Lean Survival Tactics, push the methods.

Mariela and I had the fortune to have dinner with one of our mentee's Saturday night. Jory (his real name) is a bright individual, with entrepreneurial DNA and natural "Eyes for Flow" and "Eyes for Waste"

A quick background, Jory and his brother started and ran a successful Landscaping business but the hours of hard manual labour and constant chasing clients to pay their bills was deemed not worthy. They sold the business, and decided there was an amazing opportunity to produce Avocado Oil. They conducted a lot of research, but ultimately the time and process to bring Avocado Oil to market did not justify the required investment.

Bruised and committed to meeting obligations (which he did) he started working in an Automotive Stamping Plant on the third shift eventually becoming a Team Lead. 90 days ago my LinkedIn feed announced that Jory was now the Assistant General Manager of the facility. WOW !!! what an accomplishment, and this not a small business since the company has several plants scattered through North America.

The following are some take aways from our coaching conversation. Decided to share with the hope that maybe these tips will help you ...

Company is Committed to Jory's success

The company is already investing heavy into providing Leadership training through third party providers. I asked him how his onboarding training is going and was it a steep learning curve? He shared, that it was like climbing a vertical adder at break neck speed.

Now Jory, is not a complete newbie so it was pleasant to converse about some methodologies common within Automotive and Mature Lean organizations. This company is very focused on A3 thinking.

Chasing Numbers not Widgets

As expected, Jory is transitioning in learning to run the business from numbers and not necessary based on widgets produced.I truly believe this is the most challenging transitionary step for any employee promoted from the floor into a Leadership Role. My tip to him was to create a BBB Report (Billings, Bookings and Backlog with an emphasis on identifying workable backlog). If you dont have enough workable backlog, you cannot meet your daily target so being pro-active to constantly increase your workable backlog makes your job easier. Plus as I divide my daily Billings into my Backlog I know how many days of work I have and my current Lead Time. This is my first report my fingers touch in the morning or I will use the report if it is run at the end of day ... It sets the stage of my activities for the day.

Jory is currently working on creating this report.

Segment the day

Jory exclaimed that since assuming his new role, most days he feels overwhelmed, which makes sense. I advised him to compartmentalize his day into 3 sections. A) start of day to noon remain focused on resolving Disturbances To Flow and making sure processes are running at rate, B) noon for departmental updates and then C) 2PM to end of day focus on Capital Projects and Continuous Improvement. If he at least mentally follows this it will give him a bit of sanity.

Daily Stand-Up Production Meeting

Jory tells us that they do have a Daily Stand-Up meeting that happens about 90 minutes into the shift. He asks us "is this meeting only supposed to be 3-5 minutes in length? Our response is absolutely, why? Jory said his meeting goes on like it seems forever and typically about half way through people just start to depart from the meeting. Mariela asks Jory to draw a picture of how their board looks .... it has way too many columns and is geared towards "Problem Solving"

I just dont understand why companies fail to get this. Your Daily meeting is no more than a Situation Appraisal for the Center of Gravity (Report Out Board), based on information shared it may initiate other meetings with fewer attendees to address A) Decisions to be made B) Immediate Problems to be Solved or C) Potential Problems or Opportunities to be aware of. Plus a reflection on yesterday's performance and meeting today's target. Quick, Simple and to the point.

Scrap

Jory, stated that it seemed like studying and analyzing scrap was the most dominent KPI that the Leadership seemed to focus on. It was consuming a lot of his time daily without a lot of satisfaction or resolution to the problem.

Scrap, why does this always seem to be the most sacred KPI to monitor and discuss in any Manufacturing Environment? STOP doing it ... I shared with Jory how I had worked with an individual at a Powdered Metal Company who tracked scrap numbers within the Sintering department for over 23 years and guess what ... the scrap rate had hardly changed as a percentage and the number 1 cause remained the same ... "acid rain". We estimated that this individual invested around 5 hours per week dedicated to scrap reporting which after 23 years was over 6,000 hours ... now that is truly a waste. Imagine if those hours had been diverted from record keeping to problem solving ... a much better investment. But at least we had fancy graphs and years of data.

Tip 1 ... if you size your containers to capture a normal day's generation of scarp then those days when the bin overflows, you know you have a problem, simple and visual. Even better, I had one General Manager who loved leaning against the scrap bucket and questioned almost every addition.

Tip 2 ... My advice to Jory was to simply start tracking material yield. In his environment pretty easy to accomplish, calculate the weight of material received and compare it to the weight of finished goods shipped adjusted by the delta of your inventory .. volia. Of course these numbers normalize over time.

TPM

Jory shared that his day is often disturbed due to equipment breakdowns. So naturally the question is do they embrace TPM? Of course they do, it is a fancy on-line screen where the operator answers questions presumably after conducting an inspection. Unfortunately, we had to tell Jory that that the methodology was significantly under utilized.

I advised him to go back to a manual methodology. The premise behind TPM should be "Clean to Inspect" the machines should be and remain spotless, where every square inch of the machine is touched by a human hand at minimum once per week. I asked if he had a maintenance team, yes of course was the response. But in a typical manner they always travel in pairs and they are always very busy, we are just not sure with what.

When an employee must put pencil to paper to document TPM checks completed and initial that they have been completed, employee emotional attachment dramatically increases and surprise unscheduled breakdowns significantly decrease.

I suggested that he use the Maintenance team as auditors of TPM asking Operators to perform TPM inspections under the watchful but coaching eyes of Maintenance. This will make sure the checks are done properly and most likely increase the knowledge of the operators.

I asked if Maintenance requests are logged? yes of course he responded, then what i asked? ... silence. I suggested that the maintenance logs should be given to the Quality Department for analysis. They are used to conducting this type of analysis and are very capable of noticing trends or any patterns of reoccurrence that can then be engineered out.

Dessert

Jory, appreciated how many of the methodologies could deliver just so much more than they currently are. We were not asking him to do something new, just conduct some methodology adjustments and push the methodology further. Finally the restaurant became restless in wanting to close. So we offered to facilitate a session and to speak with Jory and his superiors to share our experiences. I asked "did he think they would open to some additional coaching?" Unfortunately Jory responded "Nope, they know everything ..." Sad, since visitors or employees starting in a new role are your best eyes to identify opportunity.

Knowing Jory he will work in a stealth manner and maximize the opportunities that Lean Methodologies can deliver which unfortunately many companies stop short of harvesting.

BTW, I fully anticipate Jory is going to become a General Manager fairly quickly and he will be a darn good one. But I also will not be surprised if starts his own business and It will be highly competitive, for that I am certain