Anticipate lean manufacturing’s toughest challenges

You have been on your lean journey for a long time. You’re past the basics. The startup was a real learning experience; you achieved some improvement successes in both the shop and the office; and you have developed a lean strategy to provide a road map for your company. There has been lots of hard work and there is much to be proud of.

But there is lots of hard work ahead of you. Many companies have paved the way, so let’s take advantage of some of their battle scars, wisdom, and experience.

You will face a few predictable challenges that you can prepare for before they become showstoppers. The better prepared you are for the challenges, the more easily you can minimize or avoid them.

Not a Cookie-cutter Approach, But …

Your lean journey will not be just like the journey at the company down the road, across town, or on the other side of the country. You may focus on throughput while other companies may focus on cost reduction. Your metrics will be different, as will the desired outcomes, the speed of implementation, and the specific topics covered in training.

You won’t take a cookie-cutter approach, but if you analyze a lean implementation even at a very different company, you’ll see plenty of similarities. These include an understanding of the lean philosophy, the value of using facts and data to make decisions, and the need to keep the customer front and center in all that you do to improve the business. Diverse companies can learn from one another.

You needn’t reinvent improvement ideas or the basics of lean. The many companies that have gone before give you a well-established body of knowledge, so you can leverage existing ideas and tailor them to your operation. You have many opportunities to learn about what others have done, be it from books, conferences, benchmarking, as well as working with customers and suppliers.

Four of the Toughest Challenges

By now you know that the lean journey is full of challenges. You experienced some during a kaizen event at the same time your customer was waiting on parts, when two of your leaders had sharp disagreements about where to invest improvement resources, and when your workforce thought the onslaught of metrics was a form of punishment instead of baselines for continuous improvement.

You have so many challenges to consider, but here are four that you will most likely deal with at some time. Although they aren’t technical, they often trip up very good companies.

Challenge No. 1: Tendency to Backslide. Sometimes it will seem like there is a giant rubber band attached to the back of your organization. Much of the progress you are making will be offset by the feeling that the rubber band is trying to pull the organization back to where it started … and some people will be rooting for the rubber band to win.

Backsliding can show up in many different ways. Sometimes it’s a slow drift backward, other times a big swoosh. Either way, backsliding will give up hard-earned gains and improvements.

Once on the continuous improvement path, people need to focus and exhibit mental toughness to maintain heightened performance. If they start slowing down, if the sense of urgency wanes, or if something else becomes the “hot” item, you run the risk of backsliding. You must put a firm stop to this, because it can be contagious.

Challenge No. 2: Complacency. This begins to set in after you have some success and your improved operations become routine. People might lack urgency to keep getting better, because they have already gotten better. When they begin to feel like they have “arrived,” then complacency tends to set in. A lack of effective communications, metric sharing, and general understanding about improvement pace and direction can be a recipe for complacency.

One of the five lean principles in Womack and Jones’ classic book, Lean Thinking, is “the pursuit of perfection.” The authors suggest that if you keep pursuing perfection, it’s always out of reach. As managers and lean leaders, we should keep moving the target to get better and better. The pursuit of perfection should not be looked at as a defeating goal, but rather a noble goal that keeps us pushing, reaching, and stretching to be more effective and competitive. You have no room for complacency when you are pursuing perfection.

Challenge No. 3: Nothing Is Static. The manufacturing business is full of twists and turns, so it is unrealistic to expect that the lean journey will be a static proposition. As much as you plan for all possibilities, something will surprise you. It might be a new customer with very different demands, equipment that ceases to meet tighter requirements, or a move to a new location. Any of these and hundreds of other changes can render your wonderful achievements obsolete.

Say you have improved processes in a particular fabrication area. Based on your flow analysis and takt time/cycle time analysis, you arrange the equipment in U-shaped cells to optimize your press brake locations, welding machine utilization, and manufacturing personnel deployment. Although not quite perfect, the flow is good, the operation is balanced, and the operations metrics are telling a great story.

Then the customer’s demand drops by 50 percent. You land a new account with a new product, and you find that it makes the most sense to flow that new product through the cell with open capacity. Still, the new product has a different sequence, two additional operations, and cycle times 150 percent greater than the previous product. But again, nothing is static. You redesign the cells and processes to accommodate both of the products. Thank goodness for flexibility.

Challenge No. 4: A Key Individual Leaves. If your lean journey’s success is heavily dependent on one key person, you risk derailment. Sometimes leadership thinks the company has multiple key people when in fact it really has one individual. The others are just along for the ride. When the key person leaves for whatever reason (he receives a promotion within the company, takes a job at another company, or just hangs up the spurs and goes fishing), then someone will need to take his place. But if a good understanding of lean isn’t strongly woven into the fabric of the business, you could find that the new person simply throws out all those previous efforts and starts over in his or her own way.

To avoid this, spread the risk by training and supporting many people. If the lean body of knowledge is understood from the top floor to the shop floor, and your employees are genuinely empowered to lead within their spheres of influence, then one or two people leaving will have minimal effect.

Keep the Momentum

You’ll always face challenges, whether you are just starting out, midway through, or far along in your lean journey. Your goal should be to provide the people in your organization with an appropriate level of lean understanding so that they can adjust as necessary to whatever comes up.

You have invested heavily in your lean journey to date. Treat that investment as you would any other. Protect it. Nourish it. Keep the momentum. Expect it to continue to deliver results to fund the next rounds of improvement. Make it a perpetual improvement machine. If you do this, none of these tough challenges will stop you from achieving great success.

Jeff Sipes is principal of Back2Basics LLC, 317-439-7960, www.back2basics-lean.com. If you have improvement ideas you’d like to read about, email him at jwsipes@back2basics-lean.com or Senior Editor Tim Heston at timh@thefabricator.com.