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How basic training in lean manufacturing establishes a common view

Basic training in core principles will accelerate your improvement efforts

Every shop has some form of new-hire orientation. It ranges from the most basic, like starting and quitting times and a list of rules and policies, to extensive exposure to the company’s purpose, organization, customers, applications, challenges, and processes. Readers of this column know that I tend to favor the more extensive approach, simply because it makes the new person more effective faster and allows that person to integrate into a new environment much more smoothly.

A well-designed orientation usually yields a very high return on investment. However, the follow-on process yields an equally large ROI and applies to everyone in the shop, not just new hires. This training covers characteristics of certain types of processes common in fabrication, manufacturing, assembly, and many office situations. It has to do with flow and waste in linked operations and, ultimately, improvement in costs and customer fulfillment metrics.

The underlying bases for continuing and lasting overall process improvement involve these bedrock principles:

  • A common view of what’s ideal or satisfactory and what must be improved
  • Having as many eyes and brains as possible viewing the process in the framework of the preceding principle
  • A means of making the necessary improvements
  • A means of monitoring and sustaining the improvements

Many companies have the last two principles more or less satisfied; the real problems lie in the first two. Either companies have no common view of how a process is to be improved, because everyone is using a different reference base as to what “good” is; and/or the organization has a limited view because only a few people are responsible for improvement.

A Common View

If we can’t agree on what’s good or bad or better or worse, improvement comes only from management fiat. This becomes extremely difficult to sustain because people who actually do the processes don’t have sufficient buy-in. A whole lot of managers get a very unpleasant introduction to the limits of management by pronouncement.

To improve, we first must agree on how to assign the characteristics of “good/bad” or “better/worse” to an observation. When significant differences exist here, the organization has a fundamental problem, though happily one it can solve with minimal training—hours, not weeks or months.

Fabricators perform linked operations; order-entry links to engineering, which links to scheduling; cutting links to bending, welding, finishing, and so on. Over the years I have come to believe that in a company that relies on linked operations to satisfy its purpose, most people have only a vague idea how these linkages actually work and what governs their success—a.k.a., “the process.” So the first step in establishing a common view is to start with basic training, which should include the fundamental lean concepts:

  • All processes contain waste. Waste is defined as any activity or time that is not essential to satisfying the purpose of the process: adding value. Therefore, overall process time consists of value-adding time and non-value-adding time.
  • Some non-value-adding times, such as time spent moving, measuring, or recording, are necessary but should be minimized. Completely unnecessary activities making up the non-value-adding times should be eliminated. An obvious example is scrap. Less obvious are the times spent searching or waiting. Even less obvious is waste caused by excessive inventory, particularly work-in-process.
  • Focusing on waste elimination reduces or eliminates activities associated with the waste. This not only lowers costs, but inherently reduces the time it takes for a product to pass through the process.

Teaching these fundamentals, reinforcing them, and identifying the seven classic wastes—transportation, inventory, motion, waiting, overprocessing, overproduction, and defects—have real benefits. They don’t take long to introduce and demonstrate. The concepts are self-evident and unassailable. They form the “syntax” and “dictionary” for our common language of “good/bad” and “better/worse.” They are understandable to all, relate to virtually everyone’s actual experiences, and can explain why negative observations (like bad delivery or cost performance) happen.

So what’s not to like? Well, actually, nothing. I have done and witnessed dozens of these basic training events and have yet to see a case where eyes weren’t opened and brains weren’t engaged. Basic training usually takes two to three hours, and this includes a walk-through of the process and a Q&A session. Learning the basic language of waste and improvement in three hours yields an ROI as high as you’re ever going to see. Even better than Rosetta.

Note some nuances here. First, everyone needs to understand the basics of the whole process from start to finish, so that they understand the sequence of operations and the role each operation plays. Second, tailor the training to what people actually see and experience in real life. In other words, associate the concepts with what people will see in the actual processes so that they will learn to associate “good/bad” and “better/worse” with actual observations. Third, avoid jumping to solutions before the basic concepts have sunk in. Finally, avoid weird foreign terms for things that can be expressed equally well in native languages. We don’t need to walk around chirping “muda” when “waste” works perfectly well. The concepts are simple; keep them that way.

Follow-on Training

After about two weeks (and not much longer), hold a follow-on session of about two hours. Introduce again the seven wastes, but this time explain and demonstrate them more deeply. It’s especially important to fully explain the waste inherent in excessive WIP and how WIP affects process cycle times. Also, be sure to teach the basic principles of variability, the need to reduce it, and its inherent buffer costs in operations. These last two topics are a bit more advanced than the other fundamentals but are still highly accessible to anyone with a high school education.

Many companies do both the fundamentals of waste training and this follow-on training in one event. In my experience it works well if you introduce the fundamentals of waste and then do a walk-through and Q&A. This way, people start seeing actual and potential waste very early. This also makes the follow-on more relevant and more likely to stick.

How you design these basic training sessions is critical to their success and acceptance. Again, tailor them to what people actually see and experience. This makes the concepts familiar and clears up perceptions that were either mysterious or just plain wrong.

So far we’ve invested in four to five hours of training. We’ve opened eyes and created our common language. Not bad.

Fundamental Tools

Now that we have the basics of identifying wastes, we need to do something about them. It’s time to learn about the lean tools that are applicable to high-mix, low-volume job shops. This subset, which I call Practical Lean, includes:

  • Information management: the critical role of information integrity and its fit in waste creation and reduction.
  • 5S/visual workplace.
  • Uptime and changeover management, including rapid changeovers and productive maintenance.
  • WIP and cycle-time control, including lot sizes and hybrid pull techniques.
  • Cells and virtual cells.
  • Effective quality management.
  • Metrics.
  • Continuous improvement methods.

You can address each topic in one- to two-hour sessions, separated by weeks or even a couple of months. To make sure these sessions are effective, remember three key points. First, they must relate to the reality of the company, especially the shop floor. Adjust the dogma to what is achievable. Take the textbook concepts and design them to fit your company without losing the power of the concept. Second, prioritize the sequence based on what is likely to achieve the most with the least risk in the shortest time.

Third, follow the instruction with some test trials to show the impact.

Companies that have followed this training scheme, and have required it to be an all-hands situation, have revitalized their improvement efforts significantly. It works. Try it.

About the Author

Dick Kallage

Dick Kallage was a management consultant to the metal fabricating industry. Kallage was the author of The FABRICATOR's "Improvement Insights" column from May 2012 to March 2016.