Monthly Archive for May, 2009

We can learn a great deal from the few companies out there run by experienced and talented lean leaders who have really been successful at effecting change at the cultural level. It is clear there are a variety of ways of doing this. At Wiremold, the CEO, Art Byrne, started by personally leading kaizen events [...]

Culture change is a complex topic in its own right and the subject of many articles. This became most evident to Toyota in its efforts to globalize in the 1980s. To Toyota, globalization did not mean purchasing capacity in other countries. Globalization meant exporting the Toyota culture to build autonomous divisions in other countries that [...]

There are many “tools” approaches to organization improvement. One very popular program, which General Electric adopted with great success, is Six Sigma, an extension of Total Quality Management (TQM). Six Sigma refers to a goal of 3.4 defects per million units produced, and the focus is on training green belts, black belts, and master black [...]

The first example is the Wiremold Corporation, which was showcased by Womack and Jones in Lean Thinking as a lean exemplar and more recently has been documented in detail by Emiliani et al. (2003) in Better Thinking, Better Results. Wiremold makes “cable-management solutions” that enclose various kinds of cables. This was a family-owned business, started [...]

The toughest and most basic challenge for companies that want to learn from Toyota is how to create an aligned organization of individuals who each have the DNA of the organization and are continually learning together to add value to the customer. Will Rogers, American social commentator, said, “We are a great people to get [...]

I have illustrated throughout the article applications to service operations. Some of the specific, detailed tools of TPS may be harder to apply. It would not make sense, for example, for a lawyer to sit at his or her desk waiting for a material handler to deliver a kanban asking for the next legal brief. [...]

A central issue for many service processes is controlling the process. Some successful kaizen workshops have focused on creating the system of tracking and controlling the process using visual controls. Genie Industries is an example of this. Genie makes many different kinds of lift devices, like the hoist device phone company service people use to [...]

Northrop Grumman Ship Systems Ingalls shipyard in Mississippi began aggressively implementing lean in its operations areas in the summer of 2000. Since engineering is critical to shipbuilding, it soon expanded its transformation to lean to include engineering processes. The issue of label plates, the responsibility of engineering, had been a perennial problem in getting compartments [...]

Following the workshop, the sustaining team will continue to drive the future state. This is the check-act part of the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle. The team meets on a weekly basis to do the following: Review the status of the open action items from the project plan. Review process metrics to ensure improvements are being achieved. [...]

The session begins with a review of the scope of the process to be improved and a review of the objectives with the team. Some training is provided on basic lean concepts, particularly the concept of value added and non-value added. The flow of a typical service kaizen workshop. Step 1. Who is the customer? [...]

There are five essential pre-workshop things to do to facilitate the flow of the workshop and effectively use participants’ time. Clearly define the scope. Determine the start point or trigger that begins the process and what the final deliverable product(s) to the customer is. Set objectives. The process owner must set measurable objectives for the [...]

Obviously, CPC is not a pure technical or service organization and has some similarities to a manufacturing process. So where can you find an example of TPS being successfully applied to less repetitive technical or service organizations? The answer is that examples will be hard to find. You could spend your time looking for such [...]

Canada Post Corporation (CPC) is the equivalent of the U.S. Postal Service. It has a commercial mandate and leaders at this government-owned corporation operate with the same corporate governance as a private company. The profits are reinvested in the company to secure its ability to grow or are turned over to the Canadian government in [...]

In technical and service organizations, people are sitting at desks, working at computers, walking about, sitting around conference rooms, and generally busy moving from task to task. It is very difficult to understand the workflow in the same way you can map a physical product as it is being transformed. In service organizations, the work [...]

Applying the Toyota Production System outside the shop floor can be done, but this takes some creativity. Certainly, the basic principles can be applied to administrative processes. We sent some associates from our kaizen promotion office to dealers to help them. They have been able to reduce the time it takes to inspect the vehicle [...]

Anyone who has participated in creating a learning organization knows that it is a major undertaking. It has taken Toyota well over a decade to build an organization in North America that bears even a resemblance to the learning enterprise it built over several decades in Japan. Moving people from firefighting and short-term fixes to [...]

The adage that “you get what you measure” is in a sense true at Toyota as well. Toyota long ago realized that the key to organizational learning is to align objectives of all of its employees toward common goals. The underlying value system of Toyota’s culture does that to a great degree. But to get [...]

Believing they can get any behavior they can measure, companies wishing to emulate Toyota’s system often ask me about its metrics. To their inevitable disappointment, they learn that Toyota is not particularly strong at developing sophisticated and common metrics across the company. Toyota measures processes everywhere on the factory floor, but prefers simple metrics and [...]

Teamwork never overshadows individual accountability at Toyota. Individual accountability is not about blame and punishment, but about learning and growing. A key to learning and growing, not only within Toyota but in Japanese culture, is hansei, which roughly means “reflection.” Hansei is a bit of Japanese culture that Toyota recently has been working to teach [...]

At Toyota, a five-why analysis is often used as part of a seven-step process they call “practical problem solving.”  Before the five-why analysis can begin, “practical problem solving” requires you to clarify the problem or, in Toyota terminology, “grasp the situation.” Trainers who teach this methodology within Toyota have found the most difficult part to [...]