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Recommended Posts: Standardized Work Instructions - Cease Mass Inspection for Quality - Visible Data - Evolution of the PDSA Cycle
Related: Management Improvement Tools Explained - 7 basic quality tools - PDSA - Control Chart - 5s - Kanban - Flowchart...
Illustration of how 2-Bin Systems work, by Bill Hanover.
Related: Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) video by Bill Hanover - Messiness is Bad - Drum-Buffer-Rope Example - lean manufacturing resources
ValuMetrix Services provides some really nice lean six sigma case studies. Simple short but still with enough detail to actually provide some sense of what is going on.
While on the topic of online case studies let me plug the Curious Cat management improvement library. I think it is one of the more valuable resources for management improvement offered on the Curious Cat sites. Library shelves: health care articles, lean manufacturing articles, six sigma articles, newly added articles…
via: Daily Kaizen
Related: Curious Cat Management Search - Management Consulting, what does the web site show? - Lean Management Case Study
I am reading a fascinating book by Jessica Snyder Sachs: Good Germs, Bad Germs. From page 108:
This is a great example of a positive special cause. How would you identify this? First you would have to stratify the data. It also shows that sometimes looking at the who is important (the problem is just that we far too often look at who instead of the system so at times some get the idea that it is not ok to stratify data based on who - it is just be careful because we often do that when it is not the right approach and we can get fooled by random variation into thinking there is a cause - see the red bead experiment for an example); that it is possible to stratify the data by person to good effect.
The following 20 pages in the book are littered with very interesting details many of which tie to thinking systemically and the perils of optimizing part of the system (both when considering the system to be one person and also when viewing it as society).
I have recently taken to reading more and more about viruses, bacteria, cells, microbiology etc.: it is fascinating stuff.
Related: Science Books by topic - Data Can’t Lie - Understanding Data
Does Your Product Or Service “Just Work”? By Jim Kukral
There is truth to that statement. I think largely due to how bad so many products are - that they don’t actually work. The Kano model of customer satisfaction is an excellent way to view customer expectations.
The Kano model states that you have expected quality - it just does what it needs to (what is expected). Then more is better type - give me more at the same price and I am happier. But where you really want to get as a company is products and services that delight customers.
When you are delighted you are not easy prey to other companies. When you are satisfied you are ready for offers that say we will give it to you a bit cheaper or give you a bit more. But if you are delighted you don’t want to leave and instead are telling everyone you know how great this product or service is.
I think it might be that in many cases now people are delighted if things just work. Perhaps they have become so disillusioned that something actually working is delightful - I think there is real truth here. Which shows how much room there is to improve. It is such a huge bother to deal with junk that doesn’t work and the thought of dealing with the lousy service on such failures is enough to drive them to tears.
Related: What Job Does Your Product Do? - Quality Customer Focus - Ritz Carlton and Home Depot - Good Customer Service Example - Seven Steps to Remarkable Customer Service - More Bad Customer Service Examples 
This does a great job of explaining what you need to know clearly. While this presentation for Azithromycin doesn’t prevent a mistake it sure makes it much more likely that the process can be completed successfully. We need more effort in creating such clear instructions.
Visual clarity is more important than lots of words. Applying that concept is not as easy as it sounds but it is a very important idea for instructions to end use and instructions for processes in your organization. Expecting people to read much is just setting yourself up for failure when they don’t bother (you should consider psychology, and how people will actually use your instructions not how you want them to).
via: Prescription UI
Related: Using Design to Reduce Medical Errors - Visual Instructions Example - Visual Work Instructions - Standardized Work Instructions - Health Care Pictographs - 5s - Edward Tufte’s: Envisioning Information
Great article on The Checklist - If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do? by Atul Gawande
Related: Why Isn’t Work Standard? - Visual Work Instructions - posts on quality tools - European Blackout not Human Error-Not
Edwards looks toward future of testing
In a recent Benefield Anechoic Facility test, the 412th Electronic Warfare Group used Design of Experiments methodology to cut a two-month program to three weeks. This schedule reduction translated directly into savings and helped reduce the concept-to-fielding cycle time while still ensuring the system was thoroughly tested. While building these capabilities is critical, the most critical piece of the puzzle is our people. We must continue to develop engineers, pilots, navigators, program managers and maintainers to test these systems and “find stuff so the warfighter doesn’t.”
It is hard to tell if they really are using Design of Experiments or just using the term but it seem possible they are really using it. As I have said a number of times it is a powerful and under-utilized tool for improvement. Related: Using Design of Experiments - design of experiments articles - posts on public sector management - Why Use Designed Factorial Experiments?
The Toyota Secret: Constant Change And Growth by Norman Bodek
Great article. Kaikaku by Bodek. via New Norman Bodek Article
Related: Lean Podcast with Bodek - Change is not Improvement - What Is Muda? - lean management resources - Curious Cat management articles
Tools are just tools by Lee Fried
Great post. Great goal; and quite a challenge. My personal belief is while you are trying to make this change (which takes years) to become an organization that acts as a system you must balance education (an investment - one of the best forms of investment often) and improvements gains today (both are needed). And just applying tools effectively can often provide nice gains today (with the right guidance and proper restraint).
Often the two go hand in hand - there is little more educational than actually participating in using quality/lean/improvement tools and concepts to solve your own problems. That is the best way for managers to learn about lean thinking. But I think when you see this dual role of current improvement efforts it changes your measure of success - not just measuring improvement for today (or improvements in the value stream that will pay dividends for years) but also valuing the new knowledge gained by the participants. I have never been able to quantify the benefit of the education but that doesn’t bother me.
Related: Systemic Improvement - Encourage Improvement Action by Everyone - Keeping Track of Improvement Opportunities - Search management improvement sites selected by Curious Cat
From lean tools to lean management by Jim Womack:
Only management by science through constant experimentation to answer questions can produce sustainable improvements in value streams. ( Toyota’s A3 is a wonderful management tool for putting science to work.)
He is right. The tools are useful. The much more significant changes are in the management suite not on the shop floor (or cubicle farm). Even on the shop floor there is room for huge amounts of improvement. In the c-suite I don’t know how to explain the amount of work left to do. Lets say this - there is much much much more improvement left to do than has been done so far.
Related: articles by Jim Womack - Deming on Management
IRA Toyota - Milford; Great Service
The slickest part of the wizard was the capability to pick a service and schedule a date. Depending upon what service you picked, the calendar changed. This wasn’t any old calendar. This was dynamic. Clearly, they had predefined the capability of handling some number of services per day. It was likely also interactive depending upon what was already scheduled for that day. This all makes wonderful sense but I had not seen this before.
I went ahead and scheduled the service for Monday AM planning to drop the car off Sunday night. Saturday, we received an email reminding us of the service scheduled for the car. Sunday, Allison and I drive over to their location, pull into the lot following the “Service” sign and find lanes specially marked for night drop off. There were already some cars in the lanes so we found a spot. The box on the wall had a pen and several forms. We filled out one and put the keys in the envelop through the clearly marked “key drop” slot. This group has figured out service and seems to have thought of everything. The drive home continued the conversation on how well they have planned for service; web site wizard, email reminders, lanes for drop off, etc. Well done!
I think the lean folks will like the level loading the dynamic calendar facilitates (and all the other ways the process provided value to the customer). This strategy levels the load by pushing around demand a bit (rather than just accommodating whatever demand exists - real world conditions can make this the correct strategy). For example, if special machines are needed for certain jobs and the long term demand supports one of each such machine and if you can adjust the flow to level out the demand doing so is a good strategy. As this example shows, customers have flexibility in scheduling preventative maintenance; therefore take advantage of that in your system design.
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Every so often an article appears discussing the need to change focus from process improvement to innovation (and recently they are followed with quite a bit of blog talk). I disagree on several grounds. First you have needed to focus on both all the time. Second, it is not an either or choice. Third, the process of innovation should be improved.
I do not believe process improvement is bad for innovation. Bad process changes can be bad for innovation. But if we are looking at a research and development organization where the output is new products then process improvement would be focused on improving the processes to make that happen. The type of process improvement would be different than those made to manufacturing a product better.
Some six sigma efforts are little more than cost cutting efforts. And those efforts might claim a “process improvement” that is really just cutting costs in R&D. But we should not confuse bad management with the good practice of process improvement. Yes, cutting costs for the sake of cutting costs often leads to problems. Waste should be eliminated (which can reduces cost). Focus on eliminating waste. Eliminating waste in innovation activities is no worse than eliminating it anywhere. It might be more difficult to determine what is waste (that is where management skill and knowledge come into play) but the idea that process improvement (including eliminating waste is bad for innovation is something that should be rejected). And process improvement in innovation should not be limited to eliminating waste.
A good example of process improvement in innovation activities: Fast Cycle Change in Knowledge-Based Organizations (pdf format) by Ian Hau and Ford Calhoun, published by the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement, University of Wisconsin - Madison.
Related: Better and Different - New Rules for Management? No! - Quality and Innovation - “New” Management Needs - Management Advice Failures
How to get people to actually use instructions for using your product: make it easy to do so. This blog post illustrates a well designed instruction guide for the Seagate FreeAgent backup drive. Simple pictures make it very obvious what to do (and even includes a time stamp showing how long into the process you are - which shows you the total time it will take at one simple glance 1 minute and 36 seconds).
Such instructions are a great example to guide internal standard work instructions.
Related: Why Isn’t Work Standard? - How to Create Visual Work Instructions - blog posts on quality tools - management improvement glossary
Are You Really Asking? by Mark Graban
Good advice. When standard work is not followed by one person then it might be that intervention with that one person is needed (or in some cases it might be that person found a better way and you need to update the standard and figure out why the standard wasn’t updated before - probably a system problem, annoying to follow procedure to get improvement adopted…). Much more often “policy” (which might be similar to standard work - but I think standard work really requires a system that is missing in places where “standard work” is not standard at all) is not followed in general - everyone does their own thing.
Then obviously (at least to someone that understands management) the issue is why does the documented standard work differ from the practice and why is management allowing such a divergence… Fix the system. What needs to be worked on is the failure of the management to create a system where standard work is the way work is done, not blaming everyone for not following the standard in various ways. Often this can be the practice, though not as obvious as stated, for example, when common cause errors are examined as special causes. Instead of looking at all the data, the error in question is examined, hey they didn’t follow x procedure - obviously they are to blame. Ah yeah look a bit more - no one ever follows that procedure (or what crazy system design allows that type of error to be possible): European Blackout: Human Error-Not.
Related: Visual Work Instructions - Find the Root Cause Instead of the Person to Blame - variation description
Continuous Improvement, an article from the Label and Narrow Web trade magazine (”for the narrow web segment of converting and printing”), is an article with some nice anecdotes of successfully applying lean thinking.
Luminer Converting has been assisted in its Lean venture by the New Jersey Manufacturing Extension Program; similar operations exist in almost all US states. “Through them we received a grant which paid for 90 percent of the consultancy fees we incurred,” Spina notes.
via: Lean Printing - a new lean blog
Related: It’s Easy Being Lean - Wisconsin Manufacturing - lean manufacturing articles - Transforming With Lean
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Great post - Do Kaizen Like Toyota:
Very true.
Standardized work instructions are in important part of Deming and lean manufacturing management systems. Processes need to be standardized and continually improved (kaizen). Without a documented standard process variation normally increases over time as processes drift away from the desired standard. As new ideas for improved are proposed those changes can be tested using PDSA and adopted if successful.
The key is not having a document saying this is what the standard process is, the key is having a document that is actually used. For that reason it is essential that the work instructions are easy to use (visible and as simple as possible) and easy to update (to avoid the common problem of the process changing and the work instructions losing touch with what is actually done).
Resources on standard work instructions:
A draft version of Learning Lean: A Survey of Industry Lean Needs by Gene Fliedner and Kieran Mathieson is now available. This voice of the customer report is product of some of those involved in the Lean Education Academic Network. Conclusions:
I think it is an interesting read.
Related: Applying Lean Tools to University Courses - Lean Education Academic Network Spring Meeting - Applied Quality Engineering Education - voice of the customer
Experimenting with milkshakes?
Experiments are useful and underused. PDSA and design of experiments are two concepts that aid in experimenting successfully.
Related: Google: Experiment Quickly and Often - Why Use Designed Factorial Experiments? - Using Design of Experiments - theory of knowledge
Another interesting application of management improvement concepts in software development by David Anderson.
Related: Management Science for Software Engineering - Microsoft CMMI - Innovation in Software Development Process - Lean and Theory of Constraints - Kanban definition
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