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April 7 - June 19, 2019
hours of WIP, and an EBITDA
“What the hell is lean? All I know is that Toyota didn’t get to where they are today by simply improving their flow and reducing costs. They build cars people buy, that’s the real trick. They build them better, faster, and cheaper. Lean is customer satisfaction first, before getting into eliminating waste. And in any case, the only way to do this is through people.”
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Flow is important. Leveling, flow when you can, pull when you can’t. Of course it is. But that’s just technique, it’s a way to reveal problems, nothing more. The fundamental issue is attitude. People have to be determined to put their customers first. They have to be fanatic about developing people.
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Flow is important. Leveling, flow when you can, pull when you can’t. Of course it is. But that’s just technique, it’s a way to reveal problems, nothing more. The fundamental issue is attitude. People have to be determined to put their customers first. They have to be fanatic about developing people.
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“In a way, it’s common sense,” agreed Ward. “The most demanding product is given to people with the proven ability to solve all the small problems.
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They have five to seven team members to a team leader, 25 to a group leader, and the leader’s job is to sustain kaizen efforts. ‘We are organized for problem-solving,’ they said. “And that’s when the light bulb went on. You see, as managers, that’s what we do. We organize things. This is the one thing we should know how to do.”
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The line management had to be taught to recognize, address, and solve problems: customer problems, operator problems, process problems.”
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“A lean company is an outfit where everybody contributes directly to adding value to customers. Adding value starts by solving problems. How do you get there? Start by making all your managers spend as much time as possible solving customer problems and eliminating waste as they fight fires and organize the problem-solving in their areas. Then you need to convince all your operators to contribute their ideas and suggestions so that the company is using their heads as well as their hands.
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This is a core assumption of lean: No matter how confident we sound, we are all wrong at least half the time. The only way of knowing is by testing our beliefs, our hypothesis. This is nothing more than basic scientific thinking. Theories must be backed by empirical evidence.
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“No investment. Kaizen first. And motion kaizen before equipment kaizen.”
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Now he was frustrated to find that most of the red-bin issues were familiar, and workers simply didn’t have the time to deal with these matters—or they didn’t know how to fix them. As a result, the review felt like an empty ritual, a pointless rehashing of old issues.
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“Yes, we see the same problems every day—so we tend to take them for granted,” he’d explained. “Which is precisely why you need to keep the review every day. That way your people don’t get used to living with problems without trying to solve them. Whatever you do, stick with it.”
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First, and most importantly, stick to what you’re doing with the red bins, but involve your supervisors,” Amy said emphatically. “The red bin is really nothing more than a tool to learn about the parts.” She turned to him with her most serious face of all: “This is all about getting the line management to own their problems, and to have a daily opportunity to discuss with the staff specialists on what really goes on.
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