DailyKaizen

Once again Genie Industries has exceed my expectations.  During yesterday’s tour we had the opportunity to view their “Model Line” as well as another production line and their service parts area.  After the tour the leadership group gathered to discuss what they had seen as well as the implications for how they manage.   The team highlighted several key takeaways including:

1. Managers at Genie only meet for 10 minutes per day.
2. At Genie they shut the plant down and then do 45 minutes of Kaizen every single day.
3. Flexibility in people and process are key to a LEAN system.
4. Human resources, IT and other support departments are decentralized and allocated to support the Value Stream and not the function.
5. You cannot have breakthrough improvement unless processes are in control and standardized.  Thus the right to innovate comes after you have done the basics.
6. Make everything visible.
7. Managers are empowered to solve problems and make improvements on behalf of the customer without having to go through a long permission processes.
8. Manual and simple often trump automated and complex.

 Tomorrow the group will take these learning’s into our first Hoshin Planning process.  Our goal for this session is to transition our leader’s thinking from functional to Value Stream.  Leaders will be asked to let go of long standing principles and practices.  I am glad we went to Genie first.