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Role changes in a lean transformation

Through the eyes of the production manager

For the past few months we’ve visited our fictitious manufacturer, Typical Fabrication Co. (TFC), and have viewed the lean transformation through the eyes of the production supervisor and two shop employees. We saw what a workday looked like before the lean journey started and then again after they were deep into the lean transformation. You can find these articles archived on thefabricator.com.

As a steel fabricator, TFC has a mix of repetitive and low-volume, high-mix products. Processes include laser cutting, sawing, punching, bending, welding, painting, and assembly. The single-plant operation has 120 employees and runs two shifts.

This month we meet Sarah, who joined TFC five years ago. As the production manager, Sarah sees the whole operation. She has eight direct reports: seven production supervisors and one maintenance supervisor. Known as a no-nonsense manager, she knows what she wants done and expects it to get done.

Sarah started her career at a larger manufacturing company where she was exposed to advanced applications of lean methods and techniques. She saw how her previous employer used continuous improvement as the way to run the business. Her managers now hope she will bring these ideas to life at TFC.

TFC has the typical issues of a modern fabricator: capacity constraints, unpredictable demand, and lots of scheduling and priority changes. The place faces a classic “we’ve always done it this way” resistance to change. Sometimes it takes forever to implement improvements that seem obvious.

Before Lean

When Sarah joined TFC, she stepped into a manufacturing operation that was very different from her previous experiences. A very traditional company, TFC had grown steadily but had not invested in improvement.

Department supervisors tended to look out for their own areas without considering the effects upstream or downstream in the manufacturing process. Everybody hunkered down to meet their individual targets and avoided the spotlight when an order shipped late.

Sarah asked her supervisors and even a few production employees why they tended to be so inward-focused and protective of their areas. The universal response: They’d be in trouble with the boss whenever they missed a due date, something broke, or a quality problem arose. In their minds, the antidote was to have lots of inventory, work on orders well before they were due so there was time to recover, and not be concerned with their production peers’ problems.

Why was it so difficult to get people interested in making changes? After speaking with Carl, one of her production supervisors, Sarah learned that over the years TFC had gone through four or five different improvement initiatives, none of which really stuck. People, particularly the production supervisors, believed that if they kept their head down long enough, the new program would pass.

Appreciating Carl’s candor, she pressed further. Why did improvement initiatives seem to come and go? Carl said the quality circles (employees who met regularly to resolve problems) fizzled because they were too slow to produce results. The new ERP system nearly dragged them down with all the new reporting, questioning, and revising (that is, reworking) of shop floor activities. Finally, a new vice president of operations tried to implement a version of the Toyota Production System that didn’t fit TFC’s high product mix.

As Carl recalled, “Engineers and managers made changes to the way we did our work … but they really didn’t spend much time helping us understand why or how to do it. They just said, ‘Do it!’ So we kept our heads down and it passed. And that new VP of operations left. We knew that these changes really didn’t work. We all felt that, by keeping our head down, people like our new VP would eventually leave, and things would get back to normal.”

Carl paused. “It’s not that we don’t want to improve. God knows, this place has problems. But the way they have gone about it has really been discouraging.”

These were not bad or difficult people. They were simply products of the environment they had worked in for years. Sarah knew their deeply ingrained behaviors would be hard to change. But she knew that times were changing, and TFC had to change just to stay even.

The Transition

It took a couple of years, but eventually Sarah successfully introduced lean practices as a way to run the business. To overcome the “keep your head down” reaction, she took the time to educate, train, and coach.

Sarah did not dictate change, but instead made sure that everyone understood the “what, why, and how” behind lean principles—the philosophy and concepts that explain why it works so well. Embracing the lean concepts, front-line personnel and managers worked together on lean methods and techniques that uncovered better ways to get the job done.

For instance, as a laser operator, Harry attended four two-hour lean training sessions about the basics, including the eight wastes, flow, 5S, and quick changeover. His training group walked through the plant, observed how the shop’s various jobs flowed (and didn’t flow), and drew a spaghetti diagram to illustrate it.

When Harry was asked to participate in a kaizen event, he put his ideas to work and saw and appreciated the positive results. The improvement initiative wasn’t done to Harry, but with him. Such engagement made Harry a believer.

Now consider Harry’s supervisor, Jim. He recognized that Harry knew laser cutting inside and out, but even after all of TFC’s previous improvement initiatives, he had never really worked with Harry to figure out better ways to get work done.

As part of this latest initiative, Jim learned the same lean basics that employees like Harry did, but he also learned how to coach in an inclusive, supportive, and humbling way. Learning to coach, he of course made mistakes. He sometimes reverted to a “command and control” mentality, blaming people for problems—for instance, saying “Joe should be delivering the right material to the laser” instead of asking, “What can we do to help Joe deliver the right material at the right time?”

The bottom line is that Jim knew everyone genuinely wanted to make things better if given the opportunity.

After the Transformation

What does a workday look like for Sarah now that the lean transformation was firmly embraced? Very different. Her days are smoother, there is less conflict, and problems genuinely get solved.

Once everyone worked to stabilize flow, production meetings became more predictable. Everybody worked not with departmental tunnel vision, but instead with the needs of upstream and downstream processes in mind. After this happened, they focused less on fixing today’s problems and more on long-term improvement.

Just as the supervisors became coaches, Sarah also coached the supervisors. Disruptions didn’t lie hidden until they snowballed into larger problems, when it was too late to recover and the operation’s resources needed to reshuffle, all at enormous cost. Instead, problems became immediately visible on the floor and received attention soon after.

And this time, at long last, the changes are sticking. Why? It’s because TFC spent time to address employee needs, understand their concerns, involve them in the process, and give them a voice. Instead of just keeping their heads down, employees are now receptive to change.

Sarah’s daily production meetings with supervisors (one meeting for first shift and another for second shift) have a distinctly positive tone. Instead of blaming each other, the supervisors figure out how to help each other as minor disruptions, customer order drop-ins, or manpower constraints occur.

Sarah attributes much of this behavior to the coaching she does individually with her supervisors. And she sees the same behavior changes happening the next level down in the organization.

The View Through Sarah’s Eyes

Can you relate to Sarah’s experience? Do people just keep their heads down? Or are you investing in your managers and front-line employees in a way that makes it easy for them to embrace change?

The view through Sarah’s eyes is positive, and the upside is unlimited. She has put some of her prior experiences to work at TFC. The senior management and the owners are pleased because they see the effects of the lean transformation in the company’s financial performance and in customer satisfaction.

Sarah realizes that she did not make this happen alone. It took lots of work to create an environment for employees to buy in to change, for the supervisors to become coaches, and for everyone to improve flow and eliminate waste.

Sure, it took time for concepts like takt time and total productive maintenance to take root. But now that they have, Sarah realizes that this is not the time to stop reaching for the next level. The low-hanging fruit is picked, the isolated improvements are being connected along the value stream, and now is the time to write the next chapter in TFC’s lean journey.

About the Author
Back2Basics  LLC

Jeff Sipes

Principal

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Indianapolis, IN 46234

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