Lean in practice
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James K Franz has more than 25 years of manufacturing experience and learned lean as a Toyota Production
Engineer in Japan. He started at the NUMMI plant in California, moved to Motomachi in Japan and then teamed up with six engineers in the launch of Toyota’s $250 million paint facility in Kentucky.
In 1993, Jim left Toyota to apply his lean knowledge at Ford Motor Company, beginning in production engineering. In 2000, he accepted a three-year assignment at Ford of Australia and led its Stamping, Assembly, Casting, and Powertrain facilities to global leadership in lean for Ford.
During this time he also worked with Tier 1 and Tier 2 supplier plants in their transformation efforts. Upon his repatriation he then became a lean advisor in Powertrain for global alignment of lean practices. Jim left Ford in 2004 to work with nine-time Shingo prize-winning author Dr Jeffrey Liker as a Senior Lean Consultant. In 2008 he partnered with Dr Liker to co-found the Toyota Way Academy.
His work has taken him to various companies around the globe including Bosch, the US Air Force, Exxon Mobil, AMCOR, Android Industries, Applied Materials, Benteler Automotive, Case New Holland, Caterpillar, Dakkota, Fisher Coachworks, Grand Rapids Chair, Henry Ford Health System, Hertz, JLG, MENLO Logistics, Rio Tinto, SAF Holland, Continental VDO, Visteon and WABCO. He also teaches for the University of Michigan’s Center for Professional Development’s Lean Certifi cation course.
With a Bachelor of Science in Manufacturing Systems Engineering from General Motors Institute in Flint, Michigan, Jim completed a Master of Science degree in Engineering Management at the University of Michigan.
He has collaborated as co-author with Dr Liker on the latest of the Toyota Way books: The Toyota Way to Continuous Improvement - Linking Strategy and Operational Excellence to Achieve Superior Performance, published (April 2011) by McGraw Hill.
stations both up and down the line;
3. Short line stoppages were legion;
4. Every station on the line had at least one operator in it;
5. Some operators were over cycle and some had a lot of waiting time.
It was painfully obvious that the line wasn’t set up to run at takt time and there was a wide range of skills present on the assembly line leading to the erratic output, both in terms of quality and quantity. Some of the jobs had the operators fully engaged during their cycle, while others seemed to spend most of their time waiting. The daily and weekend overtime was also taking its toll on the two shifts as they essentially met each other coming and going each day.
The Plan
The supplier had already begun the analysis of what a line rebalance would entail. There were guns to move in every station, line controllers to reprogram, stock locations to move, racking to modify or build from scratch, new buffer locations and work contents for each station had to be determined. It was at this point we ran headlong into their mechanistic culture.
As we reviewed their plans, we asked the obvious question, to us anyway, as to where their training plans were for the team members. We were told that most of the team members had enough experience to know what they were doing so it wasn’t going to be a problem. We were also told that because they printed out their version of a standard work sheet on an oversize sheet of paper, in colour, and laminated it and hung it basically in front of their operators’ faces, they wouldn’t need to be trained because ‘if you do Standard Work right,
Management Services Spring 2012
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it takes the place of training.’ We were defi nitely sailing into strong headwinds here. We were brought in to help them ‘do lean’ so we weren’t shy about reviewing their plans. We pointed out that they were falling into the trap of mechanistic thinking. This is where your world view is basically that only the process needs to be focused on and if you can just fi nd the really, really smart people in the organisation to write sophisticated algorithms and somehow fi nd a way to force people into compliance then everything will be great. This is an elegant, static solution to today’s problems. The reason why this fails 100% of the time is that we don’t live in a static world and our production systems are more than just machines.
Without a team of strong problem solvers that are able to continually adapt to a changing environment the output of the system will fall victim to what we call ‘industrial entropy’ and its performance will continue to degrade to the lowest level. A culture of continuous improvement is sustained not by a cadre of ‘experts’ making changes from the comfort of their cubicles, but rather each and every team member out on the fl oor measuring their performance against a known standard. We say that without a standard you can’t have a problem. The problem is very simply the gap between the observed performance and the established standard or target. This concept holds true whether it is a repetitive job on a production line or a business process in a service organisation. With this defi nition we identifi ed problems in their quality, cost and morale metrics.
The next edition will look at how the supplier reacted to the plan and what was implemented.
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