…team communications

What really does “continuous improvement” or “lean manufacturing” mean to a group of multi-cultural workers in a manufacturing plant? Often it doesn’t mean much and is difficult to translate across cultures and languages. In some cultures “lean” is associated with something death-like; not the connotation you would like for a transformational manufacturing philosophy and approach.

Today we began the formal communications process of the official Continuous Improvement Program and our goal will be to talk, train, communicate, and then talk, train and communicate more until every person in the company, when asked, will have a solid foundational understanding. Goal: everyone can recite that Continuous Improvement is about creating a culture of respect for the individual and creating a culture where continually improving every thing we do is a simple reality of business life.

…standard work

Sounds a bit boring, but it is an absoultely critical foundation to carefully develop, implement and insure standard work processes are followed a “continuous improvement” manufacturing setting. This seems so basic as to hardly deserve much press, but in reality it is extremely difficult to achieve. Workers tend to ‘do their own thing’ and create personalized work processes with a wide range of effectiveness and real outcomes.

 Often just the act of establishing and following standard work processes can have dramatic results. But it takes discipline to achieve this across a workforce, and even more discipline to monitor and insure standard processes are being followed over time.

…return to the real world

A week of holiday in Maui is over today, so time to refocus back into the world of manufacturing and Continuous Improvement. While I have been away it has been fun to check in with the team daily by reviewing a few key metrics that show up in my e-mail box each morning. This is a great reminder of the importance of a few key measurements or metrics and also how it is critical to boil these down to the important few. I also like graphs as they can tell a quick, visual story in a matter of seconds. Ideally, if all the key metrics can be reported on one page daily, this is perfect. And if critical value stream metrics can be recapped weekly the combination of these two will give the management team the information they need to act fast and respond to the business quickly.

Now let’s see if I can get into a daily blogging habit!

another milestone reached…

Last week another major milestone was reached in the team’s quest for Zero Defects. Six months ago it was not uncommon for the final quality check to discover 20% to 30% of the products needed some amount of “rework” prior to shipment. These orders would then flow back upstream for various amounts of fixing prior to yet another round through the QC department. At the time, we began tracking and focusing more on quality, on getting it right the first time, on First Time Through Perfect, and even re-crafted the bonus system to reward quality rather than quantity.

Last Friday the QC department registered ONE quality defect for the day…amazing progress in a relatively short time. How did they do it? I believe a number of key factors helped with this turnaround: 1) moving a QC person into the process midway, 2) helping teams find root cause problems rather than fixing (enabling) issues during the process, 3) training and making people aware that quality comes first and that speed and quality can go hand in hand (but never at the expense of quality). 

This is a beginning, and the teams have accomplished something they did not believe was possible. What fun!!