of being funny -- see the toilet paper survey data in -- and Kenn writes a blog that appears on the website and in Facebook. Who doesn’t need a trivia break in the office when you’re ordering the most mundane supplies in the world?

Toiletpaperworld has more lean practices internally, which they also share with customers. I wrote about those last year: Helping your customers get lean. (I think the post might have been based on something else I read, which I should have cited, but thanks, Kenn, for the link you added to the Toilet Paper Encyclopedia.)

During the rest of my 5S afternoon, I listened to more about supply chain improvement when Leslie Taito from RIMES hosted a talk with Cheryl Snead, CEO of Banneker Industries and Ron Nussel, Founder and President of ICR Group. I topped off the day by listening to Karl talk to Michael Brassard of Lean Pathways about strategy deployment.

I must confess that, as a print-biased learner, I rarely use podcasts or videos to keep up with lean, but I’m going to do more of it. I’ll be listening to Karl Wadensten’s Lean Nation, because his interviews are so engaging and intense as well as being well grounded in a solid understanding of lean principles. I’m scheduled as a guest August 16, to talk about trends I see, so listen in and send me feedback. It’s a rehearsal of sorts for my debut behind the microphone at the IQPC Process Excellence Leaders Meeting in Chicago September 13-16. Don’t let me make an idiot of myself.

Massively collaborative projects

2010-08-02T10:20:00.000-04:00

Call it a cloud. Call it a community. Call it a project. Social networks on the web can collaborate to produce great things. Everyone knows Wikipedia, but not everyone knows about Project Gutenberg and one of its support communities, the Distributed Proofreaders.

To step back in time to 1450, Johann Gutenberg started a massively collaborative social media phenomenon when he invented the printing press. It freed knowledge from monasteries, clergy and wealthy aristocrats. A man with a bit of capital could print easy-to-read books, newspapers, and pamphlets that almost anyone could buy or distribute for free. Once almost anyone could learn to read, the church or government lost their monopolies on information. It was a revolution. By 1776, the coffee houses of London were raucous networks of idea exchange about the latest news in print. Lloyd's of London coalesced as a collective securitization of merchant shipping risk. Postal services had volumes of new mail to take from person to person.

Now that digital information is freed from paper, just as when printing freed it from parchment, old books are being freed from libraries. Printing saved knowledge from isolation and the risk of destruction, and digitizing knowledge has an almost infinitely greater potential.

Project Gutenberg starts with scanned documents, the same as Google Books. Image scans, like PDFs or specialized viewers, have their limits. Books available unless you have the right program or device. What happens when formats become obsolete? Because Project Gutenberg renders documents in text, they can be viewed or converted almost universally. You can download nearly any out-of-copyright book you can think of, for free, from the Project Gutenberg library on the web. Now the project is moving into more obscure and specialized works, those even more in danger of loss.

Getting from scan to text with people
To get from scans to text is rocky road. OCR (optical character reader) software is unable to make sense of broken type, smudges on paper, and so on. Here's where the massive collaboration comes in: Thousands of human beings, working for no pay, are inspecting the defect-ridden text rendered by OCR, stripping out page headers and footers, and opening up knowledge to anyone with internet access.

The Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreading (PGDP) network has been around for a while. It has released 18,793 meticulously inspected books to Project Gutenberg. 3,016 are in progress, 688 currently being proofread. How big is the effort? Of nearly 100,000 registered users, 535 people helped in one typical, more than 1,000 in a week, and more than 2,000 in July 2010.

Distributed Proofreaders cumulative results

Not fancy, but functional: The proofreading interface

As if to show that collaboration doesn't have to depend on expensive glitzy platforms from bigtime software vendors, it has evolved on old but robust open source platforms, to include a dedicated project management application, phase gates, community-developed standard work, continual improvement, project bulletin board discussions, an active wiki for collective member knowledge, social interaction, teams, mentoring, and lots of feedback data to members on team and individual progress.

It is a culture as much as a structure for a work process. People drawn to the community have a shared purpose: getting out-of-copyright books into the public domain, usable in any format on any reader, preserving knowledge and classic works. While the number of pages in the works at any given time is immense, the goal requested by the community from any one proofer is a page a day. It's a takt that is easy to swallow.

A sociable experience
As you peel back the layers of the work, the social media levels begin to reveal the personalities of the leaders, as well as the new entrants and the workers who are developing their skills. A conversation on a project discussion board or in the wiki starts to feel like friendship after a while, and our emotional satisfaction brain circuits begin to create engagement. The member becomes part of a team.

In a wiki, people don't always explore the “history” and “discussion” tabs, but they are where the social richness is found. In the Distributed Proofreader wiki, the work process is discussed at high level of knowledge and conscientiousness, a sense of holding the members to high standards, and I'm in awe of the people who make such a huge commitment to creating defect-free texts to share with the world.

From a lean perspective, you might ask how much inspection is appropriate. PGDP has three levels of proofing, two levels of formatting, and a couple more levels of rendering before a text is released. There is a way to record whatever is changed at each level, to show whether proofreaders are just changing the same word back and forth, and to identify give feedback to proofreaders who need more training on the standard. There are a couple of experiments that carry a text through many rounds (the one I saw is up to 10) to see how people behave when given an endless opportunity to change things. At all times, the original scan is available and the project manager usually has the paper text for validation.

Lessons
What can we in the lean community learn from the Distributed Proofreaders? Some of our projects produce documents, so there is a direct set of lessons. We can also learn how much work people are motivated to contribute when they believe in the importance of the result. Motivation comes out of interaction too. There is an extraordinary emphasis on fairness, civility, and respect for people that is not found in an old-style business culture. And the technology does not have to be the latest in order to produce a good project experience.

In fact, lean tells us that when team members work in close proximity, frequent face-to-face interactions, white boards, paint on walls, and pictures are all more effective than computerized "knowledge management systems" that become knowledge prisons.

But as our teams are forming across functions, organizations, and industries, we need online tools to collaborate, conduct team projects and interact. We won't all have satellite conferences, vast simulations, and virtual worlds to work within.

Project Gutenberg took years to create, and we need to move faster. What open tools do you use for team projects? The venerable conference call? Webex or Go-to-Meeting? Google Docs (my teams use them a lot)? Dropbox? Sharepoint? Have you found something else?

Social media - can we make it add value to lean?

2010-07-23T09:31:00.002-04:00

The social media craze is just that, unless it produces real value, and I doubt value is measured in easy metrics like “followers,” “hits,” or “clicks.”

From the lean perspective, I’ve been struggling with the marketing orientation of much of the discussion of social media. There’s nothing wrong with marketing, but our purposes in the lean community are different. Social media tools ought to further those aims -- of adding value through connections with people, sharing ideas, teaching, learning, and supporting. Otherwise, they are just tools. And if lean tells us anything, it’s not the tools, it’s the thinking.

Yesterday, social media tools worked for me. Let me count the ways...

(1) Google Alerts -- settings in Google search that send you a daily e-mail with links to anything new that has turned up with keywords you have selected. I use them to find new stories and new people that I might share through Twitter, Lean Reflections, writing for Target, or LinkedIn. My alert included a blog post on All things Chromatography about a Delaware company, Analtech, on its lean journey.

(2) Blogging is a great way to tell a story. Ken Grant's post conveyed to me the spirit of lean we like to see. He gave a lot of credit to DEMEP, the Manufacturing Extension Partnership group in Delaware, and included pictures and a (3) YouTube video of a class in session. It happens that I have ties to Delaware. Ken included his (4) e-mail address, so I shot him a message and suggested we talk by (5) phone.

Ken answered the e-mail right away, saying he’d be in the office and giving me his phone number. So we talked. Turns out we had more in common than lean. He's a social media evangelist. He had posted the blog story to show someone the power of social media and had a pretty good argument in its favor when he heard from me just hours later.

Ken is a different sort of lean guy. He’s the sales manager at Analtech, who doesn’t see social media as marketing, but as a way to develop relationships. In fact, he’s so excited about social media that he’s helping the State of Delaware use social media to get better connected to residents. After we talked, he sent me a whole bouquet of links that exploded into a couple of hours of exploration and engagement at my end.

The State’s (6) home page and the rest of the website are becoming more and more integrated with (7) Twitter and (8) Facebook feeds and blogs. And not in a gimmicky way. Everything a resident would want to do with the state government is easy to find.

Ken’s pretty good at the personal networking. He arranges (9) Tweetups, and persuaded the governor, Jack Markell, to appear at one where Jack was shown sending his first Tweet. All this was recorded on video by TV and by any number of (10) phones I saw in the frame of the video Ken sent me. Now Governor Markell tweets several times a day (well, he gets a fair amount of help from his staff). The feed appears on the State of Delaware website. but I skipped over to (8b) HootSuite so I could follow his feed personally. While I was there, I became one of Ken’s followers, and found another feed from DEDOgov, the Delaware Economic Development department’s Twitter name.

Ken had also helped arrange for social media guru Chris Brogan (read the book Trust Agents) to (11) meet with the governor, and I found an arty video of Jack and Chris talking. What I learned about video: if the conversation is fairly ordinary, cover it with cool music and just show the faces of the folks talking. My guess is that the conversation was valuable in helping the governor see that Twitter and such is about relationships, not marketing.

It wasn’t long after I followed Ken that he got the alert and he followed my Leanreflect Twitter feed. Then we connected to each other in (12) LinkedIn. I invited Ken to join the AME (13) LinkedIn Group, which he did.

Back to our phone conversation: You have to understand that in Delaware, everyone knows everyone else. I’ve (11a) met the governor and bent his ear about lean manufacturing and lean in government. The folks from DEMEP have done the same, and taken him to a number of (14) gembas in companies using lean. (I’m going to call going to a gemba a highly productive form of social networking.)

I had to talk to Ken about AME, of course, both our real work in lean and the (15) Social Media Council’s experimentation with social media channels. I suggested he come to AME's (16) conference in Baltimore, less than two hours from Ken’s company in Newark (trivia: it’s pronounced New Ark, not Newerk, as in NJ). Ken said he’d already heard from the DEMEP team that they will be there, and I told him that he should get a team from his company to go too, or at least get a transferable registration he could share with others at Analtech’s 17-person company.

With our common interest in social media, and Ken’s hugely greater experience compared to ours, I asked for Ken’s help on our Council’s plan to assess our lessons learned after our first year in existence and to use lean to become more strategic and connected with AME’s other initiatives in the coming year. Ken said he would, because he believes that the more things your are involved with, the more relationships you develop, and the more good will come out of it. It’s going to be awesome to put Tim McMahon’s and Jason Semovoski’s lean teaching together with Ken’s expertise, and Scott Schiave’s marketing leadership at AME HQ. (Want to be a part of it? E-mail me at Karen.m.wilhelm@gmail.com.) An e-mail went out from me (17) introducing Ken to Tim and Jason.

Continuing with the small-world theme. Ken realized that DEMEP’s Lisa Weis, whose picture is shown in that first blog post teaching a class at Analtech, is on (18) AME’s Mid-Atlantic Regional board of directors. I found Lisa’s email address on the AME website and shot her an email introducing myself.

I count 18 social media points escalating from reading an alert from Google in my e-mail, to reading Ken’s blog post, to exchanging e-mails with Ken, to talking on the phone, to connecting in Twitter and LinkedIn, to inviting Ken to a LinkedIn group for discussion, to getting his gracious response in request for his help in our Social Media council, to getting links from him that connected me with a whole world of stuff happening in Delaware, was fun.

Is there any more than fun and a flurry of jumping from link to link and exchanging gossip about my old home state? You never know. It’s the same with meeting someone at a conference. Sometimes it’s a great conversation and an exchange of business cards.

Real networking is the hoped-for result. Real networking is how we can learn and tap the experience of other lean leaders. It’s how we can pass on help to other lean learners. It happens, and when it does, it’s satisfying to have a human relationship with someone else slogging in the battle to bring lean to all the organizations that surround us.

Ken and I set up the next logical extension of the relationship that started with is blog post. I’ll be visiting family in September and now have a plant visit to Analtech on my calendar. Ken will be inviting someone from DEMEP to join us. Maybe I’ll get really lucky and Governor Markell will show up too.

What will you do today to escalate a serendipitous encounter in social media? If you’re reading this, you’ve put your toe in the water. How about sending an e-mail to introduce yourself to me, or to someone else you run across in today’s web travels? How about raising a social media relationship to a phone call, or raising a phone relationship to an in-person meeting? How about committing to going to a conference?

Let’s work together to bring the value to social media and wrest it away from those who want to make it just another advertising channel. I'll be part of a conversation on that topic at the IQPC Process Excellence Leaders Meeting in Chicago September 13-16.

Speaking of advertising: Here’s what Analtech did in YouTube -- definitely not the same old marketing stuff:

Thanks Ken, for making yesterday fun and for opening so many doors.

Lean healthcare ideas taking root in Ireland

2010-07-09T15:52:00.002-04:00

The flow of lean to healthcare has increased rapidly in the last few years, and Andy Brophy is one of those folks who arrived there from manufacturing. Andy is based in County Offaly, Ireland, and shared some updates with me the other day.

In healthcare organizations large and small, releasing employees, mainly through attrition, will save some money, but someone will have to do the work these people have been doing. Either the remaining staff will be overburdened or someone must eliminate the waste that keeps them from doing the work in the time available to do it.

Removing waste from work doesn't always start with an efficiency study. Andy emphasizes that a focus on cost cutting doesn't usually create a lot of commitment, but that hospital workers want to improve care. And improving care reduces costs in many instances.

Andy worked with one hospital to reduce injuries due to falls. Employees focused attention on the position of patients, making sure they were seated or in bed at a height they could stand up from, for example. Data showed that many falls occurred during shift changes, when patients tried to do on their own what they needed help with: going to the bathroom or getting water. Ensuring that shift change didn't cause gaps in patient assistance made a difference. Visual controls were used to flag patients who were fragile or otherwise had a greater risk of falls, so closer attention would be paid to their safety.

Other initiatives focused on what nurses were spending their time doing. It's typical to find that they spend large chunks of time walking or searching for things. When 1,000 small improvements can be made in a week of effort, labeling and changing storage locations can begin to melt away the waste and put nurses at the bedside, where they really want to be. When nurses are with the patients, there are fewer falls, mistakes, and other adverse outcomes. The important thing is that the nurses themselves, along with other patient care and support staff, identify changes and implement them. Management supports and sustains the process, but it's owned by the people who do the work.

Andy subscribes to the school of thought that people are full of creative and innovative ideas. The title of his book, "Innovative Lean: A guide to releasing the untapped gold in your organisation, to engage employees, drive out waste and create prosperity," co-authored with John Bicheno of the Lean Enterprise Research Center at Cardiff University, tells it all.

He says, "Ideas are not treated as ad hoc actions or suggestions. There is a system where ideas are visually displayed on boards, implemented fast, and recognised. People are coached to recognize 'hidden' waste and the idea system is integrated into daily problem solving. The employee’s manager mentors and supports him or her during implementation. Employees are coached as to what constitutes a good idea. A 'bad idea' is a training opportunity -- the intent behind it is teased out and put forward again. The key is to tap into people’s intrinsic motivation, the natural desire that they have to make a positive difference. The greatest reward for employees is to see their ideas used."

The type of idea process flow that Andy introduces is:
1. Employees write down ideas every time they see an opportunity for improvement and post them on the local idea board with a picture if possible.
2. The idea generator evaluates and filters their idea with their peers, and their supervisor responds within 24 hours.
4. The person who comes up with the original idea implements it themselves or with their work team. If additional help is needed from a support function like maintenance, it is provided and the idea originator oversees the completion of their task.
5. Record implemented ideas in an idea log electronically.
6. Monthly metrics include: number of ideas per employee/team, volume of implemented ideas, participation rate and implementation time.

"If the cycle above flows smoothly the improvement activity will also flow slickly," Andy says, "One idea will lead to another and continuous improvement will translate into improved performance and higher employee engagement."

My talk with Andy helped me see that lean is making the leap from manufacturing into healthcare because principles are becoming explicit and teachable. A critical mass of experience in healthcare improvement is being collected by groups like Andy's, at Lean Enterprise Institute's healthcare education efforts led by Mark Graban, at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI).

Now lean and quality leaders in hospitals can draw on examples and benchmarks that make sense to people there. Using examples from automobile assembly is no longer necessary.

What's next? Extracting principles from experience makes lean possible in a whole array of industries: Auto repair shops, trucking companies, government agencies, public utilities, and more. It's a trend to watch.

Tighten the links in your supply chain

2010-07-06T10:35:00.000-04:00

In his weekly newsletter, "Lean Thoughts," my friend Richard Kunst talked about linking your supply chain more effectively. Total cost of procurement also figures into his way of thinking. Richard has applied lean at Toyota, La-Z-Boy, and a number of other organizations, so he speaks from experience. Here's his take on the subject:

... In a typical automotive assembly plant, supporting every employee working on the line, there are at least 10 additional employees working somewhere within the supply chain. Suppliers … the hidden factory. So imagine if you struggle with communication internally how can you bridge the link to your external suppliers? We will outline some proven tools and tricks that may help you improve supplier communication and trust.

The market will establish the price so when working with suppliers it should not become part of the discussions towards improvement … it will evolve naturally.

Inventory is time … but it is also a reflection of the amount of trust that exists between you and your supplier. If you have been stocked out or shorted on occasion it is natural to bolster the inventory levels … primarily since no one ever wants to be scolded for shutting down a line due to lack of inventory.

Commodity Management
The most extreme engagement of a supplier with your organization. I learned of this concept many years ago when visiting BOSE speakers and then promptly followed suit. We provided our major suppliers with a desk, telephone and full system access. In essence they were responsible to conduct the planning requirements for their commodity and ultimately placing orders to themselves. Of course this created tons of alarms within accounting … but like most accounting systems we had the inherent controls in place. If the supplier wanted to change the price our standard cost system would immediately alert us to a purchase price variance.

We loved this supply chain technique. It allowed us to manage our 600+ suppliers with just a few buyers. We watched our inventory begin to melt away because no computer system could match the speed of human communication. Also our computer systems never tracked promotional projects that were being or the anticipation of new significant contracts.

A great by-product of commodity management was as our suppliers became more familiar with the use of their products and services within our operation they were able to make suggestions that enhanced quality while reducing costs … add this to the ability to reduce our procurement lead-time we quickly had a significant competitive advantage within our industry sector.

Supplier Technical Exchange Program (STEP)
You are busy within your organization investigating and researching new technologies that will continue to provide your product or service the leadership position it deserves. But are you alone in this endeavour? Of course not, with this in mind we decided to host a formal event annually where our R&D scientists and sales folks discussed emerging desires of the consumer and how we were going to address those needs. We then opened the venue to see what emerging technologies our suppliers were developing … by beginning early integration of the emerging technologies we were first to market with the new technology and a distinct advantage.

Supplier Self Certification Program (SSCP)
You inspect and then count and double count items before shipping only to have your customer do the same thing upon receipt … What does this symbolize about trust?

We know that inspection is a non-value added activity so it makes sense to find a way to reduce and eliminate this activity. With SSCP both sides (supplier and customer) begin/continue extensive inspection and collaboration related to inspection requirements. As the trust grows, inspection requirements begin to diminish to the point where the goods received are delivered directly to the Point of Use. Typically incoming inspection will only identify the most blatant deviations and the real problems are identified when the operator attempts to use the item and then you become victim of missing a delivery promise. Of course, if an incident occurs then the Certification process begins over.

Total Cost Of Procurement (TCOP) –Supplier Report Card and Improvement Agenda
Typically a particular supplier will get tagged as being a horrible supplier to deal with, quality and delivery issues. Often the supplier is unfairly judged, typically as a result of the volume of product they supply. Here is where TCOP is a great tool. It contains both a subjective and quantitative evaluation of your supplier. The TCOP Report captures subjective results related to Quality, Delivery, Service and Cost and then quantifies them for every $1,000 of annual spend conducted with that supplier. The TCOP report also works as an excellent working agenda with your suppliers on the path of improvement. I recall using the report to eliminate the confusion of on-time delivery … supplier thought our request date meant their ship date when it was our required dock date … the result as an overall 3 day reduction of our on hand inventory.
Doing the inverse of TCOP to measure your relationship with your customer works equally as well to reduce disturbances to flow and a cooperative attitude to reducing relationship overhead costs providing for a more competitive strategy.

Of course nothing can replace the importance of relationships with your suppliers, so encourage your senior leaders to spend time with them … but make sure you have good relationship measurement tool in place.

For a sample of a Supplier Performance Report you can contact Richard at rkunst@kunstartofsolutions.com.

Building a lean fulfillment stream: book review

2010-06-18T13:28:00.001-04:00

Too often, lean expertise is confined within the four walls of a manufacturing operation. While there is a growing awareness of the continuity of the value stream from each supplier to each customer all the way to the final customer, breaking silos has not been easy.

Robert Martichenko and Kevin von Grabe (Toyota alumni) founded the logistics company LeanCor to help their clients optimize their supply and fulfillment streams and make more money. Now they have authored a workbook-style tool, "Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream", published by the Lean Enterprise Institute, to help other companies see how that works. If it can do for the extended value stream what "Learning to See" and "Creating Continuous Flow" have done for inside the plant, the result could be dramatic indeed.

The workbook format makes "Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream" an action guide. A company could go a long way by just following the recipe and working through the instructions. They are detailed, and explain a lot of whys and wherefores that a cross-functional team would need for a common understanding of the subject. The improvement process prescribed for the lean logistics team is orderly and logical, following flow from customer back through the manufacturer to the supplier.

As you'd expect, the process includes a large-scale value-stream mapping exercise, and the workbook does a good job of explaining what information the participants must gather beforehand. The authors explain why each of those bits of data is important, and why some are different from traditional metrics. For example, inventory in its various locations is usually measured in dollars and efficiency evaluated in inventory turns. The book explains why calculating inventory in terms of the average number of days supply on-hand (ADOH) is going to be more useful, since that helps align takt time (cadence) from the customer's usage back through the system.

At first, it would seem impossible to value-stream-map the thousands of parts and paths that would be found in the extended enterprise. In practice, however, it turns out that you can learn much of what you need to know by choosing one stable part used in one stable product. As concepts are learned through the workbook’s improvement process, they are tried out, assessed, then applied to more and more products to bring processes under control.

Cost, the language of management
The workbook provides a structure for analyzing the total cost of fulfillment in a way that management may not have seen it before, but also in a way that can make management sit up and take notice. At every stage, the team can calculate how it can affect the total cost and communicate the effort's value to leaders. The team can use the concept of total cost of fulfillment to illuminate the impact of decisions to offshore, re-shore, or never-shore.

Perfect order execution and the 8 Rights in the fulfillment stream
The concept of perfect order execution is a bit more elaborate than the "what you need, when you need it, where you need it" of the Toyota Production System primer. The 8 Rights are:

Right quantity
Right product
Right place
Right time
Right quality
Right source
Right cost
Right service

Looking at the 8 rights leads to a method for quantifying execution through all the phases of the logistics value stream and exposing the cold, hard reality that when you do the math and multiply the imperfect percentage scores across the stream, the good service you think you're providing could be more like 9% than the 90% your current metrics show.

Although the workbook focuses on the single first pass of the value stream improvement process, it does address sustaining a continuous improvement approach. Although it's given only brief attention, it helps counter the impression some users might get from the simple workbook treatment that you can work through six chapters of a book and all will be done.

Using the book
The workbook lacks some simple features, like an index, that would have made it more useful to me. I skip over things as I read, then realize later that something was important, and I want to go back and re-read it. Without an index, I can waste a lot of time searching. A detailed table of contents and perhaps a glossary would be handy. All are "standard work" in textbook and professional book publishing that are being skipped too often these days. Fill-in-the-blank worksheets would be good tools for the team, both in the book for photocopying and online for customization and easy download.

The tabbed sections are helpful, but in the chapters that combine two functions like ship/receive/yard management and material ordering, you have some problems of consistency. For example, that chapter has two total cost of fulfillment charts rather than just one, as in other chapters. That repetition of the total cost of fulfillment chart is a key to the book's function as an action guide for improvement. Comparing the charts at each stage of the improvement project was important, but lost me at times. (Of course, I'm not working through the process in a real-life company.)

A single table showing the progression of total cost of fulfillment savings from one stage to the next compared to the current state shown after the first value stream mapping session would have made both a good overview of the improvement process and a capstone for summarizing the work the team has done. Small snapshots of the overall current and future state value stream maps in each section would help refresh the team on where its stage fits into the entire flow. That would continually reinforce stream thinking as the staged improvement process proceeds.

The workbook format has an inherent limitation -- it can't include everything, and I don't think it should. It must simplify. Yet even with some exposure to lean logistics at LeanCor and Toyota, I found it a bit difficult to absorb all the ideas in the book, and members of a cross-functional team attacking problems will come to the project with different levels of knowledge.

Some members of the core team should have broad, deep knowledge, and experience with lean and six sigma tools. A consultant to guide the process may also be necessary. Without that foundation, teams that just follow the workbook recipe are going to hit roadblocks and frustration, which can taint the process for years to come. The workbook doesn't make this need isn't made explicit in the workbook, and it doesn't provide a consolidated list of resources for delving more deeply into the subject.

Once I started reading another book, "Lean Six Sigma Logistics" by Martichenko and Thomas Goldsby, the underlying mechanisms of traditional management of inventory and transportation as well as how to improve them with statistical analysis and lean principles became much clearer. I highly recommend making this book a companion to the workbook. Another source that will provide more detail and examples is "Toyota Supply Chain Management" by Ananth Iyer, Sridhar Seshadri, and Roy Vasher. (If you're a member of AME, you can read my article about lean logistics at the Toyota distribution center in Mansfield Massachusetts in an upcoming issue of Target magazine for a snapshot of how the company manages its supply of service parts to dealers.

Overall, "Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream" ought to be in any lean leader's arsenal. It is authoritative, action-oriented, step-by-step, simple, timely, and results-focused. LEI is doing a great service by keeping its workbook series going, putting the means of improvement in the hands of the people who will do it.

Set-based design of capital-intensive manufacturing systems

2010-06-09T10:38:00.000-04:00

Robert Simonis, director of global lean manufacturing for a division of Lear, makes a living spending money -- big money -- designing and installing manufacturing systems around the world. At the end of the day, however, his capital investment decisions have to pay off for the company. As he’s seen how lean is affecting production thinking, he’s also become more and more conscious of the constraints imposed by upstream decisions made in product and process design.

Addressing a Detroit SME meeting last month, he said we don’t yet have good names for lean in the design of production processes and accompanying systems design. Product design has the “design-for” tools -- design for manufacturability, design for reliability, design for maintainability, and so on. But what would “design for lean” or “design for continuous improvement” be all about?

Process design was once the bailiwick of manufacturing engineering alone, to be done after the product design was tossed over the proverbial wall by engineering. Many traditional manufacturing engineering and process design rules are based on mass production. They anticipate large returns on capital investment once volume achieves the breakeven point, the point where costs are recovered and the payback period starts.

That scenario is right for high-volume production, yet Simonis said that it can result in some bad bets being placed. For one thing, demand, when it must be predicted years before the fact, determines designed-for capacity, which in turn determines size, speed, complexity and cost of the equipment selected. And in Simonis’s experience, demand is sometimes estimated way too high.

Traditional methods may cause process designers to greatly underestimate variation in demand. If they design enough capacity to handle the expected peak in year three and it doesn’t pan out, the result will be overbuilding and overspending.

Their $1 million robotic system might reduce labor by four workers, but the cost of capital may not receive enough consideration. Process designers and manufacturing engineers need better information about interest and other costs of servicing the debt on the capital investment. They need methods of process design for capital investment, taking in how long equipment is going to be used, recovery time, and payback time.

Circumstances turn on the question, “How do you anticipate the future?” Besides what traditional methods give process designers, there are a number of other variables in the real world that impinge upon how well a process design proves out:

    Speed to market
    Niche markets
    Mass customization
    Variation in mix
    Variations in volume (short term, week-to-week)
    Variations in volume (long term, annual)
    Risk to capital
    Cost of capital
    Automation vs. labor

Rather than following formulas, Simonis sees process design for lean in terms of several goals:
    Minimize total cost and risk
    Produce profit
    Satisfy customers, both external (buyers of final product) and internal (employees)
    Safe process
    Good product
    Stockholder/stakeholder interests
    Support frequent change

To disrupt old manufacturing engineering routines, Simonis said we need to start process design and development with a concept earlier -- soon after the product concept is developed, not after the prototyping and piloting happens.

Product:    concept→    prototype→    pilot→
Process:        concept→    prototype→    pilot→

Models that are often used to guide process design include replacing automation with low-cost labor, replacing people with machines, or outsourcing. In making decisions for where and how to produce a product, companies often believe that one of those models is the best practice. In Simonis’s experience, none of the three is necessarily the right strategy. Any one of them could be correct, depending upon circumstances.

To make better decisions, Simonis recommends turning to the concept of set-based design. His planning teams start decision making with a few scenarios. (Senseis say to start with seven sets, because the team usually has to really stretch to find that many, which stimulates creativity.) Which one will be the choice depends on the situation.

In set-based design, you start with multiple possibilities, develop them, and winnow them down:

----------\
---------- --------\
---------- -------- ---------\
---------- -------- --------- --------X
---------- -------- ---------/
---------- --------/
----------/

Simonis describes three that could apply:

Set A
The first option might be an integrated system capable of immediately satisfying estimated peak demand. The rule of thumb is usually to design for 85% of forecast. Simonis said his own experience suggests that the customer actually orders at 70% of forecast, so with the figure that comes from a financial model, you may have overcapacity. The fully-integrated manufacturing system has another problem. The more complex it is, the less the inherent efficiency, because any failure will stop the whole system and there are no substitutions. Over time, components stop operating the way they do when new, for example, conveyer performance tends to degrade rapidly

Set B
A second concept might be a U-shaped cell with modular components and flexible staffing. You may start with the assumption that the customer will take 70-80% of forecast. You will then have the option to add capacity only at bottlenecks, and subtract people on the downside of fluctuating demand rate. Of course, the plan will have problems if it doesn’t properly allow for rapid expansion if necessary.

Set C
The third scenario might be to design for many small cells. In fact, that gives you more opportunity for continuous improvement, because each cell will develop ideas to apply to each new one as you set it up with growing capacity. Your initial proposal will show lower but more consistent returns rather than a big return after breakeven is reached. As with B, contingencies like rapid demand expansion need to be anticipated.

Simonis favors considering the third approach, if not as a solution, at least as an alternative. Working it out among several scenarios before fixing minds on Set A will bring out ideas. Even if Set A is the choice, the idea generation in the process will likely make for a more flexible integrated system.

People ask why they should belong to a professional engineering or business organization. This meeting is an example of when local organizations do their best. Robert Simonis is a member with special expertise, sharing it with his fellow SME members, without any financial motive. If a membership fee of $100/year or so seems like a lot of money, do the math: it works out to less than $10 a month. And a meeting like this is priceless.

Robert Simonis is Director of Global Lean Manufacturing, Electrical Power Management Systems Division at Lear. His comments represent his own views, not any official statements of Lear Corporation.

Leadership, change, and the world of work

2010-06-08T10:38:00.000-04:00

I'm working on a couple of original pieces for Lean Reflections, but in the meantime, this compilation will have to suffice. (Feels kind of like cheating, though.) A few of my favorite lean and quality blog posts this week:

Transcending silos is a management power that is sadly lacking in most companies, but Jon Miller expands on a Newsweek article about Cisco Systems in his post, Leaders who think across silos.

Do sewing operators refuse to change? asks Kathleen Fasanella in her Fashion Incubator blog. She's implemented lean in a number of American apparel manufacturing settings, and analyzed many others. She knows they will change once they see that a properly set-up cell will get engagement. She gives a tip of the hat to Len Egan, who helped me write about how GoodGlove Inc. used lean to beat offshore competition making baseball gloves in Massachusetts for AME's Target magazine last month.

How it was... Download and read this for free... Work for Women Suggesting that women could become industrial designers, George Manson wrote in 1883, "Men still hold the best positions, and they receive large salaries, from $1,000 to $4,000 a year. In the present condition of affairs, hedged in as the female industrial designer is by the masculine doubt of the employer as to her ability, and the masculine jealousy of the employé whose work she seeks to do, it would be the best plan for her to do piece-work at her own home, or office." Manson describes other good careers for women such as feather curling, nursing, being a book agent, poultry raising, and button-hole making.

Take that, AT&T!

2010-05-30T11:37:00.000-04:00

For a few weeks now, people have been telling me that when they've tried to call me they got a busy signal, for hours. But some calls came through. Those who recall my last episode with AT&T, know that tackling them again could be more than I could stand. I remained in denial for some time, making a decision eventually to go to internet phone service. Not having had a problem with Comcast in at least 15 years, I finally broke up with the phone company.

The lady at Comcast, available after 7 pm on a Friday unlike our friends in the public service business, was properly sympathetic at my moaning about the phone company, and got me set up for my new service to be installed next Friday. Not instantaneous, but reasonable.

I had to have the decision verified by a "third party" -- a recording that got my name and had me state that I was the holder of the phone company account. It warned me not to hang up in the middle. Here's where I might run into trouble. While I've been a party to a phone company account for more than 30 years, and paid the bills myself, my account has always been in the name of a spouse. In a sense, I had perjured myself. My fingers are crossed that I don't go back to square one here. (There's a good story about Microsoft on this subject, but I'll save it for another day."

So if you've tried to call and haven't gotten through, e-mail me and I'll call you. In a week my heart will belong to Comcast - let's hope it doesn't get broken.

Management Improvement Carnival #98

2010-05-21T14:28:00.000-04:00

Once again, Lean Reflections gets to host the Management Improvement Carnival for Curious Cat. My picks include a look inside Toyota, lofty thinking about design of organizations, and on-the-ground mistaken beliefs encountered in a service setting:

LeanBlog Podcast #90 features Tim Turner, a plant team member at Toyota Kentucky, who compiled stories from 80 fellow team members from every level of TMMK organization about what it feels like to be part of Toyota.

Design Thinking -- Can Organizations be Beautiful? IDEO's Tim Brown ponders the aesthetics of an organization. What would a beautiful, innovative organization look like or feel like?

Daily Kaizen -- Understanding Demand Lee Fried works at Group Health Cooperative in Seattle, recently grappling with the belief that it is impossible to predict when the end customer is going need a service.

New: When you see a good blog post or article, vote it on John Hunter's Management reddit list. Let's all share daily.

From customer service problem to authentic social relationship

2010-05-20T13:47:00.000-04:00

Rather than post this as a comment on my previous post, Defects and Emotions, I decided to feature the response from Tomasso Melani Gori as a new one. I received a marketing followup from Tomasso and decided to just shoot back a note about my experience and a link to my blog. Tomasso's response is an outstanding example of forming a relationship from a problem...

Dear Ms. Wilhelm,

I really enjoyed reading your blog, that leads beyond the single experience to deeper emotions on how expectations, efforts and commitment do not always meet!

I’m extremely sorry that you did not share with us your concerns and disappointment right away. I’m exactly like you and I usually do not express my concerns nor I complain, so I do understand why you didn’t. But when I’m sitting on this side of the counter, please be sure that I never consider customers’ complaints as a bother, but on the contrary it’s a way to perfect what wasn’t and help us strive for the best quality we can deliver.

I can obviously offer you to return us the jacket anytime to fix the imperfection. If you decide so, please make sure to email me first, so that I can give you apposite instructions and avoid you problems with Italian Customs upon import to Italy.

I will take care of the seam and mail you back the jacket in no time.

Looking forward to hearing from you, I send you my very best regards,

Tommaso Melani

Tommaso Melani Gori, MBA
Marketing & Export Dept. manager
Scuola del Cuoio, Firenze
E-mail: info@ScuolaDelCuoio.com
www.ScuolaDelCuoio.com

Changeovers and art

2010-05-19T13:53:00.001-04:00

My friend Mike Thelen fielded a question recently that he agreed to share on Lean Reflections, so here it is...

Q: I have conducted two changeover events in the last month and in both cases, we were able to pull out the obvious waste but in the internal change, the tasks that the operators went through were highly technical and required lots of adjustments (Art). I know we teach to 'remove as much adjustment as possible' but I am stuck! We are setting a thread rolling machine to make high precision screws for aerospace. Tolerances are very close. One of the operators suggested that the way to improve the set-up was to get a new machine! Thoughts

A. I, too, have been working with Lean - for about 9 years now. Currently, I'm in a machining setting using similar equipment (thread rollers, thread grinders, lathes, mills, etc). Even with tolerances of +.005/-.000, it is a challenge. Inspection becomes critical and, although a true waste, is very hard to eliminate.

Why? Simply because if operation "A" has that tolerance, and the machine naturally drifts in the tolerance due to variations in material (not just piece to piece, but within the piece being machined itself - thus causing inconsistent tool/insert wear daily), it makes operation "B" (thread rolling or grinding) EXTREMELY difficult to set up without 1st piece and in-process inspection. Since the variation is inherent to the product and the processes, and the whole is run as a jobshop with different specifications and sizes running continuously through a machine, with different operators on each shift, as well as parts from different machines funneling through a single machine, you are left with testing/inspection as a standard part of your process. Would a new machine help? Maybe. Ours tend to be old, bought used, and run into the ground without a good TPM process. But, how would buying a new machine help when those practices aren't corrected?

I suggest - start by simplifying the inspection. Create standard work on the process of setup and inspection. Strive to build inspection processes that ALL operators can do within a timeframe (I guarantee one operator is very good and very quick, while some aren't good or quick!) You can make some reasonable setup reduction gains in the inspection process here.

Then build a strong TPM program. Why buy new machines when the operators and maintenance staff are just going to run them into the ground. This will also require educating the scheduling folks on the importance of routine maintenance.

Have the design folks work on the BEST specification (+anything / -0 is a STUPID design spec).

RETRAIN ALL operators to work toward the exact, not allowing +/- to get out of control - yes a little SPC. Again, I guarantee some work to hold the bottom of the tolerance, some work to the top.

Most importantly - remember this is NOT an overnight fix - no matter what your plant manager or GM thinks. EVEN WITH FULL SUPPORT - financially and culturally this will likely take years to complete. I've never worked in a facility that had full support both financially and culturally. When machines and processes are beaten down, $200.00 can't fix them...

Defects and emotions

2010-05-09T12:04:00.002-04:00

I went to Florence last week and fulfilled my dream of seeing the leather school at Santa Croce, and splurging on something made with care, the best materials (leather produced in Italy), and attention to detail. I picked out a leather jacket with a distinctive smocked effect. The sleeves were too long, but Vito assured me that they could shorten them immediately and I could pick the coat up that afternoon.

I agonized over how much it cost, being a very frugal person, and not given to buying the luxuries I often covet. This coat was producing a lot of deep feelings. Call me silly, but that's the truth.

When I picked up the coat, however, I noticed that the new seam on one of the sleeves was a tiny bit crooked and made an undesirable tuck in the smocked material. It's something most people would probably not notice, but I immediately felt a pang. I was in an emotional state, I was pressed for time, and I didn't want to complain. I wanted to believe that this was the most wonderful leather-working organization ever. My mind started working on how I could rework the piece myself without leaving needle holes showing.

I've gone through the "should haves" over and over again. I should have insisted on a coat without the defect, and waited a little longer or refused to take it. I'm not the only customer who has accepted a product with a defect and gone away disappointed and disillusioned about all the things an organization has done to create its reputation.

I felt so let down that I couldn't open the bag later to look at the coat. I took the unopened bag through the airline check-in and hand-baggage approval, through Italian customs to get my VAT refund approved, through numberless security checks, on two airplanes, through American customs, and home. It took me three days to open the bag and take out the jacket. All the feelings I wanted to have were crushed by this defect that they allowed and I accepted. I haven't cried over it, but I might.

This is an extreme reaction to a product defect, but think of all the people working in systems that allow defects to occur and how powerless they may feel to prevent them. No one comes to work to do a bad job. People get hardened to the knowledge that customers get defective products, but I think they have deep emotions tied to it.

That's why mistake proofing, quality at the source, training, and consistent standards are so important. Everything must be in place so the customer gets perfection. Every employee must be confident that they produce the best.

When it all works right, you can have the hearts and minds of employees and loyalty of your customers. When it doesn't, you betray them, and they know it.

Are you tracking 5S properly?

2010-04-23T09:26:00.001-04:00

Jon Miller of Gemba Panta Rei fielded a question this week about tracking a 5S "program." Jon raised a few questions of his own for those who may be relying on 5S as the keystone of their lean effort:

1. What is the purpose of the 5S program? You need to ask some "why"s about 5S in your operation. Is it merely good housekeeping, or a means to better safety or visual management? Or something else? You can't track what you don't understand.
2. How do we measure success of the 5S program? What's important right now and in the future to your reason for practicing 5S?
3. Based on this, what are we trying to track? From how clean is clean, to how committed employees are, what progress are we making and how do we know when we're there?

Jon goes on to explain what he sees as the importance of 5S and making measurement part of on-the-scene leader daily management.

Added to Jon's observations, which I will leave up to you to read, are several comments from Chris, Tim, Steve, and Pedro about how they have kept a finger on the pulse of 5S implementations in their experiences.

All in all, a quick thought starter for your next visit to the plant floor, because you will, of course, do that every day.

Good questions

2010-04-13T11:12:00.001-04:00

When it comes to posing nuanced and insightful questions on boards like LinkedIn, Joe says his seem to go unanswered rather than starting off meaningful dialogue. So I’m going to cite some that have caused some active discussion on various lean-related LinkedIn groups. Note that 30 responses is an awesome number, even on groups with tens of thousands of members.

Below: The name of the group, the question, which is usually expanded upon by the author, and the number of responses are:

AME: Which S, in 5S (or 6S), do you find to be the hardest to practice?, Ron Pereira, 20

Superfactory: How important is the 'people' link is in achieving a sustainable change with in an a organisation?, Allen Edun , 37 responses.

ASME: Why don't more people participate in your local ASME Chapter meetings and activities?, John Wilson, 39 responses.

SME: Do you agree with Ford's assessment of the manufacturing industry today?, Caitlin Campbell, 22 responses.

AME: Spreading the Lean Message, Karen Wilhelm, 27 responses.

AME: Toyota: where do we go from here?, Mark Gavoor, 48 responses.

Supply Chain Today: "Cost savings" vs "Cost avoidance". What is your take between the two?, Dave Waters, 87 responses.

Operational Excellence: Is Strategic planning necessary? Ralph Bateman, 29 responses.

IIE: How can lean be implemented in a hospital?, Gregory Uhlenhake, 21 responses.

Continuous Improvement, Six Sigma, and Lean Group: What are the "hallmarks of lean?, Phil Westwood, 18 responses.

Lean Six Sigma: Is a Gauge R&R meant to compare two different types of gauges?, David Weiser , 11 responses.

Lean Learning Center: Lean in R&D environment, Jason Dunklee, 32 responses.

Questions on basics are important, although it’s possible to sound like the professor giving the quiz when you know the answer. Questions played off opinions get good response -- I deliberately left out the thousands that got vocal about the Toyota product recall issue. Luck is an issue, whether the question was asked -- were there a lot of other questions coming in at the same time?

I like the exchanges that happen when someone needs to know the answer, is struggling with something he or she is missing the experience to understand or handle the issue. When mentors appear and help out the questioner, the process is really working. Even differences in opinion about the answer help by showing that sometimes there is no best answer.
Take this report for what it is, a cursory sampling of questions on a few continuous improvement LinkedIn groups. If it helps prompt more discussion online, that’s a good thing.

Join me in some subversive activities?

2010-03-30T15:13:00.002-04:00

There is endless conversation in the lean community about how "leadership" doesn't get it, or "accounting" doesn't get it, and so on...

It's true, but what are we doing about it? I got to thinking about the time I'm spending on so-called social media and thinking about how to use it to sell, and why we're not trying harder to sell lean itself. We do a lot of blogging and grouping and tweeting, but mostly preach to the choir.

How do we take the culture of social media, and use it to infiltrate groups unlike ours and spread some subversive ideas? I've written about "selling" on LinkedIn, and how learning is more important than getting clicks or pitching our services. I'd assert that pushing the lean message won't help, and could hurt.

In most LinkedIn groups, there's no barrier to entry. I've joined the CIO group, the IMA, and a couple of supply chain groups and general business groups. I can't spend all my time on that many groups, but I can check in from time to time and see if there are any discussions that could use a lean word or two. More important than mixing in the conversation, if I can hold back, is to read the comments and learn about the points of view represented. I can check the profile of someone with a set of beliefs that sound like they get it or don't and build a picture of job types and company types that are moving in the lean direction.

Sometimes when I add a comment with a lean slant (I often omit our buzzwords), other visitors add their lean-type experience. Or I can observe something like siloed thinking and ask about organizational boundaries.

Asking a sincere question can be better than commenting, but it's very easy to write a question that sounds canned, which implies some ulterior motive or other. There are a lot of people who join multiple groups, asking questions and getting in the conversation. They often ask the same question in different groups. Personally, it seems to me like they are engaging in self-promotion, not intelligent and respectful conversation.

Be careful. Imagine you're in the room with the other people you can see as active in the group and think how you'd ask them about what they think or do. By respectfully listening and learning, you also develop your understanding of where the "pain" is for people in their situations. When you encounter people in similar organizational niches, your ability to explain lean concepts in their terms will be better.

There are a lot of groups out there, many industries, many functional viewpoints. Mostly, they allow outsiders in. What's keeping us from walking in and meeting new people?

Picture credit: Alex Katz, The Cocktail Party, 1965

Innovations in innovation

2010-03-01T11:13:00.001-05:00

I was talking to Doc Hall yesterday about innovation, partly about how to frame an article about the subject for Target and partly digressing about the state of manufacturing and business. Doc thinks the way we do business is rooted in the past and about to crumble as the cracks in the foundation grow wider.

Innovation, for example, is hampered by patent processes and the extensive litigation often rising around them. Another barrier to innovators, he says, is that they may be brilliant at science and technology, but they don’t know how to create a business model that can succeed in the marketplace. You need both. Then licensing innovations by companies who can take an idea to market is made less attractive by inventors who offer only nonexclusive licenses to their product or technology.

Nathan Myhrvold, former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, along with some partners, founded a new company, Intellectual Ventures, betting on a new model of deploying innovation. He describes this in an article, “Funding Eureka,” in Harvard Business Review (you can download it from the IV home page). He foresees making a market in invention, liberating it from “charity funding” from the government and even from corporations that are more interested in development than research. He’s assembled (if I didn’t get this wrong in my quick scan of stuff) $5 billion to buy a portfolio of patents that has already generated $1 billion in licensing revenue. His plan gives me nightmares of selling shares in targeted portfolios that average out risk, then some financial innovator making a market in derivatives, the question of who rates risk, and a debacle like the mortgage-backed securities and their derivatives we’re still recovering from.

Another company that’s been working for the past several years to make a market in innovation is Yet2.com, led by Ben DuPont. (Yes, he’s one of those DuPonts, with business development expertise gained from work he did there. Could a trait for commercializing R&D be in the family genome?) Yet2.com is an online registry of technologies available for license, combined with “Tech Needs” from companies looking to buy innovation instead of making it or looking for a solution to a technology problem. One of the company’s innovations is a standardized “Tech Pak” that makes it easy to get the gist of what’s on offer by an inventor, what stage of development it’s at, and what research data comes with the license. DuPont and other colleagues are also starting to invest in promising innovations to bring them to market by adding their business acumen to research brilliance.

NASA Tech Briefs is a publication with a long history of trying to offer innovation produced by our tax dollars to private enterprise. It now has struck a deal with Yet2.com so that its database runs in the Yet2.com framework behind the Tech Briefs web search interface. You also get the NASA technologies through Yet2.com.

You can also troll the filings in the U.S. Patent Office if you’re of a mind to. It’s all online and there are, no doubt, intelligent bots constantly spidering the website for the benefit of anyone who wants to buy or sell innovation.

These are just a few models of market innovation in innovation. Much is driven by big companies, whose financial wizards are looking at intellectual property as a collection of assets that can be “monetized.” Corporate research often turns up a promising project that just doesn’t fit their core business. Until recently, those patents, data, and even business plans have sat fallow in the vault, with no ROI, but protected from competitors wishing to bring the same idea to market. They’re asking why, and answering, why not earn some money from them?

There are also the little guys, inventing a product they believe in, but not having the resources or knowledge to take it to market. TV is full of reality shows that put inventors into competition with one another for the chance to pitch their ideas to people with money. Some companies are starting to follow the online communities that are emerging among inventors, but it really remains small potatoes and a field for all sorts of “services” to offer would-be moguls.

I have a few questions. Where’s the opportunity for lean companies freeing up capacity or lean experts who are now free agents to mine these innovation resources? If they don’t have the resources for R&D, can’t they just buy it in the new innovation market? Can they base an entrepreneurial start-up on someone else’s innovation? Would they even want to? I’d hypothesize that they ought to have an advantage over non-lean entrepreneurs, even if they invest in nonexclusive licenses.

These models all seem to fit into the emerging philosophy of Open Innovation growing out of the open-source software movement. How will it take shape? How is the money going to flow?

Food for thought.

Speaking of culture...

2010-02-07T10:37:00.002-05:00

I just read this article about a Japanese manager from Deloitte Touche who is working in India after visiting many times and wishing to live there. He got his wish, but realized that he didn't really feel the culture until he got to know people who were part of it. A lesson for managers who think they know their company's culture, but don't really get it until they spend time at the gemba.

The story is in the Economic Times of India....

Adjusting to the Indian Kaizen

and obviously the title tells us we don't know all we think we know about the meaning of kaizen in the Japanese mind.

Social media experience changes thinking

2010-02-06T10:57:00.001-05:00

It's slow, but a new medium changes old thinking, including my own, like any experience with a new way of doing things, including lean.

In my old marketing paradigm, I would think of using social media like LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook to "drive" readers to my blog, my product, or membership in my organization. But users socializing in these venues are independent-minded and not about to be driven anywhere.

I'm not going to use marketing-speak when communicating in social media, because in this world, people are immune to pitches. If I'm sincerely sharing feelings someone relates to, or opinion someone can either agree or disagree with, if that makes them interested, engages their emotions even just a little, they may choose to follow my path to something I've suggested might be of value to them at the moment.

The obvious dawned on me--I didn't just know it; I felt it. It's social, stupid! Our emotional brain is at work, not our thinking brain. Yes, we may be inviting someone to an article or website with facts and rational arguments that may even result in a sale from time to time, but the invitation is personal, even if it goes to a lot of people.

Four levels of "selling" on LinkedIn

2010-01-12T12:43:00.001-05:00

You're hearing everywhere that you can't do business without Twittering, being on LinkedIn (LI) and Facebook, starting your own online community -- anything dubbed Web 2.0.

Let's not take it so seriously. I'll give you my take on social networking to expand business.It's based on no actual research, but I have collected comments from members of a number of LinkedIn groups about what constitutes discussion and what does not.

LI discussions are like being at a party, chatting about work and problems you're grappling with, then along comes someone bragging in a loud voice, wearing a sandwich board advertising a product or service, shaking hands and passing out brochures. You hope he won't barge into your discussion or that she leaves soon. They obviously don't get how to act at a social gathering, you think, and couldn't someone explain it to them?

I manage the AME LI group and delete "discussions" that feel like advertising every day. I e-mail most of the people who post them and explain why I have deleted their posts. Since I stretch the definition of "News" pretty far, so I usually ask them to re-post the message there. Sometimes, as Gilles and Roger did last week, they ask for advice on how to present their message in a more acceptable way.

We stumble because what we learned about marketing is useless in social media. That approach doesn't belong at the party. I find my own posts need a lot of editing to get rid of the marketing overtones. We're all trying to figure it out.

I suggest a four-level approach to marketing yourself, your product, your service, or an idea on social networking sites like LinkedIn. Here's how the steps progress:

1. Credibility and recognition.
2. Talking about yourself.
3. Selling.
4. Shortcuts.

It's a slow, careful, intuitive, and indirect process based on pull. If you want to move faster, skip to #4. Better to buy an ad than to be perceived as someone barging in with that loud voice and sandwich board.

1) Credibility. At the party, you respond to a conversational topic or open one yourself. People can share or just listen. It becomes clear who knows their stuff, who has experience, and who asks good questions. The same is true in a social network discussion. Every time you speak, your picture and name are displayed -- your face and your name tag -- and you make your impression, for good or ill. You can build credibility among your peers as people in the group get to know each other, even taking their discussion offline to e-mail, phone calls, or face-to-face meetings.

2) Revealing. At a party, you wait until it's appropriate to talk about yourself. Usually it's when someone asks. The way it works in social media is that, as your credibility evolves, people click though to your profile page. They choose to find out as much or as little about you as they want to know and you want to share.

On your profile page, you describe your strengths, what you do best and want to do more of. You share your work history and what value you've provided to your employers. You show the progression in your career, greater responsibilities, more expertise. You get recommendations from people you've worked with and give them recommendations as well. (Don't try to game the system, keep it honest.) Include your picture.

I see a lot of profiles. Some read like a press release. Some read like a resume. Some have more personality. I don't have a particular opinion on that except to avoid being frivolous -- it depends on the persona or brand you are presenting. If writing is not your strength, get help and feedback before you post. No matter how good your writing is, proofread! You'd be amazed how many people show up at the online "party" with egg on their tie or toilet paper on their shoe. It's enough to make an editor lose her mind.

On your LinkedIn profile, you subtly open the door to the selling process when you post a link to your website or your blog. Does your visitor begin to respect and trust you even more? That's the person who may want to know about your company or, best case, is in need of the product or service that feeds your bottom line.

3. Selling. Now that the self-selected trusting and interested potential customers are on your website, you are perfectly free to talk about your product, features, case studies, and anything else your website strategy deems important. Continue the trust-based relationship by offering white papers, having effective ways for people to contact you and simply discuss problems. It's OK to give away information. Make it easy to contact you.

4. Shortcuts. Use the "News" section to announce your webinars, blog posts, new products, and so on. These posts are not discussions, even if they end with "what do you think?" And, as I mentioned, you can buy a pay-per-click ad, highly selective about what audience it shows up for.

How do you know what's working? It helps if you can have a "do good, and good will come to you" philosophy. You can get data, but be careful about what conclusions you draw. If you start a discussion you can see how many comments it draws. If you post a news item, you will see how many views it gets compared to others. Look at the difference between items that garner 50 views vs. those that get 5. That gives you a shadowy indication of how effective your voice is.

What's the best outcome of social networking? You learn. You learn about the problems people have, and the pain or frustration it causes them. You could learn about a widespread diversification opportunity. Learn what's new in the market you are tapping through your social networking. Is your product or service as great as you think it is? It takes humility.

And what about lean? Well, you have two different markets, the doers and the decision makers, with different needs and motivators. Online or on site, in an email or in the elevator, look at the four steps.

Credibility and recognition -- prove lean's value in a pilot. Speak in the language your customers use. Don't use the word lean if it creates resistance. Comment on strategic planning, if that's the lingo, not hoshin kanri. Continuous improvement, not kaizen. Making work easier, not 5S.

Revealing. Let people know who you are, what you've done, but in an appropriate way. Look for pull.

Selling: Find the pain and embed an emotional dimension to your message. Have the facts and figures for the engineers and financial folks. Tell stories. Offer to help. Decisions have many dimensions.

Shortcuts: Be careful. There might not be any.

2009 Management Carnival from Lean Reflections

2009-12-31T09:53:00.001-05:00

John Hunter, the Curious Cat, proposed that we share our favorite posts from 2009, so I'm pitching in...

Lean bloggers have been influential forces in my lean journey. When I first discovered some of the following blogs, I hesitatingly started adding my comments. When they were received with respect, I found more blogs and entered more conversations, learning from bloggers as well as other commenters. Then I thought, "If I'm going to be involved in web publishing, I'd better learn how to use this blog thing." My Lean Reflections blog was met with encouragement from my new blogpals.

Since then, I've turned to these same blogs and bloggers, plus many who have joined us, for background, ideas, details, and case studies for articles. A community made up of learners and teachers has evolved around our lean blogs, weaving them together. John Hunter's Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival exemplifies how we recognize the best contributions of our fellow bloggers.

So here are nods to just a few of my favorites:

Jon Miller's Gemba Panta Rei
Because Jon was raised in Japan and he reads and speaks Japanese, he brings us news and insights that we would otherwise miss. His bicultural perspectives, and his own lean experience and knowledge comes through in all his posts.

How to use lean to achieve bottom line results
Heather asked Jon about the bottom line, so he provides several ways to communicate with the CFO by quantifying the dollar value of potential lean scenarios, including one for declining sales. Then he refers to another blogger, Lee Fried, who says he refuses to discuss ROI at all. Nicely balanced article for lean leaders who don't realize they are failing to use the right language with financially-oriented managers.

The advantages of A1 over A3 thinking
Jon says it's better to find a whiteboard the size of A1 paper (594 x 841 mm) than to hunt around for a piece of 11" x 17" paper for A3 problem solving. (Why do we let such obscure terminology persist?) The whiteboard allows more people to work together to explore a PDCA approach. Standing rather than sitting gets the juices flowing. While there's the temptation to cram more information in the larger space, Jon says to write big and make the board visible from across the room. Seven more people commented with their experiences using the larger format, with some dissension about what Jon asserts. When a post prompts comments, that's the sign of success.

The positive tension between SMART and stretch goals
In a hoshin planning session with a client, Jon was asked about the seeming conflict between stretch and SMART goals. He says, "Stretch goals are meant to be ambitious, challenging and out of reach according to the current ways of working. SMART goals are by definition narrowly scoped and individually and discretely attainable." This leads into a new definition for "STRETCH" that integrates its positive tension with SMART, highlighting the capacity building that raises performance to new levels.

Joe Ely's Learning about Lean
Joe's blog may be the first I ever followed. He always sounds humble, and you'd never know about his long and deep experience in lean thinking and practice. Joe's posts are neither frequent or lengthy, but always engaging.

You go to the "gemba"--then what?
Joe says, "Had a useful walk through our production areas today. And it hit me, just what was I looking for? Where were my eyes going? What was attracting my attention?" There were the usual physical attributes, but Joe outlines three ways to tap into the human factors.

How do we learn?
Our mental model of learning is a point-to-point series of steps, but Joe explains how he's started to see it as a circular model, continuously learning more about what he already knows. Joe says, "Depth comes from repetition. Don't be afraid of it."

Hal Macomber's Reforming Project Management
Much of Hal's work is in the construction industry, where the revolution in applying lean is the collaboration of project partners, usually including contractors and subcontractors, to achieve a realistic project plan in a synchronized just-in-time manner, making each phase job-ready for the next contractor to start at the right time. Everyone has projects, however, and Hal's insights into making them successful can help project teams of all types continuously improve their performance.

Lean project implementation is not adoption
Hal talks about how daily experience should influence behaviors to create new attitudes and approaches to work, and how that's worth much more than lean programs and initiatives. He says that each little difference from expectations is exactly that opportunity to learn what we need to learn. Because lean means individuals adopting new behaviors, there's really nothing to "implement."

Last Planner(R) System for Project Delivery
This "lens" references several that examine the Last Planner lean project management system. It has now been validated in hundreds of major projects, especially as construction companies are setting themselves apart from their competitors by using LPS. I strongly recommend exploring these ideas to see how they could be applied to your work.

Don't forget that commenting on blog posts does more than give feedback to the author. It prompts dialogue from people around the world with similar interests but diverse viewpoints. Join the conversations!

Joy, hope, and lean

2009-12-28T14:52:00.001-05:00

This time of the year, we look back and reflect, then look forward and plan. Goals, achievements, cost savings, and all that stuff. We want our timetables, training schedules, and reports to move our lean agendas forward.

But I think it's joy and hope that propel continuous improvement. We're just humans, with primitive brains that run on emotions more often than on facts and figures. Is Toyota's "respect for humanity" more than mere politeness and listening? Doesn't it tap those deeper feelings?

I'm reminded of a story that Joe Sensenbrenner, quality expert and mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, some twenty years ago, told me about bringing continuous improvement to city government. He required that all managers, including chief of police Dave Couper, attend Dr. Deming's series of lectures. Joe described the chief striding into the hall, in uniform, gun on his hip, not happy about listening to something that he felt had little to do with police work. Dr. Deming stood at the front of the room at an overhead projector, marker in his hand, as the chief sat down.

Then Dr. Deming wrote down one word and the chief's face changed completely. The word was "joy."

As Dr. Deming continued to explain a new view of quality of product and service, Dave Couper's view of police work was overturned. From command, control, and threat of force, be began to see the police force as part of the community, creating relationships, and helping people in crisis. Sure, there were still criminals who had to be arrested, and community policing did not cure all ills.

Dave Couper went on to take the practice of community policing to many other cities, improving communities one police officer at a time. It all began with that one word, joy.

Maybe we should take time to remember a moment when we felt that joy in our practice of lean. It could have been when employees came to a pilot cell and ask for help to implement 5S or visual control in their areas of the plant. It could have been when you were in the midst of a project and saw the light turn on in someone's mind. It could have been that moment of celebration when your team solved a difficult problem.

What's been your moment of joy?

Want to find energy savings? Look up...

2009-12-17T09:32:00.001-05:00

Buildings use something like 30% of the energy consumed in this country. We already know that continuous improvement means a lot of small things adding up to something bigger.

So try this end-of-year activity -- while you walk through your office, cafeteria, rest rooms, and production floor, look up at the HVAC exhaust vents. I'll bet you'll find the grids clogged with dust, blocking full flow of air through your system. It's an easy fix, just brush or vacuum out the dirt. Even if you discover you need complete duct cleaning, vacuuming the ducts is a small improvement you can make now.

Don't have the maintenance staff to tackle the big job? Here are a few things to ponder: Is exhaust vent cleaning on a regular maintenance or cleaning service checklist? Does this point out a need to review resource deployment? Do you have proper equipment for doing the job? Do you do a good job in the plant but not in the offices and common areas? What's the effect on morale when people notice crud in their workplace? What's the effect on employee health when air isn't circulating the way your calculations say it is? What's the effect on production equipment to have air and heat circulation impeded? What's the effect on efficiency and energy consumption of your HVAC systems that have to work harder to pull the amount of air they're designed for?

Let's all breathe a little easier in 2010, and save money while we're doing it.

AME Social Media Council update

2009-12-14T11:31:00.000-05:00

Lately, a lot of my time has been spent roaming the web. But it is in pursuit of a goal. Scott Schiave, AME’s director of marketing, asked me to chair a group of volunteer members—the Social Media Council of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence—to raise awareness of the association, provide more value to members, and in doing so, grow membership.

Responding to member feedback about a need for more online interaction, AME has been building its own social media space—AMEConnect. At the same time, platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube have been hailed as the secrets to success in Web 2.0, whatever that is.

Here’s a quick report on what the Council is doing:

It all happened through networking
We have a talented group of manufacturing professionals on the Council: Richard Lebovitz, Laura Cibulsky, Jason Semovoski, and I are the current core members.

Both LinkedIn and Twitter helped us recruit our council. Laura joined the Council after I posted on the AME LinkedIn group’s job page aone requiring a lot of work , no pay, but offering visibility among active manufacturing leaders. She applied and has become the voice behind AMEConnect on Twitter. Most of her posts link to current news articles and blog posts of value to our Twitter followers.

Current state in September
In assessing AME’s current state on social media sites, we discovered two spontaneously founded LinkedIn groups that we had to combine, using LinkedIn’s disappointing process.

There was also an AME team testing the beta version of AMEConnect. It included Becky Morgan and Ken Rolfes, who are now ex-officio members of the Council. Lea Tonkin of Target magazine is a member, tying us to both content and making Target a print medium for spreading the word about our online networks. Scott, plus Rene Ryan and Ashley DeVecht from the consulting group are also Council members.

Becky Morgan let us know that she had created a Twitter keyword (“hashtag”) for the October conference. I began to see Jason Semovoski using the hashtag to help promote the conference. Jason and I became mutual followers and started direct messaging about the conference and AME’s social media plans. Jason was already much savvier at using the various social media tools and agreed to join the Council.

Current state in December
As of now, I’m managing LinkedIn, Laura has Twitter, Jason has YouTube, and Richard has SlideShare. Facebook is on the back burner. I think we need a strategy for interacting with blogs too. All these channels have to refer to each other and integrate AME’s message and value. They are meant to prepare the way for the proprietary AMEConnect platform

Future state
The idea is for each Council member to adopt a “channel” and build an AME presence there, integrating and coordinating the networks. We’ve made the most progress on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Will the experiments yield the desired results? We don’t know until we try, learn from mistakes, and try again. One thing we know—if the customer pull isn’t there, we’re barking up the wrong tree. But the way things are now, there’s always a new tree to bark at.

Join AME (Association for Manufacturing Excellence) on LinkedIn. Follow @AMEConnect on Twitter.

Lean team competes with Asia--and wins

2009-11-23T13:52:00.001-05:00

Mity-Lite makes chairs and tables for auditoriums, conference venues, and other gathering places. Its newest product, the Mesh One chair, is expected to be a game-changer. 20% lighter than most other chairs, it can support a 1,000-lb. load. It’s thinner and takes less storage space. Its durable, breathable rip-stop nylon mesh seat and back conform to the shape of the sitter. For even more comfort, it’s 1.5 inches wider than most other chairs in its market.

As manufacturing planning for the Mesh One chair progressed, however, it looked like it would have to be built offshore to meet cost targets. That’s when a continuous improvement team came forward and asked to bid on the job. Or that’s what the Salt Lake City Tribune said.

To find out if that was true, I spoke with CEO Randy Hales a few days ago about what really happened. He said, “I had faith that the team could get there eventually, but our continuous improvement plan was new and the teams only had about four months of experience with it. I just thought that it was early for them. But they came and said, ‘We want to bid on this project competitively, just like the factories in Asia.’ They submitted their bid and won the business.”

Hales said, “They had done their homework well--facts and figures. They knew what we would have to spend in order to upgrade facilities. They had a plan as to how they would get there. They felt confident but there was no guarantee, where our Asian teams were saying, ‘No problem, we’re there, turn it on tomorrow.’”

Hales said, “We’ve asked this group to go through a continuous improvement process. We’ve challenged them to make significant differences, and now they’re coming to us saying, ‘We can do this.’ It wouldn’t support what we’d asked them to do if we didn’t give them a shot. They had convinced us that they could, on paper. But there was a fair amount of risk. There’s a big gap between making it look good on paper, and practically applying those principles and being able to do it.”

Hales continued, “They’ve done a fantastic job. They were so motivated to make sure they did everything that they set out to accomplish to prove that it could be done. I knew that there was some risk, but it was minimized by their level of interest.”

Not only did the team have the passion and the desire, they were also able to speak the language of finance. The decision makers would consider the complete cost of manufacturing and procuring the product, its total landed cost. Hales said “A big component of the decision was lead time, cycle time, carrying cost of inventory, communication hassles. While you can’t put a dollar figure on the communication challenges, it certainly plays into the whole perspective when you are evaluating things like that.”

The lean team considered all those criteria. Hales said they were very well prepared to make their case. Coupled with his desire to support them in what they had been asked to do, the team’s thorough homework won them the job.

Production of the chair is still in the early stages. Hales said, “Outside suppliers have some capacity constraints on some of the components, but our team is right on target with everything they said they would do. We’re still a couple dollars high on our labor content, but that’s a function of volume, and we believe that we’ll get all of our targets in November.”

So how did Mity-Lite’s leadership and front-line employees get on the same page so effectively?

Before taking the helm at Mity-Lite, Hales had seen the results of lean initiatives in manufacturing facilities around the world. Nevertheless, his view was from an arm’s length perspective, leaving the improvement process to others. He describes one reason for that distance as “Not feeling like I could contribute, I was standing back and watching and saying ‘Hey, you guys go do it.’”

Hales began to think differently as he talked to others who had undertaken similar transformations. Then what he heard when he arrived at Mity-Lite gave him his “aha” moment. Employees had already gone through two failed attempts at lean. They described senior management saying, “Go do that and let us know how it goes.” Employees told Hales they didn’t feel like they had the commitment of senior management. Management didn’t understand why changes had take place in the facility, sometimes with some capital required.

This brought home to Hales that it’s very difficult to go through a transformation if senior management isn’t committed and doesn’t understand what’s going on. He saw that management needs to help set the metrics, work on the plan, and watch what happens. He says, “I wanted to be very involved, hands-on, with the sleeves rolled up, and to be part of the planning process and execution.”

Even with his involvement, Hales saw the need for day-to-day operational leadership. He believed that the problem with earlier attempts at lean was that it was more a textbook understanding of lean, not a practical application. He visited facilities that Don Blohm had taken through a lean transformation. As he understood what Blohm could do, he said, he knew he was the right man for the job. Blohm came on board and, with Hales, began to guide the company’s continuous improvement journey.

Lean practices are quickly spreading throughout the company. Hales said, “It started out as an isolated group on a small project or two. But it spread so quickly through our facilities that we found people saying, ‘Hey, we want to do this. We want to be a part of it.’ We’re hearing great things, we’re seeing big changes. It has moved through our entire facility. And were hitting on all fronts. There isn’t an aspect of our domestic manufacturing any longer that isn’t in the middle of a continuous improvement.”

Hales said the people in the office and administrative areas are starting to hear the rumblings. “That’s going to be a focus of ours in 2010,” he said. “We started with our G&A team, and it’s been fun to watch. They are now completely paperless. So we’ve started to take some steps, but a true continuous improvement emphasis in the front office will take place early next year. “

Create your own economic recovery

Hales sees continuous improvement as a way out of the current business doldrums. He said, “Any under-optimized company--and in my mind that is any company that that hasn’t gone through a continuous improvement program--has the responsibility to create their own recovery. Rather than waiting on a macroeconomic recovery, we should be creating our own recovery, regardless of what’s going on in the economy right now.

“We have doubled our EBITDA in the last twelve months. Every bit of that is due to the continuous improvement and lean transformation and becoming more efficient. You can do that if you really embrace what continuous improvement means, and you get it implemented accurately. All companies are disadvantaged if they are not focused on this kind of transformational change right now.”

An unabashed trial balloon from Ontario's HPM Consortium

2009-11-15T10:09:00.000-05:00

Every week, my friend Dave Hogg sends me the HPM (High Performance Management) Consortium newsletter, which recently included a thought-provoking topic pondered by the organization’s board. Their conclusions are well worth thinking about because the HPM consortium includes some of Ontario’s companies that are the most experienced in continuous improvement. Dave also asks for feedback, so be sure to comment here or send him your own two cents.

This is a summary of the board’s discussion:

How can we provide our workforce with the skills needed to achieve enhanced accountability and performance that results in assured execution?’ In short – training to provide conversation and crucial confrontation skills to achieve results reduce stress, training that would enable our people to confront opposition or attitudes in ways that generate successful and supported conclusions. We do know that agreements that are not win-win are not sustainable so what kind of training might we consider?

Some initial considerations/thoughts:

1. The training’s duration will be as long as it needs to be to get skills delivered... there is no room any more for feel-good courses.

2. We have learned that hands-on learning sticks - and generates results.

3. One idea to consider is a two-day format with a month or more in between to try out the lessons learned in the workplace.

4. In addition, the training would be linked to the managers and leaders in the areas to ensure the support needed to drive what has been learned.

5. You add the rest... or dispute the above… ;o}

6. What would the training content look like?

Promises broken, deadlines missed, expectations not met, inappropriate behavior – all lead to tension and conflict in the workplace. The impact is wide ranging – high turnover, decreased productivity, increased absenteeism, poor team morale, lower work quality, toxic work environment.

Today’s fast-paced work environment requires full employee engagement and a culture of accountability. Tension cannot be allowed to fester. How a leader or manager addresses the underlying conflict is a determinant of his success as a leader. However, addressing these conflicts can be uncomfortable or can even make the situation worse if not handled well.

The course would need to explore the issues of interpersonal conflict in the workplace and provide participants with the skills to confront conflict in a way that addresses the issue in a direct but safe manner, strengthens work relationships, builds accountability, and boosts corporate culture.

Outcomes: Upon completion, participants will:

· Recognize conflicts ingredients and characteristics
· Understand the four types of conflict behaviors
· Know the importance and benefits of developing conflict competency
· Address the three dimensions of resolution
· Defuse hostility and prevent escalation
· Adapt your personal conflict management style to different situations
· Assess assumptions, perceptions and expectations in conflict situations
· Use a proven technique to hold difficult conversations that get results
· Recover effectively from a conflict situation.

If the balloon is to fly?

1) Email your thoughts and comments now to: dhogg@hpsinc.ca
2) Rate its importance from 1(None) to 10.

Eight ideas for improving healthcare in Michigan

2009-11-03T07:57:00.001-05:00

Business leaders, doctors, healthcare executives, and government leaders filled 50 roundtables and brainstormed how to improve healthcare and cut costs in the region at Crain’s Detroit Health Care Leadership Summit October 15. They produced what Crain’s called Eight Big Ideas.

These include the usual: The technology solution--online health information exchange. The up-supply solution—more primary care providers. The reduce demand solution--make people live more “healthily”--financial incentives for employees to lose weight and quit smoking. The rule of law solution--Michigan should mandate health care price transparency. The down-supply solution--Reduce overcapacity of some facilities.

But Idea 6 shows that lean (but don’t call it that) has gained some traction: “Use skills developed by auto industry engineers to improve efficiencies and streamline processes of hospitals and physician offices to improve quality and reduce costs.”

To me, that’s the root-cause solution.

More: Want greater depth? Click here for the complete unedited speech. NOTE: the unedited speech is 34 minutes long. Other session videos are included on the page.

Reinvent now

2009-10-29T15:42:00.002-04:00

I have a real reason for you to come to Detroit next week. There’s a supply chain workshop for the wind turbine industry going on (American Wind Energy Association and NextEnergy) and it presents opportunities you may not have thought of.

Leaving aside the question of whether wind is better than coal or solar better than gas, wind turbines are going up fast. Well, sort of fast. The wait for a turbine, I hear, is measured in years. A case where demand is greater than supply.

There are at least three hard-hit industries I can think of that should be jumping at the chance to go to this conference—automotive suppliers, machine tool builders, and companies like Caterpillar that build mining and construction equipment.

Just one turbine contains 8,000 components: metal parts, sensors, hubs, rotors, blades, shafts, and tower sections. That’s a lot of value added, and the turbine manufacturers aren’t going to do it all themselves.

So what capabilities do you have that you can leverage to enter the industry?

First, you need a record of building highly reliable products from design to serviceability. It’s no simple matter to repair a wind turbine, and catastrophic failures are not unknown. And achieving reliability requires lubrication systems, electronics, remote maintenance information systems, and other stuff I know nothing about.

Related to reliability is quality. Do you have six sigma expertise embedded throughout your company? GE is one of the big time OEMs, and they speak six sigma there. Auto suppliers have tremendous talent in this area, and if you need it, the industry has released a flood of talent. Find those folks now, before the improving economy absorbs them.

Wind turbines have some REALLY BIG THINGS in them. That’s where some machine tool builders and makers of big equipment should be looking, not waiting for their old markets to return. Really big parts require expertise in metallurgy, casting, forging, heat treating, welding, testing, and traceability. How about rolling 17-ton seamless rings more than 7 meters across. What about forging 18-ton shafts?

Know how to make castings? A wind turbine can use 10- to 25 tons of ductile iron castings, from less than 100 to more than 50,000 lbs each. A rotor hub can weigh 36,000 lbs and measure 15 ft in diameter. I don’t have to give you details of the extreme attention to metallurgy and casting quality required here. Forming parts from specialized alloys is not easy.

Castings large and not-so-large will need machining. What turbine parts are about the size of a vehicle engine block? Just asking.

Fasteners. 500 bolts per turbine, then pins, washers, studs—you name it. Need I say more?

The publicized call for suppliers doesn’t say they should understand lean, TPS, kaizen, continuous improvement, or six sigma. However, you can bet the companies with the strongest grasp of lean will be able to gain the edge. They should be able to make parts with lower cost and higher quality. They should be a source of manufacturability knowledge. They should be able to innovate in the area of materials and methods, transferring them from other industries. They should be able to deliver on time. They should be able to galvanize a workforce to achieve great things.

Money. OK. You need to invest in new capital equipment, make sure your software aligns with that of customers and vendors in the industry, redouble your training efforts, enter an industry that you don’t already feel comfortable in. And you’re tapped out. That’s where the AWEA conference and workshop comes in. It involves bringing the latest news from Washington, state economic development agencies, sources of information about tax credits. You can get a big gulp of information about the industry. You can meet potential customers and learn how they see their needs evolving.

In more news from Detroit, it looks like Zug Island (if you ever lived here, you’ll chuckle now) will clean itself up and become the home of a research center that could change the game. The vision is to develop a 15-20 mw turbine (current turbines are more like 1.5 mw). NextEnergy and a flock of companies, agencies, governments, universities and other organizations are looking for mega-money, and might just get it.

Crain’s Detroit Business says NextEnergy has talked with more than 1,000 auto suppliers about getting into the wind industry. I wish I knew what the outcomes have been.

States like Michigan are not going to be able to turn a switch and “retool” the economy. You’re going to do that. Innovative and adaptive manufacturing leaders are going to move up and build an industry. Question is, will you be with them?

It's broke and there's nobody to fix it.

2009-10-18T12:07:00.003-04:00

There should be a special place in Hades for software engineers who believe users think just like they do. (Did you ever think "user" has a disdainful ring to it -- like somebody who uses drugs or uses people?)

If you found the culprit, I can imagine the conversation, "Oh, it doesn't work? Just do this thing with that. Did you..." Like you're supposed to know. Online help writers are no better.

If you're not making things simple enough for your mom or grandmother to understand, you don't know how to communicate. There's an app for that. Bring in a usability expert to review your work and teach you about how non-engineers think.

If you're not testing things to the bulletproof stage, you're not testing enough. There's an app for that. Bring in a reliability engineer to test your work and teach you about the principles of reliability.

Right now I'm in a sync Twilight Zone, trying to get my calendars to agree using PocketMac for BlackBerry. I uninstalled it and reinstalled it and it still churns on and on. Google Sync won't work either. It thinks my radio connection is turned off.

Software developers take note! I'll be Tweeting error messages that I either like or find incomprehensible. Try to learn something about ordinary people.

Capacity planning and community health

2009-10-15T13:05:00.003-04:00

Are you thinking about getting a flu shot to protect against the ordinary seasonal flu, or are you distracted by all the talk about H1N1? People with flu symptoms in the coming months are going to test the capacity of the healthcare system. And why, if it's so easy to prevent? Not only do you protect yourself from being sick, but you eliminate yourself as an infection vector with the potential to geometrically increase the number of flu victims.

Last year was the first time I got a flu shot. It's inconvenient. You have to find out where to get one. You have to let someone hurt you. It's easy to procrastinate.

You don't know if you have to make an appointment with your doctor to get your shot. Do you go to the county health department immunization clinic? Can you get one at the drugstore or the grocery store.

What day is flu shot day? What time? What will it cost?

This year, Target created capacity and customer service by offering flu and pneumonia shots at their pharmacies. I called to ask when they'd be giving them, and the pharmacist said, "Whenever you want."

So today I went there, not wanting to trade viruses with hundreds of people at the AME conference next week. It was mid-morning and no other customers were waiting at the pharmacy counter. An associate responded to my request right away. It did take time -- I don't know how value-added it was -- to fill in a customer health questionnaire and for the associate to put the data into the computer. (You get to pick your own color container for any prescription medications so they don't get mixed up with those of other family members at home -- poka yoke.)

Once that was done, a fellow came around the counter to a little alcove partitioned off and we sat down on the two chairs that were there. He asked what arm I wanted to get the shot in, or if I wanted one in each arm. He talked very approvingly of me for getting the immunizations. It cost about $30 for each shot.

Yes, Target is accepting that they are paying a qualified person (nurse?) to stand around when there are no other customers for the shots. (Excess capacity) But by making them available at any time Target is better matching demand and leveling work than a site that is open once or twice a month. Target is providing a public health service that will keep more poeple well throughout the winter.

Do you think of capacity as something to minimize in every instance? Maybe some excess capacity would be an advantage in ensuring flow in your office or factory. Especially when it comes to people. Wrong-headed layoffs may be hurting companies more than they know.

HBS study of corporate silos

2009-10-13T15:23:00.002-04:00

We know that organizations have silos that hamper the development of a leaner enterprise, but is there a way to quantify and understand what's happening within and across divisions and subgroups?

Harvard Business School postdoctoral fellow Adam M. Kleinbaum, and professors Toby E. Stuart and Michael L. Tushman took on the challenge by analyzing server logs of e-mails and calendars, publishing their findings in a working paper, "Communication (and Coordination?) in a Modern, Complex Organization."

They analyzed more than 100 million e-mails and 60 million electronic calendar entries over a three-month period in a 100,000-employee company--studying what Stuart calls the "soft wiring" of invisible social networks--and found that people tended to communicate within their own groups. "We were surprised by how little interaction occurs across three major boundaries: the strategic business unit, the organizational function, and the geographic office location," Stuart told Sara Jane Gilbert of the HBS Working Knowledge e-newsletter.

"Two people who are in the same SBU, function, and office interact about 1,000 times more frequently than two people at the company who are in different business units, functions, and offices, but are otherwise similar. Practically speaking, this means that there is very little interaction across these boundaries," said Stuart.

He also said that people tended to interact with others at the same level in the organization, making me think that higher management didn't communicate with operational managers much, which would happen in a leaner company. They also found that people mostly e-mail people they already talk to, supplementing personal relationships that already exist.

The exceptions: junior executives, women, and members of the salesforce were active in bridging silos. Stuart and his colleagues will be doing more work to try to learn why those people—and not others—play such important bridging roles.

Although the research doesn't try to answer why corporate silos are so difficult to tear down, Stuart hopes the data will help managers understand, pinpoint, and remove bottlenecks within their own organizations.

Root cause -- for real

2009-10-11T14:12:00.003-04:00

I pruned shrubs today--they'd gotten so scary looking I probably should have left it until after Halloween. It got me thinking about root cause analysis. My shrubs are junipers, and I like them to look feathery and natural, so you can't just swipe them with electric shears. The goal is thinning. Ideally you analyze the growth of a branch, find where a leader and a smaller younger shoot is coming from and cut the long one. My goal was to make the shrubs smaller but preserve their natural look.

To do that, you have to be able to see the overgrown problem areas, then find what to cut. In this case, the juniper needles were so dense that I couldn't follow the overgrown tip of a branch back to where I should cut it, like I would if I were pruning lilacs.

What I had to do is cut the bits I knew I wanted to subtract and gradually expose the branch they were coming from. When I cut that, I got rid of a lot excess greenery and shorter, younger branches hid the cut.

I realized what I was doing was like continuous improvement. Sometimes in the workplace you can see where there is a problem, but you can't see its cause. How often is it a case where you also find clutter, dirt, and debris there? So the first action is to remove everything that is not needed and is just obscuring the problem. Maybe you realize you need more 5S workplace organization work.

With the continuous improvement attitude, you keep coming back and taking more and more stuff away, or eliminating obvious problems, knowing you're looking for the root cause. Each action gets you closer. Then you find it, correct it, and you're done.

But are you really done? Like yard work, you discover more problems at the worksite as you solve each one. You see the weeds. You see the tree seedlings that have taken root over the summer. You know that if you don't get them now, you'll have real problems next year. You see the small bare spots in the lawn that ought to have some grass seed. Gee, what was that endlessly repeated commercial about feeding your lawn in the fall? Would that produce an improvement you'd value?

So if you see a problem, but the reason for it -- its root cause -- is eluding you, you might try to clip away at the effects until you find it. That's not the only, or even the best way to find root causes, but it might fit a situation you're struggling with right now.

Companies freezing training budgets are going backwards

2009-09-23T16:30:00.002-04:00

This year, workshops and seminars all over are being cancelled because not enough people are signing up for them. At the same time, companies are trying to economize by issuing “no travel, no training” orders to employees. Think there’s a connection?

Case in point—Last week the Association for Manufacturing Excellence Northeast Region offered a 2 day workshop at the Toyota Parts Distribution Center, a program that’s had a good turnout in years past. Only four people registered, so it was cancelled.

I was lucky enough to get a couple of hours with AME Northeast Region leaders Bob Gallagher of Toyota and Scott Gauvin of Macrescoedge that included a tour of the parts distribution facility.

You could have spent a couple of days there. What did you miss?

Kaizen the Toyota way was the topic. The first day you would have heard an overview of kaizen at Toyota. Perhaps you’re new to kaizen thinking. Perhaps you think you know about kaizen but haven’t experienced the Toyota way. Toyota does things their own way, and you would have found out how.

That evening you missed a networking session with Toyota representatives and a chance to meet a group of peers interested in kaizen and Toyota.

The second day, you missed a comprehensive and idea-packed presentation about how Toyota does things. You missed the tour I took. Bob Gallagher showed me how the warehouse was organized for optimal flow. He showed me how packaging changes were saving space and reducing damage of parts. I saw the results of years of employee improvements—low cost changes that made work more effective. I learned how Toyota associates had conducted kaizens with drivers from the facility’s contract trucking company, integrating and strengthening relationships through the supply chain. I learned how parts suppliers continuously improved at their end of the chain.

Most importantly, I learned how the distribution center worked with the Toyota dealers--the facility’s customers. They get parts next day. Trucks go out every afternoon to the farthest dealers and through the evening to the nearer ones. Drivers have keys to the dealers’ receiving areas and leave the parts there.

Damage claims are infinitesimal. Bob Gallagher answered all my questions. Your group would have asked much better questions and opened up many more learning opportunities than I did.

In addition to the tour, you would have practiced a kaizen activity with your colleagues.

You would have used THE SAME WORKBOOKS AS TOYOTA USES! You would have been able to take them home with you. You would have learned from the report-outs from the breakout teams in your group.

I missed something too. If the event had gone on as planned, I would have been there for the whole thing, learning right next to you. I would have learned what you are doing and what you’d like to learn from AME’s publications and other sources.

You’re probably as disappointed as I am, and just as frustrated with your company’s decision, as desperate as it may be to cut costs.

Just to give you a contrast, DTE Energy (which I wrote about in the most recent issue of AME’s Target magazine) needed to cut $150 million in cost this year. But they told employees to think about travel and make only those trips that were really worthwhile. They are sinking a lot of dough into training. They trust that employees will work together to make those investments pay off in sustainable continuous improvements. They demonstrate respect for people.

Making a workshop worthwhile to your company takes some structure. We’ve all gone to an inspiring event and come back with workshop euphoria that evaporates within a week. That’s not going to pay off.

Your company could bite the bullet and send a big enough team to create a critical mass when you return. Your team could go with detailed expectations, and outcomes. Your team could start work before the trip, and determine how you will share what you learned and where you want to apply it. When you come back, your team could revisit those expectations and outcomes, see how your experiences fit, and discuss any unexpected epiphanies. You’ll be ready to bring others up to speed, and get started making change for the better.

Looking at budgets for next year? Make a case for training, on site or at a distance. If you can’t do that, make a case for benchmarking tours. Use organizations like AME to network with people who can open doors to opportunities for you to learn. Slack time is perfect for learning.

Make the most of it.

City clears streets of abandoned cars--makes a profit

2009-09-21T12:26:00.003-04:00

Six years ago, it was likely that if you lived in Worcester, MA, you had an abandoned car on your street. Your taxes paid the snowplow operators for the waste of time maneuvering around them. You had a safety hazard. It just plain made your neighborhood look run down.

Then neighborhood leaders and the city council convinced the city to tackle the problem. Now the city’s making a profit on the Abandoned Vehicle Removal Program, relieving some of the bite on taxpayers. That’s without counting the ancillary safety and other costs.

That first year, reports the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, 2,428 abandoned vehicles were tagged for removal. Owners then removed 55% of them, facing the prospect of the car being towed in 72 hours and a $400 fine. If they didn’t pay the fine, the state Registry of Motor Vehicles would flag the owner’s record, so they couldn’t renew their driver’s license or a motor vehicle registration until they paid up.

The city learned a few things along the way. At the start, they paid $40 to tow each vehicle away. In 2006, the contract was changed. Now the city receives $100 for each vehicle from the towing contractor. If a vehicle sits on the lot for more than 30 days, the contractor owns it. It can sell it, crush it, or harvest parts.

In six years, that has yielded nearly $425,000 in fines and fees. Payments from the towing contractor have added another $30,000 to the city’s coffers. The cost to operate the program has been only about $130,000, netting $325,000.

Continued attention from parking control officers also identifies stolen vehicles that are returned to their owners—or their insurance companies.

The city’s income from the program has diminished over the years as owners have learned not to park unwanted cars on the streets. Only 400 were tagged last year, and owners moved 80% of those.

The snowplow drivers are a lot happier.

What people are saying about... Lean in distribution

2009-08-30T13:50:00.003-04:00

I posed a question about lean in distribution operations to the LinkedIn Lean Six Sigma group, and here is a quick look at some of the answers that came in from:

Mike Gentile (MG)

Self-Employed Professional, New York, NY

Jeffrey Jackson (JJ)

Experienced change agent specializing in supply chain and operations management, Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL

Mike Darrish (MD)

Industry Specialist at OpenConnect Systems, Inc., Atlanta, GA

Peter Nathan (PN)

Project and Program Manager and Author, Atlanta, GA

Gregg Miner (GM)

President & COO at SCORE Business Systems, Raleigh-Durham, NC

Ulises Penarredonda (UP)

Divisional CPI Coordinator at US Navy, Norfolk, VA

Alex Conway (AC)

Global Supply Chain & Sourcing Manager-Sealants at Momentive Performance Materials, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

UP: A distribution center is for distributing, not for inventory. From a true lean perspective, a distribution center is non-value added (NVA) in the eyes of the end customer. However, inventory may have business value. It may benefit internal customers, for example.

JJ: Inventory in distribution may provide a competitive advantage in customer service or cover a customer service problem. The former may be important to the business plan while the latter might be waste.

UP: Ultimately, we are shooting for real JIT: A reliable replenishment of goods from the supplier, and a suitable inventory buffer to protect us from demand variability. Our goal is perfection, pure synchronicity.

Key factors

MG: Key factors for Distribution Operations include capacity utilization and time utilization -- getting as much on the truck (or railcar, boat, or plane) as possible and keeping the equipment moving productively while minimizing down time.

MG: this requires excellent forecasting, scheduling, and inventory management -- anticipating demand, scheduling tightly to it, and ensuring there is just enough inventory to meet it. In turn, this requires having people, equipment, and your vendor network ready to go when needed.

Examine the entire supply chain

JJ: The total inventory level within the total supply chain needs to be looked at. This includes the inventory levels coming off of the supplier inputs (whether from internal make operations or from suppliers) as well as the inventory levels within the distribution operation and downstream at the customer locations as well.

MD: There are typically many suppliers with different policies. The distributor may be stocking items manufactured in other countries with more of a batch mentality. One may be forced away from single piece flow because of lead times, minimum order sizes and so on. The manufacturers don't want to transport air in partially empty cargo ships or trucks.

MD: Solving the quantity shipping issue might mean something radical like building a new factory closer to the distribution warehouse, which would enable a pull system, milk runs, move distribution closer to single piece flow. That may be prohibitively expensive, however, so there may not be an easy solution.

Companies have different ideas about how to manage the distribution channel. PN: Wal-Mart has suppliers helping manage the inventory and order replenishment re-counts in a push. While as a supplier, Coke pushes order replenishment with retailers.

How do you start?

GM: The best thing to do is go back to the roots of lean. Keep it simple!

AC: One of the greatest challenges is always what to do first and how to limit the field of ideas for Lean implementation. Lean is a continuous improvement mechanism and the goal is perfection—it’s not exactly an overnight process. It requires patience and commitment.

MG: Applying Lean principles means mapping out distribution processes, eliminating unnecessary steps and other forms of waste, and executing crisply every time to the standard. Sounds simple, tough to execute, but fun when it works well.

JJ: The logical first step in any lean application is to value-stream map the major processes in order to determine the full scope from supplier inputs to customer outputs (SIPOC, in 6 sigma speak).

MD: Identify the seven or eight (depending if one is a purist or a modernist) forms of waste, then reduce them. Make sure that the voice of the customer is used, whether through Kano Modeling or some other tool, use a pull system--only purchase at the rate that the customers buy--hard to forecast, sure, have to build some inventory, sure, but work with manufacturers to lean out their processes as well.

GM: The simple formula is:

Define Value

Determine steps in delivering value

Put Value in Flow

Perform at the rate the customer wants

Do it right every time.

Old concept but works every time.

UP: All these concepts, lean, six sigma, JIT, buffer management, cross-docking, will help get us there (to pure synchronicity) and, in some places, with use of technology i.e. RFID, telematics. It's happening, as lean as it can be, as it flows in and flows out right before our eyes.

Recommended reading

AC: I’m sure you have read "Lean Thinking" by James Womack. It’s a kind of bible and I re-read it about once a year.

PN: You might try reading these two references for some ideas:

1. Improving the Extended Value Stream: Lean for the Entire Supply Chain by Darren Dolcemascolo

2. Lean Six Sigma for Supply Chain Management: The 10-Step Solution Process by James W. Martin

A final thought:

PN: Another area that would be interesting to note would be a large cargo shipping carrier. I'd like to get some insights into how trans-oceanic cargo gets distributed with the trade offs between the “must have it by X date” and rates variables. You can do the same with train cargo, but the sea carriers would exaggerate the issue.

Hospital gets vendor visits under control

2009-08-12T12:35:00.002-04:00

Dr. Kathleen Yaremchuk, head of clinical practice at the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, saved enough time for doctors to avoid hiring eight more of them, practically with the stroke of a pen, reported Jay Greene in Monday’s issue of Crain’s Detroit Business. The magazine honored her as one of its annual Health Care Heroes.

She stopped sales reps from pharmaceutical and medical device companies from bringing pizza, pens, and samples to butter up the doctors in the system’s seven hospitals and 27 medical centers. She called it an influence-free policy, and it was instituted in January 2007.

My friends who have been helping hospitals like the Henry Ford System’s to bring lean to healthcare already know that sales reps clutter up the place, even dressing in surgical scrubs to hang out in the operating room touting the latest in jazzy gadgets. They know that hospital staff may gravitate to the pizza to the detriment of patient care. They’re aware that the more influential doctors get lunches and dinners in nice restaurants.

Dr. Yaremchuk couldn’t have made this change by herself. It took more people to do some root cause analysis for the issues that made reps so welcome. It had to involve others to create processes for pharmaceutical and device reps to make doctors aware of new products in a more orderly way.

As an example of root cause discovery (asking why), one reason for the popularity of reps bringing in food was that residents had too little time between lectures and hospital duties to get lunch. So the cafeteria added an express lane for doctors to speed them through the lunch line.

To standardize the sales visit process, sales reps must now meet a number of requirements before they can enter the hospital and talk to doctors. They go through a vendor certification course to make certain that they understood health safety procedures and privacy and confidentiality policies. The Crain’s article said 2,000 vendors have since been certified. (2,000! The hospitals might as well have been conference exhibition centers!) Sales reps permitted to enter the operating rooms have to wear black scrubs, not the green ones worn by the doctors.

Sales reps must request appointments with doctors, at least five days ahead of time, via a web-based system. And doctors turn out not to be overly fond of these visits. Only 29% have been accepting the requests, and some have added themselves to a “do not call” list. If the sales reps get in, they have just 15 minutes to make their pitches.

The policy was not a fiat from a top-floor management meeting. Dr. Yaremchuk has plenty of knowledge of what goes on at the gemba, the place where services are delivered. In addition to her management responsibilities, she’s chair of the hospital’s clinical otolaryngology department.

Results? The article said the appointment process has freed up time equal to employing eight more doctors. Before the changes, that work of the eight doctors was probably coming from long hours for the doctors who were on staff. “We gave them time,” Yaremchuk told Greene. She said doctors can go home on time, provide more patient care, or do paperwork (which could probably be cut down significantly with some continuous improvement events).

An estimated $10 million has been saved as doctors now prescribe generic drugs 74% of the time, up from 60% in the past. Without sales reps prodding them, they use more tried-and-true medications unless the new ones have been shown to be really more effective.

Not all drug companies were disappointed with the new policy. Those from smaller companies that couldn’t cater lunches or come bearing gifts felt the playing field had been leveled.

It’s a change that took a high-level leader to make. Those in the system were used to the process and didn’t have the interest or power to do it. However, a cadre of lean-thinking hospital staff could make a proposal to a leader who had some commitment to improvement. Dr. Yaremchuk regularly shares her story with hospital CEOs who are interested. Even if your CEO won’t go to one of her lectures or visit Detroit to meet her, would he or she be willing to video-conference her into a management meeting? It might be an hour that sparks a big change.

Image credit: Crain's Detroit Business

Helping your customers get lean

2009-07-28T10:14:00.005-04:00

We’re starting to hear more about supplier development, but how often do we look at customer development? Not just adding to our customer base, but helping customers change for the better. One company that’s been doing that for decades is Consumers Interstate Corp., distributor of maintenance and office supplies in Norwich, Connecticut.

In June, CIC invited neighboring companies to its corporate headquarters to spend a full day learning about lean at no charge. (It cost CIC about $5,000.) Every other month, it hosts half-day seminars. Both feature speakers with experience in implementing lean and discussions about how participants can apply lean in their own companies.

This is part of CIC’s lean procurement model that helps companies streamline their practices and offload the buying of routine supplies, letting buyers at customer companies concentrate on procuring high-dollar items like raw materials and equipment.

There are a lot of companies that will give customers buyer’s cards and offer online consolidated ordering of paper clips and pencils, but do they offer lockout-tagout systems and testing and monitoring equipment too? Do they invoice monthly instead of order by order? Do they track everything for you?

Moreover, CIC’s sales reps have developed into lean consultants who will come into a customer’s office and help the staff find ways to make their work faster and more accurate. They’ll help staff construct a value stream map of its procurement process. Fully trained in lean office improvement, they’ll help them take the typical 25 steps and reduce them to nine or so. They look at delays and redundant and unnecessary approval steps that hold up purchases and clutter the inboxes of managers. They show customers how 5S and kaizen can make work easier.

CIC also has an automated process that analyzes customer orders and suggests alternative products that will save money. CIC’s fleet of trucks and drivers make customized and just-in-time deliveries according to the customer’s needs.

Their goal is to help customers think lean and cut the time it takes to order maintenance and operations supplies in half, but their lean training reaches further into customer organizations than that. Seminars and consultation are not just about lean procurement from CIC’s customer-service perspective. They help people get the message that lean can take out cost and time from all parts of their organizations.

Self-described “lean junkie,” company president Kenn Fischburg has been working on improving CIC’s processes as well as helping customers since the 1980s. Happy customers include Iseli (a Danaher company—they know lean when they see it), Greene Plastics, Naugatuck Glass, and Darlington Fabrics Corporation. It’s all about adding value, in Fischburg’s view. He had the vision and drive to package lean thinking into service to customers, improving their competitiveness and supporting a region’s ability to preserve vitality and employment.

Check out CIC’s website at www.cigco.com.

This is not an ad for CIC. It's a nudge to get you thinking about how you could help your customers survive and thrive. How about it?

Finding the signal within the noise

2009-07-14T10:07:00.003-04:00

Lean Reflections gets a fair amount of traffic from Google searches, and I have to share this one that brought a searcher to my site: I NEED SUMMARY OF THREE CUPS OF TEA YOU STUPID COMPUTER. Boy, what's a lean reflection on this? I suppose it's similar to the TV commercials for Microsoft's Bing--too many irrelevant results on Google. I haven't tried Bing because of an irrational revulsion at all things Microsoft, but they certainly home in on a need.

There's always noise surrounding a signal and that interferes with lean thinking, especially at the start. Everyone has an opinion and so many things are going wrong, all competing for attention. Like Homeland Security looking for a terrorist by gathering data from all our computer and phone transactions, you're looking for an underlying problem in an avalanche of information.

So, lean guys and gals out there, how to you decide what to go after?

Standard work and Michael Jackson

2009-06-26T10:34:00.003-04:00

Among all that's being said about Michael Jackson, he's perhaps most mourned as a performer who entertained and connected with huge audiences worldwide. Beneath the talent, however, you'd find close attention to standard work. Every second of every performance was timed and practiced to perfection by every member of the show, on and offstage. That would be true of Madonna or the Beatles, maybe even Taylor Swift or the Jonas Brothers.

Of course, standard work in music is nothing new--notation has standardized music for centuries. And how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.

Standard work will fail if there is not enough practice. Time has to be set aside for people to get the timing right, synchronizing to takt time. If possible, experimental space and mockups allow for offline practice. Practice before performance allows a person to fail without negative consequences, and to try again and again until it's right. Observation and coaching helps to get motion efficient and safe from fatigue, strain, or other injury. When muscle memory can take over in performance of their role in the show, workers are free to think about the process and how to improve it with another round of offline experimentation and practice.

So add some imaginary song and dance to your day--maybe it's another way to look at the work your team is performing on your stage.