When you are building a house you start with the end in mind. You can see the beauty of
the final product as you envision the number of bedrooms, bathrooms and of course the
location of the kitchen … People will admire and perhaps envy the final product.
Before you can translate your vision into reality you need to start with a foundation. Same is a requirement or pre-cursor for implementing your Lean Methodologies or enhancing your Performance Excellence strategy.
Typically, when doing a transformation within an existing organization a leader has an mind
blowing experience after visiting a well-organized and very clean facility. They charge back
and mandate the deployment of 5S+1 throughout the organization. This typically results in
an extensive exercise that cleans the facility but does not accomplish any tangible
improvements … so the Lean initiative dies.
It is import that from the start we create respect for people and manage to get them
engaged. Engagement can be many things to many people, but the constant is that every
human being wants to do a good job. Left without direction, people will attempt
accomplishment in their own manner and set goals for themselves. However,
The processes developed and the goals established may not complement what the
organization has promised … so we need alignment.
We need to make employees understand how to identify “Disturbances to Flow”
To enable our team to identify Disturbances to Flow we condition our employee's to constantly have “Eyes for Flow” and “Eyes for Waste”. To help them gain this capability we train our employees utilizing a waste observation sheet and standing in their own Ohno circle.
But we need more foundational tools and then as the organization becomes comfortable.
with them then it becomes easier to augment the foundational tools with advanced
methodologies as the organization becomes stronger and more agile.
The basic foundational tools consist of the following.
• Waste Observation Sheet … to identify and quantify Disturbances to Flow
• Hourly Run Board(s)… to set hourly goals and means to measure accomplishment
• Total Productive Management … in addition to operator self-checks, add your desire for Distributed Accountability to ensure that the process and area is maintained to your
standards.
• Daily Report Out Board … this is key to success and becomes the datum for Shift Start, Shift Exchange and Daily Management Report Out to established KPI’s. We
Focus only on the previous 24 hours and the upcoming 24 hours.
It is important not to overthink the content of your foundational tools but rather that you just
get started. In many cases it is worth making the investment of using a coach to get you
started. If you use us we have all of the templates and effective training to get you started.
Be prepared to see a 20 to 30 and perhaps a 50% improvement within a month.
The graphic flow chart shows how the attributes work together but the Daily Report
Out board is the center of attention.
With practice and the use of precision speaking a Report-Out can be completed within 5
minutes. The power of having the entire management team in attendance is that decisions can be made right on the shop floor without having to schedule another meeting,
Once this baseline of communication is entrenched within the organization it becomes
very easy to add on additional reporting exercises . To get the leadership team away
from “aisle management” start adding mini 5S audits, or have employee’s do mini report
outs to the leadership team on a suggestion that they have implemented giving them
acknowledgement of their contributions.
In addition, the increased visibility of management on the shop floor demonstrates the
commitment of management to the well being of employees and the vision to remain
competitive.