Continuous improvement is one of the fundamental characteristics of the Toyota Production System or a Lean Enterprise. Building a culture that supports continuous improvement is no small task. In fact, it often takes ten years of more of hard work, constant focus and total commitment.

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Enjoy and write back with your thoughts, opinions and questions. Good and bad, they are appreciated.

Developing effective teamwork is extremely difficult. What would it take to improve your teamwork? Does trust affect teamwork?

Company leaders; do your reports trust you, does ownership or your board of directors trust you? Do you trust them?

Managers/Supervisors; do you trust your boss? Do your reports trust you?
Everyone else; do you trust your boss? Your boss’s boss?

We all know the eight wastes and the negative affect they have on operations, customer service and profitability:

1. Overproduction
2. Inventory excess/storage
3. Repairs/rejects
4. Unnecessary motion
5. Process inefficiency
6. Waiting
7. Transportation (parts and materials)
8. Underutilizing people – skills, experience, creativity…………….

Some businesses are committed to create and maintain teamwork. I know of two professional sports teams who devote time and money to developing trust among the team members. The Philadelphia Flyers professional ice hockey team spent time at West Point building trust and team work in the fall of 2005. The CSC professional bike racing team spent time in military training in Europe focused on mutual trust and teamwork. Why would they do this? They are already a team of well-paid professionals. Why do they need to focus on creating trust? Both teams contain people from different cultures who speak different languages. Does your company have this situation? If not, do you have trust at all levels? If you don’t why not?

You need effective teamwork to continuously improve operations. Goals and objectives must be team oriented supporting effective teams not individual heroes.
Lack of trust impedes cultural change. Cultural change is a requirement of lean conversion and critical to attaining world-class competitiveness, profitability, and the creation of a better place to work.

And what’s in it for your company? The Toyota Production System has proven itself over and over again in manufacturing, distribution, administrative, service and retail. Identifying then eliminating waste continuously simply works and leads to: improved customer order fulfillment, lower costs, improved quality, shorter lead time, greater flexibility, increased capacity, reduced inventory etc.

Some suggestions to enhance an environment of trust

1. Frequently hold company wide meetings to discuss issues openly and honestly
2. Leaders, be noticed noticing or walk the talk
3. Leaders, Managers, Supervisors; strategic alignment is critical to earning trust. Clarify and simplify your message and tell the truth.
4. When you make a mistake admit it and take the opportunity to do it publicly. This is a huge step in earning credibility and trust.
5. Encourage effective teamwork by rewarding appropriately
6. Discourage individual “heroes” remember……it’s about teamwork
7. Create a company-wide single measure, or scoreboard, illustrating measurable objectives everyone can affect,

Whatever you pay most attention to, most likely, will improve.

Let’s talk about what you can control, each minute, hour, day, week. I am referring to those outcomes you and your team can effect. Perhaps outcomes such as:

• shipments
• billable projects completed or billable milestones
• on-time delivery/fulfillment rates
• balanced, paced work flow
• balanced and controlled inventories (raw material, work-in-process or finished goods)
• internal lead-time
• rework/scrap/defects
• machine uptime

…….I am certain you could add to this list.

My experience tells me that the attention is best leveraged by shared measures. I have also found that a clearly communicated measure that is shared with employees in a timely manner has a positive effect on team work and functions as a competitive scoreboard.

So why do so few companies post effective measures? I get many differing answers but I believe most are based in fear of imperfection. If you are waiting for the perfect measure you will likely have a very long wait because I don’t believe it exists. Continuous improvement or Kaizen does not imply that we start with perfect and improve it, continuous improvement implies we start with a plan developed from the collective thinking of people doing the job, then implement using Dr. Deming’s “plan-do-check-act” cycle. Communication is critical to the success of all continuous improvement programs. Develop the plan, then make a list of those you need to support it (when in doubt expand the list) then careful communicate the plan. Remember, it’s not what you say, it’s what your audience hears. Make sure the message is clear…….what is the objective?, why is it important?, what is the process to measure and how do you do it?, how will you know it is working correctly? how will you know when it is not working correctly? and what will you do when it’s not working correctly?

Why wait? Scoreboards get our attention. Make sure the measures are fair, within your teams control and obtainable (you will make mistakes, consider mistakes as an opportunity to communicate to your team).

The Stages of Lean (according to Dwight)

1. Beginner – implemented one Value Stream Map “future state” and are experiencing the “honeymoon effect” Improvement is daily, and progress is fast.
2. Stalling – dealing with the post-honeymoon condition. Lean isn’t as much fun and is no longer new. It still makes sense, but it’s getting a little stale. You get what you measure. What are you measuring?
3. Stalled – Lean is part of how we do business, but aren’t we Lean now? “Why do we have to continuously improve? We are better than our competition.” What has been standardized? What are you measuring?
4. Re-emergence – perhaps stimulated by some competitive failure, followed by deep soul searching, commitment and delivery of a carefully audited plan. Not making it to this step defines failure. All companies will stall sometime, some worse than others, it’s how they emerge that will make the difference. Courage, commitment and integrity are the keys. Oh yeah, don’t forget to measure.
5. Sustainability – the entrance to the “promised land” is in sight. We constantly audit our standardization, measure and post key results. Continuous improvement is a natural component of our workday and an expectation of all employees. By the way, don’t expect to ever get to the “promised land” but never quit trying.

I suspect if Taiichi Ohno or Shigeo Shingo were alive and paid me the honor of reading this, they might say……….ART!!!??? That being said, I believe the effective use of Kaizen is both art (emotions, opinions, creative, situational, political) and science (balance, flow, rules, standardization, measurable etc). I offer Kaizen as a blend of art and science, with a large helping of common sense on the side.

So what is Kaizen? The Kaizen Institute, www.kaizen-institute.com ,refers to Kaizen as an effective process when it “accomplishes sustainable implementation through the development of the internal structure for deployment and developing strategies that enable the workforce (at all levels) to maintain Continuous Improvement initiatives.”
Bruce Hamilton, President of the Greater Boston Manufacturing Partnership www.gbmp.org (and the star of “Toast Kaizen”, refers to kaizen as “small and continuous improvements”. Kaizen uses direct observation and collective thinking to identify and eliminate waste “Muda”, unevenness interrupting flow “Mura” and strenuous conditions of workers, machines and work in process “Muri”.

How do you select areas to Kaizen?

Beginner
When you are just beginning you Lean journey, I have found Value Stream Mapping to be the best place to start. This will clarify opportunity and avoid possible “Kaizen drive-bys” which waste both resources and system credibility.

Stalling and Stalled
So you have done several Value Stream Maps, and have implemented toward your Future conditions. How can you effectively use Kaizen? Find the weakest point in your value stream (perhaps administrative) and “Kaizen” out the waste.

How do you select Kaizen teams? Well, tell me about your lean training… has everyone been trained? What do you mean by “trained”? If all the problems are being defined by leadership who then go out recruiting Kaizen team members, either you have not trained effectively or no one believes you will support him or her when the going gets tough. This is not sustainable.

Re-emergence
You have identified and eliminated your cultural and training weaknesses allowing the continuous improvement to gather momentum….. Congratulations!

Sustainability
Our objective, when there you are fiercely competitive and getting stronger, people love to work there and we make things simple, have fun and make money. Not bad eh?

Perhaps your company’s “Continuous Improvement” process is disappointing. Culture is in the way rather than moving forward.

Why? Maybe your inability to effectively drive “lean initiative” down throughout the organization is a reason or, company leadership is inconsistently supporting the Continuous Improvement process. We could all add many additional points, but lets look at some possibilities to effectively change and build culture.

Chances are, most of your employees are used to being told what to do when at work. As intelligent people, they quickly learn that often “applying their thinking gets them in trouble”. This is typical of most pre-lean companies. “Check your brain at the door, then pick it up on the way out” is the unspoken rule. To believe that your team will immediately feel it’s safe to think and act accordingly is not realistic. Maybe some of these concepts could help you build culture:

1. Adopt an improvement time policy, specifically written to name and authorize a certain number of improvement hours per person, per targeted area, per week. Following the “what gets measured gets done philosophy” (thank you Al Weber) be certain to support activity by tracking progress and sharing the simplified chart with all employees.
2. Use the “Toast Kaizen” video to explain kaizen and how, as a company, you intend to implement it’s effective use. The Toast Kaizen video is available from the Greater Boston Manufacturing Partnership 617-287-7648 and is one of the simpliest, most effective tools to train continuous improvement
3. Create a scoreboard to show controllable performance. How are we doing? Did we have a good or bad day? These questions are answered by posting timely, meaningful feedback to our teams. Information such as how many should we complete today vs. our actual completion quantity. Hourly updates can be very useful in creating pace, even in a make-to-order environment. The value (in $, hours or whatever unit of measure that makes sense to you and your team) of what was completed, or shipped is very useful.
4. Single-Point Lessons: Rapid Transfer of Best Practices to the Shop Floor

Simple, visual instructions, such as this example, are very effective.  Working with your teams to create them supports the engagement of all team members.

Building a new culture is not easy and will not happen over night.  YOU MUST PAY CONSTANT ATTENTION TO YOUR TEAMS AND THE PROCESS.  Ask yourselves, “Are we paying enough attention to our teams and the process?”  If culture change is not working, you probably are not.

Don’t forget: You are a lean enterprise, every minute of every day from now on.