by Lee Fried, on 28 Oct 2007 03:34 pm
The Journey
Quote of the Week
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act, but a habit.” –Aristotle
I chose this week’s quote in response to a management report-out that I attended this last week in the Model Line area. The report-out marked the conclusion of a five day, intensive, design workshop where the team of managers and supervisors were charged with designing standard work for the Daily Management system. More importantly, it was the first time on our Lean journey where we have been able to design standard work for supervisors, managers and directors. In my opinion this event represents a very important milestone for our organization on it’s Lean journey. Let me try and provide some background information and explain why.
Over the last eight months we have been focused on implementing standard work across all 85 work teams in the Model Line area. As we have implemented standard work processes within teams have realized significant improvement in quality, cycle time and reliability. At the same time we have begun to shift the culture from one focused on individual accountability’s and results to one focused on team accountability’s and root cause finding.
Most team have embraced this new way of working, but supervisors and managers throughout the organization have struggled with the requirements of their new roles. In the old world they spent most of their time in their offices making decisions and coordinating cross-functional problem solving. In the new world their job is to manage improvement from the Gemba, empower teams to make decisions and to teach team members standard work and problem solving. They are the owners of the check and adjust cycle.
The role changes have been so significant it has taken its toll on the leadership team and we needed to make some adjustments. Our countermeasure was to focus on applying the same principles and methods of standard work as we have with the front-line teams. We needed to create standard work for the entire leadership team right down to level of detailed that they now will be able to know exactly what they need to do every hour of the day to ensure that their operation is running smoothly and continuing to improve.
During the report-out the team shared their new visual management systems, including a “Daily Kaizen” board to monitor and promote improvement; a Kamishiabi board to facilitate the hourly checking process; as well as a production board to monitor plan vs. actual on an hourly basis. Additionally, the team has designed an Andon process that was very cleaver for a administrative environment. All the standard work was recorded on job breakdown sheets and easy to follow as well as spread to other teams.
As the end of the report-out the team role played for the entire management team a “day in the life” scenario for managers and supervisors. It was a powerful display of what is possible if management applies the same principles to their work as they ask front-line teams to do.