Tony Wong 's Lean Manufacturing Concept 's Blog

One Point Lesson - OPL

2009-10-18T23:34:00.001-07:00

At recent moment, I found a term for OPL for TPM which I am not so familiar. Therefore, I dig out some information and summarized as below to keep a reference, share with my readers.

What is OPL?

OPL is the short term of One Point Lesson. A TPM one point lesson is just one of the many tools that can be used to improve knowledge and understanding of the condition and performance of an asset on a day-to-day basis. The approach engages the front-line operations and technicians and encourages them to get involved in the continuous improvement of the asset. By simply passing on good ideas, maintenance interventions can be optimised to ensure there maximum impact on either the performance or condition of the assets. The benefits for implement OPL for workshop are summarized as below,

* Communicates knowledge and skill about the asset amongst members of the team.
* Raises the knowledge and skills of the team in a very short period of time.
* Is used for eliminating problems and for making improvements to the way of working.
* Makes sure that everyone knows about a better way of doing something.
* Makes sure that next time a problem is encountered everyone knows the way to solve it.

Here is the flow of running OPL,

1. One member of the team prepares a sheet, which describes the problem and solution in simple language. It is often illustrated with pictures if possible.
2. The team discuss the 1-point lesson, formally or informally, and incorporate any ideas.
3. The 1-point lesson is approved by the line management to ensure it is appropriate and safe.
4. The 1-point lesson is then published and read by all members of all shift teams.
Individuals are then asked to sign to acknowledge that they have read the 1-point lesson.

OPL should contain the elements,

1. Workshop location (plant, floor, line #)
2. A simply description of the purpose of this OPL
3. Use photographs or diagrams to show before and after sections
4. Who prepared the document? Who approved the document?

Below are the critical points for successfully implement OPL,

* Treat only one piece of knowledge at a time. The TPM approach is about small incremental steps to continuous improvement.
* Use simple clear language. The objects can be clear learned in 5 -10mins.
* Illustrate the idea with pictures or drawings closing to the place which it is applying.
* Make the 1-point lesson available to everyone who need to work on that process.
* Recognise and reward those who share their knowledge.

Gresham's law for organization

2009-08-30T09:03:00.000-07:00

I want to write this post for a long time ago, finally, I started it tonight.

Gresham's law is named after Sir Thomas Gresham who was an English financier in Tudor times. It is commonly stated as "Bad money drives out good.", says that any circulating currency consisting of both "good" and "bad" money (both forms required to be accepted at equal value under legal tender law) quickly becomes dominated by the "bad" money. This is because people spending money will hand over the "bad" coins rather than the "good" ones, keeping the "good" ones for themselves.

The principles of Gresham's Law can sometimes be applied to different fields of study. Gresham's Law generally speaks to any circumstance in which the "true" value of something is markedly different from the value people must accept, due to factors such as lack of information or governmental decree.

The most famous instant to explain the law by the market for second hand cars, lemon automobiles (analogous to bad currency) will drive out the good cars. The problem is one of asymmetry of information. Sellers have a strong financial incentive to pass all cars off as "good" cars, especially lemons. This makes it chancy to buy a good car at a fair price, as the buyer risks overpaying for a lemon. The result is that buyers will only pay the fair price of a lemon, so at least they won't be ripped off. High quality cars tend to be pushed out of the market, because there is no good way to establish that they really are worth more. The Market for Lemons is a work that examines this problem in more detail.

I need to highlight that the critical element for Gresham's law is "asymmetry of information". Let us change the scenario to our organization, think about if the senior management team only look at the financial data and report for the operation. They do not know how the team working on the process in order to achieve the goal, but they only listen to somebody they think can be trusted. The element of "asymmetry of information" would be effective and we can find the "bad GUY drives out good!" Some bad guys from the organization did nothing for contribution but play the political game all the day. The senior management did not know who get the job done. Afterward, many people joined the bad guys team and force all the good guys out of the organization. In other words, the good guys are always not willing to work with the bad. They will quit the team by their owned willing.

In our kaizen activities, we also needed to study and avoid the same issue. As a lean leader, they are needed to join the kaizen activities to understand who is the member really gave their effort to improve the situation. They are also needed to identify who are the guys only sitting in the team but gave no idea and suggestion. The management team need to identify it perfectly and give the right award to right people, otherwise, the kaizen would be stopped by wrong motivation because of asymmetry of information. This is part of the lean culture and Gresham's law is effective here too.

Lean VS Six Sigma 2

2009-08-24T07:36:00.000-07:00

This post is used to further explain about the relationship between lean manufacturing and six sigma, refer to the article Lean VS Six Sigma 1.

In my last post about lean and six sigma, Lean manufacturing is more suitable to use for solving perspicuously problem. If the process is defined as labor intensive, we can identify the problem, or wastes according to the 7 wastes concept. disassemble the actions for the work station, we can easily to identify which is value-added actions and which is non-value-added. Sometime, we need to use a stop watch to measure the process time. We can also easily to adjust and balance the process by a bar chart and no need to use the statistic tools or quantitative analysis for improvement activities. In simply say, if we can identify the problem by observation or simple measurement, lean manufacturing concept can help us to solve the problem and speed up the improvement progress.

For Six sigma, it would be more suitable to use for solving recessive problem. You can not identify the problem directly and you have to dig out the issue and reduce the variances of process by a serious of statistical analysis. For instant, a process, which is highly automatic, is needed to use six sigma for improvement. We can not identify the problem by observation because there is no operator working in the station. The machine or process is all covered by a metal shell. All the hidden problem can not be found by our bare eyes. At this moment, we need to measure all the detail, such as temperature, current, pressure, speed, and the parameters of the machine or production line, so that we can use the quantitative analysis method in six sigma to identify the issues and make the suggestion to adjust the parameter accordingly.

Is that any conflict between lean and six sigma? Absolutely not, in opposite way, they can support each other. Let us review the process for our working place, the process is always combined with automatic process and manual process. Do you agree? The most important thing is which tools is suitable for our target process. Sometime, we need lean to speed up the kaizen process, but sometime we need the six sigma to dig out the hidden problem. Therefore, we always call the continuous improvement activities as Lean sigma activities. Those tools can be combine together organically, the critical point is the kaizen leader has enough experience for both tools or not.

If you have different ideas, please give a comment for this post, thanks!

Traditional manufacturing VS Lean manufacturing

2009-08-13T00:00:00.000-07:00

The traditional manufacturing flow is driven by push, you can think about the flow in the Henry Ford's time in producing Model T. The lean manufacturing is driven by pull concept. The table shows the differences of many elements between traditional manufacturing and lean manufacturing.

Lean VS Six Sigma 1

2009-08-10T12:00:00.000-07:00

Sometime, I was asked by somebody that which continuous improvement concept is suitable for their company? Lean manufacturing? or six sigma? I was wondered they have no idea for the differences between lean and six sigma. Here is a comparison table between lean and six sigma for your reference and hope it can help you to identify the strength and weakness of the tools.

By the way, I give you one more condition to explain which is suitable for you as below,

Lean: suitable to use for solving perspicuously problem, that's meant you no need to make a complicated calculation and mathematical analysis to identify the problem. You can point out every problem and mistake just according to the concept.

Six sigma: suitable to use for solving recessive problem. You can not identify the problem directly and you have to dig out the issue by a serious of statistical analysis.

Let me know if you have more additional details, thanks!

Terms of lean manufacturing

2009-08-06T12:00:00.000-07:00

andon - a system of flashing lights used to indicate production status in one or more work centers; the number of lights and their possible colors can vary, even by work center within a plant; however, the traditional colors and their meanings are:
green - no problems

yellow - situation requires attention

red - production stopped; attention urgently needed

baka-yoke – In the past, Japanese called the mistake-proofing as baka-yoke, it meant fool-proofing. Baka is meaning foolish, however, somebody felt the term is not respect to people and changed it to poka-yoke.

heijunka - A production scheduling/leveling tool, essentially to distribute kanban cards in an efficient manner.

jidoka - a Japanese word which translates as autonomation; a form of automation in which machinery automatically inspects each item after producing it, ceasing production and notifying humans if a defect is detected; Toyota expands the meaning of jidoka to include the responsibility of all workers to function similarly, i.e. to check every item produced and to make no more if a defect is detected, until the cause of the defect has been identified and corrected.
jishu kanri - self-management, or voluntary participation.

jutsu - to talk, or ‘the art of’ (i.e., 'leanjutsu: the art of lean production').

kaikaku - A rapid and radical change process, sometimes used as a precursor to kaizen activities.

kaizen - the philosophy of continual improvement, that every process can and should be continually evaluated and improved in terms of time required, resources used, resultant quality, and other aspects relevant to the process.

kanban - a card or sheet used to authorize production or movement of an item.

karoshi - death from overwork.

mizusumashi - the classic 'water spider', who performs a wide range of tasks which allow workers to perform 'value-added' tasks.

mokeru - the Japanese term for the industrial engineering, more properly translated as ‘profit-making I.E.’.

muda (waste) - activities and results to be eliminated; within manufacturing, categories of waste, according to Shigeo Shingo.

mura - inconsistency

muri - unreasonable

nagara - smooth production flow, ideally one piece at a time, characterized by synchronization [balancing] of production processes and maximum utilization of available time, including overlapping of operations where practical.

ninjutsu - the art of invisibility (applies to management)

poka-yoke - a means of providing a visual or other signal as to the location or condition of a part characteristic. Often referred to as 'error-proofing', poke-yoke is actually the first step in truly error-proofing a system (see baka-yoke).

5S - refers to the five words seiri, seiton, seison, seiketsu, shitsuke. These words are shorthand expressions for principles of maintaining an effective, efficient workplace
seiri - eliminating everything not required for the work being performed
seiton - efficient placement and arrangement of equipment and material
seison - tidiness and cleanliness
seiketsu - ongoing, standardized, continually improving seiri, seiton, seison
shitsuke - discipline with leadership

seiban - Seiban is the name of a Japanese management practice taken from the Japanese words "sei", which means manufacturing, and "ban", which means number. A Seiban number is assigned to all parts, materials, and purchase orders associated with a particular customer job, or with a project, or anything else. This enables a manufacturer to track everything related with a particular product, project, or customer. It also facilitates setting aside inventory for specific projects or priorities. That makes it great for project and build-to-order manufacturing.

sensei - one who provides information; a teacher, instructor, or rabbi.

shojinka - continually optimizing the number of workers in a work center to meet the type and volume of demand imposed on the work center; shojinka requires workers trained in multiple disciplines; work center layout, such as U-shaped or circular, that supports a variable number of workers performing the tasks in the layout; the capability to vary the manufacturing process as appropriate to fit the demand profile.

teian - a proposal, proposition, or suggestion. A teian system can be likened to a system which allows and encourages workers to actively propose process and product improvements.

Case study 1

2009-08-02T22:45:00.001-07:00

I am not always studing the kaizen cases for india, however, I got some information from internet to share with you. You can also check the link of Mahindra & Mahindra Limited.

Most of the hurdles on the lean path can be overcome through effective forecasting and planning, as it is done by “Mahindra & Mahindra”.(one of the largest player in the Indian automotive industry).

The Mahindra group follows a policy of non-retrenchment. Once upon a time, at Mahindra & Mahindra, Kandivali, 1134 employed produced 75 engines per day. After they went lean, they progressed to a production of 128 engines a day with 770 people. The rest of the employees were transferred to their Nasik plant. Today the plant at Kandivali has around 7800 workers in the automotive sector. Although the issue of the human resource may be delicate. The problem can be easily overcome, if handled with care and sensitivity.

Despite the difficulties associated with the implementation of ‘lean’, several companies have implemented it successfully and moved ahead. Mahindra & Mahindra selected the route of operational excellence to fight their competition. Regarding their success with the lean mode of operation, Mr. Rajan Narayan, (M & M’s Vice -President) says that they have achieved an improvement in the work culture, productivity and revenue at Mahindra & Mahindra solely due to the lean way.

Mahindra & Mahindra are not the only ones who have opted for the ‘lean’ method. Bajaj Auto Ltd., Pune, Lucas – TVS Ltd., Chennai and LML Ltd., Kanpur and are few of the companies that seem to the trading to the ‘lean’ route successfully.

Autonomation 2

2009-07-30T12:00:00.000-07:00

時間：2003.11
地點：美國
標錯價事件：379美元個人數位助理(PDA)價格錯標為79美元，戴爾事後取消上百張訂單。
-----
時間：2005.8
地點：澳洲
標錯價事件：澳幣592元的硬碟錯標為澳幣8.8元，戴爾通知消費者付原價或取消訂單，不過當地消保機關認為戴爾應出貨給已用信用卡付款的消費者。
-----
時間：2006.3
地點：香港
標錯價事件：港幣4,199元20吋液晶螢幕，錯標為港幣2,187元，折扣達48％。最後戴爾提供12％折扣。
-----
時間：2008.2
地點：中國
標錯價事件：人民幣8,999元的27吋液晶螢幕，錯標為人民幣2,515元，最後在輿論壓力下以錯價出貨。
-----
時間：2008.6
地點：智利
標錯價事件：智利披索29萬8,997元的筆記型電腦，錯標為智利披索7萬7,739元，非正式統計約有1萬5,000台，戴爾事後提供未來購物15%折扣，未得消費者認同，引起訴訟。
-----
時間：2009.6
地點：台灣
標錯價事件：全網站商品折扣7,000元，19吋液晶螢幕出現一台500元。戴爾事後提供1,000元、3,000元折價券。
-----
時間：2009.7
地點：台灣
標錯價事件：6萬元筆記型電腦錯標為1萬8,000元，有近1萬5,000台訂單。戴爾事後提供2萬元的折價券。

I always explain to my colleagues and underlings that it is no way to prevent human mistake by human checking. We only can prevent the human error by a checking system. The the process is critical, the management needed to setup more checking point in order to prevent the serious loss of business. In the same words, we can explain the idea by lean concept, and the lean tools is autonomation, or you can say poka yoke.

The above the information was talking about the wrong pricing and order received by online sales of DELL. I have no idea for how much for financial loss actually happen for the business sales by those wrong pricing issues, it is very hard for us to evaluate and it is meaningless to calculate how much count how much money in the others pocket. But all of us know it would cause a lot of customer loss for those cases, and it was a serious loss in business opportunity. Yes, off cause it would make some new customer and they are waiting DELL to mark wrong pricing again... sorry, DELL can not get any profit for those special customer...

My question is why the company can not setup some poka yoke for the online sales system? I don't think it would be more difficult than the poka yoke in manufacturing process. In manufacturing process, may be we need some high-tech design for poka yoke function, sometime, it would be came out in some special mechanism, or laser sensor, or color sensor...but what can we do for the online sales pricing? Is that hard to do so?

At my point of view, we need to understand the market and your target customer. I think those customer should be personal usage for purchasing PC online. If so, they should only need one or two sets of product. If the online system received 100 sets of order, it should alert some customer service or coordinators to manual check. To solve the problem from the beginning, we also can set some constraints to the pricing input. For instant, the price of monitor should be around 1000 to 3000. If somebody input a price lower or higher than the range, the system must give a alert to higher level and request for approval. I don't think it is very difficult to make that happen, and I don't think that was more complicated than the poka yoke in producing some products. But for these six years of time, it seems to us that nobody think about that can help.

Ironically, DELL is a successful company for implement lean manufacturing concept (may be it is only well done in inventory control...). I can not understand why there were totally absent of lean implement in sales and marketing system. It made me so surprise when I saw the news.

Do you have any other ideas to help them?

Lean design 2

2009-07-26T20:20:00.001-07:00

In continuous for last post for explaining lean design, here is more information for 3P which is the last stage of lean design process. The last stage is launch design and we always apply the lean tools of production preparation process (3P) to support the product launch to mass production.

The above drawing is the flow of the 3P and it included three steps, which are information phrase, creative phrase and redefine phrase. And the main objectives of the 3P are as below,

1. Design process with evaluate the alternative process choices,

2. Incorporate for mistake-proofing and just in time in process,

3. Build in the quality system in process,

4. Guarantee process capability, capacity and tact time,

5. Standardize the process.

Production preparation process event (3P event) is the improvement activity focus on the product development process. Mainly point to the preparation before pilot process. The focal points are material cost reduction, capacity evaluation, quality specification setting, and process flow and stations design and improvement. These are the topics included in the 3P event for your reference.

Day1:

- Team introduction,

- Lean principles training,

- Production preparation concept training.

Day 2:

- Goal and Scope definition,

- Product introduction,

- Review product development schedule,

- Tact time calculation,

- Components diagram and analysis,

- Review BOM and material cost,

- Review quality record of every process stations for both internal and external,

- FMEA setup and review with possible solution,

- Control plan setup and review

- Component reduction analysis and design fine tune.

Day 3:

- 7 proposals for main process station,

- Setup the assess specification and assess the 7 proposals,

- Simulate the best 3 proposals, observe the process and look for opportunities of improvement for process handling, fixture, mistake-proof, quick change over,...etc.

- 7 proposals for process flow and layout,

- Assess the 7 proposals for process flow,

- Select the best proposal,

- Fine tune the equipments.

Day 4:

- Finalize quality control plan,

- Fine tune the equipments,

- Pilot run evaluation, observe the material storage and process time.

- Documentation for tooling, fixture and process station design,

- Review FMEA, and possible solution,

- Final process at a glance,

- Fixture and equipment investment plan,

- Implement planning.

Day 5:

Team presentation for program result.

Hope you enjoy the information above, thanks!

Lean design 1

2009-07-21T00:59:00.000-07:00

What is lean design?

First of all, customer demand or need driven all activities in the company. In lean concept, we are only producing the product needed by customer. In the same words, we design the product according to customer wants.

There are three steps of the lean design, listed as 1. concept design, 2. detail design, 3. launch design. The details of those steps will explain below,

1. Concept design;

Refer the Kano analysis, in the stage of concept design, the designer or engineer should well study the customer demand according to Kano analysis. They should design which are the valued-added features for their target customer. For instant, a mobile phone manufacturer is going to design a easy phone for old people. They have to well study what are the features for old people needed. Is that old people need commerial features such as the words and excel built in their phone? Is that they need many mini game built in as well? No, I don't think so. On the other hand, I think they need a screen can shown bigger word and number. I also think they need a bigger keypad so that they can easier to press on the right number. May be they also needed a radio function built in so that they can listen the radio when they go out for a walk. So on and so on..., all the features they need are value-added. The manufacturer is only can produce a suitable product for their target customer in a good cost, otherwise, the product will cost too high and nobody would like to buy your stuffs. The value-added analysis is the most important tools in this stage.

2. Details design;

In this stage, we need to apply platform design and modular design in our product development process. In the words by lean concept, we must apply the standardization in our product design. Let us think about the design in automotive, all the car can be said combined by different engine platform, suspension platform, and structure platform in order to form a high flexible product line. What is the problem if they produce the car with different engine and suspension in every model? It is no way to produce the car in a low cost because they have to setup a special product line for every model, they have spend much resource to handle the material and subassembly. The other benefit is the automotive manufacturer can shorten the product development time. The engineer can choose the suitable engine, suspension and interior to fit with a attractive shape. That's the way how the successful manufacturer works for their product development, and it is also a lean concept applied. On the other hand, modular design is another important element in detail design. There is commonly appling on PC, and we always called it as, plug and play. It is good in expand the features of the product and reduce much development time. no matter is the platform design or modular design, they can be concluded as the standardization of lean concept.

3. Launch design;

For this stage, I will expand in next post. Thank you very much!

Visual Management - color indication

2009-07-12T00:08:00.000-07:00

I have so many readers out of Hong Kong, but I believed that many of them travel to Hong Kong before. Do you know how many color used on the taxi in Hong Kong? The answer is "3".

Red color taxi are running in Kowloon and Hong Kong Island.

Green color taxi are running in New Territory.

Blue color taxi are running in Lantau Island.

Kowloon and Hong Kong Island is the urban district in Hong Kong, so the license and management fee of taxi is the highest. Offcause, the daily income and the rental charge of the red taxi driver is also highest. The green color taxi are running in New Territory and the density of client is lower than the red color taxi in urban district, at the same way, the license fee is also lower than red color taxi. Blue color taxi are only running in Lantau Island. The density of client is the lowest.

Many decade before, somebody in the colonial government felt there was trouble to seperate into three colors. They needed three sets of management rules and team to control. They suggested to combine all the color into red. Some councilors rejected the suggestion and gave their comment. Three colors of taxi is using to solve the problem of traffic jam. The highest population is in urban district, all the taxi from new territory will all move to Kowloon or Hong Kong Island to earn money. The citizen in New Terrritory may not take the taxi because it will be no taxi there, and the citizen in Urban District may not take the taxi too because all the traffic will jam. At that moment, there was no brigde connecting Lantau Island to urban district yet, but the truth is compatable too. The color indication is using to control the traffic flow.

In order to make the rule success, there is another important factor needed. Discipline, in Hong Kong, no matter the driver or citizen would call police to complain if they saw a green taxi running in urban district. Most of people has the sense of discipline, this is the most important element for the success. In the progress of kaizen, we are needed to focus on build up the lean culture as well. The culture would form the discipline and make the people to follow the change.

When we apply the tools of lean to our working environment, there are so many sample existed around of us for using. Sometime, use the actual sample in the real world to intruct the concept is more easier than list the samples from the text book, because those story is too far away from the people and they are hard to understand the matter they never saw. Therefore, keep watching the world and learn from it.

Sorry! I am back.

2009-07-09T23:18:00.000-07:00

My friends and readers, I am sorry that the article was stop issued for a month because I need sometime to think and review for my future. From now on, I will resume the aritcle writing and keep share the thinking of lean with you.

At recent moment, I am setting a workshop for lean manufacturing concept in Hong Kong. Please email me if you want more information for that wongwowai@gmail.com

Thanks your your long term supporting and kindly care.

Think out of the box

2009-05-31T07:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-24T07:56:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-18T05:16:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-14T18:46:00.000-07:00

A3 Management

View more presentations from gokhansarpkaya.

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

2009-05-10T08:25:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-06T06:48:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-04T17:26:00.000-07:00

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!

In memory of my mother school

2009-04-30T09:58:00.000-07:00

Taiwan National Chung Kung University. I had my wonderful time there.

"Reasonably training is forging, unreasonably training is grinding." was heard in my military training period in Taiwan. For 15 years, I can not forget that and it encourages me everyday when I went to deep end. I send this to all my good friends and hope it can help them to face the different troubles.

In mechanical theory,
Forging, is meaning to use heat treatment and forging to harden the metal. It makes the iron tough and hard.
Grinding, is meaning to use mechanical machining to grind the sharp edge of the metal. It makes the iron sharp.
Only volition (tough and hard) is not enough, we need braveness (sharp)!

Right or Wrong?

2009-04-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

On last saturday night, I brought my sons to go to convenience store (7-eleven near my home) to buy soft drink. They were very thirsty after we came back from my mother's home after dinner. This is our habit between me and my sons. During the shoping at that night, that was interesting a story there.

It was a bustup between the counterjumper and customer! For a soft drink worth HK$5.0!

The story was that, as we know, there is a soft drink machine for the customer to fill the drink by themselves. After they paid in the counter, customer got a empty paper/plastic cup and they went to the machine to fill which they wanted. There was a customer there told the counterjumper she gave her a wrong paper cup (for softdrink A). She wanted a soft drink was using the plastic cup (for softdrink B). But the counterjumper mentioned that the customer called for soft drink A but the customer clearly mentioned again she wanted a soft drink B. The customer told the counterjumper may be she heard the calling wrongly. And then the counterjumper change a plastic cup to her but during the exchange of cup, the counterjumper made emphasis the customer was ordering softdrink A repeatly. I believed that the counerjumper talked to customer at least five times for this. And then the bustup was started, and they shouted loudly and there were at least five people stood in front of the door to watch what happened inside. At the same time, I got my paper cup and filled the softdrink with my sons, and left the scene! When my family was leaving there, the bustup was not stop yet, and the customer was calling to the shop owner for complain...

I felt it was very funny! HK$5 almost made the ladies to fight there.

I have some questions to myself,

No matter the customer made mistake for calling or not, she should respect the customer. Just exchange the cup for customer and said, "that's fine, I will change it for you!". Nothing will happen and the customer will satisfy the service perfectly, actually, the shop has no any lost for the incident. Why she repectly emphasis the customer made the mistake?

For the incident, although the handling way of the counterjumper was not good enough, but is that really need to complain to the owner of the shop? May be the counterjumper would lose her job for a cup of soft drink. Can she explain to the counterjumper the she has wrong way to handle the issue? What is the right way to service the customer?

Actually, what is the right way to face a mistake we made? I don't know, but if we think we never made any mistake, it was absolutly wrong. Sometimes, the absolutly correct is incorrect , do the right thing, not do the thing right!

7 wastes - motion

2009-04-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

First of all, let me introduce the wastes in motion by some cases in assembly. It was a most common case we saw in assembly line, it is so common because it looked not a serious issue or waste in our mindset. However, if we make a calculation for the wastes we made by that way, the result will make us so surprise why we ignored the issue. Actually, everything we did in process can be calculated its performance or waste by a very simple analysis. The problem is we always think the way we did is common practices and lie to ourselves it is not a issue.

The first case, let's say the opreator needed to move one step to her left-hand-side to pick up the WIP for next process as shown in the figure above. The process takes 30 seconds to complete. The first question is how long for one step we move? In order to have a simple calculation, I says one step is around 50cm. Also, I given the operator is working 8 hours per shift, therefore, the calculation is 8 hrs X 60 mins X 60 seconds / 30 seconds X 50cm = 48000cm or 480m. The next question is that 480m is value-added for the production? If not, the third question is how many workers are working in the same way in the production? You can complete the calculation by yourself and find it would be a very long distance they moved but it was non-value-added. If your IE counted the process one by one, they would say it was only 1 to 3 second and not a big deal. However, if you have 1000 workers and they are all working in that way, what do you think now?

The second case was also common and caused by the layout design. The operator needed to turn around to pick up the WIP and all the conditions are the same. The calculation is 8 hrs X 60 mins X 60 seconds / 30 seconds X 1 turn (180+180 degree) = 960 turns. It does not needed to think is that value-added or not, I just want to ask what do you feel after you rotary your body for 960 turns?

OK, let's stop the motion wastes in manual process here and we start to think some other case. In the lean concept for office, do you find the motion wastes as well? Did you bring a document to another floor of office for signature? Did you mail a document to another site for your boss to approve? Do you find there are so many blank to need to fill but nobody care what is that actaully? But you need to spend time to check for the information for that...If we consider the information like a flow as process or material, you can find there are so many wastes as well. The information also flows between the people, and there are so many people is not needed the information actually but it wastes much time to flow through all the chain.

For the material flow, you need to check about the locations for storing material. I meant the material in all kinds of status, such as raw material, WIP and finished goods. Are they stored in the proper location? If not, the motion wastes also happened in material flow. That's why you need so many store-keeper to handle the material.

The last point I wanted to talk is the equipment or machine design. I visited one automotive manufacturer in Japan but I dont want to state her name, I have an idea came from her equipment design. It was a automatic assembly for engine with many process included such as milling, grinding, drilling, taping and heat treatment. The body of enginer was carrying along the line through those process, sometime, the body needed to turn around in 180 degree, or turn up side down. Anyway, the body was handling by the robotistic arms to put it in right position. As my observation, the time for the robotistic arm for handling the body was longer than the mechaning process. For my point of view, it was also a kind of motion wastes. If the line can be design as the mechaning station in different pattern, may be the body of engine was no need to handle as I saw but just carried along the line in one position. The speed of process would be much shorter.

Finally, we need to consider the motion wastes in different mindset. It was not only happen in manufacturing process, even in information flow and material, we always can find it appeared in different situation. Give me some ideas of example if you found the situation as well.

Memorization = 5S in your brain

2009-04-18T10:15:00.000-07:00

Last year, I had the lesson of human resource management of MBA course. During the lecture, we had discussed some ideas for memorization, because one of my classmate was the world champion of memorization competition. We shared some info and ideas in the class, I want to share my ideas with you in post here. They might be not correlated with lean but I would like to write them in points form.

0. First of all, I am not the expert of memorization but we can have more information from Wiki link as below, Information of Memory from Wiki

1. Can people memorized everything?

I think it is possible. Physically, the memory size in our brain is infinitely. We can have a special training to strengthen memorization. Nowaday, we always equiped a PDA, even a mobile phone with additional memory. We can record everything we want to memorize by text, voice or photo. Therefore, basically, everybody can memorize anything they want, but...is that necessary to do so? Is that necessary we need to memorize the color of our dressing twenty days before? (Assumed that is not a special day we had such as the first time we were having dinner with our girl/boy friend...) Agree? Shift to next question.

2. Why we only memorize something we want?

No more talk about the handheld equipment, only focus the memory in our brain. I believed that our memorization is a selective system but we do not realize its process. We need to keep a spare space in brain for new event or thinking. If our brain is full of rubblish data (same as the rubblish email), it is a serious waste for us. In lean concept, it would be an issue of over stock / inventory, one of the 7 wastes.

First, we only need to memorize something important to us, such as our name, because we need to use that everyday. From working memory through interactive to long term memory. Second, we always can memorize the event which had deep image to ourselves. A simple question, where is the place you first time kiss your girl/boy friend? I think you can remember that in your whole life. From affective system or sensory system to long term memory. Third, we always memorized something which is not always used but need to remember, such as the birthday of your father. Actually, we only need to use that data once a year. From short term memory to long term memory.

3. Is that important of memorization?

A long time before, out of our brain, no other storage memory. All the information and knowledge only can be stored in the memory of brain. At that moment, memorization is so important. How much memory of knowledge you had, it represented how much knowledge you learned. In modern day, the above concept is meaningless, because we have too many devices having the same function of memory storage in our brain.

Now, we said, "undertstanding is more important than memorization.", why we said that? At my point of view, understanding means you have already memorized the truth. For instant, we learn driving in the thoeries of controling steering wheel and gear, it is very hard to forget after we started to drive a car. After we successfully got the driving license, that's mean we have the understanding of driving, you can not forget how to drive because you already understood how to drive. On the other hand, it is very easy to forget something if we do not understand or no way to understand. Can you remember all the numbers in yellow page? How long you can remember those number? The number on yellow page can not be used, that is meaningless for you. You have no way to understand that, and hard to remember.

4. What is factor help for memorization?

Based on the theory of "undertstanding is more important than memorization.", the most important factors improving the memorization are intellect and recombination. Intellect can make the intangible info to be a concrete image. Recombination can help you to put all the concrete image in sequence. Only one part you can remember, you can educe the whole subject.
It was a very common game shown in TV programme. We gave you some items no related such as a ball, a man, a chicken and a car, let you make a story using all the items. I would say, "A MAN played basketBALL, and then drove his CAR back to home, after playing basketball, he felt very hungry and he ate a CHICKEN in dinner by himself.". This is one kind of sample help you to memorize.

5. Which is needed to memorize?

In simply say, happy people only remember happiness. If your brain full of mirthless stories, I don't believed that you can be a happy people. No matter what we are talking about, you only recall the joyless memory to cause a negative emotion. That's a very terrible habit, but I have some friends doing that everyday.

Therefore, I suggest you only needed to remember your knowledge, and your good time. Clear up some spare space in your mind for thinking. Wash away the unhappiness. Do some 5S job for your brain.

OK, my friend, be a happy people!!!

Innovation and creative

2009-04-16T03:37:00.000-07:00

Here is a great short movie!

We always reject some creative ideas during kaizen program because we are not sure is that work or not, but if we do not try the new idea, how do we know if it works or not? Just like the video shown above, the child looked like has a mental problem because it was only filled black color in his drawings. Once we puzzled some of the ideas together, we found it worked great.

Please do not reject the ideas from the others in improvement activities again, please!

Vision, Mission and policy deployment 2

2009-04-13T06:39:00.000-07:00

Continuous from the previous post "Vision, Mission and policy deployment 1", we knew that they are important elements of success in lean implementation. Actually, the alignment of lean implementation is very important in how to implement lean manufacturing of the process improvement. If the company ignore or mis-align the vision and mission of lean, they will fail in the implementation and promotion of lean concept.

Here is a story in Hong Kong, and I think all the people in Hong Kong learned this news a moment before. I was really disappointed and angry by this incident. On Dec20,2008, it was a middle-aged male driving in urban district with his son. Suddenly, the middle-aged driver was heart attacked and his son drove him to Caritas Medical Centre (明愛醫院) for first aid. However, when the young people ran into the receiption of hospital, the receiptionist in the hospital suggested him to make a emergency call! Finally, the middle-aged father was dead because of the ambulance arrived the main gate of hospital half an hours later. What a ridiculous incident for the hospital!

Afterward, I checked the web for Caritas Medical Centre, I found that her motto was stated as "Love in the Service of Hope." The word "LOVE" is always a intangible noun especially when it was used in service. What kind of vision or mission they are? Are that all the doctor, nurse and employee in that hospital understood its meaning? The most ridiculous fact is that we let people die in front of the main gate of hospital is one kind of love? Actually, the employee in the hospital achieved the vision or mission is another matter, the most important is that the vision aligned with the main goal. In simply said, is that aligned to what they should do! If nobody realized that what they should do in their profession, how they can execute the goal? Who should we blame for?

I checked the vision and mission for another hospital (博愛醫院Pok Oi Hospital) and found that it is very clear statment of her vision, "To be a charitable organization that: strives to provide diversified and quality services, maximizes on available resources, devotes to continuous improvement, and drives for innovative measures. ". She also states the idea of continuous improvement in her mission number 3. It is obviously that she has the lean concept and aligned in her vision and mission.

This a common problem in industrial world, the companies stated that they are going to be the number 1 in the world. However, they were only seeking the way to reduce the cost. Most of the time, they were sacrificing their quality and service to achieve the cost saving target. They are always implement the lean concept but it was not aligned in their vision and mission. The manager or director applied the lean concept but without the alignment of main goal, so they are busy in making a good report only shown the saving. If it is no related with vision, it is hard to counter check the result but only according to the kaizen project presentation or report. The lean concept can not be setup as the culture of the company. Therefore, it is the most common factor of failure of lean implementation.

I worked in a MNC and I asked the management team for what are the missions of their department. I asked what is the vision of the company, the answer is only the silence. Afterward, I asked what should we do in future? No answer too and I can heard a pin falled on the floor. Therefore, we need a very clear vision and mission alignment for lean implementation, even for the success of company.

Motivation needs theory in lean

2009-04-09T00:59:00.000-07:00

David C. McClelland (麦克兰德), American David Clarence McClelland (1917-98) achieved his doctorate in psychology at Yale in 1941 and became professor at Wesleyan University. He then taught and lectured, including a spell at Harvard from 1956, where with colleagues for twenty years he studied particularly motivation and the achievement need. He began his McBer consultancy in 1963, helping industry assess and train staff, and later taught at Boston University, from 1987 until his death. McClelland is chiefly known for his work on achievement motivation, but his research interests extended to personality and consciousness.

David McClelland pioneered workplace motivational thinking, developing achievement-based motivational theory and models, and promoted improvements in employee assessment methods, advocating competency-based assessments and tests, arguing them to be better than traditional IQ and personality-based tests. His ideas have since been widely adopted in many organisations, and relate closely to the theory of Frederick Herzberg.

David McClelland is most noted for describing three types of motivational need, which he identified in his 1988 book, Human Motivation. He said that most people possess and exhibit a combination of these characteristics, bias to a particular motivational need, and this motivational or needs 'mix' consequently affects their behaviour and working/managing style.
David C McClelland's motivational needs theory,

Achievement motivation (n-ach)

Authority/power motivation (n-pow)

Affiliation motivation (n-affil)

David McClelland's needs-based motivational model These needs are found to varying degrees in all workers and managers, and this mix of motivational needs characterises a person's or manager's style and behaviour, both in terms of being motivated, and in the management and motivation others.

The need for achievement (n-ach) The n-ach person is 'achievement motivated' and therefore seeks achievement, attainment of realistic but challenging goals, and advancement in the job. There is a strong need for feedback as to achievement and progress, and a need for a sense of accomplishment. McClelland contrasted achievement-motivated people with gamblers, and dispelled a common pre-conception that n-ach 'achievement-motivated' people are big risk takers. On the contrary - typically, achievement-motivated individuals set goals which they can influence with their effort and ability, and as such the goal is considered to be achievable. This determined results-driven approach is almost invariably present in the character make-up of all successful business people and entrepreneurs. For the lean leaders with strong 'achievement motivation', they make the best leaders, but there can be a tendency to demand too much of their staff in the belief that they are all similarly and highly achievement-focused and results driven, which of course most people are not. On the other hand, they would like to use imperatively or compulsorily to lead the projects. Sometimes, they would even jump to the solution during the kaizen without any brain-storming discussion. Meditating myself, at the beginning stage of my leading of lean transformation, I made the same mistake as well.

The need for authority and power (n-pow) The n-pow person is 'authority motivated'. This driver produces a need to be influential, effective and to make an impact. There is a strong need to lead and for their ideas to prevail. There is also motivation and need towards increasing personal status and prestige. A strong n-pow 'authority-motivation' will produce a determined work ethic and commitment to the organisation, and while n-pow people are attracted to the leadership role, they may not possess the required flexibility and people-centred skills. Power motivation divided by two concept, individualistic power motivation and social power motivation. Because of the lean leader in individualistic power motivation tends to control the members in the team, the aggressive and trust in kaizen team was always be destroyed. Empowering members by the lean leaders with social power motivation can encourage and draw out the interesting of improvment.

The need for affiliation (n-affil) The n-affil person is 'affiliation motivated', and has a need for friendly relationships and is motivated towards interaction with other people. The affiliation driver produces motivation and need to be liked and held in popular regard. These people are team players. Mcclelland suggested that a strong n-affil 'affiliation-motivation' undermines a manager's objectivity, because of their need to be liked, and that this affects a manager's decision-making capability. At the same way, leading the lean transformation, we are no way to escape to challenge or be challenged. High affiliation leader would frustrate by this needs which can not be satisfied. Furthermore, because of they want to be liked by members, they cower to give their reasonable requests and challenge the team. Too high of this needs will cause the halt or slow down of lean transformation.

Not only talking about the lean leaders, basically, human being is full of these needs. The most important factor of success in lean transformation is well balancing the needs of motivation. Nobody can tell you what is the correct mix of needs, and you must build up a right mix according to the situation in different period of lean journey.

Albert's Gemba walk

2009-04-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

For many years, I stayed in China for working and ignored the political news in Hong Kong. At recent moment, I left the current job and stayed Hong Kong, so I heard many news and started to care about my home town. I knew it is not good for me as a Hong Kong people, anyway, I am going to fix my mistake from now on.

Here is two video clips about Councillor Albert Chan (陳偉業) presented in legislative council, to resolve the Public Revenue Protection Order 2009, published in the Gazette as Legal Notice No. 27 of 2009 and laid on the table of the Legislative Council on 4 March 2009. In simply said, Hon Albert Chan proposed to cancel the increasing of tobacco tax. They were a excellent presentation for Albert's ideas, and he made me to think in different point of view for a matter.

My blog is always talking about the lean manufacturing concept. This time, I used the Albert's presentation to show my idea for lean as well. I am not going to agree or disagree with Albert's proposal, but it made me interesting on "vulgarity" news for the councillors. The clips were found in youtube.com and they made me understand why they did that in council. The first thing I most disappointed that the public media were all focusing on the vulgarity they said in council meeting, but why they did that? It was obviously that the media was going to mislead the story. Whatever, it is a political game and I am not going to present my point of view here.

The most interesting fact is Albert gave us many points which are based on the Hong Kong people's livelihood. He gave the analysis of the economic problem of the cigarette seller on the streets with real data supporting. I believed that Albert has visited the seller and got the real information on the street, he found that it has a deep impact of the income for the newpaper seller on the street. What is the meaning of Gemba walk? It is not only used in factory, the councillors supposed to has the gemba walk on the street to understand what is happening on there.

This is a fatal absurdity to elminate the red wine tax and double the tobacco tax. Is that the people drinking the red wine really live longer than the others? In the situation of economic down, the most important thing is to solve the problem on livelihood, it is nonsense to double the tax of tobacco and think it can solve the problem of smoking for thousands years. At recent moment, many and many problem on the medicines and its dealer, it was the problem of monitoring fron the government. A moment before, one hospital let a diver to die in front of her gate. What did the Secretary for Food and Health do? The best policy or solution never came from the nice and beautiful office, it must come from the Gemba!

I just hope the secretaries of department walk out from their office and see what is happening in Hong Kong, and learn some lean concept if possible.

Six thinking hats

2009-04-03T09:00:00.000-07:00

In human resource management course of MBA, the professor made mention of "six thinking hat" method for using in decision making. I am so interesting for this topic so I searched the relatied info and shown roughly below,

Early in the 1980s Dr. Edward de Bono invented the Six Thinking Hats method. The method is a framework for thinking and can incorporate lateral thinking. Valuable judgmental thinking has its place in the system but is not allowed to dominate as in normal thinking. Dr. de Bono organized a network of authorized trainers to introduce the Six Thinking Hats.

The key point is that a hat is a direction to think rather than a label for thinking. The key theoretical reasons to use the Six Thinking Hats are to:

encourage Parallel Thinking

encourage full-spectrum thinking

separate ego from performance

There are six metaphorical hats and the thinker can put on or take off one of these hats to indicate the type of thinking being used. This putting on and taking off is essential. The hats must never be used to categorize individuals, even though their behavior may seem to invite this. When done in group, everybody wear the same hat at the same time.

White Hat thinking (Objective)
This covers facts, figures, information needs and gaps. "I think we need some white hat thinking at this point..." means Let's drop the arguments and proposals, and look at the data base."

Red Hat thinking (Intuition)
This covers intuition, feelings and emotions. The red hat allows the thinker to put forward an intuition without any need to justify it. "Putting on my red hat, I think this is a terrible proposal." Ususally feelings and intuition can only be introduced into a discussion if they are supported by logic. Usually the feeling is genuine but the logic is spurious.The red hat gives full permission to a thinker to put forward his or her feelings on the subject at the moment.

Black Hat thinking (Negative)
This is the hat of judgment and caution. It is a most valuable hat. It is not in any sense an inferior or negative hat. The prior or negative hat. The black hat is used to point out why a suggestion does not fit the facts, the available experience, the system in use, or the policy that is being followed. The black hat must always be logical.

Yellow Hat thinking (Positive)
This is the logical positive. Why something will work and why it will offer benefits. It can be used in looking forward to the results of some proposed action, but can also be used to find something of value in what has already happened.

Green Hat thinking (Creative)
This is the hat of creativity, alternatives, proposals, what is interesting, provocations and changes.

Blue Hat thinking (Process)
This is the overview or process control hat. It looks not at the subject itself but at the 'thinking' about the subject. "Putting on my blue hat, I feel we should do some more green hat thinking at this point." In technical terms, the blue hat is concerned with meta-cognition.

Personal comment: We are suggested to think in six sides on one matter, it is comprehensive thinking method not only included postive side and negative side. Green hat thinking recommends us to think out of the box. We can get more creative and better ideas based on the original proposal! Blue hat thinking is the evaluation of overall thinking or proposal, it aimed to a process control function. The red hat thinking shown us the side which is not covered by the physical data.

Yes! I got some ideas from the theory right now!

5E Culture

2009-04-02T22:00:00.000-07:00

Once I heard this term, it made a deep image in my mind. 5E culture is a simply term which is easy to memorize. If we can implement the 5E culture in the company, it activates the vigor of the employee in the organization. Below, I summarized the details I got and some of my experience to list out the items which are included in 5E.

1. Ethics
The vision and mission of company must connect to social responsibility. Tax in legal way, provide job opportunity to local district, supporting in charity, are some of the social responsibility for enterprise. The company with good ethics, the morale and agressive of employee will increased. Also, she can win the respectation from the related customer and industry.

2. Environment
It is the responsibility of everyone to protect our environment. The company which has the process with producing pollution must face the duty to reduce the pollution. On other hand, the company can has cost saving when she implement the enegry saving action. Enegry reduction is also a important factor of environment protection, such as, electrical power, water usage, hot water usage, etc.

3. Exploration
In order to increase the competitive force of company, the company must encourage the new technique development to upgrade her productivity. The new technique was including different scopes, for technical manufacturing process and management methodolgy are also consider to be the item for exploration. The upgrade of technical process can directly improve the productivity from existing situation, the upgrade of management method can support the productivity indirectly, and both of them are compensating each other.

4. Excellence
The concept of excellence, is inluding the continuous improvement to push upgrade of themselves. Also, we needed to provide the good quality product to keep satisfcation of customers. On the way to excellence, we must consider to reduce the wastes continuously and use the saved resource to create more value.

5. Education
The enterprise wants the improve of technical process or management method, she need to keep improve her employee first. Education of people means to upgrade by learning, out of this, the information sharing between departments, and knowledge management are also the important factors here. Education is the nutrient of all the above items.

Leadership styles and lean

2009-03-29T23:43:00.000-07:00

Daniel Goleman describes six leadership styles: Coercive, Authoritative, Affiliative, Democratic, Pacesetting and Coaching. He asserts, "Leaders who have mastered four or more styles, especially the Authoritative, Democratic, Affiliative and Coaching styles, have the best climate and business performance.

COERCIVE LEADER always demands immediate compliance, they request their subordinates to do what they tell them. The subordinates are drove to achieve, initiative and self-control. The leadership style is suitable in a crisis, to kick start a turnaround, or with problem employees. For long term, it caused a negative morale and working atmosphere. Also, this kind of leadership would cause a high risk in business because the leader usually can not accept different idea or comment from the colleagues or underlings.

AUTHORITATIVE LEADER mobilizes people toward a vision, they always say "Come with me". They shown self-confidence, acted as change catalyst in revolution. When changes require a new vision, or when a clear direction is needed, authoritative leader is the best one to lead for changes. This kind of leadership is strongly positive in working atmosphere and their subordinates are willing to follow the leaders with confidence.

AFFILIATIVE LEADER creates harmony and builds emotional bonds. They are good in building relationships in working environment, also can setup a good communication channel between the subordinates. In the situation for healing rifts in a team or to motivate people during stressful circumstances, this kind of leader would be the best choice. This is also making a positive working climate.

DEMOCRATIC LEADER forges consensus through participation. We lalways hear the leader said "What do you think?". This kind of leader shown us collaboration, team leadership and also good in communication. In situation to build buy-in or consensus, or to get input from valuable employees, the leader becomes the motivator for the team. This is also making a positive working climate.

PACESETTING LEADER sets high standards for performance. Maxim from them is "Do as I do, or I am your model." They are conscientiousness, drive to achieve and initiative. To get quick results from a highly motivated and competent team is need the kind of leader. However, they would cause a negative working atmosphere for the team because lack of suggestion system and not encourage of comment from subordinates.

COACHING LEADER develops people for the future. We always hear they say "Try this." to encourage the others to strengthen. The leader is good in developing others, empathy and self-awareness. To help an employee improve performance or develop long-term strengths is suitable for this kind of leader. Positive working environment came from this kind of leadership.

The different characteristics of leadership are just like the different numbers of golf club. It is hard to say which kind of leadership is the best or worst. When we implement the lean transformation, we should select the suitable kind of leadership to lead the Kaizen according to the change of company culture. A trope in golf, during we just start to implement lean, we need the immediately culture change in a big jump. We need to use the coercive leadership to lead just like we use the club in number "0" for issueing ball to more than 200 yards. During the culture is improved, we need to motivate the member to improve by themselves. We can use coaching leadership to lead by encourage for trial, just like we use club of number "P" (putter) to put the ball close to the hole around 50 yards.

The important factor is how to select the suitable leadership style for different period and change selectively. In simply say, the different leadership styles like our set of golf club. Select the club in right time. How many clubs do you have right now? Or, actually you don't know what is the number of club you are using?

Hong Kong Flower Show 2009

2009-03-16T02:41:00.000-07:00

I went to Hong Kong Flower Show 2009 today and took some photos, share with you!

Have a good day.

Rainbow again! 又见彩虹!

2009-03-13T22:01:00.000-07:00

很久以前，一个雨的下午，看到过一次彩虹。

今天中午，又再次看到彩虹。我以最快的速度跑回家中，把我所有的照相机都拿出来，用不同的光暗调节，拍了很多照片。

这条彩虹跟以前见过的不一样，因为它不是那种横跨天空，从左到右像跨桥般的彩虹，而是环绕着太阳成圈形的。若你没有带上太阳眼镜，就比较难看到了。

五年前看到过彩虹，过了几年不错的日子。听说看到彩虹会走好运，看看这次又怎么样!!!

祝所有关心我的家人及好朋友都走好运!!!

若你没有看到彩虹，就多看我拍的照片吧，保证有一样的行运效果！

Aged employee? Senile employee?

2009-03-13T18:15:00.001-07:00

First of all, I make a clear statement here,

Aged employee not equals to senile employee! We must say, aged employee equals to experienced employee!

Agree?

By my last business trip to HuaDong, I visited a wire manufacturing plant in Shanghai. I experienced a story and I want to share it with my reader. During the audit of the wire supplier, we walked thourgh her workshop area and the image of many old, dusted and outdated manufacturing machine get into my eyes. Afterward, we walked to the testing laboratory, much clean, well 5S working place seen there. And then, we went back to conference to have a conclusion of the audit. We stated what is the improvement actions should be in placed and give them some suggestions on quality and management system. The CEO of that supplier gave us a reply liked this, "although our machines are old (outdated), our employee are old (senile), but we appreciated your comments and it is truth that we need to improve the quality and management system.". At that moment, the aged employee looked so regret but I felt so disappointed by his reply.

On the way to Putong airport, it is around one hour of transportation, it is a chance for me to talk about my feedback about his reply in conference room because his "old" employee are not on car. It is the first time I discussed the lean concept to the people out of my current company. I summarized the conversation as below,

"In lean concept, the machine will depreciate all the time in every second but not for people. Employee is value-adding all the time! They absorb experience and solve problem during their working time. The experience never depreciates or lost, experience can combine with their knowledge to form a concrete power to improve their work. Yes, sometime, their knowledge would be updated or covered by new technology, but company must provide the chance to catch up the new technology by training or let them to join seminar for new knowledge. Keep them in a learning atmosphere is a very important factor of company success. Trunaround to machine, it is no way to value-add in its value, no matter how good for the preventive maintenance we provided, depreciation is still there. You must change your mind!"

The CEO nodded! I don't know what will he do but it seen to me that he understood what I said.
In lean world, there are two most important spirits. "Continuous improvement" and "Respect to people". Without these, The "single piece flow", "standardization ", "eliminate wastes", ....etc are all bullshit!!!

Simple? but hard to do!

Observation in Wenzhou

2009-03-13T17:37:00.000-07:00

Introduction:

Terminal is a kind of quick connection device for cable harnessing assembly. This is one of the famous industries in Wenzhou, meanwhile, the low voltage, high voltage electricty controlling device, leather product and automotive spare parts are also the famous industries in that area. Because I worked for that industry of terminal manufacturing and have some experience for that. For a long time, Wenzhou's terminal is always the strongest competitor with Guangdong's terminal manufacturer. Unfortunately, I have no chance to visit Wenzhou to have a fully assessment. Last year, I joined the audit team and went to Wenzhou for observation.

Scope:

Visited two famous terminal, housing and connector manufacturer in Wenzhou. Their sizes are very similar and they have different vision I found. I am going to use these two samples to summarize their common advantage, common disadvantage and differences.

Common advantages:

1. Good business network: the senior management of companies owned their stronge business network in both north and south part of China. The bosses of both companies were started in a salesman to build up their business, for many years experience and effort, they are not only know the business partners in whole China, also, they get so many technicial support from GuangDong and Taiwan partners.
2. Quick and wide sensation: because of their well established business network, they can recieve the news and marketing development signal faster than other district. Also, due to they have more updated news on hand by thier network, their mindset are much wider than the others. Furthermore, they are willing to learn the way of operation. This is one of the important factors of their success.
3. Good relationship and teamwork: This item is not talking about the relationship and team work within the company. Furthermore, they have much better relationship with Goveronment out of the district in Wenzhou. In simply say, the classmate of the bosses are all working in government, even to be the town mayor, offcause, they can get the benefit in local policy by this relationship. On the other hand, their family supporting is also significant.
4. Market reputation: They almost seperated the industries by different town districts. For this town, the famous product is leather product, for another town, automotive spare parts is their main product for most of her companies. During the visiting, I found so many foreign customer to visit that area to look for their supply. It is too easy to get a suitable supply when they walk around the town.
5. Resource sharing: Because of the market established successfully, the other supporting partners setup in their related area for business. For example, there are so many machining vendors for tools located in the town closed to the terminal manufacturer, offcause, they know the companies are needed tooling and machining sub-contract. Due to the case, the human resource also reinforce the industry in Wenzhou because many techinical people knew that they can get a job easily in Wenzhou.
6. Geographic location: I believed that we no need a detailly explanation. Please look at the map, Wenzhou locates in the middle between Shanghai and Shenzhen.

Ineluctable situation, disadvantages accompanies with advantages all the time. I found some potential problems for the terminal manufacturing industry in Wenzhou as below,

Common disadvantages:

1. Government policy: Due to high income of the companies in that area, the local tax rate and the land price increased accordingly. Intangibly, the local policy will block the way of the local business for further development. At this moment, some industries are started to move the main manufacturing base to Hangzhou and Suzhou.
2. Environment protection: Focus on terminal manufacturing, the plating process is a main factor of success. Due to the policy of environment protection, the plating sub-contractor as forced to consolidate into one area. The plating technique is much lower than Guangdong area, and deeply affected their quality of product (dimensional quality). For the global harness manufacturer are using the fully automatic crimping machine for process and Wenzhou's terminal can not be used in that way obviously. It makes the industry far away to deal with global customer, I am sorry that I can not see they have any solution of that.
3. Not attend to their proper works: due to the quick and updated news, good business network and huge capital we made from many years, the bosses from Wenzhou started to shift to other high return business such as land and real estate trading, even cotton trading. As we know, it is the easiler and fastest way to get fortune, offcause, it needs some lucky. They no more concentrated their core business (manufacturing business). Without attention of technical and management improvement but just step on their feet, I have no surprise that the industry in Wenzhou would be catch up by other district.
4. Fortune can not be extended to third generation: This is a Chinese maxim and always proved its accuracy by real cases. If our next generation saw us just working in speculation but earned easily and quickly, they will do the same way in their lifetime. They don't know the previous generation how to save the capital at the beginning and how they were working to build up the business. In Wenzhou right now, all the bosses are going to or went to play the land trading, what happen to their next? How many land left for them to trade at that moment? I hope they should consider my concern here!

The differences between that two suppliers:

1. The bigger supplier shown me that they are going to expand the company in capacity. No evidence shown me that they are going to improve her management system as well as quality system. They told me that they order a lot of production machines, but I can not find the machines has any upgrade. Turnaround to lean, I can not see any concept they knew of lean. 5S, standardization, continuous flow are totally absented there, Self-complacent!
2. The smaller supplier shown me that they understood the disadvantage of the industry, also shown me that they are finding the solution. For the common disadvantage item 2, they planned to setup the plating process internally to control the quality. It is good signal! At least they have a little bit ideas of continuous improvement. On the other hand, the management shown me the motivation of improving refer to their new plant planning. Some years later, I believed the smaller supplier will catch up the bigger one.

P.S.:

First of all, the above two post are just my personal observation and may be not showing the true at all. This is only my visiting summary for reference. Eventaully, this business trip is so valuable for me to analysis the terminal manufacturing industry and I gained much for my experience!

Automation and lean

2009-03-13T17:16:00.000-07:00

First of all, automation is not the term of lean "autonomation". The automation here is talking about the utilization of automatic machine or production equipment to produce without or less manpower.

Last year, I had a visiting for 6 companies in Japan focus on lean manufacturing. It included 2 famous automotive companies (Toyota and Nissan). I found they are fully utilized the automation for production. During the travel, there was much information came from the guide about the culture of Japan. Consolidated the information, I came up some ideas for automation utilization to share with you.

In Japan, I am so surprised that the average age of citizen is 48. She already was a aged country by low born rate. In order to maintain her competition force, avoid the labor shortage, automation utilization is a good solution. From lean concept, reduce the waste of manpower, or we say to use manpower to create higher value. It is totally no conflict between automation and lean manufacturing. In some situation, it is a good solution to combine the lean concept with automation. Below, I stated some condition for using automation,

1. The working environment is unhealthy for human in long term, such as the job of painting. We can consider to make it in automation.
2. The working environment is dangerous for human in short term, such as the job of welding. We can consider to make it in automation.
3. The process is in heavy loading, it exceed the strength of human for long term. Such as the moving the heavy semi-product repeatedly. We can consider to make it in automation.
4. The process is very fine and accurate, the visual of human can not complete the job. We also need the automation there to complete or support.
5. The job is no any technique needed. Only a repeatedly and simple job. Such as the material handling between two processes or some material feeding activities.

According to above conditions, actually, what should do for human in production? I made it in a simply sentence to describe, the job for human, should has a certain of technique but can not too complicated or too simple. It also can not be operated in the environment where is not heathly. However, why we still need human for production? Why not fully automation? To answer this question, we must consider the cost of operation. Please remember, human working is much flexible than machine.

Refer to the graph above, the portion "X" of automation cost meant it is fixed cost of automation no matter what is the quantity we produced. The line of manual production cost is going up proportional to the quantity they produced sharply, when the line meet with the automation cost line, it meant both method of production meet the balance and we can consider to use automation instead of manpower. For this point, out of maintenance cost and salary, we should also consider the cost of line change and lost of labor shortage.

Finally, there is no conflict between automation and lean manufacturing, actually, they are supporting each other to improve the production. Please have a good consideration when you get into the situation for changing the manufacturing mode.

Problem in Boeing 787 assembly

2009-03-13T08:37:00.000-07:00

From WSJ, We found an article talked about Boeing 787 assembly,

"The first Dreamliner to show up at Boeing's factory was missing tens of thousands of parts, Boeing said."
"When mechanics later opened boxes and crates accompanying the fuselage sections, they found them filled with thousands of brackets, clips, wires and other items that already should have been installed. In some cases, officials say, components came with no paperwork at all, or assembly instructions written in Italian, requiring translation."
"Boeing officials thought they could work through this unexpected twist in a couple of weeks. Instead, they had to put the plane up on jacks and remove its engines and tail to get to tight spots."
"Boeing set up this global supply chain and chose the suppliers. Now, they seem to be dumping on the suppliers, saying how they wouldn't use some of them again. "

I have some analysis of the problems according to lean concepts as belows,

1. Production Preparation (2P) was not working properly. Even, the PFMEA was executed the same situation as 2P. If the 2P was worked out in proper way, most of the problems in real assembly process can be simulated and prevent their happenning before actual running, otherwise, it was totally impossible to have many tens of parts missed to assemble to the plane. The purpose of 2P or product production preparation (3P) is going to eliminate the problems in the first mass production, Although, it is impossible to kick out all the process issues, but at least the process can reach a specified level. The concept is "do it right at the first time", consider about the 787, it is talking about 10 million and 6 months of process time. If the situation liked the article shown, how much lost in the business?

2. Mistake-proofing was absented in the process of assembly. If the mistake-proofing (poka-yoke) was consider in the process, it is also impossible to have parts missed. It should has a checking or testing before the next parts installation, and if it was a parts missed, the line should be stopped and clear the problem before the next process. We must remember that Poka-yoke is not only a checking, in other words, it is a very important concept and element in whole quality control system. Only one screw missed on tle plane will cause a disaster, even many tens parts missed?

3. In order to cost reduction and global supply chain system, same as A380, we found the parts came from every corners in the world. It is no needed to talk about the pull system, even if the assembly process will be affected by such kind of parts suppling. Some of the instruction in German, italian and Japanese, how can the workers to work for? Are they having the language knowledge liked James Bond?? In way of pull system to consider this problems, the final assembly process was easily to stop the parts supply chain and make the line and workers idle by the issue.

It is a good negative example for lean manufacturing implementation. We can have more understandings through the case study from other industries, because the issues were the same. Let me know if you have any comment on this, thanks! BTW, the video shown above is not the original video showing the real assembly process. The video disappeared in youtube already.

Lean life 精益思维与生活 (2)

2009-03-10T22:44:00.000-07:00

Some years before, I remember that it was a very hot summer day. I was informed to hold a lean manufacturing concept training for the new joined operators for the plant. Usually, the training was held by my subordinates Steed and Andy, but the guys went to other plant for Kaizen project, therefore, I went to hold the training by myself.

There were a lot of young people in the training room! I thought there were more than 50 people and they were only 18-20 years old. I always held training for lean, but the objects are always have higher academic level such as the staffs in office, even the manager of other departments. It was the first time I train the young boys and girls.

As usual, I started with the spirit of lean, value-added concept, takt time, single piece flow, 7 wastes,...., however, I was frustrated by their responds. I found that most of the "kids" can not understood what I said, because most of them were the first time to work in factory or just graduated by school. It is obviously that non-value-added to talk with them for the items in manufacturing industry, or I can said it was too difficult for them. Half past of the training time, is that I have to let the team go with their confused and perplexed faces? No way! I have to let them to understand something before they left, even only one or two points. I took a deep breath and start to tell them a story,

20 years before, when I was a student in high school, there was a great mathematics teacher in the school. He found some students were reading comic and fiction in the class, he was not angry but shared some feeling and experiance with us. Offcause, I am sorry that I was also reading fiction as well. The teacher said he used to enjoy reading fiction, but he found a fact by his calculation.

"let say we used 3 hours to read the fiction everyday, and we did not read in the weekend for outing. How many hours we used to read fiction?"

3 hours X 5 days X 52 week = 780 hours.

"The kids always started to read fiction or comic from 12 to 15 years old, Some time, the habbit would continuous for several years. In simply, we calculated that in 10 years, how many hours we used to read fiction?"

780 hours X 10 years = 7800 hours.

"OK, how many days or years you used to read comic and fiction?"

7800 hours / 24 hours = 325 days.

"The last question is, if you have 325 days or almost one year of time to study something useful, what is the benefit for you? You have to remember that these 325 days is no stop, no sleep, nothing other but only learning one item. You can be an expert for you are learning."

I started to explain the the "kids" in the training, I asked them how many hours per day they used on internet for chating in MSN or QQ. How much time they used to watch the TV programme? If they used that time to go to learn or join the course in night-time school, is that more meaningful for them? Yes, it is the concept of continuous improvement! If we identified the time they used for QQ is a waste, at least, I believed that it is a waste. We can use the time for some value-added action, just like continuous learning. For instant, I was 37 years old, but I still continuous to study MBA course in weekend at that moment. I was continuous improvment for myself, even I was the director of the company.

Wow! I was so happy that the young people started to understand what I was talking about. Some of them even told me that they have to go to night time school to learn more knowledge. It was a good experiance for me, the most important thing was not I shared some knowledge of lean with the young people, the critical thing was they can continuous to improve themselves. It doesn't a matter they learned lean concept or not, if they learned something which has benefit for their life is enough. I wanted them to improve and promote themselves, some years later, I do not want them to work in the workshop and still was an operator.

This is a real story we applied the lean concept in our life. I was so wonder that the great mathematic teacher can understand that 20 years before. Do you think lean concept is difficult thoery for us? No, it is not, in my point of view, I think it is more like a common sense.

Lean life 精益思维与生活 (1)

2009-03-10T21:41:00.000-07:00

As we know, lean applies in every corners of manufacturing. It helps a lot for manufacturing industry to eliminate wastes and use the saved resource to create more value. It is the most important concept from lean. However, did you consider that we can also apply lean concept in our daily life? We are using this to save our time and burden, in the same word, we use our saved resource to value-add ourselves.

Please check the photo above. These are the power cord which are using to connect the transformer for our notebook computer. The top one was mine and the bottom one was taken from my friend. Formerly, they were the same cable because we are using the same model of botebook. I spent USD0.5 to buy a plug and cut down more than the 50% of cable to connect the plug again in 5 mins as the top one shown in photo. In both working environment in home and office, I had no need to use such a long cable. The requirement of the cable length is only let the transformer touch the ground when it plug in the outlet. The exceed length of the cable is only the burden of my carrying.

You would ask, what is the benefit to do that? I have a simple calculation for you as below,
The weight of orginal cable is 110g,
The weight of short cable is 50g,
I need to take my notebook for working about 300 days per year, and two time per day,
The saving of weight I carried is (110-50)g X 300 days/yr X 2= 36kg/year,
I did that for 5 years already for 3 different notebook computer I used, therefore, 36 X 5 = 180kg.

60g different in weight may be meant nothing! But I can use the spare loading to bring a book for read. Even, 180kg for saving burden make my backbone more healthy, I believed. But one thing we need to remember is, the 60g / day is not necessary for me, I can use the saving to carry anything more important than a cable which I do not need. That's the lean concept!!!
My friends, think about it! you can find more examples for the lean in life and we will enjoy them. Thanks!

我们都知道，精益思维应用于制造业中的每一个角落。它帮助制造业去消除各种各样的浪费，从而利用这些省下来的资源去创造价值。这是最重要的精益概念。不过，各位有否想过，我们可以利用这个概念应用于日常生活中？我们是可以利用这个概念去节省我们的时间及负担，同样地，我们可以利用这些节省下来的资源去增值自己。

大家可以看看附图，这是一条电源线用于连接手提电脑与变压器，照片中，上边的一条是我的电脑用，下边的那条是我的朋友所使用的，原来它们都是一模一样的，因为我们是使用同一品牌的手提电脑。我用了三块钱，五分钟，剪掉超过一半的线缆长度，就如图上所示再重新接驳起来。在办公室或家中，我的使用环境都不需要一条这么长的线缆。唯一的要求，就是当接上插座后，变压器能碰到地上或桌上，不用直接受拉力就可以了。这些多余的长度就是我携带上的负担。
你们会问，这样做有什么好处呢？我简单计算一下给你看看，

原来的电源线重量是110克，
改短后的电源线重量为50克
每年我大概有300天要携带手提电脑上下班，即每天两次。
在携带上的负担，每年节省了（110-50）克 X 300日/年 X 2次 = 36公斤/年
我已使用种做法大概五年了，其间我已换了三台手提电脑，
即36公斤/年 X 5年 = 180公斤。

60克的差距可能是毫无意义！不过我们可以利用这多余的重量去带一本书看看，甚至减少了这180kg负担，我相信会令我的脊骨健康一点。不过，有一点我们需要记住的是，那每天的60克是我不需要的，我可以用这些负重节省来带任何更重要的东西，这总比带那多余的线缆有意义。这就是精益概念。

朋友们，想一想！你就能从日常生活中找到更多的例子，亦可以享受它们的好处，谢谢！

Lost of Toyota!

2009-03-08T07:22:00.000-07:00

Here is an article from Wall Street Journal, A Scion Drives Toyota Back To Basics . I was so surprised by the article and I think the world was set on fire by the story. Therefore, I want to share with the people who is interesting for lean concept.

"Three top executives, including Mitsuo Kinoshita, announced their retirement. Akio Toyoda is the first member of Toyota's founding family to take the helm in 14 years. Toyoda's appointment as president is pending shareholder approval in June. ...... Toyota bulked up in recent years and is now stuck with too much manufacturing capacity. It might also be faced with its first layoffs in Japan since 1950, when 3,000 workers were let go."

For a long time, we are learning lean manufacturing (or TPS) and we lelieved that the concept helps many kinds of industry to get higher profit through the way to eliminate the wastes. Why the most famous company in lean world, which is the originator of lean manufacturing, sufferred the bad situation? In this financial tsunami, is that the lost of Toyota reflects the invalidation of lean manufacturing? The answer is "NO", the lean concept has never invalid, the problem is Toyota got lost in front of the number game. Please read the below.

"An unprecedented number of unsold cars in Japan has forced Toyota to stockpile them in the parking lots of Fuji Speedway, a company-owned track near Mount Fuji. ....... I think Toyota probably over-expanded a little bit in order to compete with the American auto makers,' said his father, Shoichiro Toyoda, 83, who himself was the auto maker's president during the 1980s. "

The first waste of 7, over-production. It looks to me that Toyota forgot the 7 wastes principle. On the other hand, what is the meaning of over-expand? What is the meaning of over-capacity? In result of over-expand, it forms the over-capacity. In the same way, in result of over-capacity, it forms the over-production. Over-production forms the negative effect in P/L. The leader is only focusing on how they achieve the short term target, they only remember the number they needed to made this year. Basically, they only achieved their personal target to make somebody happy in board of director, but they forget the long term goal and the most inportant thing of company, the mission.

"There's a move away from technologically sophisticated in-car gizmos like a solar-powered cooling system designed for the new Prius and expensive new assembly-line technique of dipping car bodies into a vat of paint and swirling them around. ...... The company is also reining in its engineers, who have been designing new features that occasionally appear to be out of character with the company's utilitarian roots. For example, the new Prius, launching this year, has an option for a solar-powered ventilation system designed to keep the interior cool when parked. Gizmos like these helped lift the car's retail price to an estimated $28,000, according to analysts, compared with the $22,000 currently."

Yes, it sounds good if the interior of the car is cool when I back the car in carpark of summer days. But, how many months I need that function? I believed I need that only 3 to 4 months in a year. Do you willing to pay US$6000 more to get that thing? For me, no way! May be I need that if I can afford to buy a Benz or BMW, but I do not expect that happen in a PRIUS. I don't know what is your comment, but I think it is also over-production, or we can say "over-design". The management of product developement is also forget they only need to design something for customer demand, I meant free of charge.

"Then there's the shabu shabu paint system. Toyota's manufacturing division is one of the company's proudest operations, having developed a highly efficient 'lean manufacturing' philosophy. To replace the traditional system of slowly dragging a car through a 115-foot-long bath of anticorrosion undercoating, Toyota engineers came up with a new process in which a car body gets picked up by a robot arm, then swished around in a pool of paint, cutting the length of the line. However, the new system costs roughly four times as much to set up as the traditional process, while producing what Mr. Toyoda felt were minimal improvements in the quality of the paint job and its efficiency."

I think it would reduce much space for the painting if they paint the car as a hot pot way. In the point of no change in quality and efficiency but four time of cost higher, are customer want to pay for that as their willings? For myself, I need a car has a good coating to prevent the rust, but I don't care how to paint it from the manufacturer. I can not see how they paint the car, offcause I can not feel the exciting of painting a car in hot pot way, at least when I am driving. Why I need to pay for that? Yes, this time, the company remember the lean concept, the waste of motion, but they forget the top principle of lean. What is value-added process?

I am sorry that I am not going to attack Toyota. Actually, I like to drive a Toyota car. I felt safe and comfortable when I was driving that, just hope Toyota can find the way back and continuous to build the car as our need, not as Toyota needs.

Crisis and opportunity

2009-03-04T22:45:00.000-08:00

A Chinese Saying,
"Opportunity is always present in the midst of crisis. Every crisis carries two elements, danger and opportunity. No matter the difficulty of the circumstances, no matter how dangerous the situation ..... at the heart of each crisis lies a tremendous opportunity. Great Blessings lie ahead for the one who knows the secret of finding the opportunity within each crisis."

In year 2007, I started the course of MBA in Hong Kong. Because of heavy burden of assignments of the course, it is obviously that speed of issuing post slow down, in other words, less time for thinking! Today, an event, a negative comment from my colleague to my job, made me calm down, forced me to meditate my job.

14 years, came out from college, still now, I don't like my job repeatedly everyday. I can not rise my interesting to do the same job which I have done before. I want a new assignment and like the new challenge. Nobody likes challenge and crisis, but I use the new assignment and challenge to make the crisis for myself. I need crisis to push me moving on. For these year, I fully studied the Chinese saying stated at the beginning of this article. The good opportunity is always come from the most dangerous place, postion or duty...

10 years before, I was a project engineer. I was assigned to develop a new product for the factory. The product was totally not familiar for the company. At that moment, serious conflict in different process departments, unfortunately, the new product needed to be produced through all process stations. I knew the risk for following the project, I faced many and many blocks, but I have a passion to complete my job. What is the result? I became the engineering manager after the project. May be I had not enough experience to be the manager at that moment, may be I had not enough knowledge of management to be the manager, but I had enough passion and volition to promote that position. Company gave me the opportunity to try.

Another short story, 5 years before, I just changed my job to a new company. Just on board for a few days, my underlings argued seriously with the colleague in other department. They were arguing be email and copied all over the company, it caused a really bad image to other departments. It also a risk for me at that moment, I stop their arguing and one email in 30 seconds, called them to discuss the issue face by face. What is the result? My boss ascertain my ability and my underlings felt confidence for my capability.

Thess years, I joined the course of MBA. So many people asked me why I need to study the course? I never gave them a certainly answer. Actually, my underlings improved and upgraded so much and they created the threaten for me. I need some upgrade for myself to avoid the crisis. The crisis management theory for me is simple, not plan for when will it happen, the important thing is how to plan for preventing them.

For the these many years, I have long time not hearing the negative comment for my job. I was already unfamiliar for negative speaking. It is so dangerous for me, not from the comment from my colleague. Frankly speaking, I don't agree the comment for his point of view to my existing result, the result from him can not cause any danger to me. The most dangerous to me is, I almost forget the useful power to push me, the crisis!!! At recent moment, I felt I was stop in a stage and I can not break through. I need some motivator for my career. Honestly say, I am never angry with anybody who gave me the negative comment. Let say the negative comment only represent 1% of my performance, I will improve the 1% accordingly.

In recent moment, I quit my job but it is not my willing. At least, it is not in my schedule, I planned to seek a new job after Chinese new year and resign when I got a better one. The time line is not in a big gap but I was quit passively. May be it is the good time for me to think about my plan for future.

Lean in American way? in Japanese way?

2009-03-02T23:06:00.000-08:00

Entended from my last post "The different between American and Japanese management styles", I want to talk more about the the differet of the way they consider in lean manufacturing as well as its implementation. Here is also a blog post from Steed Wei "Lean in American way, Lean in Japanese way" for your reference. The ways of thinking for lean manufacturing is also different as their management style.

The different ways of thinking in lean between Amercian and Japanese,

1. As other management tools, such as balance score card, American thinks that lean manufacturing concept is also a tools only. How do you treat your tools? Put them in a toolbox and seek them when you need? They are using lean as a tools to force their employee to change, force them to continuous improvement. There is no culture change involved in implementation. From the cradleland of lean, actually, Japanese does not know what is lean but they called that concept in "TPS" (Toyota production system). Japanese way of lean is a culture and it is important to spread the culture to everybody in company. They need the employee fully understand the lean concept as their original thinking. All the continuous improvement actions are issued from their wills, and no need to force by senior management. In my last trip to Japan, I asked the Japanese consultant that, "is that all the Japanese companies implement lean concept?" The consultant replied, "yes, all the companies here understand the lean concept, but they only apply parts of tools for their company. They only apply the tools they needed in necessary."

2. American way of lean is focusing on short term result. As they think that lean is tools, any kind of tools would give the return or payback to its value. They spent money on investment to get a lean leader and Kaizen promotion officer, they spent on training and the charge from external consultant. They always ask for return, "How much saving we can get annually?". They need a schedule of actions, and they also need a budget they can save. They will give up some long term project to improve because of its result is not significant in the financial report. Japanese thinks in the way that lean is their responsibility. No matter it is a project in long term or short term, if the project has the benefit to their company, they will implement and push the project. They would never ask for a budget plan for how much they can saving, but they will have a summary for how much they did save. The summary is a prove they are improving the process in right direction and to motivate the people to continuous.

3. American way of lean is focusing on the holistic change, not only the manufacturing process, the logistic flow, supply chain flow, information flow even the office are also considered to changed in one shoot. As the Japanese consultant replied, they are not implement the lean concept totally. They are only focusing the critical point of their company and apply lean concept to that area accordingly. As we know, Japanese culture is focusing on the detail, they apply the lean into the area and they continuous to improve until they felt it was perfect. Offcause, for Japanese culture, it has no sense of perfect, it only has better, and better.

Any more ideas from you?

The different between American and Japanese management style

2009-03-02T20:02:00.000-08:00

I am working for American company but I am developing lean transformation in the company. There are some different in concept of management after several months of studing and implement. Below is a summary found on internet which can well present my experiance for this topics.

力量来源
●美国：依赖制度
美国管理体系运作力量来源于严密的治理和激励制度，用制度的力量约束和激励高层管理者的行为。公司董事会、股东大会、管理层的权、责、利分明。
●日本：依赖文化
日本的管理体系运作力量来源于企业文化的凝聚力，依靠员工终身对企业效忠的日本文化传统。建立董事会、工会、主管间相互合作、磋商、和谐的管理模式。

人的地位
●美国：重视个人
美国推崇领袖或精英的个人力量。领导力往往自上而下，企业依赖总裁的判断力、观察力和决策力，员工深受企业领袖行为的影响。企业文化的核心就是老板文化。
●日本：重视团队
日本的企业更加注重团队的力量。领导力通常是自下而上，中层领导不断地与一线工人在现场进行密切的沟通，激发他们的创新潜力，把公司文化渗透到每一个员工的心底。

使命目标
●美国：股东利益最大化
美国企业的根本目标是最大限度为股东创造价值，所以企业政策不断受到股票市场波动的影响。
●日本：多元目标
日本企业的目标多元化，员工、顾客、市场的目标往往大于近期的股东利益。通常情况下，为了满足扩大市场额，企业宁愿短期内牺牲股东利益。

组织分工
●美国：高度专业化
美国的企业专业化趋势更强，内部分工细腻。员工通过提高自己的专业化水平来获得职业上的进取和组织上的优化。
●日本：高度综合化
日本的企业分工相当粗犷，强调员工的长期就业心态。企业往往为员工提供持续的综合培训，内部职务轮换流动，以应付市场出现的突然情况。

绩效考核
●美国：短期目标
美国企业采用目标管理，严格执行短期的绩效评估，在季度、年终奖评过程中实行物质刺激、惩罚鼓励、多劳多得、优胜劣汰。
●日本：长期发展
日本企业重视挖掘员工在企业中的潜力。企业的短期绩效通常放在员工长期发展之后，并不拿员工的短期表现作为惟一的评判和奖惩的标准.

What is the Chinese management style???

Toyota production system

2009-03-02T19:55:00.000-08:00

Please check this link for Toyota site. This is a very clear flash media for value stream mapping as well as other useful info for lean manufacturing.

Takt time

2009-02-26T07:59:00.000-08:00

Takt time = Customer demand / working hours, it means the maximum of time per piece in output which can achieve the customer demand.

Cycle time = the total process time in sum of all work station.

In process design, we are following the thinking of takt time to work on, but it is hard to achieve perfectly. When we received customer demand, usually, it is an annual usage, we would calculate the takt time accordingly. Then, we will select a manufacturing mode to fit with the takt time. Nowaday, most of the process engineers always jump to the select the mode according to their experiance without the supporting from takt time. Actually, the engineers can intuit to know what kind of manufacturing mode is suitable according to the annual usage quantity. Whatever, I suggest we should calculate the takt first, and I called this with "customer takt time".

For selecting manufacturing mode, I have some explanation here. No matter what kind of manufacturing mode you selected, the consumption of process time is located in a specified range. In other words, you can not adjust the process time in a big gap. We was challenged if the takt time is 100% ramp up or 50% drop. If we face the cases stated in unstable of customer demand, what should we do? Can we adjust the process time as the takt time changed? Negative, but we can choose another manufacturing mode.

Afterward, according to the selected mode, we can calculate the cycle time according to the mode. According to what kind of manufacturing mode, you can adjust the configuration of the process flow to have a cycle time and process time for every stations. With that numbers, we can fine tune the process flow to meet with the takt time. I called this with "process takt time". Compare these two takt time, "customer takt time" and "process takt time", to see the process can achieve with customer requirement or not.

Finally, all the production schedule must be arranged according to the balanced takt time. It is talking about the execution force to sustian the process flow.

Another question we always have, how about if there were many different products produced in one production cell? For this case, we should do the same in most of the stages above, but we have to balance all the takt time together. Let's say if we have three products are producing in a cell, we need to adjust the sum of takt time of three products together. make sure that there is no exceed working time left for the scheduling. It looks difficult, but just try for that. We always found that it is not difficult as we though.

Production smoothing

2009-02-25T08:09:00.001-08:00

Many months ago, we held a Kaizen program with external consultant for production smoothing. Below is the study from me to summarize the concept of production smoothing for your reference.

It came from Japanese term "Heijunka" (平準化), sometime, some people called it as "production balancing" or "production leveling". It is a system designed to achieve a more even and consistent flow of work. Heijunka as a concept is closely related to lean production and just in time manufacturing. It also means two different, but related, things. One is the leveling of production by volume. The other is leveling production by product type or mix. Use for level the resource of production in machine capacity, working space, operation capital and manpower arrangement including supporting departments.

According to the figure shown above, the red line represents the customer demand and the green line represents the production capacity. If we plan for production schedule as red line, because of its high variance of demanding, due to the resource issue, it will cause much of waste in manpower or machine capacity. Production smoothing is using to plan and try to lower down the variance of scheduling but achieve the target for customer demand. Offcause, it is no way to retain the capacity in a straight line profile, but versus the red line, it becomes more consistent and easiler for planning.

The slower but consistent tortoise causes less waste and is much more desirable than the speedy hare that races ahead and then stops occasionally to doze. The Toyota Production System can be realized only when all the workers become ortoises. ~~~ From Ohno, 1988

Leveling by volume: Toyota's view is that production systems that vary the required throughput suffer from mura and muri with capacity being 'forced' in some periods. So their approach is to manufacture at the long-term average demand and carry an inventory proportional to the variability of demand, stability of the production process and the frequency of shipments. The advantage of carrying this inventory is that it can smooth production throughout the plant and therefore reduce process inventories and simplify operations which reduces costs.

Leveling by product: Most value streams produce a mix of products and therefore face a choice of production mix and sequence. It is here that the discussions on economic order quantities take place and have been dominated by changeover times and the inventory this requires. Toyota's approach resulted in a different discussion where it reduced the time and cost of changeovers so that smaller and smaller batches were not prohibitive and lost production time and quality costs were not significant. This meant that the demand for components could be leveled for the upstream sub-processes and therefore lead time and total inventories reduced along the entire value stream.

At last, we adjusted the customer demand forecast and production schedule in the program. But, one thing so important we must remember that, "the world is changing everyday". The requirement from customer is also changing as well. Production smoothing is not a improvment program, at some point of view, it should be said as a scheduling concept. We can not fix all the resource planning problem in one program, actually, it imply the concept needed to be combined with daily planning job.

Benefits of leveling the schedule,
1. Flexibility to make what the customer wants when they want it.

2. Reduced risk of unsold goods.

3. Balanced use of labor and machines.

4. Smoothed demand on the upstream processes. (people, machine, suppliers)

Belief 2 - Flamingo 火烈鸟

2009-02-24T06:40:00.000-08:00

On last week, I read a magazine and learned some knowledge of Flamingo. It was found that the migration of flamingo is interesting and shown us some ideas when we are facing the challenge of leading, or we can say the challenge of culture change in organization.

Flamingo is a gregarious wading birds in the genus. They are found in both the western hemisphere and in the eastern hemisphere, but are more numerous in the latter. Flamingo has white color originally and its red feather came from the mineral from its feeding. The migration of flamingo is not its habit periodically, it only migrates to other area when the food was shortage or mutation of its living area. Its migration is always started in the night to prevent the attacks from other accipiters.

The most interesting thing is its way how it starts the migration. The migration is usually started by one flamingo and it is always identified as the leader of the group. When the leader started to fly to other area in the first trial, there are only a few members to follow the action. There were only 5 to 10 flamingoes to follow and the leader will fly back to the base and take a rest. Afterward, the first tier of 10 flamingo starts the migration again. This time, they will fly many turns on its living base to attract more followers to join the tier, it may be 100 flamingoes to follow the action but 100 flamingoes were still the less portion of the group. Therefore, the second tier of 100 would back to the base. It is hard to say how many tiers can start the migration successfully, it started from 1 to 10, to 100, to 500, 2000, ... to all finally. We can find that if the number of bird in that tier exceed a certain portion or percentage of the group, all the group will start the migration.

In my point of view personally, the migration of flamingo is similar the way we implement the lean transformation. The leader starts to train the team and it will has some members found that it is meaningful and follow the way to do. After many improvement actions, some other members will find that worth to follow according to the result of improvement project and the number of follower will increase accordingly. When we are pushing the culture change, it needs a certain number of members to change and follow first. When it exceed the certain percentage, the culture will form in the organization. The problem is the leader has the passion enough to lead so many tiers until the culture is formed. It is the same way of how to start migration of flamingo. Why we give up the lean transformation when we faced the resistance of culture change? If you face the problem on the way in lean, let's tell your members for this story.

Belief 1 - Kong Zi 孔子

2009-02-15T17:51:00.000-08:00

"Lun Yu" is a ancient book of China which wrote by "Kong Zi". He was the great teacher of all Chinese and his thinking influence all of us till now.
Here is a story in Lun Yu recorded a conversation between Kong Zi and his student,

Student asked, "Master, what are the core factors to establish a country?"

Kong Zi replied, "Army, food and belief!"
Student asked, "If we needed to ignore one factor, which is your choose?"

Kong Zi replied, "Army!"

Student asked, "If we needed to ignore one more factor, which is you choose?"

Kong Zi replied, "Food!", he explained. "Everybody will die from of old, nothing can be done without belief."

Yes, if everybody believe and trust their country, even no food and they are starving, even no amry and they are attacked by other civilization, the country still can be stable. Without their belief, even they have food and weapon, the people in that country attack each other for more fortune and power. The country is mess and all the citizen are unhappy.

Belief, also is a core factor of culture. It is existing in every company, even in lean manufacturing transformation. During implementation of lean manufacturing, even the result of improvement is not significant enough to shown all the members, if the people still trust the methodology can help them to improve, the implementation is continuously going on. In some companies, the belief of lean is not enough, even they have a little bit improvement in any kind of field, once they faced the problem or block, they will step backward and are going to give up. Culture change is so important of success in lean transformation. On the way for improving efficency, we should do something to improve the culture and enhance their belief of lean as well. Otherwise, the lean can not be sustained and it is the most common of failure of lean transformation.

Management and Leadership

2008-11-27T02:35:00.000-08:00

Hersey, P. and Blanchard stated that, "Leadership occurs any time one attempts to influence the behavior of an individual or group, regardless of the reason. . . . Management is a kind of leadership in which the achievement of organizational goals is paramount." It is obvious that management and leadership are not the synonymous.

A clear distinction between management and leadership may nevertheless prove useful. This would allow for a reciprocal relationship between leadership and management, implying that an effective manager should possess leadership skills, and an effective leader should demonstrate management skills. One clear distinction could provide the following definition:

· Management involves power by position.
· Leadership involves power by influence.

Warren Bennis drew twelve distinction between two groups as below,

· Managers administer, leaders innovate
· Managers ask how and when, leaders ask what and why
· Managers focus on systems, leaders focus on people
· Managers do things right, leaders do the right things
· Managers maintain, leaders develop
· Managers rely on control, leaders inspire trust
· Managers have a short-term perspective, leaders have a longer-term perspective
· Managers accept the status-quo, leaders challenge the status-quo
· Managers have an eye on the bottom line, leaders have an eye on the horizon
· Managers imitate, leaders originate
· Managers emulate the classic good soldier, leaders are their own person
· Managers copy, leaders show originality

Share this with my friends and hope we can have a deep consideration how we can do better!

Catholicness of lean

2008-11-25T22:37:00.000-08:00

At recent moment, I get some information from website for electing the first company which is well implement lean manufacturing. Personally, I am not interesting the result of election because I am so sure that Toyota will be the first one. But, I am so interesting which are the competitive company. Please check the above company names.

To the moment, I was making a presentation for lean committee meeting, so I used the above info to have a culture promotion to all committee member. below is the main point of the presentation,

Including all companies in automotive industry, there are 10 companies related in those 25 companies. It is only 40%.

For the top 10 companies, it is only one company is making automotive.
Lean manufacuring is appling in different industries around 60%, although it was started by Toyota.
The industries covered such as electronics, food, funiture manufacturing, ...etc. We can find the catholicness of lean concept applied in diverse industries. Nowaday, lean is absolutely not only apply in automotive industry.

What is the main factor for apply lean concept to other industries?
Apply lean from
lean manufacturing, transforms to
Lean management, transforms to
Lean product development, transforms to
Lean supply chain, transforms to
Lean enterprise.

Whatever the stage you are, whatever the industry you are, eventually, we need --- Lean thinking!

Gemba walk

2008-11-25T00:40:00.000-08:00

"Gemba" is a word from Japanese language [現場] which is meaning of "go to the place, look at the process, talk with people!". There are some explanation as below,

1. Learning model.

Gemba walk is way to build up the learning model liked sensei's apprenticeship. "Sensei" is also a japanese word means "teacher or coach". The subordinates just like the students or apprentices. Sensei should also instill in the students the discipline needed to effectively sustain a lean conversion and have it improve consistently. Sensei has the responsibility of showing the "True North" direction of his students, coach them which is the right direction, when to stop and when to go. Sensei teach by stretching the student's thinking and perceptions through questions that stimulate the student to consider entirely new possibilities. Students might consider questions such as these:

What would you learn if you measured in smaller intervals of time?
What is the team leader supposed to be doing in this situation?
How could these expectations be made more clear?......etc.

Please remember this is not the concept in conventional, "I say, You do!" Gamba walk is a way of learning model helping you gradually to establish a new, lean way of seeing and thinking.

2. Methodology

The gemba walk should be set up in regularly scheduled basis. The time period must be, long enough to all team to digest the advice and complete the task assignment, short enough to maintain a sense of pace. We always suggest to setup the gemba walk by weekly basis.
The team of gemba walk should be firmed with necessary members and should not be changed with no reason. The gemba team should be well informed the schedule, they also need the patience and tolerance for frustration. Sometime, I saw the senior management walking in the workshop without any communication. They just liked a spy to investigate the problem, afterward, they sent a long email to challenge everyone related. And then, everyone was busy in reply his email by explanation. What is benefit to do that? Please remember, the gemba walk must be set up in transparent form.
All grading of management should setup their suitable level of gemba walk. The higher of level, the wider to check, the longer of time interval. Offcause, it is no sense of a VP to carry on a gamba walk with technician. They should a relative and suitable member such as the plant manager or general manager.

3. Focal points

As the details of item 1, The leader of gameba walk must have well knowledge in both technical elements lean manufacturing system and lean management system. During the gemba walk, they should lead the team to focus on the below items,

3.1 Process focus,
3.2 Process improvement,
3.3 Leader availability,
3.4 Labor planning,
3.5 Standard works,
3.6 Comunication,
3.7 Workplace organization.

According to the above items, the leader (sensei) should assign the tasks of improvement accordingly. They also has a responsibility to follow up and trace the assigned tasks implementation. It is also a way of leadership discipline.

Finally, we don't to fix everything in one gemba walk. The main purpose of it is going to fine tune the direction of continuous improvement. Make sure that all the subordinates are working in the same goal. at the same time, we control the speed of the improvement. Is that running too fast, so that many improvement can not sustian? Is that running too slow, we ignore the opportunity for further improving? The factor of success for gemba walk, even in overall lean transformation, is PATIENCE.

OK, any comment?

The 14 Principles of the Toyota Way

2008-11-24T06:27:00.000-08:00

The 14 Principles of the Toyota Way is a management philosophy used by the Toyota corporation that includes the Toyota Production System. In long term thinking, company is going to have a process for solving problems, to add value to the organization by developing its people, and to recognize that continuously solving root problems drives organizational learning.

The 14 Principles The Toyota Way has been called "a system designed to provide the tools for people to continually improve their work". The 14 principles of The Toyota Way are organized in four sections: 1) Long-Term Philosophy, 2) The Right Process Will Produce the Right Results, 3) Add Value to the Organization by Developing Your People, and 4) Continuously Solving Root Problems Drives Organizational Learning. The principles are set out and briefly described below:

Section I — Long-Term Philosophy

第一部份 - 长期理念

Principle 1 原则一

Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals.

甚至损害短期财务目标的前提下，管理决定亦须建基长期理念

Section II — The Right Process Will Produce the Right Results

第二部份 - 正确的流程产生正确的结果

Principle 2 原则二

Create a continuous process flow to bring problems to the surface.

建立一个连续的流程，以把潜藏的问题带出来。

Principle 3 原则三

Use "pull" systems to avoid overproduction.

利用拉动系统，以避免过量生产。

Principle 4 原则四

Level out the workload, work like the tortoise, not the hare.

平衡工作量，工作时像乌龟般稳定，不似野免般不稳定。

Principle 5 原则五

Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time.

建立一个文化去停止补救问题，要令品质第一时间就达标。

Principle 6 原则六

Standardized tasks and processes are the foundation for continuous improvement and employee empowerment.

作业及流程的标准化是持续改善及雇员授权的基础。

Principle 7 原则七

Use visual control so no problems are hidden.

利用目视控制使问题无所遁形。

Principle 8 原则八

Use only reliable and thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes.

只运用可靠及已经彻底测试的技术为人及流程来服务。

Section III — Add Value to the Organization by Developing Your People

第三部份 - 开发人材为组织增值

Principle 9 原则九

Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others.

将完全明白职责及工作的人开展为领导者，以推行理念及教导其他人。

Principle 10 原则十

Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company's philosophy.

开发能跟随公司理念的额外之人员及团队。

Principle 11 原则十一

Respect your extended network of partners and suppliers by challenging them and helping them improve.

利用挑战及协助改善去维护商业伙伴及供应商的网络。

Section IV: Continuously Solving Root Problems Drives Organizational Learning

第四部份 - 持续解决根本问题驱使组织学习

Principle 12 原则十二

Go and see for yourself to thoroughly understand the situation (Genchi Genbutsu).

亲自到现场观察以彻底了解情况。

Principle 13 原则十三

Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options; implement decisions rapidly (nemawashi).

充分考虑各种选择性并取得大多数人的同意，不急于决定，但决定後就要快速执行。

Principle 14 原则十四

Become a learning organization through relentless reflection (hansei) and continuous improvement (kaizen).

以严加的反省及持续改善来成为一个学习型之组织。

Rashomon - 罗生门

2008-11-23T05:40:00.000-08:00

“罗生门”，一个读出来很好听的词汇。羅生門，这三个繁体字的组合同样也很漂亮。可是偶至今没弄懂这三个字到底是什么意思。但这并不防碍人们熟悉它。至于将这个词汇普及的功劳，应归于大师黑泽明。

罗生门是大师一部作品的名称。在这部作品中，罗生门是一个标志性的建筑物。一切的故事都是从这里开始的。下面就准备正式说说这部片子。如果您看明白了这部片子，希望我说的您能有同感；如果您没看明白这部片子，希望下面的可以为您答疑解惑；如果您根本就没有看过这部片子，我可以负责任的告诉您，这部片子很好看。

全片的主要人物有六人，而演员只用了九个（包括结尾处出现的婴儿）。这六个人交错出现在三个不同的时空，将他们串联在一起的是一位樵夫。在滂沱的大雨中（在看过的几部片子中，都有大师对雨的巧妙运用。《七武士》中在雨中那最后的一场恶战成了后世争相模仿的对象。而本片中的大雨是分隔现实与回忆这两个时空的道具。），破败的罗生门下，借由一位来避雨的樵夫（不是上面提到的那个樵夫，此人在后面将用樵夫Ⅱ来表示）的耳朵我们听到了过程不尽相同，但起因与结果却是一致的四个事件（我们也可以说这是一个事件的四个版本）……。

樵夫、多襄丸、妇人和借巫女还魂的武士分别是这个事件四个版本的叙述者，而他们四人也是在这事件中共存的人物。没看过这部片子的同学，听到这里已经有些糊涂了吧？为了照顾大多数现在这里简单介绍一下事件的起因与结果：多襄丸是个享誉京城的大盗，因见到武士貌美的妻子而起了歹念，设计把武士骗到林中将其捆缚。又把他的妻子带到林中，在她丈夫的面前对其施暴。这是起因。结果是三天后樵夫发现了武士的尸体，而他的妻子出了家，报官后又刚好捉到了在逃的多襄丸。现在明白一些了吧？OK！我们来比较一下四个版本的区别。
第一个版本是多襄丸叙述的，在他的版本里自己是杀人凶手。但更重要的是在这个版本我们看到的是一个敢做敢当的武士（他自己），与另一位武士（他对这位能与他过招的武士也颇为赞赏）堂堂正正的较量。在这里的妇人被描述成一个失身前还是个烈妇，而在失身后却怂恿自己去杀害其丈夫的龌龊的人。

第二个版本是武士的妻子叙述的，在她的版本里自己才是杀人凶手。更重要的是在这里她却变成了一个贞节烈妇。而多襄丸只是发泄完欲望，掉头就跑的禽兽。她的丈夫也是如此轻蔑的鄙视她。正是由于受不了他那种眼神，妇人才准备杀死他，然后再自杀，但自己却是求死不得。俨然是一个背负着痛苦命运的生者。

第三个版本是借身还魂的武士叙述的，在他的版本里自己才是杀人凶手（按理说死鬼是没必要说瞎话的吧！）。更重要的是他不仅激烈的控诉了妻子的不忠，还使自己摇身一变成为一个傲然立于天地间的武士。他原谅了多襄丸的罪行，而且不惜用结束自己生命的方式来替妻子赎罪。

第四个版本是樵夫叙述的，在他的版本里多襄丸才是杀人凶手。原来他（樵夫）不是第一个发现尸体的人，而是一直在案发现场。在他的叙述中以上三个人的形象被彻底的颠覆。多襄丸并不像他说的那样只看重武士的大义，他曾恳求妇人跟他走，并许诺给她后半生的幸福。妇人也并没有因为失身就要死要活的，而是希望两个人决斗，自己好选择强者。那位武士也不是自己形容的那样伟岸，为了保全自己的性命甚至愿意将妻子拱手相让。

没想到这才是事情的真相。但这是真相么？应该是吧。因为樵夫整起事件并没有牵扯到樵夫的利益，所以他没有必要撒谎。但是有一个细节被樵夫Ⅱ发现了。在前三个版本中都有一把短刀（在有的版本中它甚至是杀人凶器），但是樵夫对此却只字未提。樵夫Ⅱ一语道破天机，正是他（樵夫）将那把价值不菲的短刀拿走了，这也可以解释当天他为什么没有报案。大师的用意终于浮出水面了。原来我们看到的只是为了达到私人利益，有选择的，片面的真相。但至此真相如何还重要么？为什么三个人都承认自己是凶手了，却还要撒谎？难道还有比这个更难让他们面对的么？

再来看看另外的三个人物：樵夫是一个游弋在善恶边缘的人；而樵夫Ⅱ则是被现实的生活打磨成一个玩世不恭、冷酷无情的真小人；行脚僧人是一位冷眼看客，像神一样怀着悲世悯人的心观察着这一切。好在大师给了我们一个光明的结尾，滂沱的大雨终于制住，看着樵夫抱着婴儿远去的身影，行脚僧人（神）露出了微笑。

人生会给你安排各种机遇，但请不要忘记，选择权永远掌握在你自己的手里！

Comment from TW:

I downloaded and watch the movie during I was visiting QD on business purpose. The mission of the trip was troublesome. Now, I reviewed this post again and it is also trouble in HZ plant. I found that there were very siminlar to the story liked .

In the movie of , we have no way to know who killed the knight finally. When people falled into trouble, the frightfulness of human beings, such as selfishness and falseness, was going to protect their benefit and reputation. Your friend would change to your enemy in no time. Your enemy would become your friend in no time as well. They are all lost in the situation.

As the comment of the moive above, the choice is always in your hands, why we do not solve the problem by facing problem? Why we lie everybody, even ourselves to protect themselves?

This is a excellent movie which was made in 1950, half century before!!! Everytime I watch the movie, I got some new foundings. It is a great movie!

By the way, I lost a good friend and partner. I learned so much from him, my mind set, management thinking, ... were improved. We fixed so many problems and we faced so many problem together as well. No matter what was the result right now, the future is fruitful and successful.

Thank you very much, Dick Sir!

Vision, Mission and policy deployment 1

2008-11-22T05:13:00.000-08:00

At recent moment, I discussed so much with my colleagues about the vision and mission for the company. As the conclusion, I would like to summarized them for an experiance as below.

Vision:
Long term goal of a company. Usually, it is not necesary to quantify but sometime it needs specify a defined target. Vision can be setup in powerful and great image of company but it should not be easy to achieve. It can encourage the employee to move to its direction and let them keep moving. It is very common of company said "To be number one of the world in XXX industrial!!!" or "To be the leader of XXX industrial in XXX area". If the vision was set properly, the departments were not need to set their vision but just go in the same direction according to the company vision.

Key performance index (KPI):
Short term goal of company and departments. This is the part of the policy deployment. Part of purposes of policy deployment is defining the quatified performance to measure the result of operation, and is, adjust the direction of working of different departments from different directions to same direction. Therefore, all the KPI in departments must be set according to the company KPI and with specified and quatified standard. KPI is always adjusted by yearly according to the result of year end to keep improving the operation result. Step by step to move to the vision of company. It is a common mistake of many companies that the goal of lean implementation is not related with the company KPI. They are always set the saving amount for lean, and most of the leader in charge of improvement team is just finding a way to calculate the saving. I am sorry that they are only calculating to have saving, not improving the process to have saving. Therefore, we need to setup the goal of lean closely related to company or department KPI to corelate the accuracy of improvement.

Mission:
The tasks of the people, department or orgainzation needs to in charge by accountability. They also needed to compactable with KPI and vision of company or departments. If the vision is to be the number one of the world in manufacturing indsutry, what is the mission of the company? earn more money for the boss only? For this, I suggest we should consider in different faces. On the customer side, if the supplier is number 1, they expect they can have better product and service from her supplier. On the employee side, they expect company provide better working environment, offcause, better salary and benfit as well. On the government side, they expect company provide good working opportunities to local area, offcause, more tax receiving as well. Those factors can improve the motivation of company and her all employee. This is sense of mission of anyone!

Please check the mission of Toyota as below,

To operate to become the most Customer Focused and Environmentally friendly automobile company in the country.

To broaden our understanding of our Customers' needs and endeavour to satisfy these needs to achieve maximum of Customer Satisfaction.

To contribute to the Society as a good corporate citizen.

Turn around to lean, a simple question for you, everyone, lean leader ask for (push) improvement of everything such as manufacturing process, material flow, operation flow,...etc. When much saving come out, the members of the kaizen team will start to ask the question for themselves, we can we get? I contribute my effort and intelligence for company, what is the payback? I am sorry to talk about this real situation but I am so sorry it is human being! I always ask the same question to myself as well.

That's why when we look at the books which are talking about lean or toyota production system, the first chapter is always talking about the vision and mission of toyota. Because, it is the first element of success of lean implement, even if, success of anything!
One more question, what is your mission in your FAMILY? if you can not achieve your mission, can you have a happy family? That is the same thinking of all!
Eventually, may be this is not a complete explanation of policy deployment, but at least I shown you something for them related to lean transformation. Agree?

Ensuring the Future of Food

2008-11-21T06:05:00.000-08:00

Here are the content of the video for your reference.

Food is indispensable to our survivalbut today, it is undergoing great change,for example, let's take tempura soba.it's a traditional japanese cuisine.but 80% of the ingredients are now imported.Currently, japan only produces about 40% of the food it consumes.This is the lowest among all major developed nations,This is a result of the significant change in the japanese people's diet.

In the past, they ate more rice, fish, vegetables,so their diet was nutritionally well balanced.but nowadays they consume more meat, fat, and oil.lots of soy and cereal grains are needed to make feed and oil,so they are being imported in large quantities,and such a changed in the diet has disrupted the nutritional balance,giving way to a wide spectrum of health problems,furthermore, although japan imports a lot of food,it also disposes of more edible food than the entire world food aid.The decrease in demand for domestic agricultural produce leads directly to the decline in agricultural productivity.

Currently, japan is tacking issues such as aging farming population and increase in abandoned farmland.What's more, 70% of the land in japan is mountainous.This means that even if all the flat land were used only for farming,it would not be able to produce enough food within its own borders.Japan depends on a very small number of countries for the majority of the food it imports, therefore its food supply base is quite vulnerable.Moreover, the global food landscape is changing drastically.First of all, the global population is growing exponentially, and it is expected to maintain its upward trajectory in the future.Next, there's rapid economic growth in developing countries.The consumption of meat, fat, and oil increased, resulting in greater demand for soy and cereal grains.

We also face energy issues. Today, food or feed crops are being used to develop biofuels.and lastly, we are challenged with various environmental issues.The progression of global warming, climatic anomalies, and exhaustion of ground water are creating tougher farming conditions all around the world.In response to such global change,the food prices are rising sharply.so, what should be done to meet food security needs?first, each and every one of us should start thinking about the global food situation as our own problem and reexamine our lifestyles,for example, going back to the japanese diet involving mainly rice and domestic agricultural produce will lead to a better nutritional balance.and the food industry should provide what consumers seek and label them accordingly.

Moreover, farmers should efficiently use the limited agricultural resources, and offer safe and high quality produce which meet the needs of consumers and the food industry.The increase in the demand for domestic agricultural produce will drive agricultural development and enliven agricultural communities. As a result, our tables will be enriched with agricultural produce growth in our own countries.Japan, as the world's largest new food importer, will engage in all possible efforts to contribute to stabilization of demand and supply of food in the world market through increasing its own food self-sufficiency rate.

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Let us focus on the message from the video which are related to lean concept,

1. Pull from customer, pull the demand,

2. Elminate the waste of abandon farmland,

3. Create value for aged agricultural popullation,

4. Vision to make benefit for society.

We have to remind that the lean concept is came from Japan and we can find the concept implement everywhere even in public promotion.

If you find any observation from the video, please share with us!

Just in time

2008-11-17T21:18:00.000-08:00

After studying and experience of Kaizen project, I will like to make a summary of the understandings of “just in time” concept and it affects the portion in company.

I will divide the JIT (just in time) to two portions in internal and external. We know JIT is closely relative to material flow; therefore, I identified the material flow in or out of company as the external JIT. On the opposite side, the material flow within the company will identify as internal JIT.

External JIT:

Most of company is monitoring this portion very closely. I can also say they are working well for that area. External JIT includes the raw material flowing in to warehouse and the finished goods flowing out to customer or logistic company. Because of the direction of minimize the raw material inventory, we are requesting the supplier to ship the material daily, or hourly. It helps to minimize the space for warehouse and material handling.

On the other hand, we established the system of build-to-order. We only build the finished goods to customer according to their demand and our shipping time. We won’t keep finished goods inventory more than the sales or market demand. It directly relates to our capital investment and most of company can perform a good result in now a day.

Internal JIT:

I would like to say that not many companies can fully understand and performs in proper way for this portion. The internal JIT is relating the material flow from warehouse to production, the first process station to the next station still the end, from the last station back to warehouse. We always ignored the internal customer relationship and the internal JIT needs cooperation between many parties such as material planning, customer service, quality control, warehouse and production. Self-regarding of the department always blocks the way of improvement. Huge amount of idle raw material and WIP abundant in every corner in the factory. Kaizen project merely a beginning but creating a lean culture is an important factor of success.

Summary:

External just in time
1. Flow from supplier to warehouse.
2. Flow from warehouse to customer.

Internal just in time
1. Flow from raw material warehouse to first manufacturing station.
2. Flow from first station to next station still the end of process.
3. Flow from end of process to final inspection.
4. Flow from final inspection to finished goods warehouse.

From lean concept, flow is existing in everywhere of company.
1. Flow of material
2. Flow of people
3. Flow of workstation (layout)
4. Flow of information (invisible flow)

Based on the last blog, just in time is very important factor of material flow. From external JIT to internal JIT back to external JIT again, it forms a continuous flow just like water. We can imagine only one part of JIT was ignored, the turbulent flow will make water flowing out everywhere. To maintain the material in linear flow, we must ensure all the connection between external JIT and internal JIT joint in right position.

When a KPO run a kaizen project to improve the material flow, he should act as a pipe fitter. Identify piping system (overall material flow system), and then he should check which joint is mismatch with wrong pipe. In some case, there are some pipes missed (external or internal JIT), he will get a new pipe (individual flow system) and cut in a suitable size (fine tuning), fit into the overall pipe system.

OK, make sure that water comes out in right place and no leakage!!!

Team Work - 团队合作乃成功的金钥匙

2008-11-17T21:12:00.000-08:00

Teamwork is a key factor of success!

In formula 1 championship, we find an impressive activity in the racing. We saw that there are some mechanics working in pit to replace the tires and fueling for the racing car. The quick, skillful and planned actions always attract our sight. But, actually how can they do that in short time to complete the all complicated mission?

The car is guided into its pit by the 'lollypop man', named for the distinctive shape of the long 'stop/ first gear' sign he holds in front of the car. The car stops in a precise position and, if a tyre change is required, is immediately jacked up front and rear. Three mechanics are involved in changing a wheel, one removing and refitting the nut with a high-speed airgun, one removing the old wheel and one fitting the new one. At the same time two mechanics operate the heavy fuelling rig, which must be precisely slotted into the car before fuelling can start.

How long for the mechanics to complete the mission in average? 7 seconds.

Talk about teamwork for the mission, it including some factors as below,
1. A good organization. Every members has enough capability.
2. Well planning. Every step of action is well planned and scheduled.
3. Well training. Every step of action is needed fully practiced.

In modern industry, we needed good team to complete all activity in company. It is a very important key factor for success to improve the competitive ability. Can you find the good team work in your career?

在一级方程式赛车比赛中，我们发现一个令人深刻的印象，在紧张刺激的赛车赛场上, 一些赛车维修人员运用工作技巧替换轮胎，或者为赛车加油，这动作的敏捷性，灵活性，还有计划性总是深深吸引了我们的视线，其实，我们总是会在想，为什么他们能在如此短的时间内完成如此复杂的动作呢？

首先赛车被“棒棒糖人”引导进它的轨道，他在车前面指引和控制它到特别的停留处，赛车停留在一个精确的位置，如果需要更换轮胎，它会被千斤顶迅速的抬起前部或者后部，三个维修工人来合作更换轮胎，其中一个人用气枪很快的拧卸螺母，另一个人卸走废旧轮胎，然后最后一个人安装上新的轮胎，与此同时，两个工人开动笨重的加油机器，而在加油之前，这个加油机必须正好精确的导入连接到赛车。

所有维修人负一起完成这项任务平均需要花费多长时间？答案是7秒。

和我们的团队讨论了这个任务的完成，认为它包括了以下几个因素：

1. 一个优秀的组织，每一个成员必须拥有优秀的能力。

2. 良好的计划，任何一个步骤都必须经过良好的计划和安排。

3. 充足的培训，每一个娴熟的动作都需要事先充足的训练。

现代工业制造中，我们需要一个优秀的团队来合作完成公司任务，这是提高公司竞争能力的关键因素，在你的职业生涯中，你发现这样优秀的团队了吗？

How does one learn to be a lean leader?

2008-11-17T16:51:00.000-08:00

To do:

1. Kick out the crutch. In order to develop as a lean leader you need to leave your comfort zone and it helps if you have something to force you out of that comfort zone.
2. Take on a new role that you are not really prepared for, sign up for a near-impossible challenge or remove whatever security blankets you have around your process.
3. Apply lean to your own work. Between what you learn and what you demonstrate, only by practicing lean on your own work will you become an effective lean leader.
4. You must be a learner first. Lean is about how an organization learns, but organizations are made up of people, so how people learn will drive the success of lean.
5. You must be the first for trial. No matter what was your position before the lean leader, work by yourself and no more order to the other during the kaizen event.
6. Regularly experiment and reflect on your own work. Systematically issue your report to all the peoples and ask for comment.
7. Engage people from where they are and help them move forward to their own idea of progress.

Not to do:

1. Don't stand in a field asking for everyone to join you.
2. Don't ask people to make an impossible leap. Take your knowledge, skill and vision from lean and help the person move forward from where they currently are.
3. Don't ask them to give up their own pursuits to join yours.

談金融海嘯後的發展

2008-11-16T18:49:00.000-08:00

This is a article from my MBA tutor, Mr. Nagar Lai. I believed that it is valuable to share with my friends. --->

最近經濟轉差，時間多了，除了可多抽時間跟家人相聚外，更是進修的好時機，適值劍橋大學──香港大學舉辦一個為期一週的談論全球化財務課程，內容豐富，除由哈佛麻省理工(MIT)、紐約大學回來的(現為劍橋港大教授)，亦走訪城中名人，如李國寶、任志剛、王冬勝、石齊平等)，了解當前形勢。課程畢業生可加入劍橋、港大行政人員學生會網絡，更有附加價值。同學中不少是銀行家、電訊公司CEO、會計師等，水平很高。學習期間老師們談到金融海嘯的成因，為何會使美國步入衰退，而中國香港未來的影響的程況，對同學有很大的啟發，其中前海基會副秘書長，現任鳳凰衛視評論員石齊平教授談得十分精彩，鋒頭蓋過英美名牌教授。

石老師從世界大戰開始談起，世界大戰的成因，無非是效率低引致經濟差，大家爭奪資源，等起貿易障礙以保護國家資源。結果貿易不相往來，自然效率更低，矛盾到了臨界點，某些國家便去搶奪其他國家的資源，引致戰爭。

戰爭後，1946年經濟學家以茨恩思為首，為重整貿易及金融秩序，成立GATT關貿總協定、IMF國際貨幣基金組織及世界銀行。其中出現了一個貿易最大的障礙，用什麼貨幣交易？當時美國最強大，而又提出以同等值黃金為後盾(金本位)，使大家覺得用美元交易值得放心。華府亦保證不亂印美元，以免通貨膨脹。

但跟著的20多年，美國協助歐洲、日本重建，美元大流出美國本土。而美國貿易赤字日增，令華府不得不能在1971年提出取消「金本位」美元與黃金正式脫鉤。1971年各國仍然使用美元，是對美元的「信心」，由「金本位」變成「信用本位」。

由於貿易逆差擴大，現已達10兆(10萬億)，華府唯有多印鈔票及發行債券。由於各國願意買，如中國就買了1.9萬億，美國經濟仍可支持下去。而美國本來因和平自由，民主等吸引入才的思想，國際的精英都爭相落戶美國。

除錢財、人才外，美國的軍事預算便超過全世界各國的總和。這一軍事強國對希望得到的都可以用武力解決。如伊拉克、北韓，甚至石老師認為在目前美國的惡方情況下，有可能對中國挑起戰爭，一來阻止中國在本世紀挑戰美國，二來又持馬上快我失的「大哥」地位。

由於美國經濟開始陷入衰退，美國國債更無力償還。而還要發債券去要求各國買，確是無恥！但各國要維持金融運作，仍無奈地要去買，真要唱徐小鳳的名曲《無奈》。

但「無奈」中，中國、俄羅斯等已表態，不再支持美元作為單一貨幣，此舉令美國十分不利，而中國的影響力，將在這新一輪國際金融遊戲中有強大深遠的影響。

美國因印鈔票及借貸太多，引致崩潰。

而中國以及香港，面對海嘯，無非只有加大內需(因不能再靠歐美訂單)，如溫總理提出4萬億方案，發展基建、重建災區、安民生等，一來刺激經濟，二來把中國內部因財富不均而浮起的社會矛盾淡化。長遠而言，中國、香港都要從改變民主教育、法制方便發展，但短期的人民不滿情緒必需處理。

而中國將成為世界投資的新焦點，香港人亦必需預實。如雷曼迷你債券事件，特區政府及銀行家都認為最有效率的方法是馬上處理投訴。像雷曼債券的衍生工具，美國證監會都掍出來，香港證監自然也認可，連不少香港銀行職員自己亦「中招」，實無欺騙情況。立法局議員做「show」運用權力及特權法，只有對事件拖慢，令效率降低，而更甚者，香港金融中心形象受損，這真是民主的代價，而雷曼苦主，除小數(小於5%)全無投資經驗的退休人士外，其他都理應知道高回報、高風險的道理，像「陳水扁」輸打贏要，實要不得！

面對經濟不景，香港人必須學習掌握中國發展機遇。而中國公路等。而各國現在資金苦無出路，必然亦參與投資，只要資金效率良好(防止貪腐)，用外包方法如BOT(投入興建、運作及最後轉移回主權國)必會成功。

香港人必須走出去，建立國際視野，在引進資金、管理及幫中國「走出去」的使命上盡一分力，而亦更可發揮「中間人」的角色。

大家最關心的「股市何時見底」？專家們都說現在猜不準，一來年底是基金贖回潮，不少公司會倒閉，有什麼「大件事」還是未知之數。但一般認為「U」型最有可能，而「U」型底部估計為2年至3年。看來這2、3年是很好的學習、修養心性、與親人相聚的大好機，請珍惜！

Selection of lean leader and KPO

2008-11-14T03:24:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of January 2008, I have a chance to discuss with some friends for how to select a suitable candidate for lead leader and KPO in company. It was so surprise me that they have already started to implement lean manufacturing or lean enterprise but they still don’t understand a most basic concept of lean.

What was that? “RESPECT TO PEOPLE!”

When the productivity improved and the demand of manpower reduced, it doesn’t mean that we can layoff the worker or any employee. It gave a chance for the company to ramp up its sales amount without any facilities investment or additional manpower demand, in another words, use the same resource to grow up the business. How about if the employees know they will be fired after they improve the output? It is a totally incorrect concept!!!

On the other hand, during the lean manufacturing implement, it is similar to run a project and no doubt we need a strong leader to manage and coach the team to execute the improvement actions. Some guys thought they have budget and can get a “superman” outside to be the lean leader or KPO, afterward, everything will be alright. It also a serious mistake! As a lean leader, who needs to identify the opportunity of improvement in the production floor or company operation system. The most suitable solution is selecting the suitable guy and promotes him/her to be the leader or KPO internally. Off cause it has so many conditions required for the job, but, it is also an attitude of “respect the people”. Any company has room to be improved but it doesn’t mean nobody can improve the situation in the company. May be somebody in the company already has ideas how to improve but they finally understand they have no chance to lead the project. What will they do?

I give you some conditions to select for lead leader or KPO as below,
1. Aggressive for working,

2. Willing to change,

3. Well understand the company operation system or procedures,

4. Well understand the weakness of company,

5. Technical background,

6. Honorable in contribution for company,

7. Well communication skill.

Why we need a technical people to lead the lean transformation? As a technical guy myself, I am not going to promote the people in professional of technical. In lean implementation, we always start the improvement from workshop, especially in manufacturing process improvement. Therefore, we need the technical guy lead the lean in the first stage. Afterward, all the people in the company can find the improvement result easily, in other words, it is one kind of lean culture promotion. That's why I strongly recommend we need a technical guy to lead in the beginning stage.

Actually, I am sure that the suitable person existed in every company and the problem is the senior management is willing to search or not! They respect their employees or not?

Autonomation 1

2008-11-13T19:35:00.000-08:00

We start to talk about this subject by language session first.
Autonomation is a special terms in lean manufacturing concepts only.

In Janpanese, autonomation is written in "自働化" or "Jidoka".
In Chinese, there is only automation is written in "自動化"
In English, automation is meaning automatic motion, autonomation is meaning automatic NO motion.

The concept is operating of the equipment will be stop automatic when its conditions achieved the limited of setting. The conditions can be considered in limit of quality or quantity. It may also be described as "intelligent automation" or "automation with human touch". Due to concept of "process focus", it makes possible the rapid or immediate address, identification and correction of mistakes that occur in a process. It was developed by earlier stage Toyota production system. At that moment, Toyota was developing the textile machine. Without the autonomation, when some wires broken, there was many defect product produced by the machine after final inspection. They came up a idea and improved the machine to detect if one of the wires broken, the textile machine will be stop automatically to prevent producing defect. After many years of implement, Toyota spread the idea to the process of automotive production and autonomation became a important principle of lean manufacturing.

Autonomation is a quality control process used in the TPS which applies the following four principles.
1. Detect the abnormality.
2. Stop.
3. Fix or correct the immediate condition.
4. Investigate the root cause and install a countermeasure.

To detect the abnormality, It is a method of preventing errors by putting limits on how an operation can be performed in order to force the correct completion of the operation, called "POKA YOKE".
The earlier stage of TPS, it called in "BAKA YOKE", means "fool-proofing" or "idiot proofing". It is obviously that not respect to people and disobeied the one of spirits of lean manufacturing. Afterward, they changed that to "POKA YOKE" and means "mistake-proofing" or "error-proofing".

TPS recognises three types of Poka-Yoke:
1. The contact method identifies defects by whether or not contact is established between the device and the product. Colour detection and other product property techniques are considered extensions of this.
2. The fixed-value method determines whether a given number of movements have been made.
3. The motion-step method determines whether the prescribed steps or motions of the process have been followed.

This the most important principle concerning quality in lean manufacturing system. It is also suitable for many kind of manufacturing industry!

Push and pull system 2

2008-11-12T21:25:00.000-08:00

Yes, I am going to talk about push and pull system again. You do not need to misunderstand that what is the topic I want to talk when you saw the photo shown on the left hand side. I am just using a common sample for supporting my explanation of pull system and it is easiler to let you understand what I say.

Pull system - Kaiten sushi

(回転寿司かいてんずし )

Kaiten = Rotating

Zushi = Sushi

If you read up on Japanese etiquette, you'll be told that if you want to take somebody out to dinner, don't take them to sushi. It would be like taking somebody to McDonald's. In Japan you can find Kaiten Zushi shops all over the place and often they are open very late. Later than most other food places. Sorry, once again, I am not going to where to eat sushi. Actually, Kaiten sushi is the typical pull system in food industry. I list out some main points as below,

1. People only takes which they want to eat. The cook only put the sushi back to the empty place which taken by customer. This is representative of customer pull. Usually, the different kinds of sushi were put in a special sequence and it is easiler for the cook to find out which kind of sushi was taken so that he can replace the empty dish.

2. The WIP is only stored on the rotary and it would not cause any extra scrap. It is also easiler for them to dig out which kind of sushi is the best selling product, so that the restaurant can better handling the material ordering. Therefore, the material inventory is low.

3. For quality, every dish running on the rotary will not last long and maintains the fresh of sushi. If you observe the handling of kaiten sushi carefully, they can find that the cook only take out the fish from the refrigurator when they needed. The cook prepare the sushi when some dishes are empty.

4. It is more flexible to handling the product. When the cook find out one kind of sushi is more favorable for those customers, the cook can place more dishes of that kind of sushi on the rotary instead of other sushi. If you have visited the Toyota plant before, you can find that the production line of Toyota just similar to the rotary of sushi. Every car on the line is different in model and color.

5. At last, one more point we need to consider. Even in kaiten sushi, there is visual management in place. The corner of bottom left in photo, we can find a board to show the price for different color of dish. The customer can easiler to handle what kind of sushi they want according to the money in their pocket. Very smart!

Buffet dinner - push system

May be I do not need explain here in detail because I think most of the people has buffet before. Restaurant only put much food on the table and let the customers to pick what they wanted. Sometime, you will find that the food has already become cold and degenerative. Some kind of food, which is more favorable of customer, it will be empty in short time and you need to wait for a long time to pick more after the cook refilled of that. Also, you need to pay a fixed amount, usually is not cheap, but no matter how much food you have eaten. The biggest problem is the push system is pushing you eat more and more, because of there is too much food and you want to balance what you paid. It made you eat more and the fat in your body also more and more. It is not lean!!!

May be the explanation above is not detail enough, hope you give me some comment to make it complete. Thank you very much!

Push and pull system 1

2008-11-12T16:46:00.000-08:00

Today my good partner Mr. Steed Wei told me a good trope of the phenomena between pull and push system. I would like to share with my reader.
In mass production world, push system is using for the processes. The trope is like a long chain of safety pins, fixed one end and push from another end. What will happen? all safety pins pushed and mess together. Every safety pin represented one individual process. If a push system apply on the continuous process, we can find there is so many raw material, WIP all mixed and idle between the process stations. Just like the chain of safety pins mess together and pin cover by another pins. You can not identify the problem in such mess situation.
In lean production world, pull system is using for the processes. Just like the safety pins fixed one end and pull from another end. The safety pins will attach and pull in sequence. That's meant all processes are well assigned in order. No raw material and WIP idle between them. The most important thing is we can identify all the problem in every process. Please remember that the important principle of lean manufacturing is PROCESS FOCUS, and that's why we need to apply pull system to show us the problem between or on the processes.
On the road from PUSH to PULL, we can find a lot of problems and that is what we want to identify for further improvement. However, the responsible members are always not understand the destination of the system. They always rise so many opposite excuses to go back to the original way of working because they have more buffer in push system. The leader of lean transformation like us needs to well explain the team for what is the expected outcome and encourage them for further improvement.
Actually, I faced the same situation right now. Do you have the same problem?

Customer satisfaction

2008-11-12T05:06:00.000-08:00

In last month, I just completed my MBA course in HK. The first subject was marketing management. During the lecture, I understood a concept of customer satisfaction and here is the usage in the case of lean manufacturing. In lean concepts, customer satisfaction is also a main factor in overall lean transformation journey. I will explain that as below.
When we talking about customer satisfaction, in other words, is talking about 2 E's (Expectation and Experience). If cusomter expection is higher than their experience, they will not satisfy your product or service. In opposite way, if customer's experence is higher than their expectation, they will satisfy and happy with your job.
Turn around to lean, for a long time ago, Toyota setup their goal to have the product in high quality, low price and low energy consumed. How come from these goal? They are the demand (expectation) from customer. In the workshop of Toyota, we can find the slogan everywhere that shown "customer first!". If a company always produces the product higher than the customer expectation, we can sure that she is leading the market in her industry. There are two cases for your reference.
Welcab is a special type of car designed for handicapped. The price of that car is not high but it made the chance for handicapped people to have the fun of driving. It was not only improving the word-of-mouth for handicapped because Toyota considered the physical hindrances of the handicapped, it also improve the word-of mouth for the normal people even the society due to Toyota has considered the special requirement of people.
In 1971, US government tried to put a plan of addtional import tax for Japanese car, although the plan was revoluted eventually, but US government has not return the additional import tax to the companies ontime. But, Toyota has return the tax to her customer by her cost, offcause, it made a serious loss for the company, at that moment, Toyota was only a company which was struggle to survive. For the concept of marketing management, the retention cost 8% to 12% of acquistion cost (retention cost is using for keeping the existing customer, acquistion cost is using to attract new customer), but the action from Toyota earned the customer long term relationship. The another item of success is loyalty of customer satisfaction.
From the cases, we should learn that how to manage the customer expectation. Actually, it is not only the concept from lean and it is the tools of any successful companies.
If you have any case or ideas, welcome to share with us.

Failure of lean transformation 1

2008-11-10T21:20:00.000-08:00

On October 27,2008, I joined a training of "Developing Toyota talent for lean manufacturing" which held by Hong Kong Productivity Council (HKPC). The training was conducted by David Meier who is the co-author of "The Toyota Way Fieldbook" and "Toyota Talent". I learned some ideas and want to share with you in these several article.

The balance between "width" and "depth" is always the cause of failure for lean transformation. The width is meaning of the concept and knowledge of lean manufacturing applying in the organization. The depth is meaning of the professional level how the employee handling the tools. We always found that some organization spend too much focus on speed of implementation. They setup a list of the Kaizen projects in different target with different lean tools such as standardization, mistake-proofing, 5S, ...etc. They always ignored how important to develop the capacity of the employee. The fact is that organizaion held a set of kaizen in a very short time but the people has no time to digest the knowledge and experiance they got in the projects. Eventually, all the projects are held as schedule but all the projects can not meet the goal they setup, even they missed a big room of improvement. Sometime, they success in one project in a specified area but failed to promote the implementation to the other similar area. Those problems were caused by the organization has not focus on develop the capacity of the people. Or, we can say that the effort spent on the width of implementation not balance with the effort spent on the depth of culture.

The culture of lean is the foundation of lean manufacturing. Without the cutlure supporting, all the action is impotent and weak. The effort spent in kaizen would change back to the original status and hard to sustain. We need to continuously spend effort of promotion of lean, provide suitable training to the leader of kaizen, develop a set of internal professional trainer to continuous spread the lean culture. If the organization has not put enough resource to develop their talent of lean manufacturing, all the actions are just a fireworks. It looks beautiful but disappear in no time.

In Toyota, she does not need her people in higher academic level, she also does not need her people very smart. Toyota just keeps spending her effort to train the employee by Toyota way of concept and management method. This is also the spirit of lean, we called "respect to people". Without those capabile people to support, who were developed by the organization, how can the organization success in lean implementation?

If the organization promoted a long time of lean manufacturing and they reach a level of lean concept but found hard to improve anymore, the improved action hard to sustain or hard to promote the improvement to the other area, they should think about this question and spend more effort to develop their "talent".

At last, I used a quote from Mr. Meier to finsih this article. "People or organization needs to create its owned solution to its owned problem, otherwise, it won't success!" I believed that it is the spirit of lean manufacturing and suitable for all situation.

Commitment

2008-10-09T08:01:00.000-07:00

I have two incidents in sport for talking about commitment. Let see the stories below and then I want to talk about my understanding of commitment.

Year 2008, Beijing Olympics, Liu Xian is the superstar of 110-meter hurdle race with expectation from all Chinese people. Chinese racer is not easy and always to win in track and field. From the last Olympics, he became the hero in China till the end of Beijing Olympics, and he made many many Chinese people disappointed. When the days just started to prepare of 110-meter hurdle race, Liu came out and shown on the camera in first trial. After moved several steps on the track, he announced he quit for the game because of the injure. At that moment, I don't know how was the feeling of him, and I don't know did he think about the feeling of all Chinese people. I felt so disappointed for him.

That's the question of commitment! As a national racer, what is the thing more important than Olympics? At that moment, a racer represented his or her country, but not for themselve personally. Their committment was directing to their home country. No matter how hard to run, he should just try to finish the track racing. 20 seconds later, he can go back to treat his leg and he would be the hero continuously. Who said the hero must win in every battle? The result of quit in the game because his committment only made on his personal glory, may be made on the income of advertisment in future, he worry about he can not join the racing anymore if he injured become more serious.

Year 1943, in Nazi concentration camp of world war II, German soldier only gave less food for British kriegie and played soccer with them. British kriegie has no any score at all and was taunted as a pig. At this year, one British who called Baerum broke the rhythm of the game by his fast running as a steed. Only in 5 mins, British Kriegie team got score historically. All the players were encouraged and inspirited by this action and scared all the German. As the investigation from German soldier, Baerum was the best player in soccer of England, he requested all the Kriegies in the camp to keep some food for him in the morning of soccer game. His friends told him that he would be killed if he got any score in the game, but his said, "Please keep bread for me, I am going to have one score for England, I will light up the faith and hope for all of us."

Yes, Baerum is a hero in British. His committment built on the love to his country, and he used his life to give his people a hope. May be the group rised based on his glory. We can found that it is totally different of the result if we do something but the committment built in different scope. In different situation, the committment is all different too. Committment can give us power to face any problem and challenge in our career path, it is the most important factor of success.

Continuous flow 2

2008-09-29T04:02:00.000-07:00

Misunderstandings and difficulties:

1. "One piece flow", explained in my last post, continuous flow is the process flow in a most cost-effective flow. It depends on what is quantity is the reasonable and efficient in running the process. The quantity also can be changed in the processes. During the improvement, we are encouraged to invest new equipment, in other words, we should use the existing equipment to re-design a new process. "One piece flow" is not always can be achieved but make the process flow smooth and continuous is much easiler. Therefore, once you started to setup a continuous flow, do not constrain by the flowing quantity. Just make the flow as smooth as you can. No concept can suit for every industry, but after your analysis and adjustment.

2. "False continuous flow", the concept of continuous flow or single piece flow, we are always encourage to re-layout the processes in U shape or L-shape. I would like to explain the concept here, both U-shape and L-shape layout can easily assign a operator to handle more than one processes. For U-shape layout, the start point and end-point are in the same location, it is good in feedback of non-conformance. The false flow is meaning that they just put the processes in the U or L-shape layout but without any concept of tact time. All the WIP still stored in the process in same quantity and the flow was still flowing in station by station. The only difference is the layout of process are much close together and in the suggested shape. The flow looks like improved but actually is not continuous and smooth. I called it false continuous flow.

3. The concept of continuous flow looks simple, but it is almost using all the concepts in lean manufacturing, such as mistake proofing, pull system (Kanban system), TPM. Actually, you will find that it is very hard to implement because once you change the layout, all the problems will come out, such as the material issue, quality issue and process issue, The situation forms a extreme high pressure for improvement leader. Sometime, they are forced to go back for old process flow due to the pressure of delivery. Eventually, the implement project may be idle or delay, the situation is caused by lack of preparation and analysis before improvement actions.

Therefore, before implement the changes, we should well analysis the overall effectiveness of re-design, even, we need to prepare enough inventory of finished goods for line stop. Avoiding the situation, I suggest to implement the changes step by step. That's meant we only improve portion of processes in overall flow, seperate the improvement action in different phases to prevent disaster on your way to go.
Finally, setup a continuous flow is absolutely not a simple job. You need to fully understand all the concepts of lean manufacturing to support the actions. It is combination of all lean concepts and is the most critical factor of success.

Continuous flow 1

2008-09-29T03:51:00.000-07:00

Concept:
Continuous flow is the most important concept in lean manufacturing system. Sometime it was called "one piece flow" or "single piece flow" to present the process must flow by batch in one piece or small batch. As we know, lean manufacturing concept came from Toyota and we all know how big the car was. We can imagine that if the car was making in conventional mass production, the workshop would be many ten times bigger than the modern automotive manufacturing factory. Applying one piece flow in automotive manufacturing is the only choose. "single piece flow" looks very similar to "one piece flow", but at my point of view, "single piece" not likes "one piece" to represent absolutely one. It can represent a very small batch size of flow, such as 5 pieces or 100 pieces, the most suitable size in the flow. In making potato chips, can we fire the chip in one piece by one piece? For some industries, the parts is very fine and the process time is very short, such as small plating parts, may be we need to use a small batch instead of one piece concept. Offcause lean manufacturing came from automotive, the concept is good, but we need to analysis and adjust the concept to suitable with your industries rather than just meaningless "copy and paste". Personally, I like to call the concept in simply, "Continuous flow", it is no need to identify how many pieces in the flow, we only need to make the flow in lowest quantity, continuously and non-stop. In this kind of flow, the processes can be operated in more economically and cost-effectively.

Benefit:
From here, I don't want to repeat the benefit for you to apply "continuous flow" because there are so many books to describe the advantages detailly. I stress again here that the most important and powerful function of continuous flow to define value-added and non-value-added process and identify the "7 wastes" in the processes or between the processes in order to shorten the delivery time, improve quality and efficiency. If we want to establish a good continuous flow, we need to eliminate them in the flow. You can also reference to my previous post 7 wastes.

Tact time:
Sometimes, we called it "takt time", in Germany. We often identified tact time as the speed of the process flow and the rhythm of all process. Orchestra needs a conductor to direct when the music rhythm, start and stop. The production leader is working as the conductor to direct rhythm of manufacturing, ensure that the process in the flow working in same speed by tact time. The tact time is calculated by the demand from customer, the other feature of tact time is matching the production output and customer demand. Make sure that we can provide the demand quantity to customer, no more and no less. Ideal situation, the flow is really in one piece, we can explain tact time like this. Unfortunately, not all the process can be put in L or U shape and easily to flow in one piece. I would like to explain the tact time in another way to suitable for the non-one piece flow.
In the situation which all processes can not flow in one piece in every stations. Especially some of the process have a big gap in process time, it is hard to avoid and adjust the process, it is very easy to find the overall process combined with manual assembly and automatic. At this moment, the tact time is using to control the flow rate. Refer to the picture above, the flow rate in process 1 should equal to process 2 and process 3. As we know, the flow speed is high, the flux is low. For example, in process 1 for making parts, the rate is 1 piece / s, 1 piece/s X 20 = 20 piece / 20 s and flow to supermarket 1 for temporary storage. In process 2, the sub-assembly rate to assemble 10 pieces of parts from process 1, 1 piece /10s X 2 = 2 pieces/20s, and flow to supermarket 2 for storage. In final assembly process 3, the process time is 20s to assembly 2 pieces sub-assembled parts from process 2, 1 piece/20s. Every stages of processes have the same flow rate in 20s and formed a good continuous flow. You can find that actually, the process 1 is only one machine and made the 20 parts one by one. The condition in process 2 is the same. At this example, the critical concern is how to setup the quick change-over, the tact time is the flow rate to balance the processes.
In simply say, tact time is same as the heart beat of human, every beat represents a cycle of blooding system.

In the next post, I will discuss some misunderstandings and difficulty for continuous flow.

选择精益还是六西格玛?

2008-09-25T20:22:00.000-07:00

许多推行六西格玛的公司大概都不知道，近几年来业绩差强人意的摩托罗拉是六西格玛的“鼻祖”。而在已跃居世界汽车行业第一的丰田公司，却还有工程师连六西格玛都没听说过。这里完全没有厚此薄彼之意，因为不论是学六西格玛还是学丰田，都既有成功者，也不乏失败之例。
　　彼得·德鲁克说：经营者就像15岁的少女一样对流行特别敏感，也就是说，如果发现其他公司采用新的经营革新技法，大多想在自己的公司应用。对于正处于学习饥渴期的中国企业，这个描述还是很贴切的。摩托罗拉如日中天时，我们学摩托罗拉；戴尔霸气十足时，我们学戴尔；IBM向服务转型，我们的企业紧随其后……从市面上流行的类似“向×××学习管理”的快餐式管理出版物中，我们也不难窥其一斑。
　　那么，我们到底应该向谁学习？其实，许多企业都忘了，最能取到管理真经的地方恰恰是在企业自身。向别人学习——不论是向其他企业还是向所谓的管理大师——最终目的是要解决自身的问题。既然是自身的问题，差异性就必然会存在。这就意味着，企图生吞活剥地用一种方法去解决不同的问题，不仅会徒劳无功，某些情况下还会适得其反。
　　在战场中就有类似教训。罗马军团东征失败后，部分失散的罗马军队进入西域，并曾作为雇佣军与西汉军队交战。罗马军队沿用其一贯的战法，身穿沉重的盔甲，排成方阵前进。这种重装步兵的战法曾经纵横欧亚大陆，但西汉军队以骑兵击之，结果大败罗马军队。
　　企业管理也如此。适用于某家公司的管理方法未必能适用于其他公司。六西格玛在GE能取得较好的效果，在家得宝却以失败告终。ERP在某些企业行之有效，在另一些企业却成为沉重的成本负担。据说，在中国实施ERP的企业中，大约只有20%成功。于是有人戏言：不上ERP是等死，上了ERP是找死。
　　向自己学习管理并不是说不需要向其他公司学习或应用最新的管理研究成果，而是要学其精髓，灵活应用。70多年前，毛泽东在《反对本本主义》中就一针见血地指出：“马克思主义的‘本本’是要学习的，但是必须同我国的实际情况相结合。”套用一下，我们也可以这样说：丰田（或德鲁克或×××）的本本是要学的，但必须同企业的实际情况相结合。
　　正如日本米其林轮胎公司生产总监原贤治（Kenji Hara）所说：“精益生产是丰田公司自身的本质。它就是一种基础，一种使你公司中的员工尊重人，尊重其发展、动机、不断进步的求索精神，尊重其特殊利益和抱负的基础。”在他看来，“这样的公司不管运用什么样的生产方式，都能取得成功”。很多企业花了很长时间才明白这个很浅显的道理，比如华晨金杯就花了漫漫的8年。
　　造成企业出现上述情况的一大原因是急于求成的心理。他们以为，既然实践证明是行之有效的，拿过来用就是了。一种办法不行，再换另一种。几年前，某大型国有企业决定推行六西格玛，结果花了不少钱，仅推行两年就不了了之；之后不久，该公司又决定推行精益生产。广东某年产值数亿元的企业从去年年初起引入平衡计分卡，一年过去之后，平衡计分卡不仅没有得到顺利实施，反而引起不少抱怨和怀疑。该公司一位经理无可奈何地说：“我们发现有些公司遇到的情况和我们差不多。因此，我不知道这到底是我们的问题，还是因为平衡计分卡真的不适合中国企业。”类似这样的企业，学什么都是不会成功的，因为他们不明白自身情况的特殊性，也不懂得应用过程中的灵活变化。华晨金杯在学习丰田精益生产模式多年之后才认识到，有许多问题是中国具体环境决定的。比如，日本人工费用很高，可能占整个成本的20%，而中国企业的人工成本仅占整个成本的2.6%。如果一个机器人能替换下来5个人，在日本使用机器人实现的是精益生产的省人化，在中国使用就是浪费。所以，企业领导者要知道管理没有万能药，要懂得像中医那样辨证施治，戒除运动式的学习和本本主义式的学习。
另外，领导们也应注意，企业是一个复杂系统，影响企业成败的因素很多，因此要从系统的角度来分析企业的问题。寄望于运用某一种管理工具或管理理论来解决企业的所有问题，使企业获得长久的成功是不现实的。

This article was supplied by my friend Steed Wei, thanks for his effort!

精益生产或是六西格玛?

2008-09-25T05:02:00.000-07:00

精益生产的理念最早产生于20世纪40年代的日本丰田汽车公司,而六西格玛的诞生相对于精益生产要晚一些,它产生于20世纪80年代后斯的摩托罗拉公司。作为一种先进的企业管理理念,精益生产要比六西格玛更早地传入中国。虽然精益生产与六西格玛虽然产生的背景和时期都不同,但精益生产和六西格玛就像一对孪生兄弟一样备受世人关注,在对精益生产品头论足的同时总忘不了带上六西格玛,在谈论六西格玛长短之时也不忘与精益生产沾上边儿。
两者就像黑暗中的两盏灯,精益生产和六西格玛指引着制造领域前进的方向,但究竟是走向精益还是六西格玛呢?精益在一边摇旗呐喊,但六西格玛也鼓声如雷,双方毫不示弱。于是很多人迷茫,很多人犹豫,越来越多人感到困惑甚至痛苦。往左还是往右?本来就是一个方向,精益生产和六西格玛究竟是什么关系,究竟是谁优谁劣,还是精益六西格玛最厉害?我想很多人都想看看精益生产和六西格玛正面交锋的一场龙争虎斗,过程和结果都一样精彩,一样令人期待。

1. 精益生产与六西格玛产生的历史地位。
精益生产称为世界第三次工业革命,是颠覆传统生产方式的彻底变革,虽然传统工业工程方法的烙印很深,但精益生产提出的以小批量多品种频繁切换的灵活生产，以小型专业设备取代大型通用设备来应对市场需求的模式是全新的理念,七大浪费的概念也完全不是传统观念的延伸.精益生产方式是一种"方式"的变革,是"新方式"替代"老方式",是"先进"取代"落后"的世界工业发展的里程碑。
六西格玛的核心DMAIC[DMAIC是指定义（Define）、测量（Measure）、分析（Analyze）、改进（Improve）、控制（Control）] 是延续传统的PDCA,或者是ISO体系中持续改善的思维模式,整合了原来很多解决问题的思路和方法,演变得更系统、更完整、更严密。且六西格玛的根本在于财务成果,注重财务表现的六西格玛出现之后,一切都改观了。因此六西格玛其本质还是解决问题的方法和工具。

2. 让精益生产和六西格玛比武过招。
其实精益生产和六西格玛已经正面交锋过，而且还没有停止。六西格玛不论是其创导者摩托罗拉公司还是将其发扬光大的GE,在运用六西格玛的若干年后的今天，他们都在尝试精益生产而且取得了突出的成效。而精益生产的创始者丰田公司则声称他们没有运用六西格玛,包括很多能把精益生产做好的优秀企业，其精益生产能实现六西格玛的目标。也许这些不足于证明交锋结果的“成”和“败”，但或许可以给大家一些思考。

3. 精益生产和六西格玛实施过程和状态。
我不敢说对六西格玛有多深的了解，但和很多有六西格玛经验的朋友交流。很多公司在实施六西格玛项目时，很多被冠于六西格玛名称的项目，其实是在已经取得成果的基础上套用六西格玛的框架，按照结果收集或设计需要的数据，最后做出一个漂亮的报告。（当然，有些黑带级项目确实按照六西格玛步骤实施并取得不错的绩效）。另一方面，很多公司为了六西格玛，什么项目都用六西格玛命名，有时就会弄得有些啼笑皆非(比如曾经某公司有人力资源部门把改善前台接电话的方法用六西格玛来改善)
精益生产实施也是步履维艰，其真正成功者也微乎其微。问题的根源是大部分人仅仅把精益生产当成一种工具，用于解决面临的某个具体问题，但问题总是层出不穷，老问题解决了，新的问题又出现，这本来是一种非常正常的现象，其实企业就是在解决问题中进步的，如果没有这种理念，很多人就对精益生产会失去信心或者没有兴趣。然而精益生产或者说持续改善是一种企业文化。
作为解决问题的思路和方法，也许精益生产和六西格玛在某些方面也许异曲同工，但作为变革的必然，虽然举步为艰，但最终精益生产必将成为生产管理的主流方式，不可逆转。就像市场经济是社会发展的必然趋势一样，不管你认不认同，其结果都是无法跨越和回避的。而如果仅仅是工具，如果不好使你当然可以换别的工具。

4. 精益生产和六西格玛本身的特点。
精益生产强调现场，强调“做”，全员参与改善用持续改善,其方法本身通俗易懂，从高级经理到一线员工，都很容易参与。
六西格玛是建立在统计学的基础上，需要大量的数据统计和逻辑分析，要充分运用电脑、软件等，不是每个员工都能掌握和参与的。
六西格玛的特点决定了其是一小部分的工具，而精益生产将普及到各个待业各个领域，具备广泛性和普遍性。

5. 精益六西格玛？
Lean sigma是最近比较流行和热门的说法，精益六西格玛真的是结合了精益和六西格玛的精髓的结晶吗？武林宗师告诫学武之人，如果两股真气贯入体内相撞后，如果不能很好的驾驭就很容易走火入魔。有时候两个最聪明的男女结合也不见得生出的小孩就绝顶聪明，也有可能是个傻瓜。
不管是作为工具或者方式，精益和六西格玛都有其独到之处，当然也会有不足（没有十全十美的东西）。我个人的感觉是精益生产是新的市场竞争形势下的应对方式，是一种简单有效的方法，大部分问题(也许是95％)都能通过精益生产解决。六西格玛其逻辑本身很容易理解，但其实施过程必须投入更多的资源（如数据收集和分析、花费更多的时间），对于一些复杂的问题非常有效。

如果借人生病作为一个例子，如果生病只是闹肚子，只需要医生问诊后开药方，而不需要先拍CT、照X光,再分析检查结果，最后再出药方，虽然这样做更仔细，但最终医院得到的只能是抱怨。
因为,精益和六西格玛其实是存在结合的，比如Nokia推行几年的六西格玛努力之后，将六西格玛纳入精益生产系统中，成为实现精益生产两大支柱之“自动化－－零缺陷”的重要工具。这样也许能比较充分发挥精益生产和六西格玛的长处，这难道就是精益六西格玛？
备注：部分文字摘于自《精益六西格玛》一书

The article was supplied by my friend Andy Song, Thanks for his effort!

Why we apply lean in China?

2008-09-22T00:05:00.001-07:00

I got some information about why South China short for labor for a long time, but I lacked of time to summarize the information because I was busy with MBA course. The original information is talking about the problem of future development of China, it covers all the range of resource which is important of continuous development of China included manpower, natural resource and policy of government. From here, I only summarized some points which related to lean manufacturing and shown us why it would be important in China near future.

As we knew, the objective of applying lean manufacturing in company is eliminating wastes and shift the resource to create more value for development. Let us focus on labor intensive manufacturing industry in China, I think it is also the most important industry in last 20 years in Pearl river delta of South China. The such kind of industry was going through a high speed development but is faceing a serious problem in labor shortage in recent years. Lean helps the company to save resource and the manpower is the most important of resource in labor intensive manufacturing. Therefore, let's us have a scan what are the causes of labor shortage and see is that lean manufacturing a solution on it.

1. Family planning:

We called that "one child policy" in China and meant one family only can has one baby. In period around 1950-1970, recommended by Chairman Mao, government encourage family to have more child. It was becuase China lost many many poeple after the war, at that moment, all kind of development needed manpower. 30 years later, the population of China growed in high speed. Afterward, in 1980, government turn around to setup "one child policy" to control the high speed of population increasing. We look backward, born rate increase is one of the factor, on the other hand, low dead rate is also the factor why the population increasing. When a country became more stable and without influence from war, the average year of life changed from 35 to 68, from year 1949 to 1980. The "one child policy" also "helps" the country aging in these 20 years. A simple thinking, two people "produced" one people but the population keep stable and a light increasing, it means the people is aging in high speed as well. Therefore, the range of golden labor dismissed and keeps decreasing today.

2. Expansion of college:

Look at the data below, in 1998, the number of college matriculation is 1,080,000. In 2006, the number ramp up to 5,300,000. The number of matriculation keeps increasing and meant more people went into college for professional education. However, do we need that so many professional manpower in short time? Can our society absorb those professionist in a short time? So many people became "double lost" in recent moment, double lost meant "lost job" and "lost education" after they just graduated from college. It is no way to let them back to factory be a operator. The expansion of college absorbed part of people in such low born rate and make the problem more seriously. From here, I am not object the people to learn more knowledge and I always encourage my friends to have continuous education all the time oppositely. However, expanding the matriculation too fast will influence the whole structure of manpower in society. One old Chinese saying, "too many is similar to not enough".

3. Price of food:

Started from 1998 for several years, the production of food decreased continuously. It made government nervous, and then the food prices was increased including rice, oil, meal and vegetable. There were also some policy setup to encourage the people to stay in agriculture such as low taxation for agriculture. The people stay in home village can earn more than working in factory. Offcause, most of people work on farm are aged people, but it also attract part of the young people to stay in their home village to help their family.

Due to the reasons above, it forms a labor shortage in Pearl river delta zone, even in overall manufacturing environment in China. In recent years, I am studing lean concept and finding a way to support the manufacturing industry. Those concepts of eliminating wastes, create value, continuous flow, JIT and takt time can help the labor intensive industry to defense the impact of long term labor shortage in later 20 years. Think that in another way, why Japan and US push so much for lean? It is because they faced the similar problem 10 or 20 years before, and they believed Lean is the solution to sustain their competition ability. Review ourselves in China, so many companies still know nothing about lean manufacturing. Now, it is the best time to find a continuous improvement tools to defense the long term issue. And, it is never too late to do so.

Things to Do Before You Turn 40

2008-09-20T07:47:00.000-07:00

Did you think about this questions before? Actually, this question can be asked like "things to do before 20, 30 or 100?" I believed a life planning is a important activity for anybody. You no need a offical planning document but you need a moment to think about it. Attached is some samples copied from website for your reference, I find some of them are so interesting.

1. don't die!
2. Write a book.
3. Learn a new language.
4. Visit a new country.
5. Pay off all your debts.
6. Sponsor a poor child.
7. Get back in shape.
8. Quit your dead-end job.
9. Stop smoking.
10. Go outside for your comfort zone.
11. Move into the house of your dreams.
12. Meet a new friend.
13. Call your father and mother.
14. Stop speeding.
15. kill your road rage.
16. Take a cruise.
17. Host a funny dinner party.
18. Setup a website or blog.
19. Live and live and live some more!
20. Live and let die.

At recent moment, I had a email from my friend Lily. From her words, I found she felt so upset for her life in lost of direction. For human being, we must have our goal for our life, without this, we will fall down somehow like a bird which was flying but it did not know where to go. Therefore, I recall my elder post in my blog and sent to her, and hope she can find out something want to do. At the same time, it was the time to review my targets as well but I found that the 3 things, which I wanted to do before 40, were just started. I am so sorry that I am already 37 right now and only 3 more years to complete them. I don't want to transfer the targets to 50 anyway.

Wow, keep working hard, Fat Man ... ... ... ... ...

7 wastes - Over-production

2008-09-16T00:12:00.000-07:00

In lean manufacturing concepts, the top waste of the seven wastes is "over-production", but I consider the term of "over-production" was relatively closed to manufacturing industries, so I like to use the term of "Overabundance" to represent the true meaning of the stated waste. "Overabundance" is meaning that the supply is more than demand. This is the other end of JIT manufacturing where products are manufactured when a specified quantities required. Below, I listed out some questions for you to think about in different cases.

For product development, I called it in "over-design",

For Mobile phone, how many features of your owned mobile were never used?

For Software (CAD or office), how many functions of the software were never used in working?

For Digital Camera, how many features of your owned camera were never used?

All the cases above were in the same concept, "over-design"! Let us think one more question for the above cases, if we calculate the un-used features or functions in percentage, how much money we pay for the non-value-added features? Nowaday, total cost leading is a most important marketing strategy in commercial world. If a company is still suppling the product in over-design, it is no doubt that the cost of the product development was claimed on the expense of consumer, what is the affect of her competitive force?

For manufacturing, we called it in "over-production",

Why discount promotion was always found at the end of season in retail?
Why we need to write off the inventory when product change or at the end of product life cycle?
Why we have to handle many WIPs everytime when we change the product line?

When goods are manufactured without real demand for them the work in progress and inventory levels goes high. This ties up capital since the goods are in stock not making cash. If the manufacturer does not have the demand, they have to create it. This involves cost in the form of advertising costs, costs of discounts etc. on the other hand over production greatly reduces the flexibility of the system. If one process has manufactured extra items generally manufacturing needs to be carried out until the stock is over. This takes time and hence it is difficult to change from one to another product quickly. Problems of the system are hidden in inventory. Problems will never get highlighted and hence will never get removed from the system.

For services, we called it in "over-service",
How many channel you never watch in the package of cable TV program?
How many features you never use in the package of mobile service combination?

Nowaday, the service provider are always using the embedded service package to attract their customer. In a normal package of service, they covered all basic features no matter in mobile service or cable TV programme service. The most important point is that they counted all cost of the different features no matter you used or not. We have to pay on them once we signed the contract. I am sure that we can not 100% uitilize all the services and meant it caused waste in our payment. You can give them the basic service they are looking for and then if they are interested can provide the additional services. In this case there is no need for the service provider to be ready with all the possible services at any given time. They can call for the expertise when the customer wants it. Here you will save your money since you are not going to invest in something there is no real requirement. On the other hand customer will pay for what he is actually using.

7 wastes - introduction

2008-09-14T23:48:00.000-07:00

In Japanese, "Muda" is meaning waste. There are 7 kinds of waste targeted by the lean manufacturing. From here, I will summarize them and give some possible solutions or methods to eliminate those non-value-add process. Before reading this post, we should have enough knowledge of value-added and non-value-added concept, refer to the VA & NVA 1 and VA & NVA 2.

1. Over-production; takt time concept is not considered in the case so they produce more than demand. From lean concept, this is the top waste of a company, takt time studing and JIT can solve this problem.

2. Motion; process is not good design so that operator will waste more time to handling the process. The operator needs to move or turn himself around and around to handling the process. We always use brain-stroming in Kaizen event to improve the work station process.

3. Waiting; because process flow is not balanced, too many motion in last process but waiting in next process. We need to record the process cycle in all process and well balancing in takt time analysis.

4. Conveyance; it means the WIP move a long way to next station, but it is totally not necessary. Re-design the process layout by 2P event is a effective way to solve the problem.

5. Processing Itself; the process station is not design or choose in the best way. As we knew, it always has many methods to produce the same product, the best way is also use brain-stroming in Kaizen event to choose the best method.

6. Inventory (raw material); because production plan issue or the cooperation of supplier, we have too many raw material inventory. At this moment, lean suppy chain and JIT are the ways to solve the problem.

7. Correction (rework & scrap); if the product or WIP is not made in good quality, rework or scrap is the only way to correct them. In lean concept, we need to make it good at once. For this waste, we need to choose the suitable tools to solve the problem in different causes. TPM is the most important factor in this case.

For 7 kinds of waste, they affected the productivity, cash flow and ontime delivery. Those factors are the root of NVA process or material flow. As my experiance, lean manufacturing concept is a best way to eliminate them. Offcause, use lean manufacturing tools skillfully is a very important element for improvement.

Lean manufacturing is popular!

2008-09-14T23:37:00.000-07:00

From industryweek: Ranking Continuous Improvement Methods

Nowaday, the lean manufacturing is used to be continuous improvement method so popular. If we included the ranking of "Lean and six sigma" and "Toyota production system" to lean manufacturing, we can say more than half of the companies are using "Lean" mothod!

中秋节快乐

2008-09-14T07:21:00.000-07:00

明月几时有
把酒問青天
不知天上宮闕
今夕是何年
我欲乘風歸去
唯恐瓊樓玉宇
高處不勝寒
起舞弄清影
何似在人間
轉朱閣低綺戶照無眠
不應有恨何事長向別時圓
人有悲歡離合
月有陰晴圓缺
此事古難全
但願人長久
千里共嬋娟

我亲爱的朋友,中秋快乐!

Mindset of lean

2008-09-13T01:16:00.000-07:00

Refer to the above mind map, the structure of lean manufacturing can be disassembled as below,

1 Lean spirit
1.1 Continuous improvement
1.2 Respect to people

2 Objectives of lean
2.1 Eliminate waste
2.2 Create value

3 Main duty of lean
Create a continuously flow of process, material and information.

4 Lean tools
4.1 Standardization and Standard works
4.2 Just in time (JIT) and Pull system
4.3 Mistake proofing and autonomation
4.4 Visual management and Kanban system
4.5 OEE and TPM
4.6 5S
4.7 Tact time
4.8 Value-added and non-value-added, 7 wastes

If we need to describe LEAN in simply, I would like to describe that as,

"Continuous improvement and Respect to people are the spirits of lean. All the actions must be taken under the guideline. The improvement activities are carry out through setup the continuously flow to eliminate the different kinds of wastes, and use the saved resource to create value. During setup the continuously flow, it needed to apply different kinds of lean tools. "

思维图是一种帮助理解及记忆的工具,最近因为要协助各部门加深了解精益生产的概念与结构,已绘制一个精益生产思维图如上.

思维图解释:
于图的上部,代表精益生产的最主要两个精神,即是(一).持续改善;(二).尊重人性(以人为本);这种精神必须贯通整个精益生产的运作,才能有效的发挥其优点.
于图的中部,从左到右代表从精益生产推动开始,以建立一个无间断的流程为手段,以达到精益生产的两个主要目的.(一)消防浪费;(二)创造价值.
于图的底部,就是代表各种用以建立无间断流程的主要工具,其中各项工具已于日常生产运作中应用,如全员生产维护,快速换模系统,防错系统,自动化,目视管理,看板系统,拉运系统,生产预备,生产均衡化及标准化等.而各工具之间,亦起了紧密的协同作用.若无间断流程欠缺了这些工具,都不能达到理想中的要求.

各位,若能理解此思维图的意义,基本上对于精益生产就有一定程度的理解了.对于以后各位推动精益生产亦有不少帮助.

Visiting of Snow Brand Milk Products 2

2008-09-12T20:05:00.001-07:00

Mar 7,2008, Steed, Andy (my partners of lean implementation) and me visited a milk products company in Japan. The company located in Yokohama of Japan with historical operation. Before we arrived the factory, the guide of the visiting explained a little bit of the background and news of the company.

Personally, I felt that the visiting for this company is not related to lean manufacturing. Also, I believed that trip is arrange by the tourist agency or Japan government by the relationship of benefit. However, after the visiting, I still found something useful for the lean implementation, even lean thinking. Simply say, I got some thinking of the attitude to face the problem.

The web-link od Snow Brand http://www.snowbrand.co.jp/ (this is more details for the company and absolutely not a advertisment.

According to introduction of the guides, we understood Snow Brand faced two serious problem before and the affection still existing right now,

1. year 2000, the milk they produced caused more than 10000 people food poisoning. Nobody explain what is the root cause and as my understanding, it may be caused by human mistake in process or maintenance. The result is the company stop producing milk.

2. year 2002, there was a affiliated company of Snow Brand sold a beef with incorrect labelling. The marked the beef was domestic goods but actually it was imported. The domestic produced beef was much expensive and better than imported. The problem was affecting her honesty and the image of brand name.

Once we sat in the conference room, the guide of the company introduced the problem they have before. I can say the they faced the problem nakedly in front of us. One of my colleague asked a question, "why you not consider to quit the market and use another brand to operate?", the answer was, "we liked to face and solve the problem! it was agreed by all employee in the company." Wow, what kind brave attitude they had in front of trouble?

It is a culture different between China and Japan. Japanese encourage brave, enjoy challenge and they never give up. For Chinese, they more prefer to escape. When we hold the kaizen projects, how many time we heard the member to give themselve a excause to stop the improvement action? "It can't be worked!", "if we did that, there is another problem on...", ...etc. The point of your member wanted to tell you is that, we do not like to face the problem. All of this, it is the attitude problem and culture problem.

I am sure that if the situation of Snow Brand happen in China, the company will stop for a moment to change it brand name and start to product again in short moment. Actually, the critical problem of quality is stll not fixed. The story would be happened again and again.
For improvement project, the most important thing, is the attitude of facing problem.

1. Brave to face problem, (it proves the value of you to exist)

2. Enjoy the challenge, (it helps you to grow up)

3. Never give up, (It is the main factor of success, no matter how much you pay on the job, once you start to think to give up, you lost everything you have paid.)

The visiting of Snow Brand looks no relation to lean, we can not find any lean concept in such material and process flow. However, we found a important and useful attitude for everything you want to success. It is a good lesson for me.

And finally, I bought one to share with my sons, so far so good...

Visiting of Snow Brand Milk Products 1

2008-09-12T19:49:00.000-07:00

This is the article which wrote by my partner, Andy Song. Good for your reference.

***** *****
我们在日本考察的最后一个企业是雪印乳业.因为雪印是从事食品生产的企业.和我们的行业根本搭不上边儿,当时心里就特别纳闷,组织方怎么安排我们去参观他们呢?

去雪印的路上,组织方就介绍:‘今天去参观的企业很特别,这种公司是从1925年开始的生产的,而且在整个日本信誉极好.是乳品业的王牌企业.但这家公司在2000年的夏天发生了一件让全日本震惊的大事:‘日本各地相继出现顾客因饮用雪印乳业公司大阪工厂(也就是此次参观的工厂)生产的低脂肪牛奶及牛奶饮料而发生中毒事件,中毒人数超过１.４万人.’使得雪印关闭4家制造工厂,公司大幅裁员.

到雪印后,发了一些关于雪印的简介.接着雪印公司的领导---工场厂(相当于国内工厂的厂长)对公司简介讲解.作完公司介绍后说:“我们公司在2000年发生一起让公司信誉大受损失的事件---顾客饮用本公司生产的牛奶及牛奶饮料发生中毒,导致公司失去消费者信任、公司严重亏损.制造工厂关闭,大幅裁减员工…”当时听到这儿就懵了,那有这样对客人介绍公司的,我们中国不是有句俗语叫---家丑不可外扬,对我们这些去考察、参观、学习的企业来说就更加不能如此表白.

而接下来的讲述更加意外:‘公司经历了此次事件后濒临倒闭,公司董事长在日本媒体(电视)对日本所有人公开道歉.并且公司高层领导和员工集体讨论是否继续将雪印这个品牌保留下去,经过激烈的讨论.公司员工强烈要求保留雪印品牌,就这样雪印上下一致决定继续使用此品牌,接着雪印公司请著名专家、普通的消费者,连同本公司自己的技术骨干组成一个团队.共同寻找发生问题的根源,解决发生问题的原因.并且为了防止类似问题再次发生,公司将生产产品的所有流程(除了部分保密外)放在公司网页上,并组成团队定期检讨.接收消费者建议,就这样一直坚持改善下去,经过将近7年的奋斗,雪印逐渐在消费者心目中取得信任.赢得失事前客户源的30%.今后雪印一直持续改善下去,最终取得消费者的信赖.’

我们作为一个旁观者,一个毫不知情的参观者,雪印在对待问题的态度着实让我们感动,就象雪印工场厂说的:’我们在以前犯了错误,并且为此付出沉重的代价.我们要做的不是逃避问题,而是勇敢的面对问题.解决问题.为了雪印在以后的成长路上不会再犯同样的错误,我们将发生的这起事件当作我们公司的座右铭.让每一个雪印的员工都铭记于心.’这正如我们经常说的---知耻而后勇.

反观在我们的工作中、在生活中同样也面对这种问题,在我们这个社会中的企业也经常发生如此错误,当我们出现这些问题,我们的企业出现这种错误.我们是如何去对待去处理的呢?是否象雪印一样,勇敢的去面对问题,最终解决问题,和长期预防类似问题再次发生呢?

小时候老师教导我们,犯了错误并可怕,可怕是我们不去寻找犯错误的原因.可怕的是我们不去面对问题、逃避问题.继续让这种错误再次发生.

Kaizen planning 2

2008-09-12T19:32:00.000-07:00

There are four factors which are important of setup kaizen project as below,

1. Focus:
For a wide range of product categories and model, we can not fix the problem in one shoot. We need to select a representative scope to improve and use the selected target to spread the lean improvement by copy and paste, we have to remember that resource is limited all the time. Once we success improved the scope, we can spread the improvement ideas to the other area smoothly.

2. Resource:
We need to consider the capability of the owner for improvement. Also, consider do we need support from senior management? Is that cross-department supporting project? Can investment balance with the saving? so, what is the investment needed? What is the organization of the team? External consulting service needed?

3. Objective:
Can we clearly define the baseline of improvement? What is the reasonable target or goal? Can we effectively collect and measure the data? If no clear target of project, there is no direction of improvement. Is that correspond with the vision and mission of company? Is that meet with the business strategy?

4. Significance:
The improvement project need to setup related to current situation. What is the most important issue needed to solve for the company or your department? If the project is simple, just do it immediately and no need to make a plan to "delay" the action. That's meant the project should meet a degree of complexity.

Hope the above concepts can help you to setup a good improvement planning in future.

Natural swimming pool

2008-09-10T07:19:00.000-07:00

That's my dream... Natural swimming pool

Kaizen planning 1

2008-09-10T01:29:00.000-07:00

Here is a Kaizen planning schedule for your reference. Usually, we need to complete the kaizen program within one week, due to time limit, we have to change some mind in our outdated thinking.

Day 1:
Kick off meeting: Program leader need to well present what is the objective for the program and what is the problem right now. To let all members have a clear direction to go.
Team training: Because of members may not have enough knowledge of lean manufacturing, usually, we need to provide a basic rules of lean to improve their way of thinking.

Day 2:
Team investigation: Full team to audit the target area, preliminary, we can have some ideas how to improve the area. Afterward, the team can have a brain-storming to setup the goal for this program.
Brain-storming for action: Team setup a preliminary action plan and starts to implement.
Site presentation preparation: Prepare the preliminary presentation to the head of that production area. It aims to get the support for the area including the supervisor, line leader and operators. Without this step, we will have resistance of the area because they have no idea what you do.

Day 3:
Site presentation: Present the objective of the program, goal and preliminary action plan to the area to get them support and sustain.
Improvement actions implement: Fully push the implement action and keep checking the result. Adjust and fine tune the actions if necessary.
Review the implement status: Summarize the action implement status at that day and review.

Day 4:
Enhance improvement implement: According to the review of day 3 and setup a enhance improvement plan. Implement afterward.
Review the implement status and sustain status: Review the actions again and check are there any item can not be improved immediately. Setup 30 days follow up action plans and request for more resource or supporting from other departments.
Final presentation preparation: Every members needs to make their own page and pass to leader to summarize to be a presentable file.

Day 5:
Rehearsal of presentation: All members present their own page. Team leader and consultant to improve their presentation skill.
Team presentation: Present the result to all department managers to let them more understand the benefit of lean manufacturing. It aims to culture change and get more support for next program.

Some main factors need to be consider for the Kaizen program will be post in next article.

Value-added (VA) and non-value-added (NVA) - 2

2008-09-09T01:42:00.000-07:00

As my discussion in last blog about value-added, all the processes can be classified as value-added and non-value-added process. From here, we can also segment the non-value-added process in necessary non-value-added and unnecessary non-value-added process. I will explain the classification, and to see how to improve here below.

Sometimes, without the supporting of non-value-added process, the value-added process can not be executed. For instant, refilling gas for car, the value-added process is only the period of gas refilling into oil tank. The action of moving the car the gas station is not a value-added process, or we can say it is non-value-added process. However, it is no way to refill the car if the car is out of gas station. Therefore, we are going to classify the non-value-added process to see which part is necessary.

1. We can seperate the processes into two parts. The car move from the existing location to gas station is necessary, otherwise, it is no way to refill, but we can find a closer gas station or a shortcut to go to the gas station. It reduces time because of short distance travelling but it is no way to eliminate. Therefore, we can say the car moving to gas station is necessary non-value-added process, it can be reduced but can not be eliminated.

2. The second part, when the car go into the gas station, the driver needed to found a suitable stop for moving in for refill. The time consumed in this process is not necessary, or we can say it is unnecessary non-value-added process. The gas station would be designed to reduce the time of the driver to find the suitable stop by clear visual identication and layout. If you drive to refill before, you should remember you always needed to stop a moment to see where was the suitable place to stop. I did that every time in China because the gas station in China is really big. Those time of seeking position can be eliminated or reduce it trend to zero. Therefore, the non-necessary non-value-added process should be removed or eliminated.

In simply say, reduce necessary NVA and elminate unecessary NVA. It is the thoery of process improvement but we can to clearly identify them. According to the explanation above, it makes us more easiler to handle the improvment during the kaizen project.

Value-added (VA) and non-value-added (NVA) - 1

2008-09-08T22:03:00.000-07:00

This is the first concept and is the most important concept of lean manufacturing because many activities of improvement are based on this concept. If we can not fully understand and identify which process or action is NVA. Nothing can be improved in Kaizen event.

VA and NVA, which has a special lean definition. An activity is "value added" if, and only if, these three conditions are met:

1. The customer must be willing to pay for the activity
2. The activity must change the "form, fit, or function" of the product (physical change), making it closer to the end product that the customer wants and will pay for.
3. The activity must be done right the first time (in good quality, rework process is not a VA process).

I give an easy example for your reference, COOKING STEAK.

The process flow of cooking steak is below, (1) take out steak from refrigerator, (2) unfreeze, (3) prepare stove, (4) put butter on the pan and heat, (5) cook steak, (6) put the steak on dish, (7) put the dish in front of you.

What is the customer requirement? They want a cooked steak only. What are the VA processes? According to customer requirement (remember that the VA process only identified according to customer requirement), the VA process are only (4) and (5). For the others, they are all NVA process. Customer only wants a cooked steak for eat, they don't care how you prepare to cook and how do you handle it after cook. They just want a cooked steak place in front of them, and that’s it.

Off cause, without the non-value-added (NVA) process, the steak can not be cooked. Therefore, we also classified the NVA process to necessary NVA and non-necessary NVA. Let discuss that in next topic.

Panorama of Nanjing

2008-09-08T01:31:00.000-07:00

Attitude decide everything

2008-09-08T01:27:00.000-07:00

Long time ago, this is the most impressive event which I want to share with you. It is sometime about China soccer...
The last China national soccer team coach Bora Milutinovic said, "Attitude decide everything!", it means that positive attitude provides positive performance and negative attitude provides negative result! During the period Mr. Milutinovic was busying to prepare the training for China national soccer team in world cup, at that moment, all China are not optimized our team can attend the final stage of world cup. Some team players and reporters asked him that “if we draw the match in next round, your class will be dismissed. What do you think?” The magic coach was so surprised that why Chinese people and team always came out a negative for thinking and passive in attitude. He questioned, “Why you guys always issued some passive question without any constructive?”
“Attitude decided everything” became golden words of magic coach and I always used it for my self and suggested to my close friend.
For the implement of lean manufacturing, the members of program always did the same just like the reporter for sports. They would say, “The actions will cause a problem for what, I think it will not work…” something like that. At that moment, we always remind the golden words!
In China, you can find banner anywhere shown a passive thinking, like what you did wrong, what kind punishment you got. I believed it is a traditional culture but I believed that it is the time we improve it.
Off cause, my point of view, Mr. Milutinovic is not only a great coach of soccer; he is also coach for me altougth I am not professional soccer players...

-----------------------------------------------------
态度决定一切
很久以来，我就想和大家分享一件令我感触很深的事件，它是关于中国足球的……
前任中国国家足球队教练博拉·米卢蒂诺维奇说过：“态度决定一切”。它的意思是说，积极的态度引领积极的表现，消极的态度导致消极的结果。在任期间，米卢先生一直致力于国家队备战世界杯的训练。当时，中国人都不看好我们的国家队能参加世界杯的决赛，一些球员和记者问他，“如果我们在下一场输掉了比赛，您的游戏就会结束，您有什么想法？”这位神奇足球教练对国人持有如此消极和被动的态度感到不可思议，他质疑道：“为什么你们这些家伙总是散布一些消极而毫无建设性的言论呢？”, “为什麽不往好的方向去想? 赢了这一仗, 下一仗将面对什麽样的对手, 以什麽策略取胜?”
“态度决定一切”成为神奇足球的金玉良言，而我也一直把它作为我的座右铭，并以此鼓励我的朋友们。
在精益生产执行的过程中，我们团队的成员有时候出现一些消极言论，就和那些看热闹的记者如出一辙。例如“这次行动将导致一些什么问题，我认为我们不应该去做…..”，这样的时候，我们经常提醒和警醒自己的就是这句金玉良言——态度决定一切。这句话是我和我们的团队在前进中保持不懈追求的动力。
在中国，到处可以看到一些消极警告的标语，比如如果你做错什么，将会得到什么惩罚之类的, 全是消极及负面的思想. 我觉得这是国人传统的习惯性思维，而现在就是我们改变它的时机。
当然，我个人认为，米卢先生不仅仅是一个优秀的足球教练，虽然我不是一个职业足球队员，但他也是我的教练和老师。他教会我们一句让我们受益终生的工作思路——态度决定一切！

Lean spirits

2008-09-08T01:10:00.001-07:00

For this year, I joined the MBA course in Hong Kong and I just finished my dissertation last week. The studing of lean manufacturing was stop for a moment, I believed that it is the time to continuous my long term studing of lean.
The first topic I want to review is the "lean spirit", it includes “Continuously improvement” and “Respect to people”. They are the soul of lean implementation and the core element of lean culture, without them, all activities of lean manufacturing are only the eyewash.

Continuous Improvement:

The "Continuous Improvement" mindset is driven by the notion that no matter where we are or what we have achieved. We should always think about the questions no matter what is the level we reached. Can we find and remove more waste? Is that the existing situation already the best? No, it is no perfect at all, and we must improve our mindset that it is no way to become perfect, but it always has opportunity to improve the situation better.
Peronally, I had a experience in lean training for my underlings. I asked them what did they do after working hours, they replied that they gone to watch moive on internet, read comics, ...etc. I mentioned them those activities are not value-added. There is nothing help for their career and why don't we spend it on studing? I told them I am 36 years old right now, I am the operation manager of the company as well, but I still joined the course of MBA, why? This is the concept of continuous improvement. No matter it is the process in production, the procedures of company operation, even our grade of living, those things should be in continuous improvement. It is also the way to improve our life.
The mindset stated above is the most important idea of lean manufacturing. It is the energy of all improvement actions of lean. Without this, lean never can be well implemented and nothing we can do by the lean concept.

Respect to people:

This concept is really important as like as “continuous improvement”, but it was always ignored in many books from United State. For instants, eliminate wastes of the motion of operators, so that they can work easier and faster. Push the operators to work faster is not the way to eliminate wastes. The employee worked together as continuous improvement team to improve the process. Saving came out from the project but company absorbed all the benefit. The wastes in process are eliminated, but the company was going to layoff the exceed manpower.
The highest value of asset in a company is “people”, they learned lean concept and are improving the company and themselves continuously. Push the people working faster, absorbed all benefit for the improvement and layoff people are all the negative factor of success in lean implementation. Therefore, respect to people is another spirit of lean manufacturing, as human being, who want to work for a company not respect to people?

History of LEAN

2008-09-08T00:12:00.000-07:00

This article modified from the info of website
Start from…1800

Eli Whitney (1799)
While Eli Whitney is most famous as the inventor of the cotton gin. however, the gin was a minor accomplishment compared to his perfection of interchangeable parts. Whitney developed this about 1799 when he took a contract from the U.S. Army for the manufacture of 10,000 muskets at the unbelievably low price of $13.40 each.
Next 100 years, our system of engineering drawings developed, modern machine tools were perfected and large scale processes such as the Bessemer process for making steel held the center of attention.

Frederick W. Taylor (1890's)
Frederick W. Taylor began to look at individual workers and work methods. The result was Time Study and standardized work and he called his ideas Scientific Management. The concept of applying science to management was sound but Taylor simply ignored the behavioral sciences. In addition, he had a peculiar attitude towards factory workers.

Frank Gilbreth (1900's)
Frank Gilbreth added Motion Study and invented Process Charting. Process charts focused attention on all work elements including those non-value added elements which normally occur between the "official" elements.

Lillian Gilbreth (1900's)
Lillian Gilbreth brought psychology into the mix by studying the motivations of workers and how attitudes affected the outcome of a process. There were, of course, many other contributors. These were the people who originated the idea of "eliminating waste", a key tenet of JIT and Lean Manufacturing.

Henry Ford (1910).
Ford and his right-hand-man, Charles E. Sorensen, fashioned the first comprehensive Manufacturing Strategy. They took all the elements of a manufacturing system-- people, machines, tooling, and products-- and arranged them in a continuous system for manufacturing the Model T automobile. Ford was so incredibly successful and put the world on wheels. Ford is considered by many to be the first practitioner of Just In Time and Lean Manufacturing.
Ford's success inspired many others to copy his methods. But most of those who copied did not understand the fundamentals. Ford assembly lines were often employed for products and processes that were unsuitable for them.
Ford production depended on a labor force that was so desperate for money and jobs that workers would sacrifice their dignity and self esteem. The prosperity of the 1920's and the advent of labor unions produced conflict with the Ford system. Product proliferation also put strains on the Ford system. Annual model changes, multiple colors, and options did not fit well in Ford factories.

Alfred P. Sloan (1930's)
At General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan took a more pragmatic approach. He developed business and manufacturing strategies for managing very large enterprises and dealing with variety. By the mid 1930's General Motors had passed Ford in domination of the automotive market.

Taichii Ohno and Shigeo Shingo (1950)
At Toyota Motor Company, Taichii Ohno and Shigeo Shingo, began to incorporate Ford production and other techniques into an approach called Toyota Production System or Just In Time . They recognized the central role of inventory.
The Toyota people also recognized that the Ford system had contradictions and shortcomings, particularly with respect to employees. Toyota soon discovered that factory workers had far more to contribute than just muscle power. This discovery probably originated in the Quality Circle movement. Ishikawa, Deming, and Juran all made major contributions to the quality movement. It culminated in team development and cellular manufacturing. Shingo, at Ohno's suggestion, went to work on the setup and changeover problem. Reducing setups to minutes and seconds allowed small batches and an almost continuous flow like the original Ford concept. It introduced a flexibility that Henry Ford thought he did not need.

Norman Bodek (1970's)
Norman Bodek first published the works of Shingo and Ohno in English. He did much to transfer this knowledge and build awareness in the Western world. Robert Hall and Richard Schonberger also wrote popular books. By the 1980's some American manufacturers, such as Omark Industries, General Electric and Kawasaki (Lincoln,Nebraska) were achieving success.

James Womack (1990)
James wrote a book called "The Machine That Changed The World". Womack's book was a straightforward account of the history of automobile manufacturing combined with a study of Japanese, American, and European automotive assembly plants. What was new was a phrase-- "Lean Manufacturing."

To now…2007

What is LEAN?

2008-09-07T23:08:00.000-07:00

From many books and training material, they always introduced LEAN in the meaning from dictionary. Lean was explained in THIN and NO FAT. I do not want to repeat the explanation here but I want to explain it by sporters and believed my readers would be more interesting to read and easiler to understand what I am going to say.

The company which is running in lean concept, she looks like a long distance runner. There is no fat in their body but only has muscle. As we know in biology, muscle gives us the power of motion but fat is using to store the extra enegry. For a long distance runners, there is only less than 1% of fat in their body. Fat is only a burden or loading of their motion and waste more enegry to carry it to run. Let say if the runner has 20% of fat in his body, they need to spend 20% more enegry to carry the extra weight to run. They can not exchange the fat to energy immediately during their running because it needs much time to do so. Therefore, we found that all the long distance runner were thin and lean, they are only carrying what they needed on the way. If we only explain lean as thin, it is not correct, because thin can be consider as morbid and healthy. Lean is one kind of healthy thin and can support you for long term success.

On the other hand, some aged company has a extreme big size. Explain this case by sumoist, the big company looks like the sumoist in Japan. The sumoist has more than 50% of weight is fat and it gave them a heavy and big size, their competitor is not easy to move them in wrestle. The traditional manufacturing company has the same characteristic, and is working everything in mass batch, there is so many inventory in warehouse, on production line, even in the store of distributor. Running business is more similar to long distance running instead of sumo. Offcause, if the long distance runner fight with sumoist in wrestle, the long distance runner will be thrown out just like a little bird. In modern business world, how often the competitors fight in face by face likes boxing or wrestle? They are fighting more likes long distance running, who run slower, who will be the loser! If you are carrying 50% of weight to run, I believed that you can not be the winner. Therefore, that's why so HOT of lean implementation of different kind of industries. The only objective of those companies are only to run faster than their competitors by eliminating their useless weight.

Nowaday, lean concept is appling in different industries such as automotive, service and logistic. Actually, I applied lean concept in my life too!

Introduction of Tony Wong

2008-09-07T07:58:00.000-07:00

Year 2008, I have 15 years of working experience of manufacturing field.

My first job position was assistance engineer for product development, and now I am an operation director. I am looking after engineering department, production department, quality department, product development department and lean sigma department.

I just completed the project in year 2006, setup a 22000 square meter new site in South China, and now I am going to setup another new site in East China.

Those above is only a brief of myself and is not worth to waste your time here but I found that the way I am going to develop LEAN MANUFACTURING is a meaningful topic which I hope I can share my feeling and experience with you through my blog.

Off cause, I want to learn something from you as well.