This ‘lets discuss’ topic is:

When a Lean Project is in its early stages of execution or even defining the scope, what roadblocks are you running into?

From my perspective, its getting folks past the ‘quick fix’ mentality and into the understanding that Lean is an on-going ‘continuous’ process…

Chime In Please!

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Greetings,

As I have posted in a few other blogs around the blogisphere, I’m going to writing a quick tutorial on what Lean Six Sigma is and is not, from my perspective as a consultant.    I hope to take some of the mystery out of it.  It will be based on many different resources, customer and client questions and experience on how an actual Lean event or project succeeds or fails.

Stay tuned for more details…

Mark Ford over at www.mdgleansixsigma.com

there is an old adage in the automation world, which goes like this.  ’Do not automated a process until you can do it manually’.   As the comment implies, you should not write a program or develop an automated script of some sort for some process if you do not first understand completely, how that process works.   We have taken that old adage and changed it a bit.   Here is it:  ’If you automate a crappy manual process, you end up with a crappy automated process!’

So, what does this have to do with ‘the concept of the kanban’ you ask?   In our years of working for such excellent companies as General Instrument, Motorola, and Boeing, we noticed in just about every ‘automation process’, such as implementing Oracle or developing a custom ERP system to ‘pull’, the effort to first streamline a good process and be able to do it manually was never done.   You just ended up with a fancy program that had to be modified over and over again as your progressed through Lean Event after Lean Event.

So, the Kanban, and what is it?  Wiki defines it as “Kanban is a signaling system to trigger action“.   Its that simple.  It doesn’t say that trigger has to be an inventory trigger via some expensive software or automation process either.

How is a Kanban, or ’signaling system used’ in Lean.   Add the word “visual” so you have ‘visual signaling system’ and it might help to understand how we can use it.   In simplest forms, it can be a notecard, flag, or some other visual indicator that lets the responsible person in a process know that he/she must do something now.   For example, an assembler has the job of installing the most expensive part used on a widget before sending the widget to be tested.  He will take the expensive part from an inventory location and consume it.  Since the part is expensive, we could set a visual trigger, or Kanban, to indicate when the expensive parts are getting low in quantity.  Imagine a flag going up when the part count is low, and the person responsible for replacing the inventory, or keeping that located stock to its requirement, sees the flag, ie sees the visual trigger, or sees the Kanban trigger, and she then proceeds to perform her task to replenish this location.     Many lean principles are mentioned in these paragraphs, including PULL and Single Piece Flow, but were not mentioned by name yet.

Now back to the automated crappy process.  As you probably can understand, the above process can be done easily and fine tuned to understand the exact levels for such visual triggers.   If the process was immediately automated, it wouldn’t be so easy to change.   In our experience, once the process is tuned and leaned out, its ready to be automated.  However, the need for it is rarely justified, since more ownership in the process is no embedded.

Both the Cabinet Shop and the Air Filter Shop utilize simple, visual que Kanban in the forms of Flags, Lights, Notecards, Clip Boards, etc.  All processes remain manual, with the exception that Excel is used to track results.

Regards,

The MDGLeanSixSigma Team

Direct Quote from our Customer:

As the owner of Metroplex Cabinets Inc. ‘73 with a 65,000 square foot Cabinet manufacturing facility, Up to 100 employees, I was seeking help in cost reductions across my business. The MDG team came recommended to me and I would confidently recommend them as well. They taught my team and I the basics of LEAN and we continue to implement their recommendations. To date, I’ve reduced our spend by staggering 19 % and look forward to increased savings.  After an assessment of low hanging fruit, we then dove straight into ‘Batch’, neither I or my team really understood what BATCH really meant. The first thing the MDG team will teach your team (explain with surprising, revealing, understandable detail) is “BATCH IS BAD” (it takes a lot of digesting, as should be expected) and then they will show you time and time again where it exists. Its an eye opener, no doubt about it. Yes, your team will get it, slowly surely they get it.”  BH

Hello there, and thanks for reading our MDG Lean Six Sigma Consulting Blog.

We readily admit, we have not been diligent in keeping a blog, and have started and stopped more than once and vow to keep this one going, no matter how busy we get.

Over the next month or so, we will post up our results for several projects we have worked on over the last two years.  We have dug out our notebooks and will begin scribing the process and the results, right away.

We are located north of the Dallas/Ft. Worth Texas area and are part of the MDG Technologies Design Group.  If we can be of assistance to you, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Regards,

MDG Lean Six Sigma Consulting

6/08/2010: Update.  first project post will start with the ‘results as our customer sees it, testimonial’.  Read the Cabinet Shop Project-> Testimonial Post.

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