Planning for Flow

We have recently visited several food and pharmaceutical manufacturers as they get started on their lean journeys. One of the most challenging was a huge plant making the base ingredients for the pills we buy in our local pharmacy or supermarket. It looks like a cross between an oil refinery and a brewery.  

This plant makes hundreds of different products, each of which goes through a dozen or so processing operations, taking about 15 months from start to finish. These base chemicals are then shipped to another plant to be turned into pills, from which they pass through several warehousing steps before reaching the point of sale. I was staggered to discover that it takes almost twice as long to make a pill as the 319 days it took to make the famous soft drink can in Lean Thinking! 

Not only was there no flow, but quite obviously there was also no pull or levelling either. Indeed we were told that production schedules in both plants change all the time and that fire-fighting is endemic. Like many firms they have pursued lots of initiatives and IT fixes to try to improve their forecasts and schedules, but have little to show for them. This suggests to me they are addressing the symptoms and not the root cause of the problem, which lies in the logic on which their planning is based. The second hurdle to overcome is the strong belief that flow, pull and levelling are impossible dreams in a process industry. 

The logic behind the way production is planned today is based on four key assumptions. First that customer demand is erratic and unpredictable. Second that therefore one needs to be “flexible” enough to make any product in any one of the many mixing tanks, fermentation vessels etc. Third that one will get “optimal use” from all these assets by scheduling large batches (or Economic Order Quantities - EOQ) through each operation in turn. And fourth that the data on which these plans are made is accurate enough to be relied upon. On closer inspection none of these assumptions turn out to be true. 

The consumption of pills, and most food products for that matter, is actually quite steady and does not vary a lot. Most of the variation in orders received by plants is “created” by the way information is batched and passed upstream and by the delays in the many “just-in-case” warehouses on the way to the customer. This would suggest that levelling production in line with demand is both desirable and possible. 

If this is the case then why let the tail wag the dog? Why mortgage the performance of the whole plant for the “flexibility” required for a tiny fraction of production? Is it not more important to create a flow for high volume products so they can be produced in line with demand, rather than constantly recalculating the plan for every product based on EOQ? 

It is also common to find that isolated pieces of equipment whose use is “optimised” using plans based on EOQ end up producing saleable product for a much smaller fraction of the time than equipment whose capability and availability has been improved so they can be linked to enable products to flow through them without interruption. 

Finally people are beginning to realise that centralised control systems can never cope with the minute by minute disturbances that happen all the time on the ground. Events change faster than the plan, beginning a vicious circle of bad data feeding bad plans. Radio Frequency tags (RFID) on every product may help, but may also lead to data overload that turns out to be nightmarishly expensive to fix. Most firms do not know the level of data inaccuracy in their systems. In my experience when they take a look they get a nasty shock. This suggests they might be better off by creating rapid, reflexive replenishment loops all the way back from the customer, which pull rather than push products through production and distribution. 

In our experience, once the fragility of these assumptions has been laid on the table it is possible to open people’s minds to creating flow, pull and levelling. The place to start is by using a simple, but powerful tool developed by my colleague Ian Glenday, which we have come to call the “Glenday Sieve”. By ranking the products (SKUs) by volume, it reveals how skewed the distribution is. It is very common to find that five percent of the product lines account for half the output of the plant. At the other end of the scale one third of the product lines account for less than one percent of output. 

In fact almost every plant (hospital, office process, etc.) has at least two different types of flow that need to be planned and managed differently. In one case you know the high volume products you will produce every week, but not the precise volume. In the other case you probably know the overall capacity needed, but not which products will be required that week. Start by separating out the high volume products, before moving on to analyse what needs to be done to the remaining product lines in order for them to be able to join the flow. 

One of the quickest ways to overcome the sceptics and demonstrate that flow and levelling are possible in a plant that has never experienced flow is by dedicating a set of equipment to produce the high volume products in a regular, fixed sequence. At least to start with. This can be done the following week. This will quickly reveal all the problems with the equipment itself and with the lack of standard work. Provided management can keep its nerve as problems crop up and signal their intention to make flow happen, then the sceptics will come on board. The biggest surprise is that within weeks you can make a lot more products through this equipment than ever before. Now you have secured top management support. 

As employees learn through repetition (and incorporate this into standard work), as equipment availability is improved and as change-over times are cut then you can step-by-step reduce batch sizes, add lower volume products, increase the frequency of the cycle and flex the volumes in each cycle in line with demand. Raw material deliveries for these products can be synchronised with production and planning becomes extremely simple, requiring no fire fighting. 

In parallel there is a lot of work to be done to analyse whether the company needs the tail of low volume products and if so how to schedule these – on separate equipment, at a different time or by reserving some capacity for them in a mixed-model pull system. The end objective, which now begins to look possible through it may still be some way off, is to be able to make every product every cycle in line with demand (to Takt time) with levelled production. A realisable dream. 

As lean thinkers we need to pay close attention to both the needs of the type of process we are dealing with, but also to the tactics that build management support to make it happen and the knowledge base that will sustain it over time. Circumstances will differ, and therefore the emphasis and sequence of actions will too, but the underlying logic and objectives are common. 

I wish you a restful break before getting back to your lean journey in the New Year. Thank you for your interest and support in 2004. 

Yours sincerely
Professor Daniel T Jones

Is Lean So Hard?

We recently had a visit from the Managing Director of a small engineering firm seeking help on his lean journey. His first port of call was his local university, one of the most prestigious in the country. They sent two postgraduate students to show him how to draw a Value Stream Map. However they stumbled when it caine to deciding what to do next. I see this all the time - firms with Current State maps but no Future State map and no Action Plan to implement it. Yet this is one of the key steps in going lean.

By chance I met these same postgraduate students at the Manufacturer Live event in Telford in September. They stnick tue as smart students with a good knowledge of the lean tools. Yet they confessed they did not know how to construct a Future State map for this plant, despite having read the right books. This set me thinking. With the plethora of advice on lean and all the workshops on value stream mapping, why is it so hard to make this essential step, even for the smartest people? What is holding you back?

There are of course some obvious reasons. If no one is given responsibility for straightening out the value stream as it crosses departments then no one is really going to bother to draw a Future State map, let alone implement it. If you do not have support from top management then even the best intentioned lean initiatives are going to run into the sand. Also if your first map reveals so much low hanging fruit then it is not surprising if people go after that, rather than do the more heavy lifting in changing the way things work.

Another common reason is that employees recognise the need to move from making large batches to flowing products through the plant. But they are frustrated in doing so by the lack of basic stability in their operations and in their equipment. Which is why so much attention needs to be devoted to creating standard operations, improving machine availability, reducing changeover times, improving bottleneck processes, etc.

But even if this is a long road there is a danger of pursuing this work without a clear plan of march. You can spend a lot of time creating islands of stability that are hard to sustain unless they are tightly linked. A Lean Value Stream Plan from a Future State map is the way to leverage the synergy between Six Sigma, TPM and Lean and to create flow that lasts.

Another stumbling block seems to be the concepts of takt time and the pacemaker process — how to establish the appropriate rhythm for the value stream and where to trigger it. A really helpful insight is to recognise that you are almost certainly making several different types of products with quite different demand characteristics that require different and not common solutions. People often think lean is about building evetything to order — whereas this is not always the case — in manyy cases it is about rapidly replenishing stock the customer has just purchased.

If you start by analysing you product families by process route and by
frequency of demand and you will discover a few high volume products that account for the bulk of your output. These should be made-to-stock with the customer pulling from a pacemaker at the end of the value stream. At the other end of the scale you may well have a tail of low volume products. accounting for a small fraction of your output that have to be made-to-order from a pacemaker at the beginning of the value stream. Map these value streams separately and treat them as two quite separate projects. Over time it may well be possible to combine these two into a mixed-model pull system, but probably not initially.

The final stumbling block is hidden in your information flow. Where sabilitv is the foundation for creating flow, heijunka or levelling is the foundation for creating pull. Without levelling you are fighting an uphill battle against constantly changing schedules and fire-fighting. We have been brainwashed to think that the only way round this problem is by holding stocks and better IT systems that can improve the forecasts on which our schedules are built. In fact there is a lot we can do to smooth the order signal from our customers. However constantly changing schedules are in fact a symptom of a deeper problem - the batch logic in our scheduling systems. I will return to this topic in a future e-letter.

You may well have encountered different obstacles in deciding what your Future State map should look like. Others of you might have created your Future State maps but have struggled to implement them. I would be interested to hear about both problems, and how you think they can be overcome. Difficult questions are rich food for Lean Thinkers to ponder upon. If we can’t crack this one then we arc not going to make much progress with lean.

Yours sincerelv
Professor Daniel T Jones

Beyond Cost Cutting

What is in your plan for going lean over the next year? Do you still think of lean as just a programme for eliminating waste and cutting costs? Have you woken up to the full potential of applying lean thinking to every process in your business? 

Toyota’s latest Annual Report just arrived on my desk. While most Annual Reports are really boring, Toyota’s are in my view essential reading. Every year it spells out with absolute clarity what Toyota intends to do over the next year. And then it goes ahead and does it! It seldom misses a target and is quite frank about the challenges it faces, which it calls its new frontiers. Think of it as a high level summary of their A3 reports on the plans they are working on right now. 

The first new frontier is its investment in new engine, safety and driver assistance technologies. Toyota was always thought of as a conservative follower taking incremental steps forward, rather than as an innovator. However times have changed. In engine technology, it is already way ahead of the competition with its second generation hybrid powered car, the Prius. Hybrids are going to rival diesel engines as the power source of the future, particularly in North America, where they will appeal as the “guilt-free” large car or truck. Toyota began its “out of the box” thinking about green technologies many years ago. It has now shown that its lean product development process can turn these innovations into marketable products faster than anyone else. What are you doing to anticipate, rather than follow the challenges from your marketplace? 

Second on their list is production engineering. Here their slogan is “Lean and Simple”. They are rethinking every one of their production processes, so they can be redesigned to save cost and so they can be used by less experienced employees in their new facilities across the world. This means for instance “reducing die casting, forging and plastic injection moulds to between one third and one tenth of their "original sizes”, and “reducing the length of their new engine lines by between two thirds and fife sixths”. This is also “out of the box” thinking. 

We should not miss the significance of this development. Most engineers designing new equipment (the same applies to new software systems) will dream of the even bigger, better, faster and more capable machine. As a result you often see the ridiculous situation of a huge line of big machines stretching across the shop floor making a piece that can fit into your hand!

I recently visited just such a plant in Germany, where they love bigger machines. Luckily this firm now realises that bigger machines are not the future. Like Toyota they are busy designing simpler, cheaper and more manual systems for their next generation products. They also showed me some prototypes of their next generation modular, desk-top machines that can be combined in any sequence to make a wide range of small products. These machines also require less operator knowledge and can be moved round the world very easily.  

This greatly facilitates the compression of each value stream, so that as many value creating steps as possible can be placed close to each other. Not only are these clever but simple machines less expensive, but capacity can be added (and removed) in smaller increments to mirror changes in demand over the lifetime of the product in each region. 

Perhaps the most interesting thing is that designing smaller, smarter and simpler machines is an even more exciting challenge for the next generation of engineers than designing the next even bigger machine. In my view every business is going to have to think about this in the future, rather than relying on general purpose machines bought off the shelf. Are you working to rethink and simplify the design of your equipment and production systems for the future?

In addition to this “out of the box” thinking Toyota is continuing its aggressive cost reduction programme and increasing its capacity round the world by leaps and bounds, particularly in China. This global expansion presents Toyota with its biggest challenge, developing enough managers and engineers to run all these operations with sufficient knowledge of the Toyota Way. To this end Toyota has established the Toyota Institute to train future leaders and a new Global Production Centre at its Motomachi plant to train managers to run its plants across the world. 

Many of you will have heard that Toyota attributes its success to brilliant processes and to a production system designed on lean principles. However this in turn is underpinned by a deep knowledge base of problem solving and process redesign. This knowledge is built up as every employee goes through successive rounds of problem solving and root cause analysis, which are captured in a common format, an A3 report. It will be a challenge for Toyota to speed up this knowledge acquisition by new employees from new locations without diluting their performance. Following Toyota’s example it is clear that the big gains from lean come from feeding back lean knowledge into the design of the next generation product and equipment – and from thinking “outside the box”. The real question is how much time and effort you are planning to invest in making this next lean leap, beyond today’s cost cutting? 

Jim Womack and I will be picking up several of these themes at the Lean Management Summit in Aachen, Germany on 11-12 November. I wish you the best of luck in thinking through your lean plans for next year. 

Yours sincerely
Professor Daniel T Jones

Eliminating Failure Demand

Lean Thinkers never take the current state for granted. For example, rather than optimising the flow of products through a bottleneck process, they think hard about how to design right-sized equipment to insert in the value stream and eliminate the bottleneck. Similarly, instead of taking gyrating orders from customers for granted and buffering themselves against them, they know from experience that most of this volatility can be eliminated by working with customers to redesign and smooth the order flow. 

The same thinking is needed when leaning office processes – ranging from call centres dealing directly with end customers to administrative processes supporting the shop floor. The starting point is not how to standardise and industrialise current processes. Instead lean thinkers ask questions about the type of demand they are dealing with? In particular, they ask how much time is spent dealing with problems that arise because the process itself is broken. The usual answer: A lot! 

We heard a great example of this at our Lean Service Summit in Amsterdam in June. A division of Fujitsu Services offers customer and technical support services for large organisations. It keeps equipment and systems working by operating help desks for employees and their customers. Many of these customer and technical support activities have been moving offshore to low wage locations. 

Fujitsu was convinced there is another way to think about this. Instead of worrying about reducing the cost per call answered, they analyse the reasons people are calling. A majority of the calls are, what Fujitsu calls, “failure” demand. They are only necessary because the system or the process is broken and fails to deliver. 

To test this simple hypothesis in your own experience, just think about the last time you tried to get help from a help desk – whether internal or external. Why were you ringing? (Surely you had something better to do!) Did they manage to help you in a way that the problem wouldn’t recur? Was this a satisfying experience? For most of us, we did have something better to do, the problem was not permanently solved, and the experience was frustrating. 

Because these experiences are so widespread, Fujitsu set to work to understand the underlying causes of “failure” demand and how to eliminate it. Typically, their experienced people could quickly track the root causes and redesign the system to remove them. And then the calls fell away! 

What Fujitsu also learnt by analysing demand was a whole lot about what their callers were actually trying to do – about their underlying purpose – in using the software or hardware in question. This gave Fujitsu the opportunity to think about new ways in which systems could be developed to provide additional value for callers, a terrific benefit for the organisations they serve.

Other help desk operators have steered clear of this approach in the belief that their business would disappear. But Fujitsu has got plaudits and a growing stream of work by making both the end users of the systems and their designers of the systems happy. It’s a win-win-win. 

These principles apply to whatever processes you are operating. Just take a look at your activities and ask how much time you and your colleagues are spending on “failure” demand and the consequences for your customers. The shop floor got the “right first time on time” message years ago. It is now time for offices to follow suit. 

Once you can see your “actual” demand (total demand less “failure” demand) – and in the process learn who the customers for your office process really are - you are ready to identify the different categories of need and the steps you carry out to meet them. It may make sense to separate different types of needs and handle them separately. For example you may need to separate the routine, easy-to-process tasks from the messy exceptions. It will also be important to look at your activities by frequency and by volume. It will then be apparent which activities are amenable to standardisation.

You are now ready to embark on your lean process redesign, creating your current state map and working step by step to achieve your future state. Office processes are different in several respects, which need to be taken into account when redesigning the value stream: Process steps are not easy to see and no one can see the whole process from start to finish. Work rarely goes as planned and right first time is very low. Total elapsed time is very long and there are many handoffs. It is hard to see the root causes of waste and it is hard to track progress and problems as they happen. But – and this is the most important insight - they are processes just like production – a series of steps that must be performed correctly in the proper sequence to create the right value for the customer every time. 

There are also a lot of misunderstandings about standardising work in the office and fears that standardisation will stifle creativity. (We heard the same laments in the factory years ago, where they proved groundless.) Identifying and standardising the many routine, repeatable steps and the handoffs between them enables the routine process to run smoothly. This frees up time for creativity in responding to individual customer needs or designing new ways to create value for them. This is the real outlet for creativity and leads directly to better employee satisfaction along with more secure jobs.

Every organisation is a collection of processes, serving internal or external customers. Many of these office and service processes have hardly been touched so far. This is one of the great opportunities in the years ahead, and one that will have a significant bearing on future living standards in countries like the UK. 

You can read more about the Fujitsu example on the articles page of our revised web site www.leanuk.org, where you will also find the report on the Lean Service Summit. I shall also be discussing these issues in more detail at the Manufacturer Live event in Telford on 15th September; maybe I will see you there. 

Yours sincerely
Professor Daniel T Jones

Learning to See Demand

Just how old is the information you are acting on today? How many days ago was the order triggered that you are now producing? And how many days ago did the customer ring up about the problem you are now fixing?  I recently come across two striking examples where the delays in passing  the information upstream were substantially longer than the time it took  to make and ship the product or to solve the customers’ problem. As we  streamline our physical processes so we expose the many problems in our  information processes.  

Even with today’s pervasive data processing and communications the  information process is as gummed up as it has ever been. Mapping your  information flow will reveal a spaghetti diagram far worse than the shop  floor! And one thing we know about information is that the older it is the  less useful and even misleading it becomes.

What we do not see as clearly is that these delays cost money and really  frustrate our customers. We (and they) are paying for the extra buffer  stocks and the excess capacity you have to keep, for the time your managers and staff spend expediting and chasing and for the lost sales and discounts to clear unwanted products.

What we also do not recognise is that it obscures our view of true customer demand and is the biggest obstacle to dropping the gains from lean to the bottom line. We kid ourselves that we can make progress with lean while ignoring the need to redesign the information flow from our customers and within our own organisation.

The knee jerk reaction is to buy a new IT system. Many who have been through the pain of installing a new ERP system know this is not necessarily the answer! Lean thinkers start by asking some fundamental questions about the current process before deciding what IT support is needed.

A good starting point is to really understand your demand – to learn to distinguish between “actual” demand, “created” demand and “failure” demand (which we will return to in the future). At each link in the chain towards your final customer you ought to be able to identify what they actually needed to solve their problem or to fulfil orders from their customers. Compare this with the orders they sent upstream to you and you will see big discrepancy – the sign all clearly contains a lot more noise than the pure “actual” demand signal. 

Toyota calls this “created” demand and it has many causes. Some of it might be caused by your customer using up spare cash at the end of a budgeting period and some may be caused by your marketing staff offering discounts to make their numbers. But most of the noise is created by all the batching, delays and handoffs in the information flow between the customers’ point of use and your point of production. This will be amplified by pervasive errors in your data and the just-in-case factors built into the algorithms in your software. And the noise is even worse if your product passes through several warehouses before reaching your customer.

In other words this noise is mostly due to the way the information system works and not because customer use of your product is inherently volatile. In other words it is something we can do something about - we do not have to take chaotic demand signals for granted! 

The lean thinkers answer is not big centralised systems designed to optimise each activity in isolation – production, transport, distribution etc. Instead they separate production and shipping instructions from materials and capacity planning. They cut the number of decision points to one and replenish exactly what was sold frequently and often. This removes most of the signal noise and optimises the flow of the whole system rather than each operation. And it is simple and foolproof and any deviations can be spotted and responded to as they happen. 

This is exactly what Toyota does all the way up their parts distribution system. After many years work Tesco and some of their suppliers are also close to triggering production and shipping in response to continuous, real time data from their sales tills. 

Yours sincerely
Professor Daniel T Jones

Beyond the Lean Tool Box

Returning from a visit to Germany I was struck how far ahead we are in the UK. There is now little argument that lean is the way forward and most large manufacturers in the UK and the USA are now running a lean initiatives. In Germany the auto industry is still reeling from wasted years trying to grow by acquisition and to compete by stuffing their cars with every conceivable technology. Neither worked.

Indeed Daimler Chrysler is now trying desperately to simplify the technology in the next generation vehicles and it’s chairman recently warned that Toyota was about to make another assault on the European market. They now recognise that Toyota’s brilliant processes have given it a decisive edge in world markets and that it is the benchmark they need to follow.

We have lived with Toyota in our midst for well over a decade and there is a growing pool of people with hands on experience of TPS in the UK. Add to this the success of the Manufacturing Advisory Service in alerting smaller manufacturers to lean and you have a good foundation for increased competitiveness in the UK. However there is no room for complacency – we now need to step up a gear in implementing lean.

Going round the UK I still find that most of the lean initiatives are led from the bottom up by operations people. And most of the training courses run by in-company Lean Academies are still about lean tools. Almost all the focus is on the shop floor – when many of the impediments to lean are now to be found in the support processes in the office. While I see lots of current state value stream maps, there are too few future state maps with Value Stream Plans to implement them. I have not yet seen Value Stream Plans, rather than departmental budgets, being used as the key building block for allocating resources in the business as a whole. 

In my view lean now needs to be led from the top and driven by business objectives enshrined in Value Stream Plans for every primary and supporting process in the organisation. The in-house Lean Academies ought to be teaching product line (or value stream) managers a second layer of knowledge about how to reconfigure the entire order-to-delivery-to-cash system for every product line and how to redesign the next generation product and process in the light of the lean lessons learnt. 

System and Flow Kaizen starts by asking the right questions of the current state revealed in the value stream map, in order to design a future state. The objective is to see what has to be done to be able to produce exactly in line with customer demand and to trigger production on the basis of levelled demand directly from the customer’s point of use. This in turn depends on choosing the right place to locate the pacemaker process with the right amount of standard inventory. This in turn depends on achieving operational stability (capability, availability and flexibility) in each step in the process. When this is assured you can combine operations into cells and pull just what you need from every upstream step. 

Only by asking these system level questions can you drive actions and select the right tools to get you closer to a Toyota-level future state. This is also the only way to be able to disconnect your MRP system as a production instruction tool, keeping it only for capacity and materials planning as demand trends change.

Once the Value Stream Plans are in place it becomes clear what level of resources are required to achieve them from across the business – from production control, operations, engineering, maintenance, material handling, logistics, purchasing, finance, human resources and the lean romotion office. It is top management’s job to lead a policy deployment process to prioritise the resources to implement the Value Stream Plans and to align them with the overall needs of the business.

We may have been talking about lean a lot longer than the German manufacturers. However they are now in deeper economic trouble than we are and the rise of Toyota in Europe will erode their remium price position in the car market. They are beginning to realise drastic action is called for. We can not rest on our laurels. It is time to move beyond lean as a box of tools and Point Kaizen to the next level of lean – to Flow and System Kaizen. We now have the complete set of action learning workbooks (and workshops) to teach System Kaizen in production. This is what every company spiring to be lean should be doing and teaching right now. 

Yours sincerely
Professor Daniel T Jones

How Lean Are You?

I am often asked, how does a company know how lean they are? My answer is always, not by looking over your shoulder at your competitors or by counting the number of Kaizen events you have run. Instead ask yourselves seven basic questions.

The first uncomfmtable question is how much you disappoint your customers? How many quality defects and missed and incomplete deliveries occurred recently? How often did you ship too early to make your numbers and offload your inventories on your customers? Near zero defects and deliveries are not only possible, they are now expected. It is almost impossible to achieve 100% correct and on time when you are still doing lots of rework, holding mountains of finished goods and relying on expedited shipments to get you out of trouble.

The second question is what has happened to your door-to-door throughput time and inventories? Have they been falling steadily since you began your lean initiative? Have they led to falling unit costs? If not then you are not doing lean!

The scale of the oppmtunity is revealed by comparing the few minutes of value creating time with the days or weeks it takes for products to travel through your plant. After an initial honeymoon when you discover lots of low hanging waste, fmther progress depends on reconfiguring both your production process and the incoming order and scheduling process that triggers it.

The oppmtunities for action are revealed by mapping your processes and calculating the standard inventmy at each point. Standard inventmy comprises the Cycle Stock to meet average demand (batch size and lead time), the Buffer Stock to meet fluctuations in customer orders (demand volatility and forecast errors) and the Safety Stock to cover you against upstream failures (availability and quality losses).

The third question is what are you doing to lean your production and scheduling processes? Do you level orders? In other words do you have a harbour wall to protect your internal operations from ocean storms, whether self-inflicted or created by your customers? Do you pass these levelled orders on regularly and frequently to one pacemaker process? Depending on whether you ship finished goods from your pacemaker or build to order from a pacemaker located fmther upstream, is everything upstream from the pacemaker pulled from it, including from your key suppliers? Downstream, does the product flow directly to the customer's point of use without being waylaid in several warehouses? If the answers are no, then you need to map your processes and learn how to reconfigure them using lean principles.

The fourth question is whether you are using lean to improve your office processes and cut overheads as well as direct costs? Firms are just wa king up to the potential for redesigning every office process using lean principles.

The fifth question is how are you planning to use the freed up time, equipment and space from your lean activities? The real oppmtunity from going lean is to be able to do considerably more work with the same resources at almost no additional cost. What will it take to generate this extra work? Or how are you going to handle the need to reduce headcount without bringing your lean efforts to a halt?

The sixth question is whether you have the management systems in place for a lean transformation? Is top managements' heart really into leading this? Is someone responsible for reconfiguring each product value stream through your facility? Is there are an active policy deployment process based on these value stream plans to prioritise and resource them? Is there a common language across the whole organisation for seeing processes and for root-cause problem solving?

The final question relates to the biggest opportunity of all - the future. What would you have to do to deliver the next generation product with enhanced functionality at 30% lower costs than your cunent product? This is what Toyota is cunently targeting their Chief Engineers! Usingyour lean experience, how could you redesign the next generation product to remove unnecessary operations? What new technologies and equipment would be required and which new suppliers? Maybe it is time to make this the end goal of your lean transformation.

Yours sincerely
Professor Daniel T Jones

Lean Allies in the Office

Everywhere I go it is increasingly obvious that lean cannot progress in operations alone. Once you begin to straighten out your physical flows you have to involve all the supporting processes in the offices. You need a production control system that can pass levelled orders quickly to your pacemaker process and on to your suppliers, a process that can collect and pay bills on time and a recruitment process that can get the right people in time, etc. etc.

The good news is that these processes are often more broken than operations and the gains from straightening them using lean principles are even greater. This is not surprising because they have subject to less detailed analysis than operations, they typically operate in batch and queue mode and the process is not very visible. It is easy to hide waste and to resist standard work.

However getting the offices involved can also be a very powerful way of capturing the attention of top management. Everywhere operations complain that top management pays too little attention to their lean improvement activities. They are always fighting for attention and support.

This route to attracting top management support was brought home to me during a visit to review a lean manufacturing programme in a large multi- national firm. After a day listening to very good, but frankly rather tedious reports about progress being made in plants across the world, the meeting finally came to life when someone from corporate office described some pilot lean projects they were doing in their centralised office support functions.

He told a stunning story about how an office team, with some expert help, had transformed the process for paying suppliers. Now incoming invoices were more accurate, payment approval was quicker and on time and they were no longer getting any calls from irate managers whose plant was about to be shut down because a supplier had not been paid. This touched everyone in the room. It was a breath of fresh air!

However the real significance was that these lean office, pilot projects were being led by someone with a finance and strategy background. A background shared by most of their senior managers. By quantifying the gains from this pilot and extrapolating them across this rest of the corporation, with offices across the globe, he was easily able to get top managers to listen to his stories. Indeed they became so enthusiastic that they are already planning the systematic deployment of lean across every office function in the company – from sales and marketing to purchasing, from finance to human resources and from engineering to product development. 

His other very interesting comment, when asked how difficult it was to translate lean from the shop floor to the office was: “The more you learn to see the office process, the more it looks very similar to any other process.” Indeed the main differences are all about learning to see – to see who is the customer, what steps create value and where all the waste is hidden. Once you can see you can ask the right questions and build a business case for change. Only then do you reach for the right tools and create standard work etc. 

But mapping the office process is not enough. You also need to spend some time figuring out who the customers for this process really are and what they really want. What is their definition of value? In many cases it is that the process itself is invisible and they never have to worry about chasing it! So a key objective is to understand the difference between real demand and what might be called failure demand - all the staff time on both sides spent in chasing the broken process! 

One of the first gains from straightening out the office process is that you eliminate the causes for this failure demand. Because it is not supposed to happen the cost is hidden in overheads. The only place it is really visible is in the stress level of your staff! Eliminating failure demand allows them to happily get on with the job they should be doing. Maybe it is time to look for some allies to plant some lean seeds in your offices?

Yours sincerely

Professor Daniel T Jones

Lean Beyond Manufacturing

One of the strongest reasons for supporting manufacturing is because it is the prime source of leading edge management skills. Designing an aeroplane with millions of parts and assembling three thousand parts into an automobile every sixty seconds are still the some of the most complex management tasks in the economy. No surprise then that the retail industry and indeed our military have learnt how to manage complex logistics from manufacturing. And manufacturing and logistics also pose the biggest challenges to software systems designers.

Despite concerns about the offshore drift of manufacturing we still have some excellent examples of lean manufacturing on our doorstep. One of the best things the UK government has done in recent years is to encourage other manufacturers in the UK to learn and emulate their success. There is no doubt that the Manufacturing Advisory Service has triggered awareness of how lean can improve the competitiveness of many smaller firms. There is still a lot to be done, and it would be a great mistake not to continue to support it.

However it is equally true that no manufacturer is an island. Every one is part of several extended value streams reaching from raw materials through distribution to the end customer. Lean is about producing to customer demand, rather than to forecasts, right the way up the value stream, not just in each factory. Indeed the biggest challenge facing today ’ s manufacturers in no longer on the shop floor. It is in managing the orders up and down the value stream and streamlining all the processes in the office. Indeed in our experience the opportunities for improving office processes are even greater than on the shop floor.

In this regard manufacturing is no different from banks and insurance companies. It is therefore not surprising that financial services, healthcare, construction and even public services are all looking to manufacturing to lean about lean thinking. Yes, lean has to be modified to suit the peculiarities of each of these sectors, as it has to for different kinds of manufacturing - from autos and aerospace to food and pharmaceuticals to custom designed machinery. However the principles are the same, and many of the lessons about reconfiguring processes are too.

In this light maybe it is time to turn the Manufacturing Advisory Service into a Business Advisory Service, encouraging the spread of lean knowledge to all corners of the economy. You heard it here first! This might also go some way towards joined-up business support, rather than seeing MAS as a sop to keep lame-duck manufacturing happy.

To rise to this challenge, the excellent cadre of lean experts recruited by MAS will need to deepen and broaden their skills and experience. Spending time helping small firms get started down the lean path inevitable cramps their style and ends up focusing their efforts on applying tools as a wake up call to the true potential of lean.

Lean does not start with tools, but with the reasons for using them. It starts at a higher level by understanding real customer demand, not the amplified demand being passed up the value stream. And it entails fundamentally reconfiguring the physical flow of products through and beyond the plant. This takes real leadership and a systematic way to reorganise the information and product flows, plus all the supporting processes like production control, maintenance and training.

Toyota has been developing its Lean Business System for 50 years. It is time we all moved into third gear. And it is time for manufacturers to help spread lean across the rest of the economy, in their own interest! A prosperous and competitive economy, not just manufacturing, is the key to their survival and growth over the next decade.

Yours sincerely

Professor Daniel T Jones