April 2010

Lean Journey 11

by Ralph Bagnall for the I-Channel

If you have been following this Lean Journey, you know something of my mindset on Lean techniques. Boiled down to its absolute essence, Lean is nothing more than a continual process of improvement. As you may be aware, every operation has a bottleneck, a station or operation that slows the rest of the production cycle down. We look to improve this operation with new techniques or equipment and remove the bottleneck. When that operation is no longer the slowest, some other one is, and we shift our focus to that. We’ve all seen this process. It is, in fact Lean. No complicated formulas, no need to learn Japanese. You need to simply be constantly evaluating and examining every aspect of your operation.

But you are busy you say. You have enough to do already, and cannot possibly continually monitor the day to day work at every point in your company. That’s right, you can’t. But your team can (and does!) I spent the first part of my career on the shop floor. When you spend eight hours a day performing the same task, you see patterns and flaws that may not be readily visible to the casual observer. If your team members have any brains at all, they can help you with your daily improvement regimen. They need to be drawn into the process. Establish lines of communication to allow them to tell you about things they see. Give them or their immediate supervisors the power to try small improvements. Establish a budget (and a culture) where they can spend a limited amount of time and money fixing problems they see. Up to a point, they should be free to experiment without having to work through the bureaucracy for permission. Allowing them to try and fail or succeed quickly and cheaply will both improve your operations, and the satisfaction and morale of your team. Not everyone will prove adept at this, but you will likely be surprised at how many are.

By my next column, I will have spent some more time with JFP. We will be working on a new process, but also reviewing and retraining on an ongoing one. A certain amount of sloppiness has crept into their plastics manufacturing section and the entire process will be reviewed and retrained as necessary. We will be working on teaching them to self-police this sort of entropy to focus time and resources on new improvements.