How do you introduce lean, effectively and sustainably, into
a large organisation? I am thinking of
organisations with thousands, even tens of thousands of employees, spread
across multiple sites, organisations like big banks, the national health
system, and schooling.
I recently visited a not-so-big single-site factory which
has been on its lean journey about two years.
In that time they have completed nearly twenty one-week kaizen events,
all carefully documented together with the claimed results. There are fewer than 400 employees on the
site and yet it was clear that despite the energetic commitment to lean by its
designated champion quite limited progress has been made. The clue came in the visual management boards. Almost all the postings were generated by
computer (colourful graphs, tables and charts); the few ‘hour-by-hour’ white
boards requiring manual updating were not up to date. One carried a date a month old!
The visual management boards were really impressive. One could track from hour-by-hour boards, to
weekly boards updated daily, to monthly boards, to an impressive overall
corporate reporting board which showed how the kaizen events linked to
corporate vision and strategy. But when
the shop floor data is not entirely up to date, can one trust the
weekly/monthly, etc. boards? I fear not.
Apart from the fact that the data was not up todate, two
things troubled me. Firstly, the visual
management boards lacked ‘fingerprints.’
By this I mean that most of the data displayed was neatly printed
following processing by computer. In a
workforce where many are functionally illiterate or at least cannot make sense
of percentages, these displays probably mean little. Indeed, they may even alienate. How much more effective would the displays be
if they were handwritten by the people in each work area? Secondly, I got the impression that flaws
were not followed up; rectification seemed to take second place to
recording. To quote David Mann in his
book Creating a lean culture, ‘
Visual controls amount only to wallpaper without the discipline to insist they
are taken seriously and used as a basis for action.’
At first glance this company has done really well. But, my overall conclusion is that it has
moved too quickly and too broadly. It
has two other, smaller factories in other parts of the country. Kaizen weeks have been initiated there
too. The champion runs from site to site
to support them. Too much effort is
going into ‘events’ and visual management and too little into achieving the essential
discipline of consistent use of agreed practices and follow-up problem solving.
I am reminded of a company I visited overseas some years
ago. At the start of every shift, each
team leader and his/her team met for ten minutes to review their previous shift
and the needs of this shift, noting any difficulties and attending to them as
ability and resources allowed. An hour later, a second team met, of the
supervisor and his/her team leaders; they dealt with what the first team could
not. Later in the day a third team met,
of the manager and his/her supervisors, to attend to difficulties unresolved by
the first two teams. No meeting went
longer than 15 minutes. I was told that
sometime in the week, a fourth team met, to deal with problems unresolved by
the first three teams.
I believe it is this relentless follow up and support which
entrenches the ‘thinking people’ essential to effective and sustainable
lean. Nowadays we would call the process
‘standardised work for managers,’ or ‘leader standard work.’
So, how does this apply to large organisations and
systems? One hundred percent, I
say. We need to be quite specific about
paying attention to the detail of getting things right. We need to deal with the actual and not the
general and adopt a zero tolerance towards non-performance. Each incident of non-performance is simply a
fact, not a discipline situation. Each
incident has causes that need to be identified and remedied, starting with
those most closely involved and escalated up if they cannot make progress. By doing this thoroughly in one part of even
a large organisation the new way is entrenched and non-performance is no longer
tolerated. Doing it in a wishy-washy way
says ‘this is just another flavour of the month.’
Having adopted this in one part of the organisation, the
process can be replicated and then entrenched through ‘leader standard
work.’ The replication needs to be done
with great attention to detail until the ‘tipping point’ is reached – the
organisation realizes this is good stuff and there is no going back. Going too fast, or spreading resources so
thinly that token visual management and token follow-up are the order of the
day will only encourage cynicism and resistance.
The process reminds me of what Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point) claims are the three
characteristics of epidemics: contagiousness, little causes can have big
effects, and change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment. Being specific about using the lean tools,
getting small wins, and persevering: that is how to reach the tipping point for
lean in large organisations.
Speaking of which: the Best Practice Workshop with Mr
Takeyuki Furuhashi of Nagoya, Japan, will be at the Rustenburg Provincial
Hospital in the last week
of July – another specific step in trying to influence a large system! See our website for details, or phone
Lorraine Govender on 021 406 1226 for more information.
