Chartering a lean manufacturing kaizen event

Editor’s Note: Sipes continues his series on a hypothetical fabricator’s lean implementation. In May and June he detailed how a fabricator might start. Sipes takes the story from here.

You’ve done the analysis, and you now understand that the frame welding area is a prime candidate for improvement. As you defined the current state, you saw the area was cluttered and disorganized, welders spent too much time looking for things, and output was unpredictable. Company leadership then decided: Do a kaizen event in frame welding.

The leadership team’s decision is your authorization to proceed. To start, someone needs to construct a project charter.

“A project … what?”

So says the frame welding area’s department supervisor during a meeting in his office.

“A project charter,” you say. “It’ll help us define the scope and get everyone on the same page.”

“But we’re already on the same page, right?”

Why Do We Need a Charter?

You expected this. The department supervisor has been complaining for months, and writing a project charter sounds like a waste of time. We know we have a problem in frame welding. Why do we need a charter to state the obvious?

But you remember kaizen events at manufacturers you previously worked for, when you bypassed the project charter and just started “fixin’ stuff.” You remember the misunderstandings, the poor use of scarce resources. You’d say one thing, and people would either deliver something entirely different or, in pure frustration, not deliver anything at all.

You remember diving into these projects, including many kaizen events, with the best intentions, only to find people misunderstanding what you were trying to do. Even worse, some began to imagine what you were doing and came up with the worst conclusions.

“We can’t risk that,” you explain to the department supervisor. “We need to make time for a project charter.”

A project charter captures important information about the project. It’s a record of accountability. Most important, it helps you avoid scope creep, the enemy of many otherwise successful projects.

You’ve seen scope creep happen. You started out working on an issue, got some results, and then somebody came along and said, “Hey, that looks good. Let’s do this over in my area too.” Before you knew it, your efforts lost focus and were spread too thin to achieve demonstrable and sustainable results. Worse yet, the boss began to question your capability to manage improvement efforts.

Who Should Write the Charter?

You have several people in mind, and the best choice depends on how your company handles process improvement. It could be the lean process owner, a point person for all your improvement initiatives. This person doesn’t do all the lean work but instead coordinates projects and ensures all documentation is complete. Someone closer to the work, where the frame welding occurs (the gemba), could also write the project charter.

You know your choice really depends on the situation, how your company handles improvement, as well as its people and its culture. At the last company you worked for, you chose the lean process owner, the plant’s continuous improvement manager. Considering the plant’s organizational structure and its culture, the choice just made sense.

You now work at a fabricator without a CI manager, but you have very engaged shop floor employees and supervisors. In the end, you choose your weld frame department supervisor. He’s eager for change, and after talking with him, he begins to understand the charter’s importance. He’s been living and breathing the problems in the welding area for some time now. If things are finally changing, he wants those changes to stick.

Writing the Charter

Now that you know who will create the charter, what should the charter entail? Again, this depends on the company and the project. On the one hand, you know it will need enough detail for the kaizen team and leadership to understand what they are taking on. On the other hand, the charter also needs to have enough leeway for the team to be creative when assessing the situation and implementing change.

Before anything else, you need a project name. It sounds trivial, but a project name helps set the tone and gets people’s attention. The name could be fun, maybe FIT, for Framing Improvement Today; or functional, like Welding Area Kaizen Project. Your department supervisor knows his co-workers and what they appreciate. He chooses FIT.

Next, the charter needs a business case, just three or four sentences about the situation in the targeted area and what needs to be accomplished. You don’t need a lot of detail here, just an explanation about why a specific area was a target for improvement. To you and (especially) the department supervisor, the reasons seem painfully obvious, but it’s still important to get it down on paper. To that end, the department supervisor starts to write:

Frame welding and assembly have throughput and quality problems. Completed frames are sent to the main assembly line. During the past month, frame shortages created six assembly line stoppages, and four frame defects caught at the main assembly line caused offline rework. Leadership agrees that we need to take a harder look at processes to identify root causes and solve these problems.

After this, you need a project description. This statement is directional rather than prescriptive, essentially getting everyone—including the project team and company leadership—on the same page. Early clarity defeats later confusion every time! The project description in your charter reads as follows:

This four-day kaizen event will focus on understanding and fixing the root causes of disruptions caused in the frame welding area. We will study the current state to ensure we know what is happening. We will go downstream to main assembly (the internal customer) to see what problems the frame welding process causes. We then will develop solutions and implement as many as we can during the four days.

Next comes the project scope, which defines boundaries. Without boundaries, the project team will not address what the leadership had in mind. To keep focused, you need to define where the process scope starts and ends, plus identify any processes, steps, or topics that are explicitly out of that scope.

The project scope starts with the receipt of in-process and raw material into the frame welding area and ends with the delivery of welded frames to the assembly line. A process that is out-of-scope is the frame welding area’s interaction with the shop scheduling module of our enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. We want to keep this kaizen event focused on physical flow and production rather than the flow of information.

Expected results come next. The leadership team commissioning this kaizen event should define what the expectations are. Are we making incremental, though still real, improvements, or are we swinging from the fences with an aggressive approach? A mismatch here will cause disappointment later.

The project team should understand that the expected results are a guideline. A detailed analysis of the current state, which occurs early in the kaizen event, will provide a truer definition of improvement opportunity.

Expected results for this kaizen event include:

1. Reduce travel distance by 50 percent.
2. Improve the 5S audit score to at least 3.0.
3. Resolve at least three causes of frame welding disruptions.
4. Eliminate the frame welding shortage to the assembly line.

Finally, the project charter must identify who the kaizen team members will be, what roles they will play, and how much time they will need to dedicate to the project. It’s a critical decision. The team ideally should be cross-functional, including people directly from the area and others from upstream or downstream areas, as well as relevant support-process personnel. You also include someone who knows nothing about the process or product. Why? Because that person will probably ask some of the best questions.

The chosen team members must know exactly what role they will play in the kaizen event. This is critical. If they don’t know exactly what role they play and what they need to do, they won’t know what’s expected or what their responsibilities are. Pretty soon a four-day kaizen becomes four days of wasted time.

Three key roles in a kaizen event are:

1. The kaizen team leader who provides direction and makes assignments.

2. The sponsor, generally from management, who supports the team, breaks down roadblocks, answers questions about the business strategy, and acts as a general resource.

3. The facilitator conducts the initial training on day one, leads and guides discussions, and helps resolve contentious issues between team members. Either an employee or a contractor, the facilitator is usually not a subject matter expert.

For your frame welding kaizen event, the team member section might look like this:

The frame welding kaizen team will include the following people. Each will be 100 percent involved for the duration of the four-day event and, during the following month, will be involved approximately 30 minutes per week to follow up on the team’s 30-day action plan. Team members are:

• Bob Smith, welding supervisor, kaizen team leader.

• Anurag Forster, facilitator.

• Herman Washington, vice president of operations, sponsor.

• Ralph Jones, 1st shift welder.

• Mary Hamilton, 2nd shift welder.

• Teddy Maldone, process engineer.

• Janet DeMoss, 1st shift assembler.

• Barry Woodworth, accountant.

Written, Polished, and Ready

With the charter written, you’re now ready. You’ve aligned everyone’s expectations, and those expectations are clear. With a concise charter in hand, you know you will get the greatest return on your improvement resource investment—specifically, an investment of time, talent, and treasure.

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, contact him at jwsipes@back2basics-lean.com or Senior Editor Tim Heston at timh@thefabricator.com.