by Lee Fried, on 18 May 2008 02:19 pm
The Journey | Tags: Daily Management , Hoshin Kanri , Standard Work
Today’s Work Today
On Friday afternoon I received an interesting phone call from a gentlemen that I met this last spring at the Lean Enterprise Institute annual summit. He has been following our journey on the blog and because our organizations are so similar in our business and experience he wanted to see if we could find ways so share knowledge, site visits and other learning’s. This is one of the reasons I love the Lean community so much, because Lean people are so focused on learning from others and sharing what they have learned.
After agreeing to look for opportunities we spent more then an hour talking about where our organizations are and where they are coming from. It blew me away how similar we are, even though we are in completely different industries (healthcare vs. banking). They began their journey a few years earlier then we did, started a Model Line and are now adopting Hoshin Kanri, aligning around Value Streams and putting in a Daily Management System. He shared a story about his organization’s focus on “getting today’s work done today”, a strategy they have recently adopted organization wide that has led to break through performance to everyone’s surprise. After hearing this part of the story I asked if I could share what he told me on the blog and got the green light.
The focus on Today’s work Today began a year and half ago after the organization had completed its first year of developing A3’s and deploying Hoshin’s and came out of the reflection process. After the first year of Hoshin they realized that their processes were so unstable across their organization that attempting to realize breakthrough performance on an unstable platform was unrealistic and chaotic. They did not hit a single one of their targets. They needed to get the basics right first and standardize their processes. At the same time they realized that their biggest obstacle to stabilization was variation in demand coming in from supplier organizations which led teams across the organization to carry large amounts of inventory to buffer their labor. Thus Today’s work Today was born.
They decided to rollout a standard work program modeled after Toyota’s Daily Management System. When they realized how large an effort this would be they came to the conclusion that besides adding the new products that they had in the pipeline as an organizaton they had the capacity to do nothing else. This was a hard sell as the leadership table, because so many of the senior leaders had their own improvement strategies in process. There was also a deep concern that a decentralized effort could add up to a bunch of point improvements that did nothing to improve the whole. Despite these concerns they moved forward and all teams were provided training and the charge to reduce inventories, level demand and get today’s work done today.
After a year of focus, organization wide he told me that the results blew everyone away. Not only had cycle time come down drastically, defects had been reduced by 75% and productivity was up 15%. They had also grown a very important part of their business organically as customers realized they could get quicker turn arounds by doing business with this company. With standard work in place they have begun to figure out how to move team members across work units in response to demand, which he believes will save them millions next year. Most impressive he said was just how engaged the workforce had become. With a Daily Management system in place team members for the first time had a process where they could improve their work outside of an event.
The reason I wanted to tell this story is because it illustrates just how powerful small improvement can be on the whole when they are added up. It also illustrates that for organizations, like my own, that are early in their journey their is huge opportunity to be realized by just focusing on the basics and getting waste out of processes one by one. Grand strategies are not necessarily required to get grand results. I plan on acting on these learning’s!