It encourages a concise, visual, and collaborative approach to problem solving.

When to Use the A3 Problem Solving Process:

1. Complex Problems: When faced with complex or recurring issues that require in-depth analysis and systematic resolution.
2. Cross-Functional Challenges: When multiple departments or teams need to collaborate to address a problem that spans organizational boundaries.
3. Continuous Improvement: When striving to foster a culture of continuous improvement and problem-solving within an organization.
4. Decision-Making: When making critical decisions that involve weighing multiple options and considering their impact on various stakeholders.

Benefits of Using the A3 Problem Solving Process:

1. Structured Approach: It provides a systematic and structured approach to problem solving, ensuring comprehensive analysis and consideration of all relevant factors.
2. Visual Communication: The A3 format encourages visual representation of information, making it easier to communicate complex ideas, root causes, and potential solutions to stakeholders.
3. Collaborative Problem Solving: The A3 process promotes collaboration among team members, encouraging diverse perspectives and collective brainstorming to arrive at effective solutions.
4. In-Depth Analysis: The A3 problem solving process encourages thorough analysis of the problem, utilizing tools such as root cause analysis, data collection, and process mapping to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying issues.
5. Continuous Improvement: By documenting the problem-solving process and its outcomes on the A3 document, organizations can track progress, learn from previous experiences, and continuously improve their problem-solving capabilities.

How to Use the A3 Template:

It is designed to align an organization’s strategic goals with its day-to-day operations and ensure that everyone in the organization is working towards the same objectives.

Below are step-by-step instructions on how to use Hoshin Kanri:

1. Understand the Current State: Begin by assessing your organization’s current state. Understand its mission, vision, values, and long-term strategic objectives. Identify the key challenges, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
2. Set Long-Term Objectives: Based on the analysis, set three to five long-term, high-level, and ambitious objectives that will guide the organization’s strategy for the next three to five years. These objectives should be in alignment with the organization’s mission and vision.
3. Break Down Objectives into Annual Goals: Divide the long-term objectives into smaller annual goals. These annual goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Each goal should contribute directly to achieving the corresponding long-term objective.
4. Identify Key Initiatives: For each annual goal, identify the key initiatives or projects that will help accomplish the goal. These initiatives should be practical and represent the most critical activities needed to achieve the desired results.
5. Create Hoshin Kanri X-Matrix: The X-Matrix is a crucial visual tool used in Hoshin Kanri. It aligns the strategic objectives, annual goals, and key initiatives in a matrix format. On the X-Matrix, the long-term objectives are placed on the top row, the annual goals on the left column, and the key initiatives in the intersecting cells.
6. Cascade the X-Matrix: The X-Matrix should be cascaded down through the organization to ensure alignment at all levels. Each department or team should create its own X-Matrix that aligns with the higher-level X-Matrix. This process continues until the objectives are connected to individual employee goals.
7. Implement and Monitor Progress: With the X-Matrix in place, begin implementing the key initiatives and projects. Monitor progress regularly, using key performance indicators (KPIs) to track the success of each initiative and its contribution to the overall goals.
8. Review and Adjust Annually: Conduct annual reviews of the Hoshin Kanri plan. Evaluate the progress made, identify challenges and successes, and adjust the plan for the upcoming year. Ensure that the changes in the plan are well-communicated throughout the organization.
9. Maintain a Continuous Improvement Mindset: Hoshin Kanri is not a one-time exercise. It is a continuous improvement process that requires a commitment to ongoing strategic planning, execution, and refinement.
10. Promote Collaboration and Learning: Encourage collaboration and learning across the organization. Foster a culture of open communication where employees can share ideas, feedback, and best practices to enhance the Hoshin Kanri process.

Remember, the successful implementation of Hoshin Kanri requires commitment from top leadership, active involvement from all levels of the organization, and a willingness to adapt and learn from experiences along the way.

It involves the use of structured routines and coaching to develop the capability of individuals and teams to address challenges and improve processes.

Here’s a step-by-step tutorial on how to use Toyota Kata:

1. Understand the Kata Concept: Familiarize yourself with the key concepts of Toyota Kata. Kata refers to routines or patterns of behaviour that are practiced to build skills and capabilities. There are two primary Kata routines: the Improvement Kata and the Coaching Kata.
2. Learn the Improvement Kata: The Improvement Kata is the process by which individuals and teams work towards achieving their target condition or desired outcome. It follows the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle and involves the following steps:
   a. Grasp the Current Condition: Understand the current state of the process or problem you want to improve. Gather data and identify the key metrics.
   b. Establish the Target Condition: Set a specific and challenging target condition that you want to achieve. This should be achievable in a short time frame.
   c. Iterate PDCA Cycles: Break down the steps to move from the current condition to the target condition. Experiment with small changes (Do), measure the results (Check), and adjust your approach based on what you’ve learned (Act). Repeat this cycle until you reach the target condition.
3. Learn the Coaching Kata: The Coaching Kata is the process by which managers and leaders support their team members in their improvement efforts. It involves asking thought-provoking questions and guiding individuals through the Improvement Kata. The Coaching Kata helps develop problem-solving and critical-thinking skills in employees.
4. Practice the Kata Routines: Start practicing the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata routines. Select a small improvement project or area and work through the PDCA cycles using the Improvement Kata. Have a coach or mentor use the Coaching Kata to guide and support you through the process.
5. Create a Culture of Kata: Introduce the concept of Toyota Kata to your organization and promote its adoption. Encourage everyone, from the top leadership to frontline employees, to engage in Kata routines to solve problems and make improvements.
6. Provide Training and Support: Offer training sessions and workshops on Toyota Kata for employees at all levels. Provide ongoing support and coaching to individuals and teams as they practice the Kata routines.
7. Celebrate and Share Success: Celebrate the successes achieved through Toyota Kata. Share the stories of improvement and problem-solving with the rest of the organization to inspire others and reinforce the importance of the Kata approach.
8. Encourage Continuous Learning: Foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement. Encourage employees to seek new challenges, experiment with new ideas, and learn from failures as well as successes.
9. Scale Up and Sustain: As Toyota Kata becomes embedded in the organization’s culture, scale it up to other departments and areas. Sustain the practice by integrating Kata routines into daily work processes.

I had seen this pattern repeat itself over a number of clients and it really got me wondering: “How and what are managers managing when they don’t have visibility of their processes?”

As I was still struggling with this question, I found myself blurting to the manager that I was working with: “What is the difference between doing the work and managing the work?” The question popped before I could even construct my potential response, in case the manager put it back to me. From her response it was clear that this was something to which she hadn’t given much thought. The question was posed back to me. Of course, my response may not be the most comprehensive answer, since it is primarily influenced by my role and experience as an improvement practitioner.

Doing the work results in the transformation of something (physical or non-physical). It is made up of actions that take something from an initial condition and transform it into a modified condition that is beneficial to the next person in the value chain. The recipient is either an internal customer or the external client who pays for the service or product. On the other hand, managing the work is concerned with transforming the transformation process in order to improve it (best case scenario). In other cases managing the work focuses on maintaining the transformation process by ensuring that it is in control. Those who do the work have a direct impact on the customers and those who manage the work have an indirect impact on customers, through their direct impact on those who do the work.

It is generally easy to see the tools/methods used by those who do the work, since they are directly used in the process of service delivery. What about those who manage the work? What tools do they use and how do they improve customer service? In many cases those who manage the work use management theory, coupled with data and the facts about their operations. This may be the reason why I was puzzled when the Unit Managers did not support the initiative to collect the requested data. I do see that the Unit Managers and many other managers work with data and some may already be overwhelmed by the amount of data and reporting that they have to do. Perhaps that’s why they felt discouraged to take on yet another reporting request.

Although those that do/manage the work are collecting lots of other data, they are not collecting data to drive and support improvement. Based on my observations, it seems that most of the collected data is control data, and measurements are used as lag indicator metrics. The control data that I have seen managers focusing on includes: shift rosters, staff clocking data, staff leave data, registers for handovers/receiving, stock and orders. In many cases the metrics used are reporting on the past and usually don’t provide deeper insight into what to improve and how to improve it. The common metrics include: units completed, number of defects, number outstanding/late, efficiency ratios, etc. Of course these metrics are important, but the gap is that they are usually not used to track performance trends and drive proactive corrective actions. If they are used for improvement, it is usually localised improvements, instead of systemic improvements.

Collecting lots of data will not necessarily lead to improvement, so this means we should take the words of W. Edwards Deming to heart when we setup our dashboards.

The open systems model (Katz and Kahn version shown in the figure below) gives us a general framework that can help the assessment of how an organisation is performing in relation to its goals. What I like about this depiction of an open system is that it makes it possible to see that the output of the system should be seen within the context of the external environment. In the case of defining metrics, this means our metric should focus on our performance in relation to the promise made to the external environment. So our first and key metric should be how we are performing in relation to the service level agreement (SLA) and therefore the customers’ experience of the organisation.

If we are not a monopoly, how we perform in relation to our customers’ expectation will impact the demand for our services. Hence the next key metric should be the customer demand. This metric provides us with two insights. The first is whether our key assumptions about what customers expect from us were correct or incomplete. If we are meeting our SLA and yet the demand is not growing it means there may be other things in the environment which we don’t understand (assuming the economic cycle has not changed). The next insight from this metric is whether or not we have sufficient capacity to meet the demand without compromising the SLA. Plans can be made to safeguard the SLA while meeting the growing or variable demand.

The third metric should come from the operations of the team/department. This is probably where the question of where to focus comes in, since there are many variables that can be measured. An understanding of systems theory is very helpful here because it is from this that we recognise that the performance of a system is determined by the performance of the system’s constraint. The terms ‘bottleneck’ and ‘constraint’ are sometimes used interchangeably but it is very important to know that they mean different things, and understanding the difference is fundamental to managing systems (a topic for another day perhaps).

So our third metric should inform us about the performance and capacity of the system’s constraint. In particular, we want to look at the relationship between the customer demand and the constraint’s capacity. If the constraint is unable to manage the demand we need actions to close this gap. In addition, if the performance of the constraint is dependent on multiple conditions, we would need to increase our metrics to include those conditions. This is because anything that compromises the constraint, compromises the performance of the system. Therefore, at minimum, our dashboard will have three key metrics: Performance against SLA, Customer demand and Performance of the constraint. The need for additional metrics will be determined by constraint’s relationship with other components of the system.

In this age when people are talking about big data, and dashboards are becoming the hype, it may be easy to get lost in the details. I hope this article will provide some food for thought for those who are feeling overwhelmed by the demands of measurements everywhere. It’s important that we remember that organisations are systems and how we use metrics should reflect this understanding. As a manager, what are you measuring and how are you finding data collection?

Cape Town is sometimes called the “Silicon Valley of South Africa”. Yet, it was a pleasant surprise to learn that Atlantis Foundries became not only an African, but a global leader in the foundry industry using AI and machine learning to achieve zero defects on the truck engine block castings that they delivered to their customers in Europe and the United States.

There is much to learn from what Pieter shares with us, but I would like to highlight one aspect in particular. It has become fashionable to talk about going “beyond lean” in the rush to market Industry 4.0 technologies. To be sure, these new technologies are game-changing and cannot be ignored, but I think that referring to them as “beyond lean” is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding what lean thinking is about.

Before introducing AI, Atlantis Foundries invested in continuous improvement for many years to improve their casting defect rate from very poor to industry standard. This meant that, by the time they started experimenting with AI, there was already a problem-solving culture in the organization that they could build on. You will hear Pieter refer to AI as another “tool” in the improvement journey. In other words, just like we use 5 Whys as a tool to find root causes, there is now this very powerful tool called AI that can be used in situations where humans cannot cope with the amount of information that needs to be processed.

Like any other problem-solving tool, AI can be used incorrectly or inappropriately if you do not apply lean to the problem at hand. Asking what issue we need to solve has to be the first step, which will inform our problem-solving and make it effective. Atlantis Foundries thought very carefully about this question and that guided them as they figure out how to tap into AI.

This story shows us how important lean thinking is in making a success of new technologies like machine learning and AI. Read full interview.