The fundamentals of follow-through in continuous improvement

On any lean manufacturing journey, follow-through in continuous improvement is a must for metal fabricators and manufacturers. It’s not complicated, just common sense. And it’s ignored far too often. Getty Images

One fundamental idea remains true throughout your lean journey: Follow-through is a must. This idea has no bells and whistles and doesn’t require any challenging equations or 10-step processes. This is just basic block-and-tackle common sense. Yet how often do you find yourself or your organization having started something that seemed like a great idea at the time, only to have it taper off as people move on to something else and leave the original great idea to languish and die?

How Do You Get Into This Situation?

The machine breaks down. The material doesn’t arrive from a supplier. John has a medical issue and is out for two weeks. You always seem to be “chasing the truck” to get that shipment out on time, and you’re barely keeping up.

You might have a hero, someone who meets the challenge, applies amazing effort, and saves the day. The problem arises when you start to depend on the hero over and over again. It starts to be the norm—and that is dangerous.

When the hero continues to save the day, other people study the lean tools and methods in search of better ways to perform the work and conduct the business. Formal and informal groups work on improvements. Good ideas emerge. There is initial excitement and traction. But the novelty quickly wears off. It gets harder for the improvement groups to keep everyone’s attention as leaders and front-line workers move on.

What happened? The grand improvement ideas got overshadowed by that chasing-the-truck mentality, and the focus turned back to the hero who saved us all again. The improvement ideas just fizzle away, and it is back to business as usual.

How Do You Free Time to Improve?

It is not enough to simply train some people in lean manufacturing, charter a project team to go do something, generate reasonable and sound ideas, and then move on to the next crisis or opportunity. People need the time to follow through and make the improvement ideas come to life.

You might in some cases be able to “burn the bridge” immediately—throw away old tools or otherwise alter a process to make it impossible for people to revert to the old way. In other cases, people may gradually adopt the new work process over time. Of course, the temptation to return to those old practices never goes away.

Sustainable improvement comes from having the time to prove the idea works, giving adequate repetition to show it is repeatable and accurate, and giving people time to change their work behaviors.

How do you follow through? If you’re a leader on the executive team, you set expectations and policy; establish plans and actions consistent with the process improvement strategy; and build accountability to drive sustainable results throughout the organization. Done successfully, you should expect to see people exhibit consistent behaviors that keep driving toward these results.

One behavior includes carving out time to follow through. Only with follow-through can you realize the return on your improvement investments, be they safety-, financial-, or customer satisfaction-related.

Department managers and supervisors make sure people involved in improvement have the time to do what needs to be done. Good managers make time for meetings, ensure resources for data gathering and analysis are available, help acquire tools, create new standard work—the list goes on. Giving such support, department managers can make an improvement effort a success. If they withhold support, they let the improvement effort end as a fizzling dud.

The department manager strikes a balance between creating the time for follow-through and chasing the truck. If company leaders make their expectations clear, department managers should have no reason to say, “I just did not have time.” This person must get creative and extend or redeploy resources to make the time everyone needs to follow through. No excuses!

What about the welders, assemblers, production schedulers, engineers, and others who do the work? They have limited authority to set aside time for improvement, but they are still incredibly essential. The person doing the work must explore new ideas; learn about different ways to perform a task; and ensure the new way is safe, effective, and doable. This takes time. If the manager cannot provide the time and simply lays the improvement on the employees, then you are “doing improvement to them” instead of “doing improvement with them.” This makes a huge difference in how ideas are accepted, embraced, and sustained. When you do improvement to someone, that person can find a hundred reasons why a particular idea won’t work.

Say a group works on a fixturing issue for a particular weldment in a bottleneck process. Their prototype seems to work both in terms of quality and speed, but the final fixture doesn’t get made. Nothing changes, potential process improvement is lost, and the welding process remains a constraint.

What happened? Company leaders review the matter and find that the department manager redirected his focus to chasing the truck, so his team put the new weld fixture project on the back burner. Everyone simply reverted back to what they knew worked. There was no follow-through.

What could have happened to ensure follow-through? Leaders could have reinforced the priority of this particular improvement and held the manager accountable to see that the fixture got finished. Further, they could have held the manager and support personnel accountable to integrate the new fixture in such a way that the employees in the area had time to thoroughly understand and embrace the process. They also could have supported workplace behaviors that help sustain the new way of doing things.

Leaders, managers, and the people doing the work are all necessary players in your lean journey. Each has their unique perspectives and contributions, but all must play their respective roles for follow-through to happen.

Positive Begets Positive

Improvement efforts can seem to occur in a kind of spiral, either a virtuous spiral going up or a debilitating spiral going down. They can gain momentum in either direction, for good or bad. Your job is to make sure the spiral is going up, delivering results, and enhancing your business.

You will always be tempted to chase the truck when operating in chaos or chase the next shiny object when times are good. Anytime you lose your focus on the basics and fail to follow through on improvement, you risk losing positive momentum.

The good news is that positive momentum begets positive results. When people see the beneficial results of their improvement efforts, they’re more likely to sustain those efforts. Managers see their days stabilize and have fewer fires to fight, which frees time for further improvement. This in turn frees leaders to set direction, hold the organization accountable to performance expectations, and spend time focused on growing the business.

Improvement thrives in a chess-like environment, where you strategize and stay several steps ahead. You’re not playing checkers, using short-term tactics just to get through the day. If you’re just trying to get through the day, you’re just chasing the truck—and without following through on improvement, you always will be.