BASICS Model: Check and Sustain1
Creating the Lean Culture—What It Means to Have a Lean Culture
A company’s culture is a direct reflection of the beliefs and value systems embodied by the CEO and senior leadership team. Ultimately, others can influence the culture, but changes to the culture start with the executive team. The following topics associated with implementing a Lean culture are covered in this chapter:
1. Understand what a Lean culture looks like—“The People Piece.”
2. Conduct a Lean culture assessment.
3. Develop high-level steps to implementing a Lean culture.
4. Define the barriers to continuous improvement.
5. Work to sustain and improve with Lean.
What Does a Lean Culture Look Like?
There is no one-size-fits-all solution. We say you know you have a Lean culture when 90% of your ideas are coming from the front line every day and 96% are implemented and standard work updated.
While every organization is unique, there are several common principles, approaches, and barriers encountered, as well as many lessons learned that can be garnered from organizations going through a Lean cultural transformation.
A common theme of this book is the balance required between task and people. Understanding people will make or break an organization’s ability to fully deploy Lean, and is even more critical if you are a service organization or working with transactional processes. Lean is a very difficult environment to create; it takes an incredible amount of work and perseverance, and must be driven from the top to be ultimately successful. Lean was originally coined the fragile production system because it can be so easily undone.
CEOs know how important it is to have company values, and in the end it is the responsibility of the CEO and senior management to put the value systems into practice. We ask the leaders; what would your employees say if we asked them the following:
■ What are your company values?
■ Does your leadership live by those values?
■ Do your leaders make decisions based on those values?
■ Does the leadership put the values into action?
■ Does the leadership follow-up on actions?
One company that does walk the talk is Barry-Wehmiller. Target Magazine profiled CEO Bob Chapman and the “unique management system that truly embodies the people-centric, sustainability-focused principles of the Toyota Production System.”2 Mr. Chapman proposes the following equation in the article:
|
|
We feel CEOs must:
■ “Be patient with the process but impatient with the results.”3
■ “Don’t confuse effort with results.”4
■ Create a no-excuses environment. Excuses are for losers!
■ Pause briefly to reflect on your successes, and then move on to the next one.
Lean Culture Assessment
Figure 27.1 is a self-assessment that can determine where your organization is on its Lean journey. We have selected attributes that align with each type of culture, which can be used to help assess your organization. Place an X where you think it best fits your organization.5 This assessment includes just a few of the attributes of a Lean culture. On which side does your organization seem to land?
Figure 27.1 Traditional versus Lean. (Source: Authors; significant (80%) input from Jim Dauw, CEO, Impresa Aerospace.)
The way to truly motivate people is to give them a challenging vision to which to aspire and to lead them there. Make them feel part of a winning team, part of your successful organization. People should be rewarded for being more productive. A goal of the Lean culture is to have 20%–30% less labor than your competition but have a 15%–30% increase in market wages over your competition. Another key past practice in companies was the notion of promoting from within, which Toyota still follows today. Yet, in the United States, it seems it is more often promote from outside, and employees’ opinions are not as valued as those of external consultants.6
High-Level Steps to Implementing a Lean Culture
Step 1: Utilize Skip Levels to Determine What Your Employees Are Thinking
Use skip level meetings to meet with employees two levels below you without their manager or supervisor present.
Step 2: Education and Training
Educate yourself first on the Lean culture and then train your board of directors in Lean and obtain their support. Consider assigning a member of the board to monitor your Lean activities. Train your senior leaders. Set expectations related to improvements, which can only be met by implementing Lean, and have each area create its plan to improve, monitor these plans, and help to remove barriers. Create an executive team of Lean role models. If you are the CEO, once you have learned Lean, then you should lead some of the training or participate on an implementation team. As Ritsuo Shingo says “Show them your back.”
Step 3: Create a Pull for Lean
If you are the CEO, start by having every leader develop and report their process cycle times and overall throughput times. Create a pull for Lean by instructing your senior team to cut cycle times by 50% over the next year. Make sure your strategic plan contains a continuous improvement strategy. Make sure at every meeting you emphasize Lean and A3 problem-solving thinking and techniques and assess their progress on their cycle time reductions.
Step 4: Create a Lean Implementation Plan
Create an organization-wide implementation plan, including your Lean vision, values, training, and communication plans with deliverable milestones. Make sure all functional areas and value stream managers have a say in the plan. Communicate your vision, values, and guiding principles. Put it on wallet-sized cards and distribute them to everyone in the organization.
Step 5: Create a Lean Steering Committee
Convert your senior leadership team into your Lean steering committee. Remember, Lean becomes the culture, and the way you do business from now on.
Step 6: Baseline Metrics
Baseline your current performance metrics. Establish process-focused cycle time and throughput time metrics and goals for every process in every department.
Step 7: Implement a Pilot—Utilize the BASICS Model
Pick an area to experiment. Normally we start closest to the customer. Baseline your current performance metrics. Take baseline videos and pictures everywhere as you will be surprised to see how fast things change.
Step 8: Organization Role Clarity
The team leader and/or supervisor layer must have time to implement the improvements. At Toyota, they budget 50% of the team leaders’ time for improvements. Each team leader has four to six persons that they are responsible to train and develop as well as coach on finding improvement ideas. Without the structure to implement 80% of ideas from the floor, we will not be able to sustain the new culture.
Step 9: Gemba Walks
Get out of your office and go watch the processes. Don’t just walk for the sake of walking … conduct audits, talk to employees and encourage suggestions, and ask employees how you can help. A good question to start with is “What is the standard?” Without a standard we can’t have quality or measure our improvement.
Eliminate all the reports and create visual metric boards in each area (not computers). This not only demonstrates your desire to understand what is happening at the gemba but also shows that you are walking the talk and will gain your employees trust and respect. Eat lunch with your employees. Encourage them to think; do not give them all the answers. Ask them what their metrics are, discuss Lean concepts with them and, most importantly, listen.
Step 10: Sustain—Hoshin and Suggestion System
Implement and formalize hoshin planning, which is a top-down goal-deployment process where top management sets the overall vision and the annual high-level policies and targets that are passed down to the next level. Managers and employees participate in setting their annual targets, and developing the strategy and detailed action plans. This provides bottom-up participation. Then establish a formal, Lean-type, suggestion process, not the typical suggestion box. Toyota’s suggestion system is described in the book, 20 Million Ideas in 40 Years.7 Recognize, reward, and publicize successes. Remember, rewards do not have to be monetary. Consider having quarterly or yearly events to recognize best improvements.
Step 11: Continuous Improvement
Take the Lean culture quiz every six months and report the findings to the board-level Lean committee. Update your roadmap or plan of continuous improvement to maintain and narrow the gaps.
Lean Infrastructure
Most companies fail to create the infrastructure necessary to support the Lean culture. Most companies implement the Lean tools on several product lines, get great results, but do not continue to drive the improvements, nor do they have the supervisor training or resources required to generate and implement new ideas or ingrain the standard work into the operating system. Almost immediately the Lean lines start to degrade and we end up with the phenomenon of what we call Lean Lite.
How Do You Get the CEO on Board?
To sustain Lean, the CEO must be on board. This does not mean they have to be on board in the beginning, although this is ideal. Getting them on board will depend on the CEO’s exposure to Lean. Encourage them to read, go on a benchmarking trip to Japan*, and attend executive Lean seminars. It can be difficult if you are trying to create a Lean culture within a traditional organization. In traditional organizations, the CEOs and financial officers are looking for short-term, quick, and large return on investments (ROIs). If the organization is traditional, they will respond best if they are shown quick results on one or a series of projects. Many times, Lean progresses for a couple of years and the CEOs still have not totally bought in. This is mainly due to pressure from the CFOs. We normally end up having very candid discussions with the CEO and CFO over their investment in the effort and whether they are serious about implementing Lean and embedding it into their culture.
Rapid Kaizen Improvement—See, Solve, Tell
Rapid kaizen is a phrase we started using to help people “learn to see” simple improvements. It is an improvement that can be implemented within 30 minutes and requires no capital or purchases. We teach the team to use the PDSA process versus throwing solutions at a problem. After their observations, the team or individual writes the problem statement and root cause. This allows us to teach them to “learn to solve.” After the implementation of the improvement, we have them report out. Here is the catch—they only get five minutes. This allows us to teach them “how to tell.” This is a critical part of the learning. It allows us to coach people on how to close the communication loop and tell a simple story from the heart instead of the brain. Once they can connect with the heart, the story becomes natural and is spoken in simple terms that others can understand.
Two-Second Lean
Two-second Lean was created and popularized by Paul Akers, owner of FastCap. In Paul’s book 2 Second Lean* he explains how this approach can get everyone involved in making very simple improvements every day and most importantly making Lean FUN! This approach includes taking photos or videos of the improvement ideas and then putting them on an intranet for everyone to share and see.
In his book Paul says,
Lean is about continually reducing the waste stream that’s involved in everything you do in your life, from how you make your lunch to the way you get dressed in the morning. It can simplify how you do everything like: collecting your car keys and briefcase before you go to work, how you get the kids ready in the morning, family meal time, yard work, and home maintenance—it doesn’t matter. Lean thinking applies to every aspect of life and therefore can improve every aspect of life.
Paul later goes on to talk about his trips to Japan. When he asked the vice president of Lexus
What is the most important thing about Toyota … He (the VP of Lexus) said, “The most important thing for Toyota is people. Toyota is all about teaching and training people and building a culture of continuous improvement. We don’t care about the next hybrid, the next engineering marvel, not even the next sales strategy. Our number one concern is how to build our people and how to build a culture of continuous improvement.”
Paul then set out to build this culture at FastCap. He started by creating FastCap’s Morning Meeting which had the following agenda and grew from five to ten minutes to over 45 minutes per day.
■ Review mistakes
■ Review improvements
■ Sales numbers
■ FastCap principles
■ Raving ran letters
■ Product training
■ History lesson
■ Stretching
■ Read from a Lean book
His philosophy is, “First we improve:
■ The individual
■ The process
■ The product”
He sums up 2-second Lean by describing it as three pillars:
1. See waste.
2. Continuously improve everything, everybody, every day.
3. Make “before and after” videos of all your improvements.
Paul goes on to say:
It’s the same thing with videos. Just make it now— with the phone that is in your pocket. Make before and after videos now. Do not move a thing in your work area until you record in living color the chaos you are working in now. I began to instruct companies to do this and the results were phenomenal. It was literally like pouring gasoline on a bonfire. They made one video and they were able to show it to different branches and locations of their company. The next thing you know, they made another video. In just a few weeks, they made forty videos. I realized this was a critical component. It builds a library of success and a library for training all your current and future employees. This is a powerful concept. One of the reasons why FastCap took off in terms of its Lean journey and why everyone was so interested in it, is that we documented what we were doing with our cheesy little videos— and everybody loved them. If it was good enough for us, why not instruct everybody to do it and make it a pillar for building a Lean culture? Indeed, that’s what we’ve been telling people all over the world. The more we say it, the more people look at me and say, “Wow! I never thought about that.”
Building Blocks of a Lean Culture
It is interesting to note how we all know what it takes to build a Lean culture. The question is, why don’t we do it? Some organizations are not ready and should not implement Lean. If there is no compelling need to change or fundamental dissatisfaction in how things are done, Lean will not be successful. David Mann suggests in his book, Creating a Lean Culture, there are four areas to focus on to create a Lean culture:
1. Visual controls
2. Leader standard work
3. Accountability
4. Discipline
Visual Controls
Visual controls are of paramount importance to sustain Lean. Building in the ability to make the abnormal immediately obvious in all processes will highlight areas that need a quick countermeasure and then yield candidates for the PDSA cycle. It is a given in this discussion that standard work is in place, and processes are stable and capable. The more visual the process, the easier it will be to manage and sustain the process. Visual controls should be part of our standard work.
Leader Standard Work
The concept of standard work extends to the leadership and supports the sustainment of the overall system. This means every employee up to the CEO has standard work as a basis for their jobs. The higher one is in the organization, the less standardized the work is. David Mann, in his book, Creating a Lean Culture,8 describes leader standard work in detail:
Whether you are a supervisor or CEO, you may wonder why you need leader standard work. One reason is it helps manage your day, and the other is to set an example and role model the behaviors desired from the rest of your organization.
Critical components of a Lean initiative are developing standard work for processes routinely performed, eliminating errors, providing role and task clarity, and decreasing variation within an activity, task, or process. Standard work must become part of the fabric of the workplace, which means it should be part of ISO, QS, or other standards that apply to your business. By engraining the Lean processes in your formal policy and procedures, it will make it much more difficult to revert to the way it was before.
Once you start seriously implementing Lean, it is important when hiring people to communicate the new Lean expectations during the initial interview process and that all employees are expected to follow standard work and every day everyone is expected to contribute improvement ideas. We must spend time coaching our workers to apply critical thinking while doing standard work.
Once developed and implemented, it is important to audit standard work. This ties into the CHECK part of our BASICS model (see Figure 27.2). This is the job of the supervisor and manager. The audit of standard work is part of a supervisor’s daily responsibility as a team leader, group leader, and general manager. Layered process audits involve leaders in the audit process. Leader standard work becomes the sustainment portion of Lean by creating accountability within the Lean framework. The accountability system many times is either missing or overlooked, which results in Lean failing. Once the Lean system kaizen implementation is complete, there are several sustaining tools:
Figure 27.2 Standard work audit sheet. (Source: BIG Archives with input from Mike Bland and Casey Weems.)
■ Training within industry (TWI): some of the programs within TWI assist supervisors/leaders in how to create, manage, and audit standards. TWI includes: Job Instruction, Job Relations, Job Methods, Program Development (PDSA), and Job Safety.
■ QC circles.
■ Point kaizen events.
■ Ongoing daily improvement kaizen (ideas generated from employees on the front lines).
■ Company-chartered continuous improvement groups.
The ultimate vehicle for sustaining, regardless of the approach, is the constant updating of the standard work to capture all improvements.
Ten-cycle analysis is a process of filming or timing a job for two to ten cycles or more, and then obtaining the split times for each step or activity. It is a great tool for auditing standard work or performing an operator analysis for machining or quick cycle operations.
Accountability
Accountability means: meet your commitments. If you say you are going to do it, do it, and do the best job possible by the time promised, otherwise don’t say you are going to do it. A culture of organizational accountability is critical to sustain Lean. Once we implement Lean in an area, there is a need for it not only to be sustained, but also continuously improved. There is a common phrase one often hears when discussing behaviors: You get what you expect. This saying reigns true throughout many of life’s situations, including the workplace.
Ultimately, as a manager or supervisor, the organization embodies the behaviors it rewards. These behaviors can be both desired and undesired. The goal is to convert the undesired to desired behaviors, by changing the reward system.
No matter what our role is in the organization, most of us want to understand what is expected of us and be empowered to achieve it. To be successful, we must be provided with clear direction, organizational priorities, and the ability to create processes to do our jobs safely and efficiently.
We need to be able to obtain the right tools and supplies to do our jobs and leave feeling like we accomplished something and we are part of a winning team. This is impossible to achieve if processes, areas, or people are out of control and not standardized. The combination of Lean and change-management tools can help make us successful.
Discipline
Discipline is welcomed in Lean thinking and can be internal or external. From an external standpoint, it is following the rules, and if not, being subjected to some type of negative reinforcement. However, internal discipline is the ability we develop in ourselves to adhere to a plan, follow the rules, get to meetings on time, adhere to standard work, follow check lists, etc. Discipline should be viewed positively as a quality for each of us to develop. Discipline is a key ingredient in the recipe for Lean environments, as without discipline, there is chaos. We need people to have the discipline to follow standard work, put things back where they belong, get back from breaks on time, start on time, follow through on audits, conduct root cause analysis, and create the continuous improvement environment.
Notes
1. Some of this chapter is inspired or repeated from Protzman, Mayzell, Kerpchar. Leveraging Lean in Healthcare (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press), 2008.
2. “Capturing the Competitive Advantage of Employee Fulfillment”, Target Magazine (Volume 25, No. 3, 2009).
3. Peters, Tom, Speed Is Life, Video.
4. Mr. Vic Chance.
5. Includes input from Jim Dauw.
6. From Detroit Free Press.
7. 20 Million Ideas in 40 Years, Productivity Press.
8. Mann, David. Creating a Lean Culture (New York: Productivity Press), 2005.
___________
* Paul A. Akers. 2 Second Lean, 3rd Edition. FastCap Press.
* Business Improvement Group conducts benchmarking trips to Japan including Toyota factories, first and second- tier suppliers and TPS training. www.Biglean.com