DOES LEAN WORK IN REAL LIFE

by Beth Crowley

Early in my career, a mentor shared his method for identifying waste in a manufacturing environment over dinner one night. “Find the laziest person who is still meeting the production rate,” he said. “Then watch him, because he’s got it all figured out.” Across various environments, facilities and industries, I found the laziest (or perhaps smartest) person where the work was being done and I observed how he or she did the work. Inevitably, that person, let’s call her Carol, had an organized, well-stocked work area and/or toolbox. Carol knew exactly where everything that she needed was, and she followed a standard routine that was rarely deviated from. Unless she came up with a better way—a way to be faster, safer, or more defect-free—and the new way became her routine. Repeat. No one had talked to Carol about Value Stream Mapping or 5S, yet she intuitively identified and eliminated wasted time and energy in her day. Without coaching, Carol permanently resolved issues and worked “smarter, not harder.” I started to wonder: why is it easy for Carol to see waste? Why has continuous improvement always seemed like common sense to me? I challenged myself to figure out how that happened and then to apply it everywhere.

I come to Operations and Continuous Improvement naturally. My paternal grandfather graduated from the Henry Ford Trade School and was a faculty member there from 1925-1941. When automotive companies were tasked with making aircraft for the war, he was appointed General Foreman of Engine Parts Machining & Assembly at the Ford River Rouge Aircraft Engine Plant. According to my Aunt Betty, who was a teenager at the time, “they switched from cars to aircraft in record time” to produce engines for the B24 Liberator bombers made at Willow Run. She also explained that when she was growing up, her dad kept a duplicate set of tools in each bathroom so that he “always had what he needed.” My grampa died when I was 7 and I only have a faint memory of him, but I have a pair of scissors and a box of Kleenex in every room in my house. Nature or nurture? Aunt Betty had 13 children and 13 steps on the staircase up to the bedrooms. If Aunt Betty set clean clothes on the bottom step, her youngest knew those clean clothes belonged to her and her job was to take her clothes upstairs on the next trip. After this conversation with my aunt, it became clear to me: many people practice Lean Thinking every day without realizing it. There are certain universal experiences, like completing a DIY home project, in which you can find examples of Lean Thinking that are relatable to most people. A collection of these everyday stories, woven into discussions about lead time reduction, just might be the way to convince people to give Continuous Improvement in the workplace a try. Here are a few of those stories.

Everyday Lean: Keep It Flowing

Have you ever been stuck in traffic? Of course you have! And while you’re sitting there, patiently waiting to make a left turn across two oncoming lanes without a traffic light, you’re thinking, “this is a waste of time, let’s get moving!” Think about malls and other retail areas on Saturday mornings - everyone is running errands. After grocery shopping, buying a birthday gift, and picking up the dry cleaning, my next priority is maximizing the time on the couch with the remote control (we all need a little downtime). In order to get back to the couch quickly, I plan my route by maximizing right turns, avoiding high-traffic streets/areas, and taking the road less traveled.

Taiichi Ohno, widely considered the Father of TPS, famously said, “all we’re trying to do is shorten the timeline.” When I plan my Saturday morning route, I plan ahead to shorten the timeline (lead time) and keep flowing toward my goal (the couch).

Everyday Lean: Do More With Less

Do you use your stairs as a holding area for objects that need to go up or down? Based on my non-scientific polling, most of us do. We’re not going to waste our limited energy, and someone will need to go up or down at some point & they’ll take it with them.

In manufacturing & warehousing environments, how many times does a forklift drive by with nothing on the forks? At a machine shop client, the Quality Manager’s desk faces a wall-sized window toward the factory. One morning I was waiting to chat with him, so I sat and watched the activity through the window. After a few minutes I casually asked, “how many times a day does a forklift go by with nothing on the forks?” His immediate answer was “ALL DAY.” We started our “No Empty Forks” campaign that afternoon, making moves to point-of-use faster without increasing resources/labor costs.

Do you ever wonder how many of the big trucks hovering over you on the highway are full? If they’re empty, returning to where they started (while incurring cost with no associated revenue), does that seem like a waste? Many companies have focused on minimizing the number of miles traveled with an empty truck. Backhauls get filled through implementing milk runs or outsourcing the process to logistics service providers.

Traveling may seem glamorous but doing it on a weekly basis is exhausting. On long consulting projects, you often return to the same hotel every week and the staff becomes like family. A Road Warrior’s life consists of packing, unpacking, and lugging stuff to and from the airport. Talking with a more experienced colleague decades ago, my mind was completely blown when he said, “why don’t you have the hotel wash your clothes over the weekend? They’ll be in the closet of your hotel room when you return.” What? That’s an option? It may have added to my cost, but it allowed me to eliminate the need to check a bag on flights, cutting my time (& aggravation) at the airport twice each week. A short time later, I started leaving a toiletry bag at the hotel over the weekends, further decreasing the amount of time & energy it took to return the following week. I call that Continuous Improvement!

Everyday Lean: Standards Don’t Stifle Creativity

Did you ever wonder why (or how) a Big Mac in Oregon tastes EXACTLY THE SAME as a Big Mac in North Carolina, or Idaho, or Texas? The food service workers in North Carolina have never met the ones in Idaho, and yet the products look and taste the same. There’s only one way to make that happen: they use the same routine, the same ingredients, the same timing, and the same heating method at every location. The process is documented with pictures and text describing each step in creating the perfect Big Mac. Why? Because a consistent process yields a consistent result. When I teach this concept to Business School undergraduates, I replace the word “result” with any process output: a consistent process yields consistent cost, quality, taste, timing, appearance, functionality, etc. Without standards and processes, the expectation of a consistent Big Mac would rarely be met.

Standards give teams a place to start, a line in the sand, a baseline from which to improve. Taiichi Ohno also said, “without standards, there can be no improvement.” Consider a Pit Stop during a NASCAR race. Every activity is monitored to 1/10 of a second, and each second matters because when the car is stopped, it is not moving toward the goal (the Finish Line). A Pit Crew practices their stops over and over because 1/10 second might be the difference between winning and losing a race. How would the team know if they were improving if they didn’t have a standard to compare their practice times to?

I mentioned earlier that I come to a Lean Mindset naturally, through my dad’s family and the automotive industry. Would you believe that as an adult, I learned this skill also comes to me through my mom’s side of the family? For decades while I was growing up, my mom volunteered to count election ballots in my hometown. The volunteers would start counting after the polls closed and work through the night. In the early years, we didn’t see my mom until the following day. After a few years, she moved up the volunteer ranks and became a Team Captain. After a few more years, she started having a pre-election planning meeting with her team, giving each team member roles and responsibilities and answering questions ahead of time so that on Election Night they could get right to work. They also held a post-Election meeting to talk about what worked and what didn’t and to create an improved process (standard) for the next year.

You probably can guess where this is going. Every year she got home a little earlier, but as it was in the middle of the night, we didn’t really notice. One year she walked in while my dad & I were watching the 11 pm news. I remember we both looked at her, confused, until my dad said, “what are you doing here?”, to which (of course) she replied, “I live here.” We still laugh about that. Over the years, that Ballot Counting Team decreased their timeline by 75%. Their reward was a good night’s sleep.

Everyday Lean: Steal Shamelessly!

Lean thinking includes being generous in sharing the lessons that you have learned with others. Either Picasso or Oscar Wilde said something close to “Talent borrows, genius steals”. As such, take these stories and make them your own! Consider your activities or routines that fit into the concept of lean thinking and use them to encourage others to be open to new ideas. One of my favorites is the Sunday night routine, everyone has one and they don’t realize it is a process until you point it out to them.

In Conclusion

Breaking down resistance to change happens when your audience can relate to the story that you’re telling. If you’re speaking in abstracts with unfamiliar language (ex: six sigma, lead time reduction) to a group of people who work with their hands, your message may not get through. Instead, understand your audience and their perspective and craft your message using language and examples that make sense to them. Everyone has experienced traffic delays, fast food & the Sunday night blues. Leverage that knowledge when influencing people to embrace change and in the end, it just might save some of your own precious time and energy.

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Beth Crowley loves Coaching Organizations through Cultural Transformations! I have a

passion for Operations and Continuous Improvement & I thoroughly enjoy the opportunities and challenges of the journey. Beth worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies, guiding them on the path to better effectiveness of their people & processes.

Experience & Expertise includes: Lean Leadership, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, Change Management, Project Management, Training Development & Facilitation, Public Speaking, Value Stream Optimization, Leadership Coaching, Operational Excellence, Process Improvement, Waste Elimination, Operational Assessments, ProgramManageme nt, Strategy Development & Implementation, Train-the-Trainer, Continuous Improvement (Kaizen) Event Planning & Execution.