Don’t be a one-trick pony

A cell here, some 5S there. Throw in a little visual management. Now we’re lean, right? Of course not. Approaching lean manufacturing in a piecemeal way may produce limited improvements, but it does little to achieve systemic, game-changing improvements.

Regardless of where you are in your company’s lean journey, be sure to keep front and center an important idea: See lean as a system. You’ll apply this idea differently, depending on where you are in the journey, but it’s critical at all stages of continuous improvement.

Discrete Methods Designed to Work Together

The lean body of knowledge comprises methods, techniques, and principles that usually are taught in a discrete manner. That makes sense if you want to learn the details of establishing 5S or setting up a manufacturing cell. Some techniques involve equations and other specifics that help you implement them. To be effective, people in your organization need to have that deep knowledge.

But the real power comes when you harness the interaction of discrete lean ideas, methods, and techniques. Looking at lean as a system happens when you apply three or more lean ideas in the same area; it could be a cell, a department, a value stream, or the whole plant. Approaching lean as a system will affect the way you gather data and perform analysis. It will also raise the level of employee involvement.

So what is a system? BusinessDictionary.com defines it this way: “An organized, purposeful structure that consists of interrelated and interdependent elements (components, entities, factors, members, parts, etc.). These elements continually influence one another (directly or indirectly) to maintain their activity and the existence of the system in order to achieve the goal of the system.”

You can do 5S. Or you might implement visual management/control to clarify walk aisles, production priorities, or when something is needed. When you see lean as a system, you take advantage of how these and other methods work together. 5S, visual management/control, one-piece flow, and quick changeover—call it a comprehensive improvement solution.

These interacting methods help reduce waste and increase speed and responsiveness to customers. Applying only one method would achieve a fraction of the comprehensive approach’s potential. Think of the lean toolbox as an a la carte menu that allows you to build your improvement solution to meet your unique business and operational needs.

Failing to See the System

Many companies start modestly with lean improvements. In fact, most start with a good helping of 5S. Treating lean as a system from the start helps you avoid setting your improvement expectations too passively. If you start with 5S and quickly get comfortable with 5S, you may fall into this trap: “We made improvements … no need to do any more.”

If you fixate on one tool in the lean toolbox, you can become a one-trick pony. Squeeze everything you can from your narrow approach, and you get comfortable with the new status quo. Just like the one-trick pony, your organization will have severe limitations. Your competitors who take a comprehensive approach (that is, seeing lean as a system) will leave you behind.

Consider a situation in which a plant manager supports doing 5S and visual management/control in one department. The area has been performing poorly, causing late deliveries and excessive overtime. 5S and visual management/control help the operators and welders find tooling quickly, clear the area of unneeded materials, and know exactly what tools they need and where they are. Not bad for a one-trick pony!

Problem is, the plant manager has just scratched the surface of what is most likely causing the late deliveries and excessive overtime. A lean-as-a-system approach would address the work flow (streamlined and continuous flow), adherence to pace (cycle time and takt time analysis), and employee engagement when solving the business issue (addressing the eighth waste, underutilized human potential).

Without investing in improvement throughout the rest of the value stream, the plant manager will fail to achieve significant improvements. He leaves cost reductions, profits, and customer satisfaction opportunities on the table.

Examples of System Thinking

Consider a department that produces a large welded and machined assembly.

It has six operations: assembly weld, blast, robot weld, final weld, milling, and final machining. Prior to treating lean as a system, supervisors managed flow in discrete, disconnected steps. Any imbalances or disruptions caused wild swings in work-in-process, starving one operation while burying another in work. All this made daily output unpredictable.

Enter lean-as-a-system thinking. The department changed the flow, created linkage and dependency between operations, and used data (takt times and cycle times) to make decisions. All at once, they deployed 5S, streamlined flow, continuous flow, kanban, total productive maintenance, visual management, and quality at the source. All these lean elements worked together to substantially improve the process.

They previously had done a kaizen event in a single assembly weld cell in the area. That cell did see some improvements as a result of 5S, but there was no improvement in the overall flow.

I am not suggesting that the initial kaizen event was a waste of time, because it did create some traction for the larger improvement effort. But in and of itself, the initial kaizen had no impact on the department’s imbalances and disruptions.

Now consider a press brake between a laser cutting machine and a welding cell. Thinking traditionally, the supervisor and operator wanted to run large batch sizes to spread the setup time over as many pieces as possible, thereby increasing the press brake’s efficiency.

If the supervisor and operator approached improvement narrowly, they might have attempted to reduce the changeover time by investing in faster tools to take the die set in and out, or looked for a way to run parts faster. But by taking a lean-as-a-system approach in the press brake cell, they came up with a more robust approach.

During a kaizen event, the team implemented 5S, visual management, quick changeover, quality at the source, streamlined flow, and digital presentation of prints—all to improve the press brake operation, both in terms of throughput and quality.

Applying 5S and visual management, they rearranged the tooling organization to reduce the time spent looking for things. They studied the changeover and eliminated as many elements as they could. They then moved those elements that occurred when the machine was down (so-called internal elements) to when the machine was running (external elements). So instead of the operator retrieving tools for the next job while the machine was down (internal changeover element), tools were staged while the operator ran his job (external element) so that he could swap out tools immediately after he finished the previous job.

Although prints were part of the traveler packet, the operators tended to refer to a three-ring binder containing old prints. You can imagine the confusion and quality issues this caused when a revision made an old print obsolete. Many times employees didn’t catch these issues until the formed parts showed up in welding or assembly—and didn’t fit.

To address this problem, the shop put a tablet with wireless access at the press brake. The operator accessed the engineering database and pulled up the print on the tablet. The digital print was always the most current rev level, easy to read and easy to organize.

Again, they took a comprehensive approach, weaving together six lean tools. Theirs was a robust solution.

Avoid a Narrow Approach

Although we usually study specific lean methods one at a time, we uncover their true power by harnessing their interactions. If you pick one or two and become wedded to that narrow approach, you run the risk of becoming that one-trick pony.

My challenge to you is simple: Take a look at how your company approaches improvement. Are you achieving your improvement potential, or are you leaving results on the table?

Jeff Sipes is principal of Back2Basics LLC, 317-439-7960, jwsipes@back2basics-lean.com, www.back2basics-lean.com.