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Inside the Toyota Maintenance Reduction 50 Percent by Paul V. Arnold:
“The goal is to reduce maintenance activities and the maintenance that you perform on a machine by 50 percent. That goal covers every machine and every activity,” says TMMK facilities control manager David Absher.
This is not about arbitrarily chopping budgets or personnel. It’s a game plan that balances today’s corporate wants and needs with long-term implications and vision.
I think this is another example of how potentially dangerous targets or goals can be used within a excellent management system effectively. Still such target can be dangerous, even in an excellent management system - so it is a tool to be used with great care (especially when the management system does not embody many principles of management improvement). Therefore care must be taken to assure the target doesn’t become the focus instead of the measure. If it is the focus success is defined by meeting that measure not by improving the system and having the chosen measure serve as an indicator the goal has been reached. This slight difference is critical as it avoids the problem of distorting the system or distorting the numbers. But it is not easy to judge (if the pressure is great is it easy to resort to distorting the system or numbers).
Employees are encouraged, even expected, to shake things up and seek a better way. This system of all-hands continuous improvement is called kaizen. It is applicable for anything from bottlenecks to neck soreness to soaring energy costs and everything in between. Kaizen activities seek to identify and eliminate waste, while also striving to ensure quality and safety.
The article continues to make many excellent points, read it.
Related: Targets Distorting the System - Dangers of Forgetting the Proxy Nature of Data - Eliminating slogans and Toyota - Toyota Production System posts
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September 12th, 2006 at 8:14 pm
[...] Related: articles by Jamie Flinchbaugh - management blog posts on podcasts - Toyota Targets 50% Reduction in Maintenance Waste - blog posts on healthcare improvement by curiouscat Tags: Management, Lean thinking, webcast Permalink to: Two more Lean Blog Podcasts [...]
May 5th, 2007 at 9:00 am
If you only study what results tell you when results are unsatisfactory you can fall into the trap that “you only learn from failure.” I guess many people only learn from failure, since that phrase is so popular, but that method leaves plenty of room for others to learn faster than you..