Toyota Just Really Good Problem Solvers

Through the years of learning and implementing lean, I have had the opportunity to work with and learn from Toyota.  At first, it is easy to get really excited about the tools (kanban, 5S, flow) and how well they use them. After the initial excitement the understanding of how to use the tool with people systems starts to gain clarity.  This is great, but it is still what is best for Toyota and not necessarily what is best for someone else.

Dig deep enough and what Toyota is really good at is problem solving.  Toyota really understands where they are and where they want to go and develop a countermeasure that helps them close that gap.  Toyota looks at both the technical and human side of the system when solving the problem.

Toyota didn’t develop 5S to straighten the place up.  They realized by putting things in a designated place they could see and understand the problems they were having at a glance.  This allows them to address the problems quickly.

Kanban was not put in place to reduce inventory.  Toyota had a problem of not enough cash or space for lots of inventory, but wanted to be able to have enough inventory on hand to build what the customer wanted when they wanted it and also make visible any problems in flow they were having.  The kanban was a countermeasure for this.

Years later others have the ability to learn from Toyota’s lessons.  Instead of understanding the problem trying to be resolved, other companies just copy the solution from Toyota without understanding why or if it fits their needs.

Organizations need to become really good problem solvers and if needed learn from Toyota’s lessons, not copy them.

Need the Mental Toughness of a Navy SEAL

Recently, I have been reading a book by Marcus Luttrell.  A Lone Survivor.  Marcus was part of Navy SEAL Team 2 that came under attack in Afghanistan.  Marcus was the lone survivor of the six man team.

The book is very well written.  One of the interesting sections was about Navy SEALs BUD/s training.  Essentially, the weed out trials for the SEALs.  Marcus goes into detail the physical and mental pain they were put through.  Looking back he realizes it wasn’t to just weed men out of the group to keep the best of the best.  It was to prepare the elite fighting teams to be able to work, think and react under extreme pressure with the precision of a fine tuned instrument.  The SEALs would no be distracted from the physical pain and their surroundings.  They would think and react as they had been taught.  This mental toughness was what would get them through anything and make the SEALs stand apart.

This made me think of some of the legendary stories of Taiichi Ohno.  Stories of him leaving a guy standing in a circle to observe with no break until he came back.  Or calling in a team leader to his office and then berating them for leaving their team on the line.  While on the surface this seems very harsh, at least that is the way I reacted, he was driving home his points.  Taiichi Ohno was getting his people to be able to think and react under the pressure of delivering product on time in a cost efficient way and at the highest quality.

As lean implementers, we have to be able to think and react under the pressure of senior to middle management to shop floor employees questioning what we are doing.  We have to be tough mentally.  Not willing to quit if we are going to eventually change their minds and see the waste.  We have to be prepared for any question or situation that may come our way and react calmly and swiftly.

While people may understand the lean concepts, not everyone puts them into practice.  Part of it is because you have to mentally tough to go against what others are  doing.  Day after day.  Sometimes it feels like you are beating your head against a concrete wall, but we can’t quit.  We keep pushing and eventually things will break through.  And that will be a great day.

Note: By no means do I think lean implementers go through what Navy SEALs to, but the story got me thinking about the mental toughness it takes to make change happen.

Guest Post: John Wooden Quotes Relating to Lean

Joe Wilson has worked in a variety of continuous improvement, problem solving and engineering roles in manufacturing and distribution functions  in the automotive, electronics, and food/grocery industries. He was responsible for site leadership of Lean implementation during the launch and ramp up of becoming a supplier to Toyota and was able to work directly with their personnel and the Toyota Supplier Support Center.   His training background includes courses in Lean/TPS through TSSC and the University of Kentucky’s Lean Systems program.  He is a Six Sigma Black Belt and a Shainin Red X Journeyman in addition to training in Kepner-Tregoe problem solving techniques.  Joe also has a BS degree in Engineering Management from the University of Missouri-Rolla.  

I have spent the first part of 2011 with my John Wooden “Page A Day” calendar taking up real estate on my desk.   It’s filled with quotes, stats, and other random info about  the former UCLA Men’s Basketball coach who was about as successful and universally liked and respected of a person as you will ever find.  (I’ll skip the full bio, but a quick Google or Amazon search will show the extent of his influence.)  Here are a few of the gems that have popped up so far:

“No matter how fine a person is at anything, he can always improve.  No one ever reaches maximum potential.”
“A good banker isn’t careless with pennies; a good leader isn’t sloppy about details.”
“What is right is more important than who is right.”
“A player who makes a team great is much more valuable than a great player.”
Wooden’s Four laws of learning:  Explanation, Demonstration, Correction, and Repitition

Pretty much any of those could have been just as at home in a Lean text.   In addition to the similarity in phrasing to lean texts, I’m struck by the similarities in those who emulate the behaviors.  There are bunches of companies ‘working’ on Lean, but very few approaching the level of success of a Toyota.  Similarly, you can find hundreds of coaches and managers who claim to utilize Wooden’s principles, without replicating his sustained success.  Some have tried to piecemeal add aspects to their own way of doing things without understanding that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  Some have tried to copy other people’s visible actions without the understanding of why things work.  Surely others have latched on to a ‘brand’ because it was a trendy thing to do.

I think there is another piece of the puzzle that seems to be left out.  Ultimately there can be no way to document everything that goes in to making someone or something successful.  There is also no way to codify the reasons for all of the visible aspects of a system.  There is no way to look in the rear view mirror and make sure you have accurately weighed the impact of the ‘little things’ that altered the paths.  Even if we think every aspect of a history has been written about, it still doesn’t mean that the right things were weighted correctly.  That is true no matter who’s story is being written.  The best we can do is study success stories like Coach Wooden and Toyota and use that knowledge as pieces of the puzzle as we set out to write our own story of greatness.

Guest Post: The Value of Benchmarking

Joe Wilson has worked in a variety of continuous improvement, problem solving and engineering roles in manufacturing and distribution functions  in the automotive, electronics, and food/grocery industries. He was responsible for site leadership of Lean implementation during the launch and ramp up of becoming a supplier to Toyota and was able to work directly with their personnel and the Toyota Supplier Support Center.   His training background includes courses in Lean/TPS through TSSC and the University of Kentucky’s Lean Systems program.  He is a Six Sigma Black Belt and a Shainin Red X Journeyman in addition to training in Kepner-Tregoe problem solving techniques.  Joe also has a BS degree in Engineering Management from the University of Missouri-Rolla.

Lean teachers have taught us things like “go see”, “ask why”, and “thoroughly understand what is happening at the gemba”.  Enough practice with these mindsets can teach you how to quickly and effectively evaluate current states and identify where our gaps may exist on the way to our ideal state.

If you are like me, you probably really enjoy touring other people’s operations or even watching shows like “Ultimate Factories” or “How It’s Made” on TV to see how other people do what they do.  You’ve also probably tried to copy an idea or two that you’ve seen doing one of those things.  I know I’ve tried several tips, tricks, or notions that I’ve picked up through these observations.  Some have been fantastic.  Some have been total, immediate failures.  And some others may not have worked right off the bat, but have triggered discussions that have led to some really great solutions.  Those types of activities aren’t really what I think of when I picture benchmarking.  I would put those in the same group as reading a book or taking a class and applying an idea from one of those.  Great places to get a seed to plant or to identify rough milestones, but you shouldn’t really be finding blueprints in them.

The danger in a benchmarking mindset from some circles comes from looking at similar processes or industry data and working in a “We should do it just like they do” mindset.  Don’t get me wrong, it is extremely valuable to have an understanding of where the competition is or where the bar is set at.  One of my favorite examples of this in lean lore is how, in the early days, Toyota believed that German manufacturing was 3 times as productive as Japanese manufacturing and the Americans were 3 times as productive as the Germans.  Toyota then determined they had to become 10 times better than they currently were to be better than the best manufacturers and compete on a global scale.  This scale wasn’t used as an excuse to copy American manufacturing, it was used as a line in the sand to set a goal.

Another mantra that I continually remind myself of comes from statistics/data analysis guru Dr. Donald Wheeler who says “No statistic has any meaning apart from the context for the original data.”  All of our observations or industry data studies or side by side comparisons of plants only work if we can phrase them in terms of the context.  If they lack context or we don’t understand the context well enough, we may not get any valuable information from which to build.  In the wrong hands, this can lead to a tremendous waste of time and resources to try to be like someone else.  I don’t think that’s why we do what we do as Lean thinkers.  Our greatest abilities as lean leaders don’t lie with our ability to recognize and copy someone else’s answers.  Our greatest strengths come from our ability to thoroughly understand our own states and solve our own problems.

Toyota Fails Due to Earthquake…Not Lean

I will warn you this post is going to be a rant.  One that I can’t help and I feel is necessary to do.

A couple of days ago I found an article on Bnet.  The title was “Lean Production: Another Casualty of the Japanese Quake?“.  The title caught my eye so I decided to give it a read.  I would have been better off not reading it.

The first part of the article had some good information and was informative, but then came this paragraph:

When complex systems break down, they really break down

The old model of having a plentiful supply of components on hand was costly and inefficient, but it had one big plus: It made it easier to recover quickly from an economic downturn or a natural disaster that disrupted business. In a nutshell, it was durable, if dumb.

My jaw hit the floor from shock when the author mentions that traditional supply chains are costly and inefficient but defends them again because it is quicker to recover from a natural disaster.  What!?  Can you imagine sitting in executive meeting that goes like this:

Person 1: “Are supply chain is really working well.  The costs are down and we are delivering great value to the consumer.”

Person 2: “But what happens if a once in a lifetime 9.0 earthquake causes a tsunami that knocks the earth slightly off its axis?  Will our supply chain work then?”

Person 1: “Great point.  We should triple our inventory immediately.”

The lean model allows for an automaker like Toyota to produce better cars and adjust more nimbly to fluctuations in demand. But because it’s accordingly more complex and required more brain- and communications power to operate correctly, it’s vulnerable to the type of catastrophic breakdown we’re now witnessing in Japan.

Where is he even hearing about lean?  In all my time studying and learning about lean, I have never heard that lean is complex and requires significant communication power to operate.  If someone understands that lean at the basic level is about eliminating waste then how can you draw the conclusion that it is more complex?  At the fundamental lean is the complete opposite of this statement.  It is about making things simpler, including communication.

There is more but I just can’t stomach it.  Plus, a lot of it has already been said very well by some of my counter parts in the comment section of the article.  I really appreciate Steve Martin from theThinkShack kicking off the comments.  Also, Mark Graban from the LeanBlog, David Kasprzak from MyFlexiblePencil, and Joe Dager from Busines901.

I encourage you to go and read their very thoughtful insights and your own if you would like.  I didn’t have an account and as upset as I was I didn’t want to take the time to sign up for the free account to post something and then never use the account again.  So, I decided to use my blog as my forum for this one and didn’t want to rehash some of the great insights from others.

I appreciate your patience on this rant and now I will return your to your regularly scheduled program.

Train and Do. Do Not Train Then Do.

I have read about three quarters of the Toyota Kata by Mike Rother.  It is a very good book.  One that provokes a lot of thought even from people that have been implementing lean for a long time.  This post isn’t a book review of the Toyota Kata.  It is a reflection on a point made my Mike Rother in the book about training and doing.

In the book Mr. Rother talks about moving from a system where we train in the classroom and then ask them to go out on the floor and do.  Instead, the mentor needs to be with the mentee on the floor training and doing at the same time.  Below is a graphic to try and illustrate that it isn’t two steps, but one combined step.

As I thought about this, I remembered some of the coaches that I got the most learning from.  In every case, the coach was out on the floor with me observing me learning and resolving the problem.  The coach invested a lot of time in me.  He made sure I was thinking about the problem in every way possible and would ask questions and guide me when he saw I was off course.

In contrast, I had coaches that would train me in the classroom and then give me an assignment.  The coach would come back a week or month later and see how my work had progressed.  The coach would try to get an understanding of my thinking but it would be hard.  I learned but not nearly as much or as fast as when I had my coach there with me as I worked.  This isn’t an indictment on the coach.  It was just the way the process was set up.

It may seem that having coaches for a lot of employees that can spend time with them on the floor is not feasible.  In our current system and thinking that may be true.  What is amazing is that Toyota has found a way to do it.  Leaders at all levels are coaches to their employees so they are training and doing at the same time.  This creates hundreds of coaches training and doing on the floor across the organization.

Our organizations may not be able to do this right away.  If it is truly important to the company to create learning an investment will need to be made.  Start small.  Get a few people coached and then have them coach.  Slowly let it spread.  Start with a small part of the organization.  It allows for experimenting with the training and doing process before spreading it.

I know this is easier said than done.  It was a method that worked for me in the past.  To show how slowly it can move, I was coached and then I coached 5 others and then they started to coach.  Just to get to that point took 3 years.  That started with a base of one, just me in our plant.  The whole purpose was I was there with them training on the floor as they were doing.  It is definitely a huge commitment.

I believe this huge commitment and slow process is why organizations are not successful at it.  It takes patience.

I hope your organization is willing to make the commitment.

Indirect Employees Do Add Value

Lean as the cost cutting tool is a paradigm most of the lean community has to struggle against everyday.  Then the most common way is too reduce headcount.  The first comment I most commonly hear is, “Reduce the number of indirect employees.  We have too many.”

While a company may truly have too many indirect employees, it isn’t having too many, it is using them properly.  Most efforts I have seen go out and eliminate supervisors, material handlers, and clerks in one fail swoop.  What usually happens is the work they were doing must still get done and it gets put on the direct (or value-added) employees.  These are the employees that are working on the product or service directly.  When they pick up the duties of the indirect employees it takes time away from working on the product and therefore makes them less productive.  Management can’t figure out why this is happening.

My suggestion and a concept that Toyota uses is one team leader for every 4-7 team members.  The team leaders responsibilities are to provide immediate support to their team members each and every single time they have a problem and complete non-value added work like paperwork, finding parts, or getting someone to help with an improvement idea.

This structure takes the burden of non-value activities off the value-added team member so they become more productive.  The rapid response to problems allows for better understanding of what actually is happening and leads to more problems being resolved.  All-in-all this reduces the companies total cost by having these indirect employees.

I know going from a traditional supervisor structure to a structure mentioned above is not easy in most cases.  Usually, you don’t have extra employees sitting around that you can just train and insert.  One way to free up someone for this role is through improving the work of some indirect employees.  For example, improve the work of the material handlers so they are more efficient.  When they are efficient enough to do the same work with less material handlers, use that person to become the first team leader in an area.  As the area with the new structure gets more efficient then you may be able to free up some people to become team leaders in other areas.  And so on.

I have used this method before and it worked but it does take patience.  The good news is once results are shown the process seems to speed up.

So the next time you see indirect labor as $$$…..stop and think of how you can better utilize them to remove waste and cost from your process through continuous improvement.

Top Posts of 2010

The wonderful people at WordPress.com and Stats Helper Monkeys provide some great statistics over the year.  I thought I would share the Top 5 Posts based on views from 2010.

If you saw them it might be a refresher.  If you didn’t see the post I thought it might be good to share what seems to be the most popular ones.

These are the posts that got the most views in 2010.

1

5S in the Office September 2010

This is about applying 5S in the office.  When is it appropriate to use and when is it not.

2

Comparing Lean Principles to the 14 Toyota Principles (Part 1) July 2010

This is the first of a three part series comparing the 5 Lean Principles from the Lean Learning Center to the 14 Toyota Principles.

3

Dilbert Leading Transformation July 2010

A funny Dilbert Cartoon from Scott Adams about how employees might react to a boss wanting employee engagement after years of not caring about the employees.

4

Walmart Changing Transportation Strategy June 2010

Comments on an article about Walmart changing their transportation strategy.

5

Redbox Produced In the U.S. Using Lean October 2010

Highlights of an article showing what Redbox is doing to use lean and keep the manufacturing in the U.S.

HR and Andon

Andon (or signaling) is a tool that is common to the manufacturing environment.  The most common version is a light and/or sound to signal when an operation is down.

An example that is studied quite often is the andon cord on the Toyota production line.  When an operator has an issue, they pull the cord and the team leader responds immediately.  The team leader responds with the questions, “What’s the problem?  How can I help?”

While andon is a tool that is associated with manufacturing, it is applicable anywhere.  A great example was a team from Human Resources that I facilitated during a kaizen event to reduce the amount of time from department request to candidate offer for a new hire.  During the Day One training, I explained the Toyota andon system in detail and the purpose behind it.  Two days later, the team, which had no lean exposure prior to the event, came up with an andon system for their hiring process.

The team discovered during the product-process mapping exercise that it only takes a few minutes to review a resume and give feedback by the hiring manager but they had a range of 4 – 20 days to actually get the feedback from the hiring manager.  The team decided on a reasonable reduced lead time for reviewing resumes and then designed a process to show when it was out of tolerance.

The process was as follows:

1. The hiring manager had 48 hrs to give feedback on a resume when it was sent to them
2. If no response in 48 hrs, an email was sent to the hiring manager and their HR representative with an additional 48 hrs to respond
3. If no response after the second 48 hrs, an email was sent to the hiring manager, their HR representative, and the hiring manager’s manager with a response due in 24 hrs.
4. If no response within 24 hrs, an email was sent to the same three people in step 3 stating the hiring process for that position has been put on hold and no more resumes or work will be done until they all meet on the current resumes in process

I thought this was a great way to show when a problem was occurring and when it was too far out of tolerance.  It didn’t mean they couldn’t take longer to review.  If HR sent the resume and the hiring manager replied that they were out of the office and would get to it by a certain date, that would be sufficient for HR.  They would be aware of an abnormal condition and would running the process for that condition.

This was one of two main drivers to reduce the lead time on the process from 92 days to 43 days.

It shows how a manufacturing centered concept can be applied outside of manufacturing when the reason for the concept is understood and not just copied.

Andon – Subtle Difference Changes Mindset

Last week, I got a refresher and a deeper understanding the lean principles as presented by the Lean Learning Center.  One thing deeper understanding I got was around andon (or signals).  We started the week off by doing a case study around Toyota.  The case study introduces the andon system that is on the production lines at Toyota.

A quick overview of the system.  When an operator has an issue, any issue, they pull a cord at the line.  The cord sets off music and lights telling the team leader their is a problem.  The team leader responds immediately and asks, “What is the problem?  How can I help?”

The first time I took the class, 3 years ago, I learned to use sound with the lights.  In case the team leader wasn’t looking in the direction of the lights, the sound would tell them the problem.  I have used this thinking in the last three years to install a few andon systems.

For three years, I looked at sound and lights as a way to get the team leader’s attention.  Here is the subtle difference that I learned this time. Use the sound to alert the team leader of a problem and the lights to indicate where the problem is.

I know this is very subtle, but had I taking this understanding in the past, I would have implemented some andon systems differently.  In some cases, I did you sound and lights to alert and tell where, but that was purely by accident.  In some cases, I used sound and light just to alert and the the team leader had to find out where.  Having this small change to my understanding gives me a whole new perspective on signaling when there is a problem.  It allows me to put in systems with even less waste now.

I know this may seem small, but it has caused me to go back think about the small things and WHY I do them.  It has me questioning things I haven’t question in a long time or ever before.  It re-emphasized the importance of why.

As lean thinkers, implementers, teachers, and coaches we should always be thinking about the why and gaining a deeper understanding.