These Wounded Soldiers Need Lean To Get Their Benefits?

Soldiers risk ruin while awaiting benefit checks - Yahoo! News

I've read about this problem before... and at the risk of this turning too political, I'm going to address the issue. Wounded U.S. soldiers are reportedly waiting too long to get the benefits to which they're entitled. In the case of one soldier:

Stevens' descent from Army private first-class, 3rd Infantry Division, 11 Bravo Company, began in 2005 — not in battle, since he was never sent off to Iraq or Afghanistan, but with a headfirst fall over a wall on the obstacle course at Fort Benning, Ga. He suffered a head injury and spinal damage.

The injury alone didn't put him in a homeless shelter. Instead, it was military bureaucracy — specifically, the way injured soldiers are discharged on just a fraction of their salary and then forced to wait six to nine months, and sometimes even more than a year, before their full disability payments begin to flow.

That's shameful, injured vets living in homeless shelters.

Nearly 20,000 disabled soldiers were discharged in the past two fiscal years, and lawmakers, veterans' advocates and others say thousands could be facing financial ruin while they wait for their claims to be processed and their benefits to come through.

It sounds like they need a serious dose of Lean thinking. If they're "waiting" for claims to be processed, I can only guess that the "process" is plagued by:

• Departmental silos
• Long delays between steps in the process
• Long delays before decisions or approvals are done as a batch
• Poor processes that lead to missing information or missing paperwork

I'm speculating and, call me a cynic, I wouldn't be surprised if any of that is the case. I wonder how long it really takes to perform what you might call the "Value Added" steps in this process, which might include:

• Receive paperwork
• Verify status
• Finalize paperwork
• Start sending checks

If it takes SIX MONTHS to get this done, I bet most of that time is waiting and delay. The U.S. government needs to do better than that. Use Lean thinking, create value streams that are focused on flow (and quality) of focusing on departments, efficiency, and internal politics or battles. Focus on the "customer" of the process - the wounded soldiers. Come on, get it done. I read about this months ago.... let's get this process fixed. For shame...

The point, with this or any Lean improvements, wouldn't be "doing things faster" or cutting corners. One should be able to take significant time out of the process without being sloppy and giving benefits, for example, to just anyone who applied. Reducing delays before verification steps, rather than eliminating such safeguards, would be the "Lean" approach.

Subscribe via RSS | Lean Blog Main Page | Podcast | Message Board

A Japanese Paper on the Spread of TPS

CURRENTS / 'Toyota way' inspires lean practices

From a Japanese newspaper, an article about the impact the Toyota Production System is having on organizations around the world.

The first example is the U.S. military, the Air Force more specifically:

Since embarking a decade ago on what it described as a "lean journey," the U.S. Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC) has halved the time taken to overhaul the massive C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft from 339 days to just 171 days. More efficient repair and maintenance work also enables the AFMC--charged with keeping the U.S. Air Force equipped--to keep an additional 100 KC-135 Stratotanker refueling aircraft operational.

Jeff Liker, who has done consulting for the military, described some of the waste in the process:

"They were weak on standardized processes. There was inventory everywhere, the maintenance people were doing as much walking as working. It took a lot of time to turnaround the ships and aircraft," Liker said. "The turnaround time was a major focus--as an asset under repair is not working for the country and the cost of building more is astronomical."

The article mentions the Toyota Supplier Support Center (TSSC), a U.S.-based organization that provides assistance to American manufacturers and organzations. The ideal of not using Lean improves to drive layoffs comes straight from Toyota:

TSSC charges fees only to cover labor costs and travel expenses. One precondition TSSC insists on before offering to share its skills is that the company being assisted must agree not to shed workers who become superfluous due to the implementation of kaizen--continuous improvement practices.

Companies are going along with this, thankfully:

"All companies we have helped respect this, and some have even used the surplus workers for expanding production or starting new projects," Yokoi said. "I believe when team members feel secure in their jobs and are able to contribute to the business conditions of the company, they are more willing to be creative in improving their own processes and working conditions to produce quality products in the most efficient ways."

It *is* possible to use Lean as a growth strategy, not just for cost cutting. Helping team members feel secure in their jobs, being able to contribute, to be cmreative -- that's "Respect for People" in action.

The article then meanders into a discussion of how many Japanese companies are struggling with low productivity... but you can check out the linked article if you're interested in reading more about that.

But, as a great final though, Toyota Chairman Fujio Cho highlights the critical importance of valuing people:

"Manufacturers treating workers as simply one of the 'three Ms'--men, machines and material--won't develop in terms of international competitiveness," Cho said. "We firmly believe that we need to value our workers so much that every single one of them feels part of the management of the company and an active participant in everyday business."

That's so much better than treating people as a cost to be eliminated, isn't it??

Subscribe via RSS | Lean Blog Main Page | Podcast | Message Board

John Boyd, Lean Fighter Pilot Part II

By: Andy Wagner

Harry Hillaker--Father of the F-16

Toyota's Value Innovation: The Art of Tension

Mark has written before about "Everyday Lean", those little examples of error-proofing or kanban or flow that we see in our day-to-day lives. In a similar vein, one of my enduring lean fascinations is all the places where lean thinking exists in big ways without people having called it "lean" or associated it with the Toyota Production System. As I said in Part I of this post, the work of Colonel John Boyd is a great example of this kind of undercover lean thinking.

I first learned about lean as a design engineer, coming from the engineering side of the enterprise, rather than manufacturing. The idea of designing a product, especially a major system, like an automobile or airplane, based on optimizing what the customer values most and eliminating what the customer considers waste has always appealed to me. (Hence my vocal support for Boeing's 787-- the supply chain might be the embodiment of muda, but the product was designed for the customers).

Before John Boyd presented his famous OODA loop, he developed the even more famous F-16 fighter, and the design approach would have made Toyota's chief engineers proud. In the 1950s and 60s, American fighter aircraft were designed with two things in mind: speed and technology. Each generation went faster than the last, and each generation added move gadgets and gizmos. Folks who have seen the movie know part of the story of Top Gun. In Vietnam our heavy, technology-laden F-4 Phantom went to battle carrying the best missile system money could buy, but no gun. At 42,000-lbs, the Phantom was being out turned and out maneuvered by the fleet 17,000-lb MiG-19 and our Sparrow missiles weren't getting the job done. The Korean War US kill ratio of 10:1 dropped to 3:1 and even 1:1 during Vietnam.

Boyd's team, known as the Fighter Mafia, set about designing a ”Lightweight Fighter” to prove that there was a different way to design an airplane. Boyd's research into what he called "Energy-Maneuver Theory", and the MiG-19 experience showed that agility was more important than speed and technology had to be applied in the right way to the right problems. Reading the way that Harry Hillaker, chief engineer for General Dynamics at the time, tells the story, you'd think he were talking about Toyota:

The real issue isn't technology versus no technology. It is how to apply technology. For example, the F-15 represents a brute-force approach to technology. If you want higher speeds, add bigger engines. If you want longer range, make the airplane bigger to increase the fuel capacity… Our design was a finesse approach. If we wanted to fly faster, we made the drag lower by reducing size and adjusting the configuration itself. If we wanted greater range, we made the plane more efficient, more compact.

In The Toyota Way, Jeff Liker called this Toyota's "No Compromises" approach to optimum product design. This approach is about finding a handful of key factors that matter most to the customer, and setting high, often contradictory goals, based on what matters most. Matthew May at Elegant Solutions described the Lexus development this way in his recent post on The Art of Tension:

Greater speed and acceleration conflicted directly with fuel efficiency, noise and weight, because higher speed and acceleration required a more powerful engine, which in turn is bigger and heavier, thus making more noise and consuming more fuel.

Lexus used concurrent methods to get the lowest coefficient of drag in the industry. That critical factor gave them speed, acceleration, fuel efficiency as well as noise reduction. They found what mattered most to the customer and optimized it. Much like the F-16 team, as Hillaker explains:

Range was associated with fuel capacity...People tend to focus on one part of a given parameter…The typical approach to increase range is to simply increase fuel capacity. But increasing fuel capacity increases volume, which means more weight and more drag. People think that big is better. It's not. With the lightweight fighter, we wanted to achieve our ends through different means. We increased range by reducing size.

How many times do we use the “brute-force approach to technology” rather than the “finesse approach”? Let’s face it. Brute-force is easier. The Toyota Way is tough because it teaches us to ask hard questions about what we’re trying to achieve and how best to achieve it. It teaches us to resist the siren song of technology. The first solution that comes to mind is never the right one. The right solution comes from iterating, questioning our assumptions, and in short, continuously improving. It doesn't much matter what you call it, or where you happen to find somebody doing it.

John Boyd and his Fighter Mafia took this lesson to heart and produced the most revolutionary jet fighter the world had seen. They optimized around actual customer needs, rather than industry trends, to create a product that any Toyota chief engineer would be proud of. In my mind, that's as lean as any Camry.

Subscribe via RSS | Lean Blog Main Page | Podcast | Message Board

John Boyd, Lean Fighter Pilot Part I

By: Andy Wagner

The OODA Loop & You

I love examples of lean thinking that come from unexpected angles. Mike Gardner at the TPM Log recently brought up one of my favorite figures from the world of folks who embody lean without knowing it, the late US Air Force Colonel John R. Boyd. Boyd is most known for being the father of the F-15 and F-16 fighter aircraft, but the most likely connection to the lean world would be, as Mike points out, the similarity of his “OODA loop”, Observe-Orient-Decide-Act, to the Deming Cycle, Plan-Do-Check-Act:

Colonel Boyd believed the OODA Loop process could be successfully applied beyond military applications and used to benefit any business organization. Gadfly management gurus such as Tom Peters have thrown the OODA acronym onto Power Point slides and stated that "whoever has the fastest OODA Loops wins!" and "Ready. Fire. Aim!"

Mike raises some great questions regarding how the two similar cycles relate to on another:

I have some problems with that. To begin with, business is not the military and business competition is not the same as military competition. Concepts such as the Deming Cycle of Plan-Do-Check-Act encourage a bias for action, but emphasize taking the correct action rather than the fastest.

In a sense, PDCA is actually two consecutive OODA loops, compressed together. Plan encompasses the first “observe-orient” phases. Do represents an experimental “decide-act.” Check is the second “observe-orient”, taking into account the results of the experiment. Act reflects a second decision and consequent action. While the Deming Cycle lends itself to a process engineer experimenting and developing a change, it doesn’t fit the kind of decisions and reactions that line workers have to make on-the-fly while the line is moving.

Far from advocating, “Ready, fire, aim”, Boyd advocated simplifying decision making processes by removing waste from them. One concept, embraced by the US Marines in particular, is the idea of Commander’s Intent, essentially decentralization of decision-making. Rather than giving explicit, detailed orders, commander’s train their men in a standardized way, with a common philosophy, and give them orders in the form of what they intend to accomplish and why. It’s left to each subordinate to determine the specifics for their unique situation.

Think about an andon cord. A line worker observes his surroundings and his immediate problem, including the takt time remaining. He orients himself based on his training, his understanding of standard work and why the job is done in a certain way. He decides how to act—fix the problem himself or get help, and then he acts. He can pull the cord if he has to, but he can also fix the problem himself.

At the next opportunity, he begins another loop, this time, informed by the experience of the first decision during his “orient” phase. Perhaps he barely had time to fix the problem and he knows he’s running behind the takt time. If he sees the same thing again, he’ll know it’s time for a root-cause fix and pull the cord. Lean training methods and respect for people mean that each person on the line has the ability and authority to make their own decisions without being forced to involve a supervisor. This shortens the decision cycle and allows the whole facility to solve problems faster.

In Part Two of John Boyd, Lean Fighter Pilot, I’ll write about Matt May’s recent post at Elegant Solutions on the Art of Tension and how John Boyd accomplished the same type of systems engineering in the design of the F-16 fighter, one of the world’s most successful and capable combat aircraft. Click here for Part II.

Subscribe via RSS Lean Blog Main Page Podcast Message Board

Respect for People: US Army Edition

by Dan Markovitz

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.

Subscribe via RSS | Lean Blog Main Page | Podcast | Message Board

Teaching "How to Think" not "What to Think"

I heard a great phrase, the Army liaison officer to the White House, Col. Chris Hughes, saying on cable news, "we teach our young soldiers and officers how to think, not what to think." From a quick Google search, this seems to be a common buzzphrase in the Army these days.

How ironic, considering the military is often used as an example of a "command and control" environment where the "grunts" (another military term often used other places) aren't expected to think, just follow orders.

So many businesses and management systems are built around that idea (going back to Frederick Taylor). But it seems, more and more, the military doesn't operate that way. Anyone with a military background care to comment?

Lean and the Toyota Production System are often described as a way of thinking. The U.S. Army is working on learning and using Lean methods. Interesting parallels, don't you think?

Hughes is also the author of the book WAR ON TWO FRONTS: An Infantry Commander's War in Iraq and the Pentagon.

Subscribe via RSS | Lean Blog Main Page | Podcast | Message Board

"Theory of Restraints"???

San Diego Business Journal

I'll assume the reporter misquoted the commanding officer and that he actually said "Theory of Constraints" (ala Goldratt) rather than the quoted "theory of restraints." Kind of a funny misquoting, if that's the case, in this article about a navy fleet repair center using Lean and Six Sigma.

“FRC uses a process called Theory of Restraints; in every process we do there are constraints that cause things to not come out together, so we have industry partners who come in and give us the latest and greatest techniques and observe and coach our production lines to help us make advances and speed up our production times so we can do more work in less amount of time,” said Cleveland, FRC’s commanding officer.

Oops!

Subscribe via RSS | Lean Blog Main Page | Podcast | Message Board

U.S. Army saving $2 Billion from LSS

Army Article

We've had a few posts about the LSS efforts of the military, including the Army and Air Force.

Here's an article from the Army (hat tip to iSixSigma's blogs) that spells out the savings. It looks like they are focused on good basic "blocking and tackling":

• Reducing mass hall waste at West Point (officers-in-training receiving Green Belt training and being asked to work projects)
• Streamlining communication processes to reduce waste and delays
• Reducing recruitment process steps from 32 to 11
  

It's hard to see, on the surface, how that adds up to $2 Billion. There must be multitudes of projects all throughout the Army that start adding up.

Sounds like good work by the Army. Congrats! Thanks for using our tax dollars more efficiently.

Here's more on the Army effort, from their main website about the effort, their "Business Transformation Knowledge Center."

Another Lean Army Report

Digital50: USAEC News and more Business News

Here's another success story from the U.S. Army's Lean Six Sigma program, increasing production to support troops in Iraq:

"When the call came in to deliver the door kits we were experiencing production rates twice as high as normal," said Randall Quinn, chief, Environmental Management Division. "Even though we didn't build new facilities to accommodate increased production, instituting 'lean' manufacturing methods enabled us to meet the need of our Soldiers in Iraq."

Lean manufacturing at Letterkenny is the result of the depot's commitment to the Army's Lean Six Sigma management approach. The lean core team utilizes the kaizen and value stream analysis lean tools to discover and eliminate waste by reducing floor space, flow time and distance traveled as a means of increasing productivity. More than 80 percent of the workforce at Letterkenny has participated in at least one Lean Six Sigma rapid improvement event (RIE). RIEs are exercises designed to identify inefficiencies quickly and recommend immediate corrective action.

RIE's appear to be a "kaizen event" driven approach. Beyond the initial improvements, I hope the site is also putting a lean management system in place, to make sure that they don't "backslide" and lose their improvements. Driving improvement is impressive, and can be difficult, but putting a lasting, sustainable lean culture in place, driving continuous improvement, is even more difficult.

The article also talks about waste reduction and environmental impact.

Lean in the Air Force

Thinking lean, a must for stronger, smaller Air Force

Here's an article about the Air Force's ongoing Lean efforts, a Major General giving a speech about Lean in Turkey:

General Rogers began with a big picture explanation of the Air Force's strong focus on the "lean process" -- the endless pursuit of identification and elimination of waste, adapting to change, and continuous process improvement.

That's a pretty good standard definition -- but what about people?

General Rogers stressed that the focus of lean should be on enabling the Air Force's people, for they are the key component of all processes.

"Lean is a great leadership development tool that should be used to mentor your people and develop them," the general said.

Oh, there we go. That's good that the Air Force sees the people development potential of Lean. That's always in the center of Toyota diagrams about the Toyota Production System, people and the development of people. Lean isn't about the Generals figuring out what waste to eliminate, it's about involving everybody.

Will Lean Outperform Bureaucracy?

Worldandnation: Scandal sires bureaucracy

It's too bad that the Lean Six Sigma component of the response to the problems at Walter Reed has been lumped into the category of "bureaucracy."

There are no less than nine blue-ribbon committees, task forces and review groups investigating soldiers' medical care, some of them with overlapping missions.

"Every time I turn around there is a new committee," said William Bradshaw, national veterans service director for the Veterans of Foreign Wars. "That's just overkill. Everyone is piling on."

I can understand that all of the task forces, committees, and "blue ribbon" panels might be just political posturing or blaming exercises. But, Lean efforts should really be doing something to fix the problems, right?

The article says:

Lastly, there's a "Lean Six Sigma" review. Tiger Teams and 15-6 investigations are military jargon for internal investigations. Lean Six Sigma is a performance review used in the business world to improve speed and quality of service.

Done right, Lean should be more than just a review of the problems. It really should be focused on kaizen and improvement. I would bet that whatever improvements are driven by Lean and Six Sigma might well be claimed as success by any of the politically-driven investigations, eh?

Government, Soldiers, and Backlogs

Worldandnation: Backlog has veterans waiting for disability claims

Here is a sad case of bad flow, an imbalance in demand and capacity, and the impact it has on our country's injured and disabled soldiers.

Nearly 400,000 disability claims were pending at the VA as of February, including 135,741 that exceeded the VA's 160-day goal for processing them. The department takes six months, on average, to process a claim, and the waiting time for appeals averages nearly two years.

We can only guess what the "Value Added" time in that 160 days is. I'm sure it's a very short process with amazingly long "waiting time" and queues.

The only thing that can solve the backlog is increased capacity (either through improving productivity in processing claims or adding people).

Little's Law very much applies, where Cycle Time = WIP / Throughput

To reduce CT, you have to increase Throughput. With an expected increase of claims (from the deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan), Cycle Time and WIP will only get worse if the VA can't increase Throughput to 1) decrease the backlog and 2) meet new higher demand.

This strained system may grow more overburdened in years ahead as many of the troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan return from those wars, experts say.

Ronald R. Aument, VA deputy undersecretary for benefits, acknowledged that the department needs to do better, but he rejected the idea that the delays and denials are motivated by money concerns.

"It's not as though we're working on commission here," he said. "There is very much a shared passion in this organization in trying to do right by veterans."

It's probably either 1) lack of funding or 2) gross waste in the existing processes, not any lack of effort or lack of caring on the VA's part. Here's an opportunity where Lean, or dare I say, "Office Lean" can help immensely. Instead of pointing fingers, let's fix the process.

"Bureaucratic Morass"

Wonder Land - WSJ.com:

Reading up on the continuing Walter Reed situation (my earlier post on the subject), I saw this in the WSJ this morning:

"Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, described the problems at Walter Reed in words that should be inscribed on portals across every bridge leading into Washington: 'Life every day in this system is like running in hip boots in a swamp.' He called it a 'bureaucratic morass.'"

There's a colorful phrase. How many of us work in an environment like that? I'm lucky that I don't currently work in that sort of environment, but I have before. I think many manufacturing companies could be described as that sort of morass.

Our goal with lean should be to destroy that sort of bureaucracy and waste. But, the Catch-22 is that it can be very hard to get started with lean when things are that bureaucratic.

I've described two types of "pre-lean" companies:

1. Those that are good at "non-lean" things, they get stuff done, just the wrong stuff (e.g., expediting, counting parts, fighting fires)
   
2. Those that aren't good at doing anything, things don't get done at all

Type 1 companies, I'd argue, have more hope than Type 2 companies. Type 1 workplaces have to have their energy and "get-it-done-ness" harnessed in the lean direction. Might be hard, but there's some hope. Type 2 workplaces are so demoralized and lethargic or flat-out paralyzed with bureaucracy. Moving to lean in that environment will be quite a challenge, generally speaking.

One other thing from the WSJ article, sounds like a classic description of waste and a non value-stream focus:

"...he GAO's Gregory Kutz describing the soldiers' problem: "overall, we found the current stove-piped, non-integrated order-writing, personnel, pay, and medical eligibility systems require extensive error-prone manual data entry and re-entry." That's right -- "and re-entry."

Wounded soldiers are having to negotiate this waste. "Stove pipes" or "silos" -- the disconnected workings of separate departments - that leads to waste. Very often, the handoffs between silos are botched or delayed. Often, each silo has very poor visibility into what the upstream and downstream silos are doing.

The lean approach and Value Stream management push us to start looking across departments, looking at the whole process and the whole value stream. From an office standpoint (or administrative processes), we have to start breaking down department boundaries. Maybe we have to re-organize the work and space so that people who used to be in different departments are now sitting side by side and working together. If disparate IT systems are creating or maintaining the silo boundaries, we have to work toward a single IT system so the entire value stream can work together.

It sounds like fixing the Walter Reed mess will take more than just firing some people. I hope they can fix the system.

Leadership Means Being Aware

The Courier News :: News :: Walter Reed 'failed'

You may have read or seen reports about the poor conditions for injured soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital in DC. A good summary of the sad tale can be found here.

The article I’ve linked to looks at some of the management failings in the system. I’ll call the military leaders “management” since that’s the term we’re familiar with in the manufacturing world, as I think there are general leadership lessons that can be learned from this case.

Flayed by lawmakers' criticism, Army leaders said Monday they accept responsibility for substandard conditions at the service's flagship Walter Reed Army Medical Center but also said they hadn't known about most of the problems.

Accepting responsibility is a good thing. Being unaware of bad conditions in your organization is miserable excuse. It’s not an excuse, whether you are a plant manager who is “unaware” of unsafe working conditions or products your plant is shipping that do not meet customer quality requirements. Lean teaches us to “go see” (the concept of “genchi genbutsu).

In addition to going to see, we must create an organization that is free of fear, so that problems we do not see (or cannot see) are brought to our attention by those who can see. Deming taught us that we need to eliminate fear in our organizations in order to improve quality. Are your employees afraid that bringing an issue to your attention will get them yelled at or singled out as a “troublemaker?” This human dynamic is seen in manufacturing, healthcare (nurses are afraid to raise issues for fear of retaliation by powerful surgeons), and I would suppose the dynamic is true in military situations with poor leadership.

I assume many leaders are afraid of the lean “genchi genbutsu” concept because they are afraid of what they might see. Seeing problems means that you have an obligation to fix them. How sad that many leaders feel a compulsion to play ostrich and stick their heads in the sand.

"I'm afraid this is just the tip of the iceberg, that when we got out into the field we may find more of this," said Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee that held the session.

"My question is, where have you been?" Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., chairman of the panel, asked Army Undersecretary Peter Geren, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker and Vice Chief Gen. Richard Cody.

The leaders had their heads in the sand.

VP Dick Cheney promised action and response:

"There will be no excuses, only action," Cheney told a gathering of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. "And the federal bureaucracy will not slow that action down."

Unfortunately, I hear different reports from a good college friend who is a physician at Walter Reed. In an email to friends, he wrote, in part:

"The adminstrative oversight review ordered into military medical centers has already in less than 5 days created an additional mountain of beauracratic paperwork, meetings, outside reviews, and productivity reports (think TPS report cover sheets) to be generated by us medical staff. This will further detract from time that could be better spent doing patient care."

This is not good. When we go to the “gemba” (the actual place) and observe problems, we have to work on fixing the underlying root cause of the problem. We cannot add extra layers of inspection in place of preventing problems from occurring in the first place. Added bureaucracy is a wasteful approach to eliminating waste.

Lawmakers listened as several patients testified with stories of lax or poor treatment at Walter Reed. Staff Sgt. John Daniel Shannon, who lost his left eye and suffered traumatic brain injuries from a rifle wound, said that after he was discharged from Walter Reed, he was given a map of the grounds and eventually found his way to outpatient quarters by wandering around and asking for directions. Then, he says, he "sat in my room for a couple of weeks wondering when someone would contact" him about continuing treatment.

How sad that the leadership wasn’t putting themselves in the shoes of their patients, their customers. How sad that traditional management approaches so often win out over lean thinking. Problems are hidden or ignored, and then when they arise, we claim we “didn’t know” and add extra waste on top of the waste. We need to do better, for the sake of the soldiers and for the sake of the doctors and other health providers. This isn't a medical problem. This is a leadership problem.

What problems are hiding beneath the surface of YOUR organization?

Another Shingo Prize for the Army

The Herald-Mail ONLINE

Congratulations to the Letterkenny Army Depot for winning its second Shingo Prize for lean excellence.

"David Gress, the division chief for the Ground Support Division, said each step of production is limited to 30 minutes. Depot Chief of Staff Mark Sheffield said the result has been lowering the man-hours it takes to rebuild a vehicle from 274 man-hours in January 2005 to 174 now.

The efficiencies have been realized by “observing the process. Taking the waste out of it,” Korby said. One example, he said, is determining whether repairing or replacing a part is going to save the most time and money."

So the time is limited to 30 minutes. We can assume that is somewhat faster than the takt time (or demand) for Humvee refurbishing. Demand is 275 per month. Assuming 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, and an 85% utilization rate (we're accounting for breaks, etc.), let's say there are roughly 9180 minutes available per month. 9180/275 = a takt time of 33.3 minutes.

Unlike building a Humvee, which would have very consistent and deterministic labor content, I'm sure it's challenging to predict exactly how much work is required to refurbish a set of Humvess?

It's great to see the Army talk about observing the process and eliminating waste. It also sounds like they have done a good job of matching their cycle times to takt times.

Administrative Lean in the Army

Hilltop Times - New process leads the way for lean initiatives

Here is another article about the Army using lean, I would suppose for "employee satisfaction" purposes. It wasn't just a matter of using technology, it appears, but true process improvement that happened to utilize technology.

Lean Army Video

Lean Army Video (via YouTube.com)

Here is a video highlighting the benefits of apply lean to the Army Materiel Command. Improving turnaround time on equipment repairs helps the troops: Faster, cheaper, better quality, all three of those metrics.

"Lean and Mean" Army? Not Really

TIME.com: Lean and Mean -- Jul 10, 2006 -- Page 1

So the article isn't as bad as I thought given the headline. A better headline for my posting here would have been:

"Lean and Mean" Army? Lean, But Not Really "Mean"

The article tells a pretty compelling story about the opportunities for lean/six sigma in the Army. It's not just all theory, they claim some success stories that wouldn't surprise a lean person:

• "[one] command alone saved $110 million last year, and military sources expect that to be doubled this year."
• "the [Humvee repair] facility can turn out 32 mission-ready humvees a day, compared with three a week in 2004; the Lean process has lowered the cost of repair for one vehicle from $89,000 to $48,000."
• Arkansas' Pine Bluff Arsenal reduced repair recycle time 90% and increased its production rate 50% on M-40 protective gas masks.
  
• Letterkenny Army Depot in Pennsylvania has saved $11.9 million in the cost of building the Patriot air-defense missile system.

The article talks about employees even, the human side of lean (not just cost cutting). People are being asked for their suggestions for improving support processes and are coming around to view lean as a benefit:

"I thought it was just going to put me out of a job," Moore says. "But I've turned around 180 degrees--I can see what an efficient shop can do."

Any lean transformation isn't just about cost cutting, it's really about improving effectiveness (notice I didn't say "efficiency").

"How is the Army going to judge success? Cutting people or saving money is useful, but the challenge will be making sure all the changes are not only relevant to the soldier in the field but that there aren't negative impacts for war fighting."

Faster response, better quality, and employee involvement will help the troops and support employees. Saving money and

Given the headline, there wasn't really anything "mean" talked about in the article, except for at the end:

"Even advocates of the Army effort recognize the challenge. Employees at all levels must adopt a new work ethic, learn new systems and often work harder, with no immediate rewards."

I guess that's where the "mean" is. If you're "doing lean" and people are working harder, something is wrong. Lean should eliminate problems and reduce waste that's cause people to exert themselves. Now, if your starting point was a process with a lot of waiting waste, where there was really unbalanced work or un-level demand, the "slow times" might have been eliminated and now people are doing more in a day. But, if they're rallied around the mission, how can they complain about being more effectivfe?

"Lean and Mean?" Sir, No, Sir!

TIME.com: Lean and Mean -- Jul 10, 2006 -- Page 1

I haven't had time to read this yet, but I'll invite your comments. I'll add comments when I have a chance to read and digest this.

My first instinct is that I'm really frustrated when I see the perpetuation of this rhyming "lean and mean" thing. Lean is not mean. I have a talk that I give at healthcare workshops and my central theme is that "lean is not mean". I'll have to blog about that more here.

I had a chance to ask one of the guys who was real close to MIT and the Lean Enterprise Institute what they thought about coining the term "lean" and it rhyming so well with "mean." The measured MIT-ish response was, "That was unfortunate."

Here's my comments on the article, you can comment there.

Lean in the Air Force (Video)

From the Air Force news service and Google Video, a story about what basically sounds like a week-long "kaizen event" with the goal of reducing waste and increasing airplane availability.

Here is a look back at the "Lean Across the Air Force" memo.

Adblock

One thing I like about these Air Force videos is how they let airmen describe what they are doing and what lean is. Whether it's their own words or scripted, I don't know, but sounds like a good attempt at using lean principles.

There is another video, on engine repair and lean, if you search for "air force lean" on Google Video.