As a business professional, educating yourself about lean is only the first step on the path to process improvement and money savings. Yes, millions of light bulbs have gone on after people have read the classic lean texts like Becoming Lean or Inside the Mind of Toyota. But from light bulb to implementation lies a multitude of problems, caveats, refuseniks and other barriers.
This is why the workshops and events that Productivity Alberta promotes through their website are so important. Just recently Calgary and Edmonton were home to a workshop titled, Leading the Lean Initiative: Creating a Culture that Sustains Lean. The event featured David Mann, a lean consultant and author from Michigan.
Jim Cooper, a manager of business planning and capital sourcing with the Government of Alberta helped orchestrate the event. Watching more than 40 people in a two-tiered conference room in Edmonton working on visual controls, mock production tracking charts and real life case studies, Cooper was happy with the turnout.
“We need to sustain the journey that these people have already started. 95% of lean implementation fails. Companies start off, they get going, they form teams and it all falls apart,” says Cooper,
“What this is about is how do you create and sustain the journey you’ve started and offering management insight and tools to use to sustain that journey which helps their investment.”
Building up the skills and knowledge of the leadership and management team is imperative if you want continued success with your lean initiatives. With such a high failure rate it takes real commitment and knowledge to continue your lean journey.
“Without the commitment and the involvement of the senior leadership in the long term lean will not last.”
The knowledge is where David Mann comes in. The author of the book Creating a Lean Culture, is all about figuring out what the best practices, behaviours and tools are for leaders that will sustain their lean projects.
“The vast majority of lean projects fail, they don’t fail because they don’t work, they fail because they’re different from what people have learned how to do,” says Mann.
“It requires a different tool set in terms of where you spend your time, what you measure, what you look for and what kind of lessons you teach. None of them are particularly complicated but they are different.”
Mann focuses on three actionable pieces of productivity advice.
Put in place visual controls and track what you’re doing visually.
“Something that frequently reflects and records the health of your particular process”
Use a standard accountability process. Bring up the problems you found out about with your visual controls and assign people to figure it out using a visible, public task assignment date board.
“It is a dramatic increase in accountability from keeping a list of task assignments on an Excel file where they are invisible.”
Once you’ve identified the problem and the fix make the change to standard work practices to reflect new information.
”It’s very straightforward it just takes discipline to stay with it, especially when things start heading south on you. But if you do, you’re going to reap the benefits from the investments you’ve made in lean,” says Mann.
Dana Springer is a Group Leader with General Dynamics Land Systems, a worldwide company that manufactures, repairs, and retrofits light armored vehicles.
“We had some internal training on lean about 6 or 8 months ago from our head office and this presented itself an opportunity to take it to the next level and get an outside point of view,” says Springer.
“I prefer an outside point of view because you’re not getting specific information. Your own people know what the issues are and they tend to drive those issues down your throat while here you get a better overview and you can use your own judgment.”
Springer really appreciated learning about visual controls, a vital part of Mann’s presentation.
“The only visual control we use right now is our end state. We have a scoreboard, and that’s it, that marks when every vehicle gets made. I am definitely going to look into the possibilities at our company.”
