3/19/2013
HEADLINES
PERSPECTIVE: Prompt Measuring Key to Creating A Lean Company
“You can’t improve without measuring,” lean consultant Kevin McManus of Great Systems told the Pacific-West Fastener Association.
Lean requires “100% customer focus,” McManus said. “Make what customers want, when they want it.”
Speaking to Pac-West on “The Real Upside of Lean: Strategies for Sustaining Process Excellence,” Oregon-based McManus recommended developing scorecards to track daily errors.
“Don’t wait for the accounting report at the end of the month.”
Measuring isn’t just to increase efficiency. There are limits to efficiency, McManus pointed out. “At some level service begins to decline as efficiency continues to increase.”
Many companies fail to define points where service slips away due to emphasis on efficiency.
Measuring is vital because “behaviors will change with tracking and reviewing. Feedback is motivation.”
Excerpts from McManus’ advice to Pac-West members:
• Conduct daily error and defect tracking: “Don’t wait until the end of the quarter to determine the top five errors. Don’t live with problems.”
• “Can you imagine waiting until the end of the month to check sports scores?”
• “Human error is rarely a root cause,” he observed. “Faulty systems account for 90% or more of errors. Few people really want to make mistakes.”
“At a minimum, all errors result in time loss,” yet too frequently error rates are unknown for most processes.
McManus urged tracking errors, assigning cause codes to each error and “fixing the root causes of errors.”
• “Design out defects, don’t just design detection.”
• Employees spotting a production problem should be able to stop the line and fix the problem rather than defects continuing until management can step in.
• Provide rewards such as lunch for hitting goals.
• Change from a reactive process to proactive, but realize that it takes training for employees to change. “No one can convert to proactive overnight.”
• After working 50 hours in one week, an employee may be functional, “but how functional?” Studies show cognitive skills drop after a human is awake for 20 hours, he added.
• “Every process owner should be responsible for tracking and trending process performance and process errors and defects on a regular basis, and for using that information to improve those processes,” McManus said.
The opposite is “waiting for bad things to happen before changing things,” he added.
McManus said scorecards and dashboards are vital to lean thinking.
• A lean layout design will include such details as the forklift routes in the plant.
• Have employees watch a NASCAR pit crew in action as a demonstration of quick changeover.
• “You can’t be excellent unless you get rid of waste,” McManus pointed out.
• McManus disagrees with managing by budget. Budget numbers come in lagging and improvements need to be made earlier.
• One goal is to “mistake proof key work systems.”
• Don’t rely on memory too much. “Give people memory joggers.”
• Sales people should be on profit sharing rather than commissions based on total sales.
• Give daily feedback. Create “green days, yellow days and red performance days.”
• Lean requires perfection and transparency. “There is no end to improvement,” McManus declared. ©2013 GlobalFastenerNews.com
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