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How lean manufacturing strengthens executive decision-making

How fabricators and manufacturers can weave lean thinking into decision-making

Executive decision-making in lean manufacturing

Metal fabrication and other manufacturing business leaders make countless decisions to weather a crisis. Here's how lean thinking will enhance, not hinder, response if weaved in properly. Getty Images

Decision-making is a way of life for manufacturers and fabricators. This is as true for front-line employees as it is for senior executives. Of course, the scope and magnitude of decisions at different levels of the organization vary, but there is no denying that decisions are made all day, every day.

With the pandemic and all its challenges, you’re making decisions that would have seemed completely foreign a year ago, utterly off your radar. And still you have the typical “get the product out the door” challenges to deal with every day. Do you weave lean thinking into those decisions? More importantly, do you do so intentionally?

Why the Need to Be Intentional?

Under normal circumstances, unplanned events—such as machine breakdowns, supply chain disruptions, or key personnel absences—create easy distractions. They break your regular rhythm, causing short-term workarounds and sometimes even long-term deviations.

Enter the pandemic and business as usual becomes a distant memory. There were (and continue to be) many decisions to be made about social distancing among employees, product flow, and information flow. Just think how many Zoom meetings you’ve attended during the past few months.Incorporating lean thinking into your pandemic response (or any other major unplanned crisis) will enhance, not hinder, your efforts. And your resulting strategy will be more robust for handling the crisis now and after it passes.

Lean thinking can be an effective source of continuity and structure to make decisions that meet the challenges of whatever issue you face while maintaining as much of the rhythm as possible. Intentionally keeping lean thinking front and center will create a balance between overreacting to external influences and maintaining effective operations. This is all in the spirit of keeping your workforce safe and gainfully employed. Be intentional!

Examples of Intentional Decision-Making

Decisions made with lean thinking tackle the root cause, and they don’t kick the can down the road. For instance, let’s say you have a poorly performing business segment. Deliveries are inconsistent, quality is suspect, and customer confidence is waning. The day you plan to start a formal kaizen event to focus on this product line happens to be a day when the customer’s supplier development person is visiting your plant. The shipment might not get on the truck today because some of the people who build the product are on the kaizen team. You are the manager in charge of this part of the business. What do you do?

The traditional decision would be to cancel the kaizen event or go find other employees to be on the kaizen event while the regulars go make today’s product for the truck. Unfortunately, tomorrow will likely be another day of scrambling to “make the truck.”

Here’s a more enlightened approach that incorporates lean thinking. You inform the supplier development person that you’re conducting the kaizen with the aim of identifying and implementing permanent solutions to your operating problems. Meanwhile, you reallocate resources from other parts of the operation to get today’s product on the truck. You’re not kicking the can down the road.

In another scenario, say you need to reconfigure the work flow to minimize employees’ exposure to one another. Knee-jerk reactions might be to stretch the line or move individual operations away from one another into separate departments to create distance. Without the underlying lean ideas of minimized travel distance and one-piece or small-batch flow, you could end up with disconnected and isolated operations. You might even revert to where things were before you implemented lean.

Here’s an approach that weaves in lean thinking: You maintain social distancing while preserving lean fundamentals within your operation. You have effective 5S, and you continue to perform audits to measure and reinforce positive behavior—after all, the cleanliness aspect of 5S has become more critical than ever during this pandemic. Next, you redistribute the work content to separate workers in the process and then, to ensure changes are applied consistently, revise and retrain with new standard work instructions.

What about your sheet metal assembly cells, where you worked so hard to keep employees close together so they could communicate and collaborate? Here again, lean thinking wins the day. You maintain social distancing by keeping the spacing 6 ft. apart; but to keep the product flowing from station to station, you use gravity-fed chutes and short sections of roller conveyors to connect adjacent operations. In fact, these solutions actually improve operations in the assembly cell. No longer must assemblers manipulate awkward workpieces from one station to the next. They now just slide them down a conveyor. The resulting operation is now safer, ergonomic, and more efficient than ever.

In yet another scenario, production planning seeks to “optimize” the plant’s operations by planning larger batch sizes and fewer shop orders, with the noble intent of having fewer orders and simpler planning. But wouldn’t that be a step back toward pre-lean operations? Processing large order quantities increases the likelihood of split orders or incorrect information due to an order being open on the floor for longer periods of time. All this creates more interaction between the office and floor, leading to even more complexity, not less.

Instead of larger batch sizes and fewer shop orders, the lean thinking approach would be to focus on rhythm and flow and tickety boom (that is, a consistent rhythmic pattern that gets to the same ideas behind takt time). Doing so creates a predictable and stable process that results in less chaotic reactions to problems. If you can still maintain the essence of your cell, you then can have fewer reporting points, less inventory, and clearer line-of-sight management in the process.

A final scenario is where you as a senior manager, faced with all the pandemic’s challenges, must decide whether to continue with the lean journey, including training, improvement projects, and lean strategy development. If you backtrack, you make it more difficult to maintain a safe workplace. The continued training, whether at senior levels or on the front line, may need to be less intimate; you cannot squeeze the training group around a small table in the conference room for a simulation exercise, for example. But with a mixture of creativity, patience, and technology, training can be effective and still advance your company’s lean journey.

Be Intentional

These scenarios just scratch the surface of the issues you face every day but are representative of the current situation. The decisions in these scenarios can be made without lean thinking, but they will come at a cost. By intentionally using lean thinking, you will make more effective decisions for the good of your company and your employees.

Lean thinking, effectively done, affects all parts of your manufacturing business. It deals with the processes your people work in; the respect with which your people are treated; and the performance of your business, which affects all your stakeholders.

Lean thinking needs to happen everywhere. Senior executives demonstrate lean thinking as they build corporate metrics that reflect important lean ideas like cleanliness, velocity, and people development. Front-line managers demonstrate lean thinking by the way they continually work with staff to find better and safer ways to manufacture. Welders demonstrate lean thinking as they creatively work at everyday kaizen.

It’s easier than ever now to make short-sighted, short-term decisions that feel good but deliver little value to the organization. Intentional decision-making based on lean thinking helps you make it through the short term while being true to your long-term success. In this period of uncertainty and pandemic, keep doing what you’re doing. Weave lean thinking into your decision-making—and do it intentionally.

About the Author
Back2Basics  LLC

Jeff Sipes

Principal

9250 Eagle Meadow Dr.

Indianapolis, IN 46234

(317) 439-7960