Failure of lean transformation 1

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.