So I think things are back to normal after a somewhat stressful day of wondering why my blog "broke." Unlike some web/blog outages and problems, it wasn't due to anything I did or tried to change. It just broke. Settings that worked fine up until Thursday morning no longer worked. It wasn't a general Blogger outage (the first thing I checked), it was my site's settings. Downtime, pressure, scowls, and flashbacks
I had some flashbacks to my time at the GM engine plant, circa 1995. We would have machining centers go down (for various reasons, including not doing enough planned maintenance) and managers would respond by coming out to the gemba to stand and glare, pressuring employees and maintenance folks to work faster. We always joked that nothing ever got fixed by a superintendent or plant manager standing there.
As the length of downtime progressed, arms would be crossed, brows would furrow, and scowls would grow. Oh yeah, don't forget the yelling. At times yesterday, I felt like I was standing there, scowling at myself (as both superintendent and maintenance tech for the blog). As they say, hope is not a strategy, and scowling or pity do not get machines back up and running. I tried to get out of that mode and mood ASAP.
Thinking back to GM again, I had the idea back in 1995 that, if machines got fixed faster with the plant superintendent standing there (the guy who claimed that you had to "beat down on people until they did exactly as they're told"), then we our plant should buy a bunch of life-sized cardboard cutouts that could be strategically placed around the plant. If you kept them far enough away, you might not know if it was "real Bob" or "cardboard Bob" watching you work. The photo to the left represents what he would have looked like (well, without his toupe'). It wasn't a very collaborative or "Lean culture" environment, at least not until we got a new plant manager with a NUMMI background.
My blog downtime
Many of you might want to quit reading here if you don't care about blog tech stuff. My blog and hosting setup is a bit unusual maybe -- it's hosted for free on the Blogger service (owned by Google), but my domain (leanblog.org) is hosted (a paid service) through godaddy.com. There are some settings on godaddy.com that point your browser from leanblog.org to the material stored on the Blogger servers. That was all working fine... until yesterday.
I'll look in the mirror and think about how I could have avoided the problem. It's a bit loose use of the term, but I could have "5S-ed" my site set up a while back. Months back, I had tried setting up the "Google Apps" platform for my domain, leanblog.org. I was never able to get it working, so the setup was just, well, sitting there. If I had never partially set up Google Apps, I wouldn't have had the problems that occurred when they added the "Sites" feature. Not sure how I could have (or should have) anticipated that. Live and learn. Note to self: Don't ever leave half-installed features hanging out there... I shut down all of the Google Apps features and that helped get things back up and running.
Updated: I'm back up and running (almost) as normal as of 10:10 EST. Sorry for any inconvenience. A bit of reflection on the whole thing coming tomorrow. My blog time today was consumed with tech troubleshooting, unfortunately. Is anyone having any problems reaching the page via leanblog.org (without the www?)
I was alerted at about 10 AM this morning (thanks, Dad) that my blog was down and showing a "404" error.
I'm still troubleshooting and trying to get this resolved, but there is a workaround, in the meantime. My pages can be found on the old domain (http://kanban.blogspot.com). Any links that you have with "www.leanblog.org" need to have that replaced with "kanban.blogspot.com" for the link to work (don't use the quotes).
Long story short -- last year, I moved to the "custom domain" option, where blogger hosts my pages but displays my leanblog.org domain name. Everything was working fine... until this morning. This morning, google introduced a new "Google Apps" feature that is apparently conflicting... thanks for the advance warning, Google/Blogger. I don't know if there's causation, but there's definitely correlation.
I will work to get this fixed ASAP. Thanks for your patience and thanks for reading.
No, not a hospital for moose -- a hospital in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada.
The Five Hills Health Region is revving up speed in providing mental health services and lab tests for patients -- by applying principles used in auto manufacturing.
The hospital used value stream mapping to identify waste in the process:
Lab staff tacked sticky notes on to large sheets of newsprint to create maps to identify how to cut in half the time a patient waited to have their blood taken.
They also recognize the lean concept that the people doing the work are best positioned to actually improve the process:
As a result, outpatients getting bloodwork done wait about 15 minutes instead of half an hour. Besides decreasing wait times for patients, the team approach has boosted staff morale, said Barb Flowers, the region's director of laboratory services.
"All levels identify waste, but staff are the ones who can see that if I moved this over here, I'd save myself so many steps," Flowers said. "It's teamwork in that it is a bottom-up and top-down approach and management is moving toward more of a mentoring role to make sure that we meet standards and regulations."
Whether it's for mental health services or traditional hospital settings, Lean methods work... if you're willing to work at it and allow your employees to have some control over their process. The description of Lean being "bottom-up and top-down" reminds me of hearing John Shook talk about Toyota management being neither of those things (or being both of them). Lean leadership is definitely not the traditional dictatorial "top-down" method. Nor is it the "empowerment" model of just letting employees do whatever they want as long as they get the results you want. Lean leaders work WITH their people to define goals and standards, figuring out together how to meet those objectives.
Here's a recent article on Toyota's globalization -- how to grow and spread The Toyota Way quickly, yet effectively as they expand around the world.
“It’s extremely important to have the same common Toyota Way infiltrated to employees in all corners of the world,” said Katsuaki Watanabe, the company’s president. “But on the other hand, in each corner of the world, in each region, there are inherent characteristics that need to be respected.”
One thing that I found interesting was the illustrations of how Toyota uses innovative technologies for training employees in doing quality work:
Such training is essential in places like China, where Toyota found that some of its newest employees had never driven the cars they were hired to build.
At Motomachi, more than 3,000 tasks on the assembly line have been translated into video manuals that are displayed on laptop computers above 30 simulated workstations, situated where their functions would be carried out inside the factory.
The videos show everything from the correct way to hold a screw to the best way to hold an air gun so that a worker’s hand will not tire in a few hours.
I think it illustrates how the Toyota Production System evolves. I've had people insist before that Toyota does standardized work instructions with paper and pencil -- therefore, everybody should. It sounds like the Toyota of the past did that... why should anyone copy their own methods exactly, instead of progressing with new technologies (such as video). Toyota isn't stuck in their own past, why should we be?
There's also a story in there about how Toyota has moved to "kitting," the practice of delivering a tote of parts for a specific vehicle instead of storing many parts line side, to be selected by employees. A side benefit is that older employees, who are still guaranteed in Japan, can perform less strenuous material handling jobs while younger employees can do the assembly work more quickly.
I'm Jason Turgeon, the newest addition to the Lean Blog team. Mark and I have had an email dialog going for a few months about the intersection of green and lean, and he's invited me to post on the topic. So over the next couple of months, I'll try to put about one post a week up discussing the link between these two topics, which are intrinsically linked at many levels.
But first, a brief introduction. My interest in lean comes from a lifelong fascination with innovation and improving systems. Before I discovered lean thinking, I made a nuisance of myself at many jobs, where I continually disrupted my bosses with constant suggestions for improvement and a somewhat over-the-top willingness to ask "why?" Now that I have the tools of lean to channel my energy into, I think I'm a good deal more effective in my daily efforts to make everything around me just a little bit more effective, but I am by no means an expert in lean systems. Lean is something I'm new to and I'm enjoying learning about it and looking forward to the chance to apply it.
I have a BS in Environmental Geology from Northeastern University in Boston, where I live. I work for the US Environmental Protection Agency, where I specialize in improving energy efficiency at drinking water and sewage treatment plants. EPA has done a fair amount of work to link green and lean, although it hasn't really caught on inside the agency yet. The agency is looking at lean both from a manufacturing perspective and with an eye to making government itself more efficient. I also run Textbook Revolution, a website I started in college to combat the ludicrously high prices of textbooks. The textbook game is another old world industry that could really benefit from some lean thinking, but that's a whole 'nother topic. I'm also a big fan of live music, and I write on the growing movement to green the music industry at GreenBase, the green blog of JamBase.com.
Subaru and Zero Landfill Status:
So now that you know who I am, let's dive in. This week's focus is on an article in the Feb 18th USA Today that Mark alerted me to. The article describes the efforts of a Subaru plant in Lafayette, Indiana, to eliminate waste from the factory, a quest known as "zero landfill status," and discusses several other companies doing the same thing. Of course, the elimination of waste is one-half of what lean is all about, so this fits in perfectly. The article quotes Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott:
Wal-Mart CEO Scott set a zero-waste goal for the cost-conscious retailer in 2005. "Think about it," he said at the time. "If we have to throw it away, we had to buy it first. So we pay twice. Once to get it, once to have it taken away."
To figure out how to eliminate waste, management took a page from the "go and see" playbook--they took all of the trash out of a dumpster and spread it out on the factory floor to get a sense of what they were throwing away. Then they went to work figuring out what could readily be recycled and what could be reused. They took steps to rightsize, like using a smaller roll of steel for parts that are stamped, reducing the leftover steel by over 100 pounds per car. Management also spent a lot of time designing systems to make recycling easier, like sorting all the plastic shrink-wrap together.
Subaru also went for the other aspect of lean--respect for people. The article says that the waste elimination program has reached "an almost religious fervor" among employees. Unfortunately, there is no discussion of just how the plant got this buy-in. In the same vein, the plant has worked extensively with its suppliers to coerce them into taking back reusable or recyclable materials. The styrofoam inserts that protect engine parts get used 5 times before they get recycled. And because many of their suppliers are close, often within an hour's drive, they are sending recyclables back in trucks that would have otherwise been empty, reducing waste in transportation as well.
"Old" and "New" Environmentalism
But what does all of this mean from an environmental perspective? To start answering that question, it helps to know that there are really two separate environmental camps out there, with dozens of splintered subfactions. The "old environmentalism," as I like to put it, was based on nagging and regulations. Old environmentalists are always pointing out what other people are doing wrong, begging government to pass more laws to restrict other people's behavior, and generally making life unpleasant for those around them. This is the group I work for. Old environmentalists are prone to saying things like, "if we could just convince every American to change one lightbulb to a compact fluorescent, we could save x, y, and z." To be brutally honest, it's not much fun to hang out with this group of people.
"New environmentalists," a group which I try very hard to be in, are much more closely aligned with lean thinkers. New environmentalists, inspired by books like Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution and Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, are constantly on the lookout for a better way to change the planet. Those of us in this camp would prefer to align economics and the environment, working withbusiness instead of trying to regulate it out of existence. Our arguments for government intervention tend to be at the more macroeconomic level, for instance suggesting that we redesign tax laws to punish wasteful behavior and reward good behavior. New environmentalists believe in the concept of "sustainability" not as a poorly-understood buzzword but as a way of life, a game-changing philosophy in which everything we do, everything we buy, everything we use contributes in a positive way to the world, both now and in the future.
Subaru: Reducing Waste but still Wasteful?
Getting back to the question of Subaru's waste-reduction, I think that old environmentalists are probably very happy about Subaru's work. Why look--they've eliminated almost 100% of their waste! They have a very high recycling rate! They've done what we asked, and saved money in the process!
But from a new environmentalist perspective, Subaru's work is only the first baby step towards true sustainability. It's a good step, to be sure, and the company deserves praise and recognition for it, but if they stop there, it's not good enough. From our perspective, the stuff in the dumpster is just the tip of the waste iceberg. Cars are perhaps the single most visible element of a wasteful, unsustainable lifestyle, and as such are emblemic of the larger societal shifts we need to see if we're going to avoid some pretty painful global collapses in the not-too-distant future.
Let's look at the waste that's left in the system three ways. At the more granular level, cars are still woefully inefficient. Even a Toyota Camry Hybrid (this plant makes Camrys for Toyota, but the article doesn't say if the Hybrid is one of them) only gets about 30 mpg in real world driving. As the authors of Natural Capitalism put it:
The contemporary automobile, after a century of engineering, is embarrassingly inefficient: Of the energy in the fuel it consumes, at least 80 percent is lost, mainly in the engine's heat and exhaust, so that at most only 20 percent is actually used to turn the wheels. Of the resulting force, 95 percent moves the car, while only 5 percent moves the driver, in proportion to their respective weights. Five percent of 20 per-cent is one percent- not a gratifying result from American cars that burn their own weight in gasoline every year.
Natural Capitalism devotes an entire chapter to a discussion of how to make the automobile more efficient at delivering the service we want--comfortable, safe, reliable transportation--while at the same time using less natural resources. They argue that using steel doesn't make any sense in a modern automobile. Steel, to them is a "monument." By switching to modern plastics and carbon fiber, we could have cars that are just as safe, just as fast, and much, much more efficient, without having to do anything involving hybrids or biodiesel or hydrogen. Consider:
The conventional car is heavy, made mostly of steel. It has many protrusions, edges, and seams that make air flow past it turbulently. Its great weight bears down on tires that waste energy by flexing and heating up. It is powered by an internal combustion engine mechanically coupled to the wheels. Completely redesigning cars by reconfiguring three key design elements could save at least 70 to 80 percent of the fuel it currently uses, while making it safer, sportier, and more comfortable. These three changes are:
1. making the vehicle ultralight, with a weight two to three times less than that of steel cars;
2. making it ultra-low-drag, so it can slip through the air and roll along the road several times more easily; and
3. after steps 1 and 2 have cut by one-half to two-thirds the power needed to move the vehicle, making its propulsion system "hybrid-electric."
As you can see, there is a lot of waste left in the car. But what about what happens to the car when its useful life is over? Today, most automobiles end up in a metals recycling facility, where they are crushed and shredded. The economically useful metals are sorted for recycling, and everything else--the seatbelts, the plastic dashboard, the steering wheel, all the leftovers, collectively known as "fluff"--is trucked to a landfill. Making cars more efficient is a fantastic first step, but efficiency isn't the only end goal. In Cradle-to-Cradle, the argument is that being less bad is not the same as being good. They say that reducing the amount of waste is not good enough. In a properly designed system, one that mimics nature, there is no such thing as "waste."
The "C-to-C" take on auto manufacturing would have the Subaru plant churning out cars that were designed not to be shredded at the end of their lives, but to be dissassembled and turned back into new cars. BMW long ago started designing for disassembly, making it easier to take cars apart and reuse their components. The next logical step would be to figure out how to turn these parts, say the body panels from one car, back into top-quality body panels on a new car with a minimum of energy. The auto manufacturer that does this will have a huge competitive advantage. Why stamp out new steel doors for each car, at tremendous environmental and financial cost, if you could have a plastic door that was reconditioned using an environmentally benign painting process and put back into service on a new car at a fraction of the cost of a new steel door?
The third take on the Subaru factory, and the most extreme, is that the factory shouldn't be producing cars at all. Automobiles, as I've said, are emblemic of waste and over-consumption. If the rest of the world suddenly starts looking like America, we're going to be in a lot of trouble, fast. This has already begun in China and India, where they began by modeling their vision of success on our ways. As car ownership has spiked, transportation and infrastructure headaches, air pollution, water pollution, the destruction of land for roads and parking lots, and all the other negatives that come from automobiles have also risen.
The mayor of Bogota made worldwide news when he made strides to take back the city streets from cars and give them to people (see the video at the end of this post for an inspirational look at how things could be better). Now there are hundreds of miles of real bike lanes and pedestrian avenues--not a stripe on the side of the road, but full lanes off-limits to cars, separated from auto traffic by vegetated buffers. And every Sunday and holiday, the city shuts off dozens more miles of road to cars, opening them up to cyclists and pedestrians.
The more extreme environmentalists would say that no matter how little waste goes to the landfill, the factory is inherently wasteful. They would prefer to see it transformed into a factory that produces clean, modern, efficient, and comfortable public transportation. It could be light rail or it could be a bus that becomes part of a really useful bus system, one that people enjoy riding, like the one that transformed Curitiba, Brazil. Or it could be something new, something that none of us have thought of yet. But even if you don't agree with that point of view, there is still plenty of room to eliminate waste, both in the design of the car and the cars disposition when its useful life is over.
So kudos to Subaru for taking the first steps on the path to sustainability. Let's see if the company can follow through.
I'm glad that Ted had a positive impression of the lab. He writes (and posted a lot of pictures) about what he saw that was surprising to a non-lab person:
First, there is a work room right off of the lab floor. It seems out of place relative to the other conference rooms on another floor, but it is there by design. Staff can problem solve in a safe area that’s close to the work. Visual systems are used to alrt the team to important metrics.
The two formerly separated machines are now in the same room. One performs chemistry evaluations, the other hematology. Why is this important, I asked, if the types of tests are totally different? The answer is that the lab is cross training staff to operate both machines, which allows for leveling of the load.
Ted is right. A traditionally laid out hospital lab has sub-departmental silos. This is not unlike a traditional functional factory layout. There are historical reasons for the silos in factories (machines used to be run off of drive belts, so similar machines had to be grouped together, regardless of the overall flow) as there are in laboratories (chemistry and hematology were separate academic fields, so it was natural that they occupied different rooms).
As lab testing has become more automated, the testing areas are often still kept pretty separate... until Lean process flow analysis helps the lab identify that a cross-functional automated testing area, or "cell," can be created, an area that now houses instruments that used to be in their separate sub-departments. Modern medical technologists are typically cross-trained or at least have the skills and education to run multiple types of testing machines. The main "value add" of the technologists is in reviewing and interpreting the results of the testing (loading the tube into the machine isn't particularly skilled work).
When labs move to the cellular layout, the department typically moves from a "one person, one machine" staffing model to one where a technologist (or two, depending on workloads) can walk a standardized work pattern, loading and unloading different instruments and reviewing results as they come out. Manual testing work is typically isolated into an area that is staffed separately during a day (technologists are still cross-trained and able to work in either area). The advantage of this new standardized work is that the routine flow of specimens and testing in the automated cell is no longer interrupted by manual work or specimens/results that require more detailed interpretation.
The general approach might seem familiar to those of you from manufacturing settings... but it is certainly implemented in a way that's keeping with the mission and setting of a hospital. One key difference between a manufacturing "cell" and a lab "cell" is that lab specimens tend to only go through one test instrument, unlike a factory cell where a product would be machined or assembled in all (or almost all operations).
There are many examples that Ted cites where the process was improved to reduce walking and specimen travel distances -- also very classic benefits of a "lean lab." I'm glad that it also felt like a "lean" place in terms of environment and the focus on the customer/patient.
I'm having a local, informal "Lean Lunch" event in Southlake TX, Saturday March 15 at noon. It's a gathering of some Lean folks from different companies who I've met through the blog.
If you're in town and interested in attending, send me an email at leanpodcast [at] gmail [dot] com and I'll forward the e-vite.
strategy+business, the e-magazine from Booz, Allen & Hamilton, reports how the US Army is changing the way that it shares knowledge within such a massive organization. The new system is a powerful example of how respect for people and a focus on correcting systems can lead to huge improvements.
The Army’s bureaucracy has been criticized over the years for impeding the transfer of essential knowledge quickly throughout the organization. To address that problem, the Army developed the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) network in 2006. This Web-based collaboration system allows new bottom-up concepts to be disseminated instantly to those who can benefit from them. In its first year of operation, the network shared more than 15,000 lessons from combat operations. Of these, more than 4,000 led directly to improvements in unit preparation and training for deployment.
The article explains how the deeply-rooted Army culture inhibited the adoption of CALL at first:
As you might imagine, some Army leaders were initially reluctant to allow CALL analysts to post information about their own snafus because they didn’t want such failures broadcast and didn’t want to be penalized for errors. But analysts worked around these ingrained anxieties by assuming that if team X is having a particular difficulty, it likely reflects a systemic problem. The analysts will check around the network to see if others are experiencing a similar challenge. And when they get confirmation, they post the problem on CALL in a generic fashion, specifically describing the issues, mistakes, and lessons learned without identifying who, what, when, or where.
And this is where we come to respect for people: the focus of CALL is not on identifying a person's mistakes or penalizing individuals for having problems. Rather, the assumption is that there's a "systemic problem" that needs to be addressed and fixed. In other words, there's no blame for doing something wrong.
Toyota, of course, approaches mistakes and defects on the production line in the same way. They're opportunities to learn, to solve problems, and to improve the system -- not excuses to fire or punish someone.
ThedaCare is one of the recognized leaders in the use of Lean and the Toyota Production System in hospitals. He has resigned as CEO of the health system to take on a new job focused on improving healthcare throughout the country.
ThedaCare announced Thursday that Toussaint, who has served as president and CEO since April 2000, resigned that post and will lead the new ThedaCare Center for Creating Value in Healthcare, an organization dedicated to finding ways to reduce health care costs for providers, businesses and individuals. The program will be based in the Fox Cities.
"We need leadership to focus on this issue," Toussaint said in an interview with The Post-Crescent. "I've done what I can in statewide and national activities, but really it's hard to do both jobs effectively."
Dr. Toussaint is one of our best advocates for driving Lean improvements in quality and cost throughout healthcare. Let's all wish him the best in his new mission and organization.
Some highlights of their improvements:
ThedaCare has drawn medical professionals from around the world in recent years, mostly to observe how the system has been able to cut costs and improve care delivery without reducing staffing levels. Cutting $23 million from its operating costs was a five-year process, Toussaint said.
Toussaint said ThedaCare has come a long way since its lean efforts began nearly five years ago.
"Our quality of care is what I'm most proud of," he said.
...
"We've taken waste out, so patients are not waiting for things," he said. "One of the real benefits we've seen is that we've had zero medication errors because of the collaborative care model. It just goes to show when you reduce waste, quality improves and costs go down."
This morning, I experienced my annual visit to the optometrist. The wait was 30 minutes, but that is not what I wanted to address. At the optometrist, they have a fancy machine that takes a picture of your eye. I'll call it the eyephoto. This is an expensive machine and insurance does not cover it. If you want to have the eyephoto, you have to pay $35 out of your pocket.
In order to see if you want the eyephoto, they give you a piece of paper when you walk in that has a paragraph description of the eyephoto and a place to check a box and sign if you want it done. I decided to keep my $35.
In the exam room, while waiting for the doctor, there was not much for me to do, so I was watching the screensaver on the office computer. What was it showing? It was a commercial showcasing the benefits of the eyephoto. As I watched the commercial, it occurred to me that paying the $35 might not be such a bad deal. The commercial changed my mind.
Here is an example of a badly sequenced process that does not get the customer information when the customer can use it to make a purchasing decision in your favor. It is putting the cart before the horse. I wonder what the rate of use is for the eyephoto at the optometrist. I bet it is pretty low. Wouldn't it be higher if they reversed the sequence? If I had walked into a lobby with a giant flat screen TV showing non-stop eyephoto commercials and THEN been presented with the election form, I bet I would have signed up.
Most Lean we see addresses the movement of product before or after purchase, but in this example, an appreciation of Flow creates the potential for increased revenues. There is a huge amount of value to be gained by using Lean to ensure the purchase of product.
Jeff Bailey at the New York Times wrote a great article about Southwest Airlines and their legendary approach to the key lean principle of respect for people. After talking about Southwest's propensity for cross-dressing CEOs and other 'fun at work', the author brings up a popular topic in the lean blogosphere these days, direct labor costs:
The premise behind all this is that a little fun translates into a lot of productivity. Southwest, after pay cuts at other airlines, has the industry’s highest wages. But because of efficient work habits, measured in how much it spends to fly a passenger a given distance, its costs are the lowest among big airlines.
That right, while legacy airlines, a veritable flying "Detroit Three," were busy chopping heads and chopping pay, Southwest was doing the same thing that they have always done, cutting waste. Southwest's key competitive advantage over some 40 plus consecutive quarters of profitability has been its 30-minute turn-around time at the gate. By requiring flight crews, including pilots, to do cabin cleaning and not assigning seats, the airline shaved 15-minutes off its ground time verses their competition. This improved on-time arrivals and reduced the number of expensive airframe they had to buy--capital costs during flush years that often leave airlines in the lurch during downturns. Southwest is one of few US airlines that continued to buy, slowly but steadily, through the recent airline crisis.
Nobody would ever compare the flashy, over the top Herb Kelleher with any of the button-down conservative, straight laced types from Toyota City. Strictly speaking, Southwest hasn't used the word lean or cited the Toyota Production System as the source of what they do, but evidence abounds that they embrace the two key pillars of lean: respect for people and continuous elimination of waste. I think this goes to show that lean can wear many types of clothing.
It's disappointing when a publication with the wide audience of BusinessWeek misrepresents the Lean and Toyota Production System concepts. But hey, at least they really are a weekly publication, unlike our pals at IndustryWeek (sorry, haven't made that joke in a while).
The article talks about attempts by Chrysler, with the leadership of Jim Press, formerly of Toyota, to turn the business around. Unfortunately, the article equates "leaner" with getting smaller -- fewer models, fewer plants, and fewer dealers.
The sub-headline reads:
By cutting models and dealerships, Chrysler aims to be a leaner, more productive, and more profitable business
It's all talk of "eliminating redundancies." Sure, Toyota only has one minivan and doesn't compete with itself, unlike Chrysler who competes with their own Dodge. It might be very necessary for Chrysler to take those actions, but couldn't someone other than a Toyota person have figured that out? It's a similar struggle that GM has had, with divisions and dealers competing with each other (hence the death of the Oldsmobile brand).
It's too bad that the article didn't talk about attempts to further transform the Chrysler culture and workplace. They already had a pretty good Lean leader in Tom LaSorda, now they have another in Press. Is Chrysler going to do more to motivate their employees to participate in kaizen (continuous improvement)? Can Chrysler get more customer focused?
The article *does* talk about sacrificing short-term sales for the long-term sake of the company (again, something that GM has also struggled with). Do you think that's the influence of Press or, again, is that something that other leaders (such as Nardelli) could have come up with on their own? Principle #1 of "The Toyota Way" does focus on the long-term, even at the expense of the short-term.
Adopting the Toyota culture might not be enough to save a business like Chrysler... but it would also be interesting to hear if they're trying to make the organization operate more like Toyota. Who is writing about that? Anyone have any articles or links to share?
Chrysler can get as small as they want (or as small as the market requires)... but that's not going to turn them into Toyota.
Here is an article about the Republican who lost the Michigan governor's race last year, Dick DeVos. Considering all of the problems in the state's economy, it might have been interesting to have a manufacturing company CEO as governor of my home state.
From the article, it sounds like there are many Lean methods and mindsets in his company, Windquest.
"This culture," [DeVos] said, waving an arm across the floor of his Windquest Cos. factory in Holland last week, "this fast, flexible, teamwork culture, is the future of manufacturing."
Even though the article doesn't mean the word "Lean," the results and culture sound like Lean:
Delivery times for custom orders have shrunk from 2 1/2 weeks to three days.
Every worker on the two production shifts is trained to do multiple tasks. Shift lengths are adjusted to suit rapid changes in order volume. "We might be six hours one day, 10 hours the next," said Eric Wolff, the firm's president and chief operating officer.
"The old manufacturing world, with 14 layers of pay, long lead times, inflexibility, us-versus-them attitudes -- those days are gone," said DeVos.
Shrinking lead times by eliminating waste is a common benefit of Lean. Companies often make a leap as seen there, from measure lead time in "weeks" to "days" (or from "months" to "weeks"). Getting away from an "us-versus-them" attitude sure sounds like Lean to me.
The key principles of the company:
Five banners hang overhead in the plant, exhorting workers to:
• Be enthusiastic.
• Make a difference.
• Be a problem solver.
• Find the win-win.
• Have integrity.
Again, sure sounds like Lean to me. Could he have brought that attitude and Lean principles to state government, ala Iowa? Maybe. But, at the least, let's hope that DeVos can inspire the Michigan business to grow by being more Lean. That's especially needed with the shrinking automotive base... ironically the home of Lean.
This is great news for patients and is probably great news for those of you who have been following the "checklists" saga. The federal government has reversed its earlier decision to shutdown the Michigan hospital checklist usage, recognizing that quality improvement protocols are NOT the same as experimenting with a new drug.
“We do not want to stand in the way of quality improvement activities that pose minimal risks to subjects,” said Dr. Ivor Pritchard, acting director of OHRP. “HHS regulations provide great flexibility and should not have inhibited this activity. The regulations are designed to protect human subjects.”
The Johns Hopkins study demonstrated that a comprehensive five-step program can dramatically reduce the incidence of catheter-borne infections in ICUs. HHS strongly encourages hospitals nationwide to adopt the program, which can save thousands of lives and millions of dollars each year.
OHRP noted that the Johns Hopkins project has evolved to the point where the intervention, including the checklist, is now being used at certain Michigan hospitals solely for clinical purposes, not medical research or experimentation. Consequently, the regulations that govern human subjects research no longer apply and neither Johns Hopkins nor the Michigan hospitals need the approval of an institutional review board (IRB) to conduct the current phase of the project.
Bob Wachter, in his blog post (hat tip to him for breaking this update to the story and kudos to him for writing such informative and passionate posts on the subject), wrote:
The prior OHRP decision, if left standing, could have mandated regulatory approval and the need to obtain patient and provider consent every time one wanted to improve a process and measure its impact.
The one thing that bugged me about the prior OHRP ruling... the hospitals were measuring the impact of the checklists (an important part of the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle), therefore it became research? So it would have been OK if the hospital were just using the checklist without measuring the impact? Seems a bit irresponsible. But what is really more irresponsible is a hospital NOT using checklists (or standardized work) to ensure consistent care and patient safety.
Here's a recent article from Bob that was hosted on superfactory.com about the Toyota Way principle of "Respect for People." It's a very well annotated history of writings and references about this oft-forgotten principle. If you're skeptical about the origins or importance of this principle, please check out his article. "Continuous improvement" is not the only important Toyota Way principle. "Continuous improvement" and "respect for people" are of equal importance, according to Toyota.
From the article:
Lean community leaders have recently made two huge changes in how they present Lean. The first change is Lean as a management system rather than “Lean manufacturing.” Second, they are finally taking note of the long-established “Respect for People” principle. Why now? In part because there have been so few successful Lean transformations over the last 20 years. Another reason is that most other aspects of the Lean management system have been studied in detail, so this is the next territory to explore. This batch-and-queue non-integrative approach has severely increased the lead-time needed to properly educate people about Lean management – particularly the “Respect for People” principle.
Some guy (not me) has been spoofing his way onto companies' investor / analyst calls, asking questions about Lean and Six Sigma. He's using a fake name and uses a lot of jargon, but companies find it more annoying than funny and nobody's sure what the point is.
One company rep "speculates that Mr. Herrick is "some minion" at a consulting firm trying to do clandestine research on companies' use of Six Sigma techniques.
Mr. Herrick's questions are usually narrowly focused on details of a company's results from well-known cost-savings techniques such as "lean management" and Six Sigma, or else supply-chain issues. They're virtually the same on each call, and he often follows up aggressively. In the Newell Rubbermaid call, Mr. Herrick asked the company's president and chief executive, Mark Ketchum, to outline his "top initiatives regarding lean manufacturing" and Six Sigma.
I guess real analysts aren't asking about Lean or Six Sigma?
This was pretty exciting to discover... my book ("Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction") is out there on the publisher website as well as amazon.com (my publisher would certainly prefer that you order it through them directly). It looks like you can go ahead and pre-order if you're interested in doing so now or in the future.
There's no cover image yet... the book is still going through the editing process, but it looks like we have July 23 as a release date, so that's exciting too.
A few friends of the blog had asked about autographed copies... that's very flattering. We'll work out something, especially for Lean Blog readers. The "Lean" approach was taken by the authors of Freakonomics, who would send a free autographed label that you could put in your own book (avoiding the "waste of transportation" of shipping a book multiple times).
Stay tuned and thanks for the enthusiasm that everyone has shared for the book.
As we work on the marketing plan for the book, if anyone has ideas for blogs or podcasts (in the healthcare space) that I should try to be interviewed for, I'm happy to hear your suggestions (Email me at mark [at] leanhospitalsbook [dot] com).
Here's a nice article about our good friend Jamie Finchbaugh and his colleague Andy Carlino at the Lean Learning Center.
What strategies can help clients to use the principles learned to become successful?
Flinchbaugh: Leading the center's philosophy is the idea that tools are largely ineffective unless they are supported by the proper foundation of lean guiding principles and rules to help an organization understand how things work together and why. We hope that the ultimate goal is creating better customer relationships. We want the lean concept to help clients apply rules and principles to help achieve greater customer satisfaction.
Carlino: Adults do not learn best by listening to a series of lectures. Adults learn though their own discovery, through experience combined with the right questions and through interaction with other adults, which is what our training is based on.
As the entertainment industry works to recover from the recently-ended writers' strike, the WSJ article featured a quote from a division of General Electric:
"[the networks] are hoping to maintain some of the cost-cutting benefits of the strike, such as ending costly studio deals through the use of force majeure clauses. "
We're a little bit leaner and more agile now," says Marc Graboff, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and NBC Universal Television Studio, units of General Electric Co"
Are the buzzwords of Lean and TPS spreading that far and wide throughout GE now that the TV people are talking that talk? Or was it just the "everyday" use of the words as we often hear?
You might remember this earlier post about a funny "Six Sigma' clip from the NBC show 30 Rock. Will we see 30 Rock mentioning the Toyota Production System, whenever they finally get new shows back on the air?
Coconuts, Bamboo, and Pedal Power(Mike Wroblewski, Got Boondoggle?) "Unfortunately, the castaways did not understand the concept of policy deployment so all this ingenuity was not focused on more important projects like say fixing the hole in the boat or building a raft."
JIT and Jidoka are Useless... (Ron Pereira, Lean Six Sigma Academy) "Yes, the two pillars of the Toyota Production System - JIT and Jidoka - are absolutely worthless… if you don’t respect people."
Half Right... No, Not Even (Kevin Meyer, Evolving Excellence) "5S is not a value, it's a tool. One of many tools, and one that is completely useless and unsustainable if the "respect for people" pillar is not recognized."
Don't Use Performance Appraisals (John Hunter, Curious Cat blog) "Performance appraisal is a strange disease: most people agree performance appraisals are not effective and indeed are harmful. Yet, most still don’t think anything can be done about it."
Management by Kaizen Events (Jon Miller, Gemba Panta Rei) "What if kaizen events were enough to achieve a whole lean enterprise strategy? First of all we need to imagine a scenario under which that would be possible."
Did I Violate Federal Regulations Today? (I Hope So) - (Bob Wachter, Wachter's World) "DAMN IT, I RUN A SERVICE OF 120 VERY SICK PATIENTS. IT IS PRECISELY MY JOB TO TRY TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF CARE FOR THESE PATIENTS..."
Burden on People, Burden on Earth(Peter Abilla, Shmula) "On average, most business processes are inefficient and create an unhealthy amount of waste..."
These Machines Used To Be in Two Different States... (Dr. Ted Eytan, Daily Kaizen) "The two formerly separated machines are now in the same room. One performs chemistry evaluations, the other hematology. Why is this important, I asked, if the types of tests are totally different? The answer is that the lab is cross training staff to operate both machines, which allows for leveling of the load."
Why a To-Do List Just Doesn't Work (Dan Markovitz, TimeBack Blog) "The calendar enables you to “level the production” of your key projects at work."
Trainees Report Back and Train Trainers (Paul Levy, Running a Hospital) "...will train over 600 staff members in the techniques of calling out problems and pulling together help teams to solve them."
Muda, Mura (and Muri) in Health Care (Mark Rosenthal, Lean Thinker Blog) "Key Point: Separate the routine from the non-routine. Separate normal from abnormal."
What's a Leader to Do? (Matthew May, Elegant Solutions) "Bottom line: get people into a learning mode."
Explaining Lean at a Bar (Mark Graban, Lean Blog) "I asked [the bartender] how it would be if the ice were in the far corner of the bar, requiring lots of walking back and forth all day. She said that would be horrible."
Thinking back to GM again, I had the idea back in 1995 that, if machines got fixed faster with the plant superintendent standing there (the guy who claimed that you had to "beat down on people until they did exactly as they're told"), then we our plant should buy a bunch of life-sized cardboard cutouts that could be strategically placed around the plant. If you kept them far enough away, you might not know if it was "real Bob" or "cardboard Bob" watching you work. The photo to the left represents what he would have looked like (well, without his toupe'). It wasn't a very collaborative or "Lean culture" environment, at least not until we got a new plant manager with a NUMMI background.
and 
, are constantly on the lookout for a better way to change the planet. 
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" does focus on the long-term, even at the expense of the short-term.
, send me an email at leanpodcast [at] gmail [dot] com.