The Lean Toolbox The Essential Guide To Lean Transformation

[Sueann]

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Many organizations struggle to implement Lean and to use the Lean toolbox in the way that best suits their unique situation. Avoiding common pitfalls in Lean transformations saves money, time and nerves.

The Lean toolbox is a set of methods and tools that help to implement Lean principles such as value flow, pull, waste elimination and continuous improvement in practise. Lean methods vary in terms of their implementation complexity, key benefits and impact areas. Simple and visual methods bring the team quickly onto the same page. The toolbox creates a common framework for operations development.

For example, the value stream mapping Lean tool includes step-by-step instructions, visualization icons and process calculation logic. It can help e.g. to streamline an orthopaedic patient care process by focusing on activities that bring value to the customer, like the knee surgery procedure does, while minimizing waste such as queuing for an operation.

The personnel also need to be engaged in cross-functional process development, since it creates a wealth of improvement ideas and helps in adapting to change. Lean development needs to be started with focused efforts to gain quick wins that will also inspire others to commence their Lean endeavours. Wisely used, a Lean toolbox paves the way for a successful Lean transformation.

I understand the reasoning for this, as its very clear that what many companies label as Lean is certainly nowhere near the essence, spirit and intent of TPS (the Toyota Production System) and the Kaizen Culture that generated the business success that they wish to emulate.

Many of the posts recommend a shift to a purer approach, one of embracing Kaizen and forgoing the idea of 'Lean', the intent of which I support. However, I do believe that this doesn't address the fundamental challenge that we face in developing Leaders who properly understand the essence of how a Business's Operating Model should be built around an engaged and enabled workforce.

Many business leaders claim to want a 'Lean Organisation' but each of them ultimately means something different than the other and most simply don't wish to work towards, or are able to envision, the kind of Lean organisation that engages its people and creates a culture of Kaizen. It's certainly true that many of the Lean initiatives that I experience have failed to represent the people engagement necessary to be successful, and are instead very poor, tool-based, facsimiles of a Lean Operating Model.

I've struggled for a while with the semantics around the terminology that is used in the 'World of Lean', and terms such as Lean, Kaizen, Operational Excellence, Continuous Improvement, Six Sigma, and many others, mean many different things to people. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that Kaizen is just as misunderstood, perhaps more so, than the term Lean.

I did flirt with the idea, for a while, of changing the terminology that I use, which is primarily around the theme of Lean Leadership but, after due consideration, determined that it would not solve the problem, only add additionally to an already rich lexicon.

Instead, I decided that it is necessary to remain focussed on the education of organisations' people, and in particular their leaders, in what Lean Leadership really means. I have three models that I use for this:

Introduced in my first book Leading with Lean: An experience-based guide to leading a Lean transformation, the Lean Leadership model encompasses the four Leadership styles that must be practised in order to achieve Lean Leadership:

It's the antithesis of 'Red-carpet' Leadership: Leaders who turn-up on site with a 'red-carpet' approach, causing mass disruption to normal operations, with much preparation and 'wet-paint' to make things look better than they are.

It is the model that we use in the Leading with Lean Academy to ensure that all of the key elements of a Lean Organisation can be effectively taught in a systematic way, and ensures that the Lean tools aren't seen as separate from, or useful without, the people systems.

2. Kaizen: Creating the Kaizen Culture is critical to the People engagement, ensuring that our people have the skills and support to make a difference every day, and this section supports the journey to attain it.

BTFA stands for Believe-Think-Feel-Act and is a revolutionary model for understanding the neuroscience behind how our brains work, and has helped the engineer in me, comfortable with the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) model of Deming / Shewhart, to understand why logic and facts are very often not the principal players in the game of change, and to explore a different way of dealing with change, that factors in both the eminently logical, and the less tangibly emotional.

In the book I reveal how long-held beliefs about how change is made, fails to properly recognise that everything that we do as individuals, and hence collectively, is a result of what happens in the brain, which has been 'programmed' since birth with the collective experiences of our life.

Plan: Plan the change activity, understanding what the underlying issues are that need to be addressed and determining how to best address them. Do: The implementation of the change, whereby the effort is made to execute the plan as effectively as possible. Check: During and after the change has been implemented, the efficacy will be assessed to understand if the anticipated result was achieved. Act: Based upon the check, either adaptations will be made and / or standards put in place to establish the new practice.

Believe: As we go through the problem solving and planning of the change, there must be a belief created that it is the right thing to do. We sometimes refer to this as stakeholder management, forming a guiding coalition, or other approaches which accept that change requires the acceptance of the people involved. Think: Whilst the plan is being implemented, it is experienced and processed by the people involved. What do they think about the process of change? How does it affect them? Feel: As the people experience the outcome of the change, what it means to them and how it impacts their world will evoke an emotional reaction, they will feel the impact of the change. Act: Logic should drive the actions taken as an outcome of the success or failure of the change. However, in reality it is often driven emotionally and often will be contrary to what logic might suggest.

As we utilise the model, what we start to recognise is that every single brain (each person) will have a different response to the stimuli of the change process, responding with a plethora of emotional responses but many of them masked, as the business environment that they work within is likely to subdue the admittance of emotional response. Without the understanding of this, we will continue to labour under the frustration of slow or failing transformations, as the explicit nods mask the implicit resistance to a change that the brains do not want.

The world of work faces ever more complexity from a combination of societal changes, brought on due to Covid and generational advances (the impact of Generations Y & Z in the workplace, aging populations, etc.), and technological changes (AI in particular starting to have a significant impact in the workplace).

This is resulting in both the role of Leaders and the relationship that employees have with their employers changing significantly, which is also leading observers to question whether Lean has a place in the modern workplace. Nevertheless, hopefully I've convinced you that it is, in fact, required more than ever, as we think about Lean Leadership and how we utilise its philosophy to engage and empower our people.

We may indeed be in a Post-Lean World, in the sense of moving beyond a bastardised version of the Toyota Production System, and having now entered into a new era of Lean Leadership, an approach to running an organisation with a philosophy of Kaizen, built upon a solid foundation of people engagement.

Like previous industrial revolutions, new technological developments are driving Industry 4.0 forward. The most relevant of these new technologies for lean manufacturers are cyber-physical systems (CPS) and the industrial internet of things (IIoT).

Human to machine data collection is primarily sourced from operators via a digital interface. The CPS can collect information via traditional data entry, methods like typing into a computer, or selecting options on a tablet. Operators can also share information through advanced technology. For example, computer vision can collect data from specific gestures or movements that have assigned meaning.

Machine to machine communication historically meant a machine pushing data into another machine. These machines were usually connected via an Ethernet connection. The full potential of M2M communication was limited by siloed, proprietary technology.

IoT transforms machine to machine communication in two significant ways. First, it often involves communication both ways, versus just a push from one machine to another. Second, adding the cloud is enabling greater possibilities between machines. With IoT, purchasers want more connection options, which is driving a change from point to point communication embedded in hardware to open communications between devices.

Many manufacturers are already preparing and collecting data in other software systems. They use enterprise resource planning software (ERPs) to manage purchases, financial planning, employee, and other aspects of their business. They use MES or manufacturing execution systems to track and trace materials, resources, etc.

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