LEAN MANUFACTURING  SECRETS FOR YOUR BUSINESS – 3

Ask yourself how you can make the most of people’s time and investment in CI or LM practices and how it will/call affect/benefit your business? Your resources, employees and customers are important assets – how are you using and utilizing them all in this process of becoming a more agile and cost-effective organization/business/operation ? 

Always, start by asking what can I do? This personal hands-on approach can truly make a difference in any business.  

Ways to avoid your LM initiatives to be stymied and frustrating, fail or come up short: 

  • Pay special and close attention to what the business culture really is! It could be totally out of alignment with the principles and fundamentals of LM and cause some stress, tensions, or even resistance within and throughout the organization. 
  • Ask and answer yourself/your team, your business, partners and customer honestly what the existing climate is that would support (hinder/help) Lean working methods and how it will benefit all stakeholders?  
  • Here is another useful question: Is our organization hierarchical, rigid and autocratic and not a people centered company?  
  • Learning what not to do from the mistakes and discoveries, shared learnings and insights from others is critical.  
  • Be aware that not everyone will necessarily share your enthusiasm for LM. Some might dread what it does to their work load and world. Some initial resistance to any change is normal. Showing the value or the WIIFM (what is in it for me) is a very important part of the whole LM initiative.  

Here are TEN easy tips of how to enable LM in your organization: 

1. KEEP THE CHANNELS OF COMMUNICATION OPEN 

  • Talk and inform often 
  • Educate and empower, knowledge, skill, practice and competence, on-going mastery and teaching others 
  • Trust, honesty and information = transparency 
  • Give everyone a head start, a common language, goal and purpose and unleash the power of lean on your organization.  

2. GIVE OPPORTUNITY FOR EVERYONE FOR INPUT AND FEEDBACK 

  • Get everyone engaged, excited and hands-on, involved and aboard with your LM initiative and plans 
  • Introduce feedback and coaching, establishing communication channels where before they might have been none 

3. CREATE AND CULTIVATE THE RIGHT WORKING CONTEXT AND ENVIRONEMENT WHERE HONESTY IS ALWAYS THE BEST POLICY! 

  • Set communication and information sharing, learning and openness (transparency) as an organizational priority 
  • Less people will feel threatened and insecure about speaking up, hiding errors for fear of embarrassment or consequences (like being held accountable or losing their jobs or face in front of others) 
  • Treat each other with respect and share ideas, issues openly, always keeping in mind the overall benefit (or detriment) for all if closer attention are paid to certain issues or challenges at hand.  

4. TAKE NOTICE, REWARD, ENCOURAGE AND CELEBRATE! 

  • Select examples of great achievement with LM, samples, project studies, specifics, general, share and celebrate them all-round. Give credit and recognition to the team where it is due, even for accomplishments that made a great difference for the company, a specific area or problem that was solved. It is highly motivational and quite an incentive for many to keep trying and even do more!  

5. Implement a system and metrics and monitor process BUT ALSO PROGRESS!!  

  • Formalized record and tracking is essential for these LM processes and initiative to WORK and LAST! Ensure they are streamlines and purposeful, organized and regularly occur.  

6. STICK TO THE BASICS and KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID!  

  • It sounds easy enough, but believe me, we get sidetracked so easily in the intricacies of calculations,  metrics and spreadsheets, that we often forget the pleasantries and clarity that simplicity brings.  
  • Making things easy to follow and stick to, will help that they do exactly that!  

7. STAY POSITIVE AND KEEP AT IT! 

8. ACHIEVE and TAP INTO YOUR RESOURCES  

  • Be always focusing on needs, wants, desires and motivations, to mobilize and sustain momentum and change.   
  • Make the stake and reward personal for participating and applying the principles of LM.  
  • Make it the way that you do business – WITHOUT COMPROMISE!  
  • Set the bar and standards high,  keeping on reaching higher. 

9. DISCIPLINED PRACTICE 

  • consistent, persistent, determined, dedicated to make things work, better and last! Low cost, no waste, effective and efficient!  

10. A CONTINUING JOURNEY (not only a destination)  

  • Ongoing Learning is essential and learning from our mistakes, oversights, challenges and achievements are important.  
  • Always ask what we learned, what went well, what did not work and how can we make it all better next time round,  should be part of normal conversation and routine.  

Always remember, despite what you read or hear from consultants, there is NO ONE-SIZE FITS ALL LM deployment that works and fits for everyone. It depends on the organization, leadership, dynamics etc.  

MUCH has been written about lean manufacturing (see reference listing for an eclectic sampling of some recent books and classics on the topic).  Practical information on how to implement lean, especially in small business is hard to come by. Tapping into the expertise of those who have thread along this path is a great way to discover the secrets and pitfalls, mistakes to avoid when considering LM for your business/organization.  

Start by asking yourself what the current readiness and knowledge levels regarding LEAN would be? Close to most of us (almost 100%) have heard about lean manufacturing at some point in time, we are just not sure even how much or little we really know until you start getting into it!  

For some lean thinking comes naturally, for others a little more rigor and discipline is required to effect and impact business processes and ensuing success.  

Are you doing something currently (like LM) to cut down on waste,  scrap or unnecessary costs? Typically less than 50% of companies will still be in the running here.  

Do you consider your lean manufacturing processes a roaring success? Less than 5-10% will respond with affirmation and agreement here!   

There is always room for improvement in any business. LM provides us with the tools and means, channels and connections to plan, execute and sustain these changes to benefit our profit and bottom line.  

Always remember that… 

You can not do everything yourself or quickly necessarily. You need the combined efforts, buy-in, support and infrastructure to get things done and it may take longer than expected initially or overall, BUT STICK WITH IT! 

LM is an on-going journey and NOT a ‘quick-fix’ for business woes! Although some of the tools and applications will start providing you with immediate reward and benefit that is measurably making a difference.  

It is not successful as a project here and there or uncoordinated strategy, shooting from the hip, when we feel like it type of approach.  

Dedicated time and resources, focused and targeted effort will benefit your LM initiative tremendously. SHIFT YOUR FOCUS MORE LONG-TERM and step out of the day-to-day fire-fighting and reduced focus we so typically have in our organizations,  dealing with one problem at a time, as they come up and not following a very effective strategy overall or at all.  

LM is about more than tools, counterintuitive thinking and application to manufacturing and transactional processes! It is about the people involved  in, touched by, working with and through these processes and outcomes,  to IMPROVE and SUSTAIN business success and growth.  

Someone once quipped that LEAN IS NOT ABOUT WHAT YOU SEE, BUT COMES FROM WHAT YOU THINK.  The impetus and motivation starts early and it starts with each of us. Engage and enable the minds and hearts of your people and mobilize your organization, taking it to new heights of performance excellence and increasing bottom line profit. Tap into the collective talents within your organization,  more organic, lead by example and emphasize that this is NOT A PROGRAM (with a start and finish). This is an initiative that will continue, grow and expand FOREVER, from here on forward.  

Things can not and will not stay the same with LM – that is the one guarantee.  

Skill-building, training, knowledge-application, ,refinement and mastery will come over time. There will be learning curves (steep sometimes at the beginning), no recipe BUT a ROADMAP (general ideas and suggestions, like we mentioned in this book) to follow to great, proven success.  

In the lean manufacturing toolbox it is NOT ABOUT how many tools or which ones you have, chosen or are/will be using BUT HOW YOU UNLEASH, UTILIZE AND LEVERAGE THEM! 

We have covered a few key tools to get you started, there are myriads of LM tools available and it will take time to develop your competency and mastery over time of any, some or all of these as part of your overall strategy of getting BETTER as a business or organization:  

Jidoka, kaizen, andon, kanban, SMED, visual management, 5S, 5 Whys are all examples of lean tools that you can use. It all starts with how we think about things and the shift that we have to make in our minds from conventional, traditional and current ways we are doing things, what works, what does not? 

テキスト ボックスLM starts with each of us and a willingness to be open-minded, see, discover and harness the potential savings, cost and waste reduction opportunities within and across our organization and levels,  business partners and even customers to all become MORE SUCCESSFUL and BETTER (even BEST) at what we do, at the lowest possible cost, without sacrificing quality.  

Here is an example of what we mean. Mastering a tool like the 5S (reducing waste or MUDA), you could go around cleaning up basically, without a detailed understanding or internalizing the ability to immediately identify problems to enable quick responses. What then would be the purpose? See the difference?  

For those of us who would want to learn more about LM and the tools that can be leveraged, laws of lean that can be applied with great success in your business, consider the FOUR LAWS OF LEAN as laid out and adapted from Bowen and Spears’ in “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System” (Harvard Business Review, Nov. 1999). Space eludes us to elaborate too much on this.  

In Kanban for example, it is not about the visual cue or tool as much,  as understanding the logic and importance of upstream and downstream process, flow and the implications for operation and customer!  

DAILY Decision-making, problem-solving and managing will be affected and enabled by this type of thinking and very soon it will be about so much more than mere application of tools on a couple of projects. It will change the way you think about and do business moving forward, FOREVER!  

テキスト ボックスA LM TOOLBOX OVERVIEW 

A quick summary is provided here of some of the most basic LM ‘tools’ to get you off to a good start. They are:  

Closing Remarks 

Getting on board with LM is no easy task, but the initiative will soon deliver rewards to your business. Fostering its growth and filtering through all levels of the organization will definitely pay off in the long run.  

Many of our organizations are so busy getting ‘work’ done, dealing with problems, fires and urgencies,  meeting goals and objectives, and initiating business strategies, that they do not take or have the time to even consider ‘looking’ for waste.  

WE all should pause and take a minute to consider how LM principles, rules, tools and thinking can help us eliminating waste. Getting to root-causes make problem-solving easier and  more permanent! This process is on-going and will reveal things about your business you did not even know at all! You might be surprised by what you find, unearth and reveal when using LM thinking and tools.  

Looking at processes to see how to BEST eliminate the different forms of MUDA or waste,  requires new,  counterintuitive thinking at times,  a true non-traditionalist point of view.  

HERE IS AN AMAZING TRUTH (and in our opinion another key to really understanding the power and potential of LM) for business, regardless of their size, industry, challenges and the like:  

We DO NOT HAVE THAT PROCESS-FOCUS AUTOMATICALLY. WE have to discover, hone, harness, develop and refine it as we go along!  

See value through the eyes and requirements of your customers and take a real, long hard look at what and how you are doing things to get them what they need and want. Look for opportunities to improve it and cut down on cost, waste and expenses. and remember – keep it simple:  

We wish you all the best on your LM journey. If you like to learn more see additional sources provided here.


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