Day 225: Gaining some perspective through time

This past week, I hosted a tour of my organization. The visiting group was from Calgary and they worked in the financial services sector. They wanted to see how one company had adopted lean, to hear about their journey, their successes and their challenges. Within the group's members was a guy with whom I'd completed my Black Belt a few years prior. He had actually started his Black Belt in an earlier session, but completed at the same time as I. As part of the Black Belt training, you perform a lean assessment of an organization, and my friend had actually assessed Alpha for his Black Belt session. Now, that was in late 2011, and at that time Alpha scored a 3.0 out of 5.0 - a significant improvement from a previous assessment of 2.3. So my friend had the advantage of knowing about Alpha and our business, and had an idea of how we had adopted lean into our operations, but he was not ready for what he saw this time...

In fact, he told me afterwards that he was absolutely astonished at the changes since his last visit. I was actually a bit surprised at this, so I asked him what specifically did he see this time that wasn't here last time. Here's what he said:

• 5S (*and* 5S audits)
• Kanban
• VMI
• Point of use
• Pull of work
• Huddles
• Visual management
• Problem solving via Ishikawa diagrams
• K-cards + standard work
• Training within industry (TWI)
• Kaizen via A3s, PDCA boards
• Gemba walks with fixed stops/routes

It's a long list. I know some of these things were around at the time he was last here, but perhaps they weren't as predominant, as obvious, as pervasive throughout the organization as they are today - and not just in manufacturing either.

It's funny how when we are immersed in the day-to-day, we often do not see the progress made. It's a trick of the light, I think, that we can't see our accomplishments easily. We might not be standing in the right place - or time - to see them. Perhaps that trick is what keeps us motivated to continue to strive, to achieve, to improve.

I have a small hardbound notebook that I take when I travel, particularly when I travel to other companies. I like to jot my ideas and observations in that book. I bought it for my Black Belt trip to Japan in 2012, when I visited Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Toyo, Omron. I wrote down so many ideas of things I wanted to do back at Alpha on that trip. I took that same book with me to Europe earlier this year, and on the flight over, I flipped through the early pages - the pages with all those ideas from 2012. Many of them had in fact been implemented, and often further improved. It was an odd experience, looking back in that way. Perhaps my friend's visit was a bit like that. A chance to step back a bit and find a good spot to look at all that's been accomplished.

AMac 

Day 217: Selecting a Master Black Belt Project

It's been a few weeks since my last post, as I've been busy kaizen-ing with a specific internal group, our Custom Power System Engineering (CPSE) team. We mapped the top-level process flow, put it up on the wall for all to see, clarified some ownership questions, exposed some other problems. We did tackle a key problem area: improving the quality of the inputs, the customer requirements, by use of detailed checklists.

Developing the checklists was interesting, as it uncovered some hidden truths about some of the custom power systems we design & build for our customers. The big take-away was that our systems fall into two main groups: those for indoor installations and those for outdoor. The checklist for indoor systems was basically a 1-pager, but the corresponding checklist for the outdoor systems was 3 pages long. There is a lot of hidden complexity in these outdoor systems, and there had been many cases where some minor detail had been overlooked - until it was either found in production or worse, by our customer. The process had been the same regardless of indoor or outdoor - and that was a definite contributor to previous issues. The design team played a huge part in creating these checklists, and it now gives them a vehicle for capturing and resolving problematic requirements earlier than later. 


But now it's time to start focusing on my MBB project. There are so many things I could tackle here, so many options, but I think I want to focus on the CPSE group again. 

I think the Custom Power Systems value stream has a lot of waste hidden in there... 

and I think the cycle time is too long... 

and I think the material flow is all wrong...

and I think the rework and defects are too high... 

and I think that the additional revenue this team could bring in is substantial...

and I wonder if the process needs to be treated as if it were a separate business unit... with a single "general manager" responsible for the whole shebang...

So it's time to do some investigating. I need to better understand what is happening (or not) in this area. 

Stay tuned.

AMac