Let me give it to you straight. No amount of operational efficiency you glean from a Lean Initiative is going to give you sustainable results without three fundamentals:
- Responsibility & Accountability Institutionalized
- Prioritization mastery
- Critical thinking and decision logic maturity
Without these inculcated into your organization with front line leaders and those that drive the ship, you will ultimately lose money and then blame the Lean Leader for their failure.
Let’s look at waste: TIM WOODS stands for Time, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Overprocessing, Defects and Skills which is the fundamental framework for eliminating waste in a Lean Organization.
However, let’s apply this to the humans vs. processes and see the waste through a different lens.
Example 1: A quality supervisor makes a decision to reject material and hold it until a disposition of scrap or rework can be made. The production manager understands the issue and pressures the supervisor that the specifications are just guidelines and in the end application, there will not be an impact and pressures them to release.
What’s wrong with this picture? While conversation is necessary in such situations, who ultimately is responsible for these key decisions? Refocusing the energy from pressuring the release of a product to identify the root cause why the product is not in specification is a better use of time. However, in this process without clear Responsibility and Accountability defined, there is Waste. I don’t care if you have an efficient production process to create products with defects; under the surface, the organization is generating waste.
Example 2: Production is realizing the benefit of Lean and is producing products with a lower takt time (a measurement in Lean for how fast you need to produce to keep up with customer demand). Management is celebrating a win, but there is a bottleneck in the quality lab. The quality manager has two people out for COVID, another is out for training, they have several research projects to complete for R&D, Customer Complaints to be resolved and they have to work with maintenance who is coming down today to repair a leak. The Manager is stressed and sees the work piling up and is working late hours to try to meet all demands.
What’s wrong with this picture? Clearly in this situation without further context, the Research work and possibly the customer complaints can be paused in favor of the leak and managing resources to get the work done with a reduced staff. However, this manager lacks the prioritization savvy to make those decisions or doesn’t have a support system to help them manage the increase in work and reduced resources. Wouldn’t it be a better use of time in concert with speeding up production to also work with Quality to ensure they are also level loaded to meet the demands of production? Could we also help this leader to have a framework for prioritization and a voice to message when they’re in trouble? Sometimes these situations cause burnout without us realizing it in the spirit of creating a lean production machine.
Example 3: Returning to the Quality Manager who is overloaded with a reduced workforce, they make the following decisions to manage:
- Authorize overtime
- Work 12 hour days
- Delay the repair of the leak in the quality department
Where did they go wrong? Their decision logic based on a position of helplessness made the decisions based on what was in their control. Instead, they could have contacted customer service to see if any orders could be rescheduled. With the increased efficiency in production, there were resources that could be pulled in to do administrative work; moving resources to where the work was needed. And let’s talk about that leak they delayed. Short sightedness may cause a long term expensive issue if that leak introduces safety or health hazards in the lab. They could have reschedule to the weekend when people were not around.
Critical thinking and better decision logic might have had a better outcome for quality keeping up with production. By not preparing them with better skills, they sometimes make wasteful decisions which is what we’re trying to eliminate.
So my advice to you is next time you think of a Lean Initiative, look at yourself and the organization.
Do they have skills to prepare for the improvements you are making or are there skills under the surface you need to Lean out Waste before moving forward?
Think you got this because the Lean Consultant is on a mission to realize cost savings on behalf of your stakeholders? Think again as your Lean Initiative can be that Four Letter Word that leaves an irreparable legacy on your organization.
For the unfiltered, off the cuff discussion about this topic, please listen to my podcast airing on 1/19/24 and view the video so you see how I really feel about this topic!.
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Be well-Deb