Tweddle Continuous Improvement

Too often [kaizen] has come to mean assembling a special team for a project using lean of Six Sigma methods, or perhaps organizing a kaizen "event" for a week to make a burst of changes. We sometimes hear the phrase "doing a kaizen" as if it were a one-off activity. At Toyota, kaizen […] is how the company operates at the most fundamental level.

Nice visual

His approach to expose problems and to help workers visualize the problems was simple:

Limit work in progress
Limit the number of workers
By doing both (1) and (2), Ohno believed that it will place workers in challenging situations that will force them to improve their processes and thereby creating a culture of continuous improvement.

In sum, 1. The reality of the shop floor is clearly reflected in the standard work 2. Standard work must be realistic and applicable on the shop floor 3. Standard work must lead to continuous improvement opportunities

In all, I see the principle of respect for people thrown about sometimes casually, and sometimes in direct conflict of what I believe the principle is truly about.

This is a great article! He is absolutely right. I could see this being misinterpreted very easily.

Article about waste in office operations and personal waste as well.

"Challenge" is one of the explicit values in The Toyota Way 2001 but it looks quite different. Yes, there are challenges issued. But behind that challenge is a support structure. The leaders, at all levels are expected to stretch their own personal development, but to do so within the context of kaizen, deep understanding gained by genchi genbutsu, team work and most important of all, respect. The leader's development level is gauged by how the challenge is met even more than whether it is met. Just "get-r-done" doesn't work here.

When we start removing the 8th waste, stop ignoring people as idea generators, listen and put into practice their kaizen suggestions, we are engaging more of a person's potential. It is an quantitative improvement. Instead of only physical ability or trained-in job skills, we are making use capacity for creativity, problem solving and so forth.

The basic process of abnormality management goes something like this: 1. Develop a standard. 2. Develop a way to identify when the standard is not being met. (i.e. make the abnormal condition apparent). This is most often done with visual controls or some form of daily management. 3. Take action to remove the abnormal condition.

During one of my training opportunities a Toyota Sensei once told me that the highest form of "respect for people" was allowing people to solve their own problems.  This statement stuck with me and I have often used this during training/coaching sessions.  Apparently, this statement also stuck with my friend.  In the hallway last week he said after a year of gemba he finally understood his role as a leader and what I meant when I talked about "respect for people."   He said at first he loved the Lean approach, because he loved being in gemba, but after a while the follow-up became overwhelming to him and frustrating to the teams he worked with.  He said each time he went to gemba he felt guilty about the increasing number of problems he was not having the time to solve.

It turns out that a common method line managers and team leaders often did was to help on the production line, making the production numbers look better than they really are. The role of team leaders and line managers are not to be on the line, but instead to observe and generate continuous improvement ideas. Since their role is not in production, their time doesn't count and makes the production numbers look better than they really are.

With a bit of creativity we can find motions, data entry tasks or mechanism that can be combined or triggered in such a way to turn manual processes into examples of jidoka - self-working low-cost automation.

I'm going to try & use this on some maps.

How does your team run its pace line? When circumstances throw it off course, how quickly does it react to protect itself? How does your team re-establish its operating groove? What is communication like? How quickly does the wind tunnel return? Does your team practice this drill?

We know that a Poka-Yoke approach is a much more effective approach to preventing mistakes and errors. But, sometimes, we see the approach of providing a "do not" sign only, which by itself, is not effective. But, coupled with a process or system that prevents the human from making mistakes or the error from being made, then that's a great balance to warning the person as well as preventing the person from making the mistake in the first place.

Click on the article entitled "Lean Product Development"

Value stream mapping is a tremendously valuable tool for improving a process. Well suited for a broad range of industries and processes. A value stream map (VSM) illustrates the flow of materials and information as a product or service moves through a process. In short, it helps eliminate waste.

Take any work - if it is assembling, accounting, programming, welding - anything.  If the work is simplified and understandable, if it is constructed so as to be simple to perform, it is likely to be far less open to simple mistakes and, therefore, quality improves - which means easier leads to better.  If the quality improves, then there's less re-work, less "going slow to make sure you get it right" and the like, so the speed at which the work can be accomplished is increased - hence, faster.  If we are doing things without burning people out, without rework and scrap, and take less time to do it - hour costs (especially per unit) are also….cheaper!

A common response is "Mark, that makes sense… but we just don't have time…." I'd like to make the case that "lack of time" should not be an excuse that shuts down the possibility for Kaizen, but rather it's the first problem statement to which we can apply our Kaizen thinking…

Great headline!

Good simulation of benefits of single piece flow.