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Lean manufacturing in metal fabrication: How to jumpstart a stalled improvement effort

These key steps help establish an improvement culture

Virtually every company I work with has at least some form of continuous improvement (CI) program or initiative in place. Some are pretty effective. Sadly, most are not, at least in terms of tangible results. It’s not that managers don’t care or buy into the notion of CI; they generally do. But, although they rarely admit it, managers don’t see the results they were expecting.

At this point many essentially give up on actively managing the process or put it on the back burner. They tacitly declare that there is a CI process in place and if something comes out of it, that’s fine. But if nothing of real significance occurs, as is usually the case, most tend to quietly move on. Rarely do managers actually explore why the process is failing or not living up to its perceived potential.

When I look at CI processes that are either totally dormant or seriously stalled, I inevitably find elements that are either missing or actually interfering with the process. I can’t remember a case in which improvement failed because of lack of culture, talent, or inherent indifference (though I do see many cases of “trained” indifference; more on that later).

Postulates of Improvement

Let’s review some general postulates. Successful CI-driven companies believe the following statements to be self-evident truths:

1. The desire to improve things is a human trait that exists in most of us. What follows necessarily from this statement is that people tend to improve their environment and their common welfare if nothing seriously impedes their efforts. What also follows is that nearly everyone in an organization is capable of contributing to improvement.

2. In an organization, improvement is actually a process. This means that it can be defined, analyzed, and measured. The process is amenable to improvement itself. This makes CI manageable.

3. The practical improvement potential of any person or group is bound by the environment—that is, what they experience and the inherent breadth and depth of that experience. As we’ll see, this means that successful CI processes are layered according to certain variables related to this environment, span of control, and responsibility.

It’s pretty hard to dispute these assumptions; they generally ring true. This then would imply that designing and executing a robust CI process first must generally satisfy these postulates. When we violate them, we can and do impede success.

Layering

As the third postulate states, successful CI is bound by an individual or group’s actual work experiences, responsibility, or control. It is the rare CEO who can tell an experienced welder how to improve his or her TIG technique. And it is the rare welder who can demonstrate how overall plant layout is impeding work flow or quality. Even if he could, it is doubtful that he could do anything about it beyond possibly his local environment.

So the first task is to layer the process. That is, we need to bind CI to what a given individual or group can achieve. This is vital for full employee buy-in and engagement.

I like a basic three-layer approach. The bottom layer focuses on improvements in an individual or group’s local environment: how people do their work, perform changeovers, and store and move tools and materials.

To steer this, we must educate people in this layer on common wastes, such as searching, excessive motion, bad or confusing information, and removable downtime. Limiting the improvement potential to a defined number of things almost always results in CI that matches what people in this layer can actually do. It provides focus and challenge. It works.

Also, if poor quality from the upstream press brakes limits improvement potential in welding, then CI must account for departmental or interdepartmental action. In other words, valid CI from this layer must include improvements at the boundaries—that is, the inputs and outputs: the parts and information (like work instructions and quality requirements) coming in and going out.

This leads to the second and third layers: department supervision and company management. These layers have broader environments and spans of control. They also can resolve interoperation or interdepartment problems and initiate improvements that involve more than one operation. A supervisor may find better ways to improve flow velocity through the operations he or she is responsible for. A senior manager may initiate a companywide 5S initiative. Like the bottom layer, these top layers have defined boundaries set by what the people in this layer have the authority to accomplish.

This layered approach is one of the common things missing in stalled CI efforts. There is little focus and essentially no way to manage the process for results. People come up with suggestions, but they often are all over the place, difficult to organize and categorize, and therefore next to impossible to prioritize and actually execute.

So, do the layering first. People then will naturally look for improvements they believe are actually achievable, and they will know where to look for those improvements. And it’s manageable.

Organization

Beyond layering, organizing the CI effort includes developing standard methods for collecting the input, categorizing and prioritizing it, and providing feedback and recognition to those initiating the improvement suggestion. All of this should be highly visible, with the inputs and results posted on CI boards throughout the company.

Be sure to categorize initiatives according to defined variables. These depend on the company and specific operation, but they can include a project’s complexity (how easy or difficult it is to achieve); the cost and time required; affected operations or departments; and the benefit in terms of savings, quality, safety, throughput, and cycle time.

CI boards should show the status of these initiatives, there for everyone to see. Visibility is critical for CI success, and it’s almost always missing in initiatives that fail. It shows the company’s commitment to CI and ensures it is properly managed and attended to.

Execution

I believe there should be a fourth postulate to CI: Nobody expects you to do all improvement initiatives at once, but people do expect you to do something continually.

Having proper layering and organization sets the stage for CI success. People make suggestions, and ideas are vetted and prioritized according to whatever criteria the company deems appropriate. All that’s left is execution—in other words, actually doing something.

The most common complaint I hear about ineffective CI is that nothing ever happens. Part of the blame is attributed to serious defects in layering or organization. But even if they were done properly, execution can fail.

The primary reason is simple: The initiative has no serious assignment of actual responsibility or accountability. The solution generally is also fairly simple: Map responsibility to the layer.

Operators generally are responsible for improving their operation, supervisors their department. When they require outside assistance, the next layer up is responsible for resolving this.

Proper prioritization and assignments by layers helps avoid the black-hole syndrome that is the ultimate killer of CI: lots of input, at least initially, but no results. This is the root cause of “trained indifference” to CI. The collective mood becomes “Why bother?” This is totally preventable, even in the leanest of organizations.

Execution of CI cannot be on a when-I-get-around-to-it basis. Nobody ever “gets around to it.” We must demand and manage CI as any other core company process. As I’ve written many times before, saying you don’t have time for improvement is like saying you don’t have time to exist.

Pillars of Practical Improvement

The keys to CI success are layering, organization, and execution. The first two are critical to the third and, therefore, are effectively the pillars of practical CI. Note that the upfront investment in these pillars is very low. The payback is limited only by how broadly you execute them.

For many in this economy, it is unlikely large sales increases will drive up profits anytime soon. This makes internal improvement extraordinarily important. It’s time to revisit your CI process, and it’s time to do it right.

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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.