It seems that with oil nearing $140 a barrel, everyone is suddenly excited about improving efficiencies across the board in the world of transportation and fuels. Applying Lean to a process, whether it's the manufacturing of cars or the method of refining fuel used to run those cars, is the best way to find new efficiencies. Of course, any Lean efficiency in energy use or transport that reduces fossil fuel use has an immediate Green payoff, too.
On the subject of Lean, Green, and fossil fuels, this article from the always excellent Cleantech.com describes a very lean-sounding new process for growing biofuels. There's been no shortage of press releases from startups touting breakthroughs in the biofuels arena, especially those interested in producing biodiesel from algae. Lean applications help this latest announcement from the stealthy Algenol Biofuels stand out from the crowd, although the fact that the company already has an $850 million project in the works to bring the product to market doesn't hurt either.
Most algal biofuel companies have focused on growing strains of algae that produce fats as a byproduct of their growth. The fats are then refined into biodiesels which can be used in diesel-fueled engines or as a heating oil. It's a promising arena, but the process generally requires tremendous amounts of fresh water, open space, and sunlight. Open space and sunlight are easy to find -- just go to the desert. But finding fresh water in the desert is a bit of a challenge, and even if you can get the water you have to transport the fuel from the desert to your customer base somewhere else.
Algenol took a look at the process and decided it made more sense to use seawater for its growing medium. There are plenty of deserts that border on oceans, including the Sonora desert in Mexico where its first facility is planned. Another advantage of locating a facility on the coast is that the transport of the fuel to market is easily accomplished by using the existing tanker fleet, a much more efficient method than using trucks. By making the switch from fresh water to seawater, the company has found a way to rid itself of a relatively expensive and scarce input (fresh water) while at the same time shortening its supply chain. That seems very Lean to me.
But the big Lean standout is that instead of refining fats into biodiesel, the Algenol process has used naturally occurring algae that turn the sugars they're fed directly into ethanol, with no refining step needed. Since the Leanness of this move might not be apparent to everyone at first glance, I'll use some phrases from the Lean Manufacturing Glossary to explain myself--I'm not trying to drop buzzwords, just trying to phrase this in a way the Lean audience can understand.
If you were to value-stream map the entire manufacturing process of any fuel, whether it was biofuel or fossil fuel, you would see a large step in the middle called "refining." Until now, refining fuel has been absolutely unavoidable--you can't burn crude oil in your car or feed algae-based lipids directly to your truck's diesel engine. Any Lean improvements to the process would probably look at how to improve the refining process. But Algenol has taken a higher-level view. In a sort of a large-scale Kaizen exercise, the company has found a way to eliminate the refining step. What was once an essential but expensive part of the manufacturing process is now just so much Muda. I'd imagine that for a lot of people in the world of oil, eliminating the refinery is a big paradigm shift.
Here we have an example of a company that seems to have taken a Kaizen approach from the very beginning. The company looked at what it was trying to produce - biofuels - and eliminated as many unnecessary steps as it could. Compared to the process of corn or cellulosic based ethanol, which is shockingly inefficient, it appears that they've succeeded. Compared to other algal biofuels, they've switched a scarce resource - fresh water - for an abundant one -sea water - while eliminating the refining step and minimizing the supply chain expenses. From a waste-reduction standpoint, it looks like they've found a beneficial reuse for the majority of their process wastes. The only outputs seem to be ethanol, fresh water, and the nitrogen-rich dead cell bodies, which can be used to replace fossil-fuel based nitrogen fertilizers. And of course, by taking waste CO2 from other companies, they're closing an important loop and setting themselves up for financial gain if the CO2 trading market finally becomes a reality.
All of this isn't to say there aren't some important questions that haven't been answered. Off the top of my head, I'd like to know what the source of sugars that they are feeding these algae are. I'd also like to know the circumstances surrounding their Mexican land acquisition. The company claims that this is an unused desert wasteland, but that's rarely the case, as the desert has tremendous ecological value and there are almost certainly people who may be displaced to worry about. Finally, I'd like to know more about the real energy balance, since they are awfully shy on details. I note that the process involves a small power plant, but the feedstock for this power plant isn't clear. Will it be running of the ethanol they're producing? But these questions and others aside, I'll remain cautiously optimistic and congratulate the company for coming up with a Lean and Green approach to tackling some of our most pressing problems.
I'm just thrilled anytime I see an example of an airline making a process improvement (a "kaizen" if you will) instead of their usual game plan of whining, slashing employee pay, or cutting corners.
Drivers have long known that slowing down on the highway means getting more miles to the gallon. Now airlines are trying it, too - adding a few minutes to flights to save millions on fuel.
Southwest Airlines started flying slower about two months ago, and projects it will save $42 million in fuel this year by extending each flight by one to three minutes.
On one Northwest Airlines flight from Paris to Minneapolis earlier this week alone, flying slower saved 162 gallons of fuel, saving the airline $535. It added eight minutes to the flight, extending it to eight hours, 58 minutes.
That meant flying at an average speed of 532 mph, down from the usual 542 mph.
This is a simple kaizen we can ALL apply. Instead of just whining about high gas prices, drive slower, ease up on the "rabbit starts," and keep your tires at the proper air pressure. To learn more about mileage improvement tips, click here.
This week is National Drinking Water Week! If that doesn't excite you, think about the Lean implications of this dreadful story about the deaths of 80 children last month in South Africa resulting from a breakdown in the local drinking water treatment plant. While everyone involved is busy pointing fingers at everyone else, I think a little digging would turn up plenty of opportunities for Lean--error-proofing, anyone?
Drinking water and wastewater treatment are the two crowning achievements in public health for our species--arguably more important than vaccines and antibiotics. We tend not to think about these plants until something goes wrong, which is fortunately not very often here in the US. But just because our water infrastructure tends to stay out of the news doesn't mean there's not plenty of room for Lean.
The state of Arizona recently handed down a fine to a local water company after an important water-purification system broke down and the company failed to act quickly to remedy the issue. The background is that Motorola and other unnamed companies managed to contaminate the local groundwater supply with TCE, a carcinogenic solvent used to clean grease off machines, several decades ago. The water utility is supposed to remove the TCE down to an acceptable level. The TCE-removal equipment failed, and the alarm that was supposed to let people know about the failure failed, and no one noticed for 16 hours. To make matters worse for the company, management decided not to notify the authorities until 9 hours after that, and in the subsequent investigation it came out that they were just dumping the TCE they'd removed back into a storm drain. The state cited a poorly designed system (PDF) and ordered changes to make sure it didn't happen again--a very Lean approach. Motorola, on the hook for some of the costs of the cleanup, says it was human error:
Operator error is blamed for a malfunction in January at a plant owned and operated by the Arizona American Water Co. that treats groundwater contaminated with trichloroethylene, a suspected cancer-causing chemical.
That is the conclusion of an investigation conducted for Motorola Inc. and other companies that were the source of the TCE contamination decades ago. The companies are paying for cleanup of the contaminated groundwater, including the treatment facility.
A separate investigation done for Arizona American concluded that the plant's systems and components were not designed or operated in an optimal manner.
So what's the solution? Well, the first thing I would say is that the most holistic Lean approach would be to reduce Scottsdale's water use to the point where they could discontinue use of these two contaminated wells. That's the most environmentally friendly thing to do, especially given Scottsdale's location in the middle of a desert. Coming down a level, Greenpeace has been hammering Motorola recently for continuing to use toxic chemicals in its products, although some of the more recent news (PDF) shows that the company is making some progress towards a toxin-free product line. As I noted in my last post, Lean practitioners can play a big part for the environment by urging their clients to get away from toxic chemicals. Finally, it looks like the state is pushing the facility in question to be a bit leaner, but I'm sure there is plenty of additional work that could be done to make this facility both more Lean and more green.
Not a Lean article, but a major issue for hospitals is a shortage of nurses. With the economy in its current condition, more nurses are returning to work. There's still a need for the reduction of wasted motion and wasted time in a nurse's workday... that's the Lean concept.
"Hospitals have also taken steps to keep older nurses in the work force by making their jobs easier, including replacing hand cranks used to lift beds with automated lift devices, bringing in lift teams so nurses don't strain themselves picking up patients, or putting supplies closer to patients' rooms to cut down on walking."
These are good practices, regardless of age. Lift assists are better ergonomically for nurses (preventing injury) and they can also help prevent patient falls. Reducing walking is good since that wasted time can be used in more productive ways (such as patient care).
Keeping supplies closer to rooms -- that goes against a previous trend toward centralized inventory cabinets (often automated) in a floor or unit. The advantages were all for materials management -- it was easier to restock and kept better control of inventory. But, optimizing materials management shouldn't be the primary goal. The nurses are providing "value added" care -- the job of the rest of the organization should be to support them in "making their jobs easier." There's a pretty direct parallel to a factory using material handlers to allow assembly operators to be more efficient.
You don't want assembly workers to stop, looking for parts. You don't want surgeons digging and searching for tools during a procedure (nurses or techs hand the instruments to the surgeon, an old idea that originally came from Frank Gilbreth). You also don't want nurses to be roaming around, searching for medications or supplies either. Systems and processes (and technology) need to support them in the way they do their jobs.
OK, so we're piling on JPS Hospital at this point.. but this letter to the editor caught my eye today:
One glaring omission in your series was failure to critique the pharmacy. It's one of the worst parts of the JPS system.
One example: The pharmacy won't let us order refills until five days before our medications run out. But it often takes seven days or more to get the refills. Some patients need a continuous supply of life-or-death medications. The pharmacy seems to operate independently, with an air of indifference, as if it's not part of a patient-care facility.
I hope your series will prompt those officials in charge to act aggressively to fix the hospital's problems so you'll have plenty of material for your series on JPS's positive aspects.
Yikes. That's one anecdotal story, but still. A pharmacy's "value added" time (filling a prescription and having a pharmacist review) should really be measured in minutes, if not seconds. It shouldn't take one day, let alone seven, to get a prescription filled.
A standard Lean measure is the percentage of "Value Added" time to the total "cycle time" or "turnaround time." As with many non-Lean processes (whether in manufacturing or healthcare), the percentage of VA time is very low according to that story about JPS. The non-value added time is waste -- waiting due to not having enough capacity to get the work done or waiting due to batching and other systemic delays.
I certainly do hope there are JPS success stories in the future. Lean methods could certainly be used to improve processes, reducing turnaround time in the pharmacy.If there isn't enough capacity (people or equipment) to get each day's work done, Lean would focus on reducing wasted time so people can be more effective. Lean isn't about cutting corners or doing work too fast -- that might introduce more errors, something you don't want to do in a pharmacy, yet alone any process.
Update: For those who didn't catch the update to Monday's post, it was announced that the CEO will be leaving, with somewhat of a sliver parachute, I guess.
The first link above takes you to the Monday article in the series about a Fort Worth TX hospital. This article focuses on problems with patient throughput and access:
"I think the emphasis is totally on money. We've forgotten what our mission is: to take care of indigent patients," said Dr. Wayne Williams, a JPS board member.
The first anecdote in the article is about a patient who allegedly died as a result of poor ER care:
Yet JPS' emergency department is as clogged as ever -- worse if measured by the time patients must wait for care. The crowds aren't as obvious, though -- they've been moved out of sight.
Doctors and nurses say quantity, not quality, is the JPS measure of healthcare, a concern echoed by consultants who studied JPS operations last year.
Like the employees who "gave up" (as mentioned in the first article), so do patients:
"It becomes a vicious cycle for those patients who know they have a difficult time getting access to the JPS system," said Dr. Greg Fuller, president of the Tarrant County Medical Society. "So what happens is they give up before they even start seeing a doctor. When they finally get seen by a physician, it is sometimes too late to alter the outcome of what has happened to them medically."
Bottlenecks permeate the health network at every level. Patients wait weeks to get a doctor's appointment and months for some specialists, like pulmonologists. And when appointment time finally arrives, patients cool their heels for hours waiting to see the doctor.
The hospital is focusing on physician productivity, but in a way that apparently sets quotas. We should remember from our Dr. Deming lessons that setting quotas will inevitably harm quality, as people are pressured to focus on quantity over quality:
Steve Montgomery, chairman of the JPS board, said doctors need to speed up to match the pace in the private sector.
"Why can't they see more [at JPS]? Why are some of them seeing 16 patients a day when private doctors are seeing 30 patients per day?"
There's a ready answer from physicians and other staff: The health problems of the poor are far more complicated. What's more, medical care at an educational hospital, such as JPS, can take longer because the doctors in training are learning as they go.
Dr. John "Jay" Haynes, the chief medical officer at JPS, said the productivity standards do consider the patient's age and severity of cases.
But other doctors object to mandates to see a set number of patients per hour in some departments, clinics and other JPS facilities. Such quotas have nothing to do with quality of care, board member Williams said.
"It hurts quality care," he said. "And it is a mechanism whereby they can blame the doctors if there are access problems."
Disorganization leads to wasted employee motion and delayed surgical procedures:
Once in an operating room, things slowed even more. The operations manager ran around trying to find missing equipment and instruments. Nurse assistants, tied up transporting patients, weren't checking the operating room and making sure needed supplies were available.
Those are problems that are 100% fixable, using Lean methods of 5S, standardized work, and waste elimination.
Here's what the consultants identified as caused of delays (with my comments):
1. The hospital doesn't have enough beds, so patients stack up throughout the hospital (what can be done to reduce length of stay? more efficient discharge processes? faster lab results?)
2. Medical records can't be found or aren't up to date (bad processes/systems)
3. Medical equipment and instruments are broken or in short supply. (lack of systems/management focus)
4. Doctors are juggling work in clinics, the operating room, hospital rooms and the emergency department.
5. Some nurses lack experience or are diverted to hunt for supplies. (poor training, 5S, and standardized work)
6. At peak times, there's not enough staff (need to eliminate wasted motion or staff to match demand)
7. Some employees lack the skills or are otherwise unable to do their jobs (poor hiring or poor training)
8. It takes too long to clean and ready operating rooms and hospital rooms between patients (need to use Lean to reduce setup time, reduce wasted motion... better standardized work)
9. Doctors don't get timely consults from specialists or crucial results from labs. (need to reduce batching or improve standard processes?)
10. Inadequate phone systems, a limited window for scheduling appointments and communication problems between the clinics and call centers make it difficult to get in to see a doctor or talk to a nurse.
A commenter asked about Part 1 of the JPS articles, did I think Lean could fix the mess? No, it runs much deeper than that. I hope a real "servant leader" type will take over though, one who can listen and actually start getting people to work together. The community needs it.
This linked article is a preview of what I'll be blogging about next. I'm trying an experiment in posting an article first... what comments do you have? Don't worry, I'm not totally outsourcing the blogging to the readers :-)
What a mess. Reading stuff like this will help you see the opportunities for Lean -- well, it's not just "Lean" but some good leadership. Maybe a mess like the hospital described in the article is beyond repair. It's embarrassing that this is the local county hospital in my area.
PixelRN is a blog written by a nurse (who is unfortunately considering leaving the field). She writes about the problems involved with handwritten orders, charts, and notes that are used in so many hospitals. This is particularly a problem in hospitals without "electronic medical records" (computer systems that can be helpful, but they're also not the cure-all that vendors would claim -- more on that later in this post).
Charting and records -- that's an example of how quality and efficiency go together. EMR can be faster (but not always) and it can also help prevent errors or miscommunications. PixelRN writes:
I made a mistake yesterday. I didn’t just miss one order. I missed A WHOLE PAGE OF ORDERS.
Why? Because the doctor wrote them on a separate page and stuffed them into the side pocket of the binder, rather than putting them in the proper place.
Here's a process error that could really impact that patient's care. Part way to a root cause, we could ask "why didn't the MD put the orders in the right place?" The RN probably just gets blamed for not finding them (and blamed for not reading the MD's mind). If we put an electronic system in, we still have to rely on people using it properly (assuming they're trained and they understand the implications of not following the standardized work). PixelRN again:
Fortunately no one was harmed, although the patient did have to stay in the recovery room for an additional hour because I didn’t see the order.
This was my mistake and believe me, I owned up to it. I apologized to the patient for creating this delay and I apologized to the attending for missing his order, but I know that this mistake could have been avoided if the recovery room used a computerized ordering system.
Or if the MD had properly utilized the paper chart binder. Why is the RN apologizing?
She writes further:
And yet there is such a lack of standardization in the way that doctors write their orders, so it can be difficult to carry them out. Do the recovery room nurses care about this? The answer appears to be no. Whenever I ask the nurses about this situation their reply is this, “Oh we’ve been fighting this battle for years. Nothing ever changes.”
How do you get beyond that kind of apathy?
It requires Leadership! This isn't something that Lean can solve if there's not leadership and a drive to fix problems like this. It's so sad to hear about the frustration (and to see it first hand)
I've seen cases where a hospital HAD the electronic systems and they were used inconsistently. Some MD's refuse to use the Computerized Physician Order Entry Systems (CPOE). The electronic charting systems are often slow and glitchy, leading nurses to workaround the problem by writing down and carrying lots of paper notes around. So what was really solved?
I'd argue that hospitals need to focus on "process" as much as (if not more than) technology. Don't expect technology to be a cure-all, because it's not.
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.
Here's a photo of something I bought at SuperTarget last week, this box of whole-grain Quinoa (snicker if you must... I'm trying to eat somewhat healthy). The box is next to a wine bottle (um, also for "heart health?") for size perspective. click on either photo for a larger image.
Looking inside the box... the contents are TINY. Three packets -- grains, spices, and dried fruit. The box is maybe 5x bigger than the contents, if not larger.
WASTE!
Look at all of the air that was shipped from the producer to the store. Extra cardboard. Extra space in the cupboard.
One reason I even bought the box was that it caught my eye in the aisle. Would a smaller box have done so? Maybe not.
Is waste or muda an acceptable "marketing expense?"
I felt sort of silly, having been suckered in by something that wasteful. Tasted good, though. Should I boycott this sort of packaging in the future, as a "Lean Thinker?" Should Target (as the company that contracts out the manufacturing AND as retailer of their house brand) do something about this? Or is it OK if they're willing to accept that inefficiency?
Here's an interesting story about the shortage of machinists:
While millions of jobs making everything from textiles to steel have moved to new powerhouses like China in recent years, precision manufacturing remains a crucial niche in the United States, one that is overworked and chronically understaffed.
And, in a bad sign for the United States and its declining economic might, that shortage of skilled workers is likely to get worse as Baby Boomers retire -- with no younger generation of manufacturing workers to take the baton.
"Our workforce is an aging workforce," said Chief Executive Jeff Kelly, whose father founded Hamill nearly 60 years ago. "There isn't a queue of people lining up to come into the industry."
I've sort of lost track of this in manufacturing, but I can believe it. The last machining environment I worked in didn't have many young "new" employees. Hospitals face many of the same types of key skill shortages: pharmacists, medical technologists, nurses, and other areas.
Who wants to go into manufacturing, given the reputation it has been given in this country? The prospects for a good career don't seem very good, given the incessant stories about how manufacturing is going overseas and the U.S. will be a "service economy."
The article talked about strategies companies and organizations are using -- increasing pay, offering educational and apprenticeship help... but I didn't hear anything about Lean. How many of these open machinist positions would be filled, only to have them standing around some part of the day due to poor product flow or an old non-Lean "one person - one machine" approach where people stand and watch the automation run?
I heard one hospital president speak, in a Lean conference, about the shortages of skilled employees in healthcare. He had a really provocative thought (and I'm paraphrasing):
Do we have a shortage of skilled employees or a shortage of the proper types of managers?
He was saying we need more managers who focus on eliminating waste (through Lean) so that we can be more efficient rather than just asking for more people and more resources.
This hospital president (after success with Lean throughout his hospital) was CONVINCED that the industry's labor shortages would be solved if everyone was using Lean.
The linked article is a virtual "gemba walk" for those of you who have asked how and why Lean is helpful and necessary in a hospital environment.
When you read the description of a nurse's day and activity, you'll notice waste and workarounds galore.
With Lean, the focus in hospitals is reducing non-value-added activity and waste so that nurses and other caregivers can spend more time with patients, providing care and treatment. Not being able to find needed supplies -- that takes nurses away from patients, delaying care and causing frustration. Missing medications, missing physician orders all create distractions, rework, and delays.
I've spent just a little time in the nursing gemba. I couldn't imagine doing their job for a 12-hour shift... if you think factory work is grueling, follow a nurse around for 12 hours. It's quite an eye opener.
In some Saturday afternoon background TV watching, my ears perked up when I heard about this story on the History Channel, from 1988. A factory, in Nevada (just outside of Las Vegas) had produced a chemical that was used for the space shuttle program as a rocket fuel accelerant.
The show claimed that, after the Challenger disaster that grounded the program (killing demand for the chemical), the company "kept producing it anyway, stockpiling it, and hoping to eventually sell it."
According to Wikipedia:
With the space shuttle program frozen, no government instruction dictating where to ship the product, and no mandated storage procedure or proper storage facilities for such large quantities of product, PEPCON stored almost all manufactured ammonium perchlorate on-site, in plastic drums on campus parking lots. An estimated 4000 tons of the finished product were stored at the facility at the time of the disaster.
Well, wouldn't you know, an employee was careless with a cigarette -- who allows smoking in a facility with explosive chemicals!?!?!?!? -- and one barrel exploded, flying through the air, landing in the middle of the main storage stockpile.
According to fire responders, the plan at the factory had apparently been "in case of fire, run like hell," but they arrived to find employees trying to put out the initial fire with regular hoses. A huge explosion ensued with the force of 250 tons of dynamite equiv (3.5 on richter scale) that was felt at the Strip, 10 miles away.
Two people were killed in what should probably be considered an utterly preventable disaster. It makes me wonder why it was cheaper or somehow better to keep producing the product, just to pile up dangerous inventory. Is there some chemical engineering reason that someone knows about?
It seems like an interesting case study in failure mode planning, basic safety, and error proofing, not to mention the "waste of overproduction." I don't think I've ever heard of a case where overproduction had been deadly.
This past week, I stumbled through a systemic problem that might not ever be solved, namely the National Car Rental service at Terminal 3 of the Toronto Pearson International Airport.
I say a "systemic" problem, because I've seen the same frustrations (for customers and employees) twice in a month now. A co-worker reports "Oh yeah, it's always a mess there, same problems, I quit using them." The normal routine with car rental involves minimal delay, especially as a frequent renter. If you even have to go to the counter (which you do in Toronto), it's a quick handoff of keys and off you go to your car.
Not in Toronto. Twice now, they haven't had cars ready for the customers. So, there's the line to get checked in and the separate line for people who waited up to 30 minutes to actually get a car because nothing was ready.
When I finally got a car (after about 30 minutes of the "waste of waiting"), I did my best to put on my "why?" hat and I asked the one employee, "why aren't there enough cars available?" (rather than just giving him a hard time or yelling).
Well, the employee went off on a mini-rant directed at "corporate," how the local outlet has been complaining about being understaffed and "corporate won't do anything about it." He encouraged me to complain through National customer service since our concerns (as customer and employee) were very much aligned.
Part of me wanted to ask, "what about improving your process so you don't need as much labor?" but I didn't have time for that... off I went. I'll assume they do need more labor. So why doesn't a problem like that get fixed? Is National waiting for all of their customers to go away? That will solve the labor crunch, eh?
I think one lesson learned is to ask why, even if you're frustrated and cranky about the situation. Don't assume that the folks at the front lines of customer service have much, if any, influence over the corporate policies that cause frustration for everyone.
If this problem has been going on for months (according to my colleague), are they unwilling to fix the problem or unable to fix it? I'm not sure which is worse...
I read Paul Levy's blog every chance I get. He is the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Although fellow blogger Kevin Meyer and I caused a bit of a kerfuffle with him, unfortunately, earlier this year (link here), I hope we have all moved beyond that. I respect his efforts to drive improvement at a hospital (with Lean and other methods) and I respect his openness with the public on quality data and his thoughts on Running a Hospital.
In two recent posts, he gives some great, very real insight into the types of problems that hospitals face today. This is my attempt to empathize, not criticize. These are all very widespread issues that most hospitals face (except for the skyrocketing Boston salaries, but that's a problem to some extent in smaller towns with competitive hospitals).
First is an outstanding post where he shared a letter he wrote to BIDMC employees. He started the letter (bold emphasis is mine):
What's the most important activity at our hospital? Providing patient-centered care?
Right!
But what do we spend most of our time doing? Patient care??
Wrong. It is fetching. As in spending time trying to find a piece of equipment, a certain paper form, or some other supply. Or it’s re-doing work. As in writing the same piece of information in 3 different places.
Admit it. If you are a nurse on the floor or the OR or the PACU, a respiratory therapist in the ICU, a person cleaning surgical instruments in CPD, or a practice assistant in a clinic, think of how much time you spend fetching instead of actually taking care of a patient or doing the job you’ve been hired to do to support patient care – whether that’s running lab tests, preparing food in our kitchen, or repairing a broken piece of equipment. How much of your day is spent in these ways versus face-to-face time with patients or in doing something tied directly to patient care and the support of that care? If you are a typical person here, it is way over 50% and more like 80%.
But I don't have to tell you that, do I?
Paul is pointing out what we would all recognize as "waste" in the Lean terminology. Employees are interrupted and distracted away from their true "value adding" work -- caring for patients or supporting those who do directly care for them. The problems are by no means unique to BIDMC. Every hospital I've seen has these same problems, even if they are already working on Lean. The good news is that Lean methods help reduce exactly the waste that Paul describes, but you can't fix everything everywhere all at once. I hope they are making progress with their Lean efforts.
He continues to nail it right on the head:
Every day, thousands of you undertake "work-arounds" to solve the problems you face in delivering care. And you do solve those problems -- by dint of personal commitment, hard work, and good will. As a result, our patients get extraordinary care.
But, because we all invent work-arounds, we often don’t solve the underlying work process problems that pervade every aspect of what we do. And you go home feeling really tired and wondering how you really spent your day.
Intermission for a shameless plug -- these are exactly the concepts I'm writing about in my upcoming book on Lean Hospitals (not finished yet and not out until mid 2008).
Paul then starts writing about solutions... I wish he had mentioned Lean. I know nothing about the consulting approach he writes about, but an employee centered approach, making sure they feel pride in their work and appreciated sounds all right to me. But Lean will help too. I know I tend to be a bit of a one trick pony, but there's room for other complementary approaches.
So the hospital is full of waste and rework in their processes. Employees feel overworked and under appreciated. What does Paul describe in his next post? How they're hiring like crazy and how labor costs are skyrocketing.
In his theme of openness, Paul shares their staffing levels over the past few years:
Here is a summary of the average FTEs (full-time equivalents) on staff year by year.
For fiscal year 2008, we are budgeting another increase, this one in the range of 10%. Part of this is due to further expansion of staff -- almost 450 new positions. Most of these are related to increased patient activity on our floors, clinics, and in the ORs. A significant number, too, are being added to enhance customer service and to meet safety and regulatory requirements.
Imagine the opportunity that comes from reducing waste with Lean. Some freed up time from existing employees would go toward more value adding time, so, for example, a Lean hospital might not change patient/staffing ratios. But patients and employees would be happier all around. It's hard to get your nurse to respond quickly when he or she is down the hall rummaging for supplies.
(On a somewhat parenthetical note, Lean factories do a much better job of using material handlers to keep assembly line workers productive and focused on value added work. Seems like this is a concept that hospitals would be anxious to adopt. I've seen basically that approach work very well in a hospital lab, eliminating the need for value adding Med Techs to walk and get their own supplies -- that's material handling, not what they went to school for).
But, in other jobs, especially in support or ancillary areas, eliminating waste and Non Value Added time means that employees can do MORE value added work (more lab tests, more medications, more sterilized instruments). That's the kind of productivity improvement that helps you increase volume without increasing headcount.
I wonder what productivity increases the hospital is seeing through their existing Lean efforts? I wonder what industry wide productivity increases would do for the serious shortages of key technical staff, including nurses, medical technologists, and pharmacists?
Keep at it everyone. Good luck with your Lean efforts.
I saw this featured in Time as one of their inventions of the year. I've seen "digital paper" before, but this is a concept where you can print and then easily erase the paper for re-use. This would reduce waste, right?
It was interesting to see comments on this "TreeHugger" site that implied the re-usable paper is a bit of a workaround, it's not really getting to the root cause issue -- why do you need to print?
Still this is an interesting application for those times you have to print a document for single time use.
The WSJ had an article today about how GM is trying to avoid overproduction of hot new vehicles (like the Buick Enclave) so that they don't have to dump inventory to rental fleets or resort to using incentives and discounts to move metal. Both of those practices harm resale value, which is one buying point for many customers.
I read recently how Toyota's goal is to build one car less than customer demand, always keeping that in balance.
So how does Toyota compare to the "Detroit Three" in terms of inventory levels and avoiding overproduction? This graphic from the article tells quite a story.
Toyota has half the inventory of GM, Ford, and Chrysler, not just in total numbers, but in adjusted "inventory per market share point." Toyota carries fewer days of inventory than their competitors, clearly.
I'm in Seattle, about a mile from the stadium where the Seahawks are playing the Saints tonight. I was tempted to get a ticket, but I should be working and I'm able to watch on TV (providing some background noise in a hotel room).
The NBC Sunday Night Football telecast was delayed by about 10 minutes when the overhead "cable cam" conked out and was stuck down on the field (or hanging just above). This is the camera that swoops around overhead, something that's been used the last few years. I wonder what the root cause of that failure was? Did they anticipate that problem and do a Failure Modes and Effects Analysis? Is there "standardized work" for how to respond to problems with the cable cam? It's not a problem that happens often, thankfully.
A second thing I was thinking of... from the overheard blimp shots, the baseball field next door (I won't mention the sponsor, that's what they want. Anyway, the lights were on at the ballpark. There's obviously no game going on tonight. Why light the place up? For marketing purposes? So they'll mention the name of the sponsor on TV?
I'm surprised that, in a city as environmentally conscious as Seattle is (Tully's has compostable coffee cups, for pete's sake -- no, not for Peet's sake, that's another city), I'm surprised they would sit back and let the lights be on for no reason at [Insurance Company Name] Field.
I received an interesting piece of "junk mail" this morning. What caught my attention and provoked me to open it was simply that it was from Honda and my Lean obsessive-ness engaged.
Now, I know Honda isn't necessarily using the TPS philosophy, but I understand that they do have their own system based on similar principles. Correct or not, that belief was the motivation that kept me from simply discarding the mail unopened. Upon opening the envelope (aside from noting it had a fancy, matte finish that added no value to the customer but surely cost more), I was immensely disappointed.
Let me begin by providing necessary background information. I live on a farm in South Dakota. It is 20 miles to the nearest population worth noting (24,00
and 
, are constantly on the lookout for a better way to change the planet. 
