Think out of the box

This week, stop for writing post for lean concept. We are going to look at a architectural-model. As we saw before, most of the architectural model are built on a base and you can study the outlook of the building easily. However, you can not study the internal details from the model.

There was an exhibition on view at the Guggenheim Museum, the models of Wright’s designs are attracting as much attention as the exhibition itself. Perhaps the most notable model is that of Wright’s Herbert Jacobs House #1 of 1936-37, the first of the architect’s pioneering open-plan, energy-efficient Usonian houses. This and the exhibition’s five other models were designed and made by Situ Studio.

The model were made different, and all the details of the house were hanging in the air. They are all attracting your eyeballs out of the other projects. Think out of the box, you can make everything differently and amazing. A common matter can be shined from your brain if you think it and make it different. The most important thing is you needed to know what is your customer want to know and see.

Lean consumption

I read an article about re-layout of a famous supermarket. She made an inscrutable decision to put the diaper and beer together in the same area, the configuration was not appeared in other supermarket before. This is not a joke and it happened in US Wal-Mart. People thinks that it is non-sense to put them together, however, the sales of both beer and diaper was growing much with the combination existed in the supermarket.

The fact is wifes are always "order" their husbands to buy diaper after they left office. The husbands are rushing to the supermarket on the way they are going back home. They are tired by all day works in office and they just want to spend their shortest time in the supermarket. The husbands have no time to walk through the whole huge area to seek the goods they needed in detail. When they arrive the area stored for diaper, they always bring some beer they like. Therefore, the husband is willing to shopping in Wal-Mart again, because they can bring some gifts for themselves during shopping.

The article was ended here with the words "it is a amazing combination! Diaper and Beer.", however, I think it can be explained in lean concept! Here is some lean consumption concept from the book "Lean solution - James Womack" for your reference.

Principles of lean consumption; the customer only thinks the items are value-added as below,

1. Can solve my problem entirely;

2. Do not waste my time (cost of consumption included the price of goods added the time I spent and the trouble I got during consumption);

3. Prepared the goods or service what I wanted;

4. Prepared the goods or service where I wanted;

5. Prepared the goods or service when I wanted;

6. Reduce the options for me to choose.

Yes, your wife is only needed diaper and you needed beer, the storage combination is preparing exactly what / where / when your family wants. It solved your problem and absolutly not waste your time. That's why the combination was success in US Wal-Mart, however, you have to remember that it was always shopping by your wife in family of Hong Kong. That may not work in Asia too. However, the most simple element is, create the value in the flow. The flow is the path from the entry to exit in the shortest distance of the supermarket. The stuffs you will pick is the value-added action for both supermarket and you. That's only a simple concept in lean but it can explain the story better than the words "amazing combination.....!"

Joke of leadership

I read a funny story about the leadership, hope to share with my reader and think about what is going to tell us in this story.

There was a skipper sailing his merchantman on the sea for long distance trading. Suddenly, a corsair approached his merchantman and the pirates shouted the skipper to stop. I don't where is the location and it has not mentioned in the story. May be it was near Somali in many hundreds years before.

At that dangerous moment, the skipper asked his sailers to take a red shirt for him, he put on the red shirt and fighted with pirates bravely. Finally, the skipper led his sailers to repel the attack from pirate, saminlar story of American captain...but I don't know is that Philips wore a red shirt or not!

A moment later, the skipper sailed at the same sea area again. The pirates appeared again, this time, there were two corsairs approached and double numbers of pirates came to pillage the merchantman. The skipper did the same thing as last time, asked his sailers to take his red shirt. The skipper put on the red shirt and led to fighted with the pirate bravely. The miracle happened again, the pirates were repelled with full of anger.

One year later, the skipper sailed at the same sea area. However, the pirates were waiting there for the skipper for a long time with well preparation. This time, ten corsairs came to the merchantman and prepared for killing. The skipper asked his sailers to take something for him. It was a yellow trousers, not a red shirt! The sailers wondered that why take a yellow trousers instead of red shirt. They took the yellow trousers to the skipper and asked, "Captain...why not a red shirt this time?", the skipper said, "Red shirt was used to cover my blood, you guys can fight without fear for my wounds."

The story was end here, I believed that you knew why the skipper asked for a yellow trousers.

Let's think about it, if we are leading something, it is not good to let the team member knew you got a trouble. The trouble would come from hostility from other departments, the delay of schedule or you just complained from your boss. However, let your members know your "wounds" is totally not a good idea. The same stories are not less mentioned in Chinese history. Yes, the communication with your team is always important, but the most important of the leader is let the members to know only what they needed to know. The members are not needed the information which is affected their morale, and a good leader is needed to lead the team in avoiding the team attacked by fears. Moreover, you can not bring your fears to your team.

Think about you did good or not good when you faced the trouble!

A3 Management

A3 Management

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At recent moment, I always found the term of A3 management in lean. I have no idea what is that once I heard that term, so I was searching the related information for further study. Finally, I found something but it is not so special for me but only its "name".

The term “A3” refers to an international-size piece of paper, one that is approximately 11-by-17 inches. Toyota’s insight many years ago was that every issue an organization faces can and should be captured on a single sheet of paper. This enables everyone touching the issue to see through the same lens. While the basic thinking for an A3 follows a common logic, the precise format and wording are flexible, and most organizations tweak the design to fit their unique requirements. The A3 is like a resume that can be adapted in layout, style and emphasis according to the person seeking the job and the type of job being sought. Practitioners can adapt the format to fit the requirements of each situation.

Let us see what are the items should be included in A3 form,

1. Title: Names problem, theme or issue;

2. Owner/Date: Identifies who “owns” the problem or issue and the date of the latest revision;

3. Background: Establishes the business context and importance of the issue;

4. Current Conditions: Describes what is currently known about the problem or issue;

5. Goals/Targets: The desired outcome;

6. Analysis: Analyzes the situation and the underlying causes that have created the gap between the current situation and the desired outcome;

7. Proposed Countermeasures: Proposes some corrective actions or countermeasures to address the problem, close the gap or reach a goal;

8. Plan: Prescribes an action plan of who will do what and when they will do it, in order to reach the goal; and

9. Follow-up: Creates a review/learning process and anticipates remaining issues.

For myself, I found nothing special for that compared with our kaizen presentation or report. However, I still promoted the tools because it has the benefit for,

1. Easy to share, you can post the A3 form anywhere because it is not so big in size but included everything you need on it. For the normal kaizen report, people liked to make it as heavy as they can to show their effort spent on it. It is not lean!

2. Easy to keep record, one file holder can store hundred of the report and good for the people to review and update of it.
3. Clear stream of thinking in problem solving, it stated everything we need to consider in problem solving by sequences. We would not missed anything when we are going to improve the target.

Offcause, you can use A4 if you can write so small and the others can see clear what you wrote. On the other hand, you also can make it in A0 so that the others can read it like a map and feel sick in front of it. Altough, it is nothing special but it is a good way we should follow, because it is one kind of lean concept apply in documentation.

The difference between expert and technician

I read a story and motivated me to think about the structure of kaizen project, share with you as below,

There are two hotels located in a famous beauty sport and they made a same curved slope in front of the gate to let the car moving near for their guests. In winter, most of the time, snow falled on the slope and melted to be a thin ice coating on the slope. It was dangerous the guests to walk on the slope and their guest are always slipped on there.

One of the hotel organized a kaizen team with many authority in building, service and proprieties. After a few days of brain-storming, the team made a solution by a infra-red detection system for temperature. When the temperature falls to a stated range, the salt water will spray on the slope to melt the ice in avoiding the guest slipping. It was a high-tech solution and it worked, but the hotel spent many ten thousand of RMB for that facility.

There was another hotel in 5 km far from that, and she has the same problem. The boss of that hotel shouted to the lobby manager, "If I see the guests slipped on the slope, you will be fired in no time!" The manager found a technician to fix that problem, the technician started to use a chisel to cut many light delves on the slope. The outlook of th slope has bot been damaged but the delves prevented the people slipping on it. The problem was also fixed and the manager gave 30 RMB to the technician. The technician went home happily.

Think about your kaizen team, ask youself what kind of members your want? Experts or technicians? Therefore, I formed the kaizen team with a mixed function. In my experiance, the worker or operators always gave us a in-expensive but feasible solution.

A "addition" is always gaving you a waste, A "subtraction" solution is always gaving you a real solution. That's is the lean concept.

Learning organization

Information from Wikipedia - learning organization

Motivation of learning organization came from the pressure. The companies are facing two ways of pressure, from internal and external. External pressure came from the business environment change and the innovation of technology. Internal pressure came from the issues of internal operation system and management methodology. To create a competitive advantage, companies need to be able to learn faster than their competitors and also develop a customer responsive culture. On the other hand, they need to correct their internal issues and elminate the wastes in their process. For this post, I would like to discuss more about the learning organization to face internal pressure, and this kind of culture is also part of the lean manuafcturing culture.

In order to form a learning organization, for all employee should promote their self-reflection. This is the basic element of learning organization. Similar to the lean spirit, everything needs continuous improvement, and the attitude of self-relfection is the part of the mindset of continuous improvement. We can do better! Ask youself, "where is the room for further improvement?" If we think everything is alright, is the best, there is no motivation for improvement anyway.

In the organization, we need to execute the policy deployment to align the goal of everybody. The learning organization can only exists when most of the people have the same vision and same objective for working. With this sense, they can share their knowledge and experiance supported by some knowledge management system in IT. Otherwise, all the effort we spent on improvement is only a short term solution. The only way to solve the internal problem is well implement the standardization, and the standardization is also a part of learning organization because the others can learn and study how to solve the old problem from the document of standardization.

With the self-relfection attitude and common vision of grow, the company needs some tools to dig out and solve the issue. It is a very important tools in lean concept for problem solving, do you remember? Yes, the 5 whys analysis. At this moment, we got the preliminary solution from 5 whys analysis, we also need the Deming cycle to make sure the follow up the actions and fine tune the answer according to the situation until the problem is solved in long term. They are always using the A3 report to summarize all the information, the report will be used as the material for standardization and training material for the organization.

In lean concept, the learning organization is more focusing on learning from the mistakes. The knowledge and experiance is generated from the problem we solved before. The most important elements of learning organization is self-reflection, 5 whys analysis, Deming cycle and policy deployment. If we miss anyone of these, the learning organization can not be well implement.

Let me know if you find I missed something, and welcome for any comments. Thanks!

Pay by piece counting

Last week, I was pleasure to talk with a lean consultant in garment industry and learned so much from his experiance. One topic we discussed related the salary of operator counted by piece they made and I want to share some ideas from this post.

In 70's of Hong Kong, most of the manufacturing industries paid the workers by piece count. Especially, it was common in garment and light industry such as toys and plastic parts assmebly process. In that golden years of manufacturing industry of Hong Kong, this kind of salary scheme was an important factor of success.

In aimed at fully utilize of abandon labor and improve flexibility of capacity, at that period, there were many housewifes stayed in their home to take care of their children. The economics environment is not well growth of Hong Kong citizen, the housewifes needed to earn some money to support their family but they also needed to stay in home to take care of their children. Therefore, so many factories sent the material to the housewifes and let them to make the sub-assembly in their home, they were paid by piece counting because they are not doing the job in factory and hard to count the pay by hour. They only needed to use a common sartorius or some simple tools, they can start the production in their home in spare time but not affect their duty in family.

Excluding the transportation cost of material delivery to the housewifes, piece counting meant the pay of labor fixed. That also meant the total labor cost of the product was fixed, the factory only needed to quality control the sub-assembly and the management of delivery. In that many years, the labor cost of manufacturing was under a well control and the competance was improved.

But in the meanwhile, we always asked a question, "Is the piece counting pay conflict with lean maufacturing?"

As we known, lean manufacturing concept is using to reduce the wastes in process flow in order to reduce the cost. If we pay the operators in piece counting, we can not improve the labor cost by reduce the wastes because the labor cost is fixed. In lean concept, all the effort we spent on setup the continuous flow is aimed to dig out and elminated the wastes. From the activities of wastes elmination, the non-value-added labor cost will be reduced. But, if we pay in piece counting, the value-added and non-value-added cost is combined together and pay in a fixed amount. No matter how we improve the process, we can not improve the labor cost and only can improve the overall capacity.

On the other hand, we encourge the multi-skill operator in lean concept. Piece counting pay is also conflict with that destination. In human being, nobody is willing to change to other work-station which is not familiar because the salary we are paid refer to the quantity they made.

Offcause, what kind of payment schemen we used, we can improve amount the on-line material and semi-product by lean concept. we can also improve the overall respond time of the process, I meant the material staying on-line can be shorten by lean. There are so many items can be improved beside the labor cost, but can we have a best way to combine the idea of piece counting pay with lean concept?

In that discussion with the friends from garment industry, they are going to pay the operator by productivity. That's meant they pay the operators in group by the quantity of finsihed goods they made. It is no longer to pay by the piece they made in semi-product, the team has to find a way to complete the final product as fast as they can. I found that they have setup a continuous flow to replace the traditional mass production method, and I believed that it is most important factor in success of payment scheme changing. I am sure that the pay by productivity is only feasible if they have a well set process flow.

I have not much information how they handle for this in future but I realized everything is possible to improve only if the continuous flow was well set. Whatever you want to change, no matter it is a manufacturing process, material flow, or operation flow of company, the most important thing is setup a continuous flow. (I like to call it continuous flow rather than single piece flow.)

At last, I am sure that the implementation of above payment scheme under lean manufacturing environment would be a great step in garment industry, because it can solve a big historical problem in that industry. Good Luck!