Frontiers - Lean & IT

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

By any objective measure, Lean has ‘done well’. Most major organizations have active Lean/Continual Improvement activities. Lean thinking has developed roots far from its manufacturing beginnings and into far-flung fields like healthcare, construction and the process industries.

Yes, there have been dead-ends, detours and growing pains.

Why do so many organizations fail to fully harvest Lean’s potential? How do we sustain Lean as a system, and not merely a set of tools?

How do we engage senior leaders more deeply?

Nonetheless, we’ve made good progress these past few decades.

So what’s next?

Information technology. How to translate the powerful Lean principles methods & principles in this vital, fascinating, yet often arcane field?

There has, of course, been some helpful cross-fertilization. Agile, for example, and its constituent methods (Scrum, Kanban..., are creative expressions of visual management, Pull and PDCA. But my sense is we've barely scratched the surface. (Are respect for people, quality in the process, and Strategy Deployment well understood?)

The obstacles are substantial. Information Technology language, mental models, and gembas are radically different than those in, say, manufacturing, logistics or the process industries.

IT value streams are among the most invisible my team & I have encountered. IT departments tend to be fragmented and often comprise multiple deep silos. (DEVOPS is a valuable attempt to integrate the software development and delivery process, and emphasizes communication and collaboration between product management, software development, and operations.)

On the plus side, IT practitioners are among the most capable and creative people we've ever worked with. As ever, shared experiential learning (Yokoten) begins with a shared understanding. I encourage Lean practitioners around the world to learn the language & business of IT, and to think deeply about how to support our colleagues there. (My daughter and I recently enrolled in a coding course, which took me back to my student days & reminded me I’m a bad coder…)

And I encourage our colleagues in IT shops around the world to learn & adapt the powerful thinking methodologies of Lean.

Should lead to interesting conversations.

Best regards,

Pascal



In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

Getting the Right Things Done in a Digital World
On Big Data
Why Lean Outside the Factory?
Too Often, Power Means the Power to Do Stupid Things

Why Lean Outside the Factory?

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

I wrote a book about it – (The Remedy). Why did I bother?

Because Lean is about reducing waste & variation -- and most of it is outside of the factory.

The past few decades, factories, and Operations in general, have gotten better and better.

There’s still much opportunity, but in many industries they are no longer the bottleneck.

Suppose you order a new Toyota Avalon, Total lead time (i.e. time between your order and delivery) will be something like 30 days.

How much of that time does the vehicle spend at the Toyota Kentucky factory?

A day or so. Most of the lead time is outside the factory and comprises administration, transportation, and plenty of waiting. So where is the opportunity?

Sales, Marketing, Design, Engineering, Finance and so on are the "undiscovered country".

How do we support the good people in these areas?

Here are a few questions to get us started.

For each zone, ask:

1) What is waste?

2) What is value?

3) What are some core mental models?

If we can build on these to define our Purpose clearly, we'll can start to pull in powerful Lean tools to help us achieve that Purpose (Getting the Right Things Done)

Best regards,

Pascal



In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

Too Often, Power Means the Power to Do Stupid Things
When You’re Convinced You’re Right, You’ve Lost Your Ability to Learn
On Labels – ‘Expert, Master, Sensei’ and the like
Fred Taylor & the Illusion of Top-Down Control - Part 2

Beware INITIATIVES

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Like most people, I went to business and engineering school with the best intentions - get a better job, learn interesting stuff, become a better manager and so on.

But we pick up more than we bargain for - including dysfunctional mental models, which I've written about at length.

We begin to believe that, because we are so smart and well-educated, we can manage from a distance.

And the corollaries:

1. What can front line workers possible teach us?
   


2. Improvement means head office INITIATIVES dreamed up by people -- just like us!
   

Result?

Endless INITIATIVES stream out of head office.

They crowd out real work and often crush our managers and team members.

Everywhere, I see good people struggling under the weight of actual work plus the funny work head office insists on.

Executives are like crows - they like shiny things.

Here's some advice:

1. Resist the temptation
   


2. Put the shiny things on a wall in the Executive metrics room
   


3. Look at them occasionally, but don't do anything
   


4. When the organization has some "white space", pull one off the wall and look at it
   

Then put it back and forget about it.

Here's a reflection point:

At our old Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada plant - we never had INITIATIVES

We had tough performance targets set through Strategy Deployment, and the expectation that we'd figure out root causes & countermeasures.

Result: we focused entirely on making the day's production and improving our management system.

We were free to balance continuous improvement with breakthrough.

We owned our management system.

Best,

Pascal


In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

Point, Flow & System Improvement
Andon – Putting Quality at the Forefront
Lean Outside the Factory - Reverse Magic!
The Beauty of Making Things

Andon – Putting Quality at the Forefront

By Al Norval (bio)

In a couple of recent blogs we’ve talked about Jidoka or Built in Quality at the Source. While it sounds easy, putting it into practice is very difficult. One of the primary reasons for this is it requires a fundamental change in our thinking or as we say a change in our Mental Models.

Let’s start by asking what is Jidoka?

It’s one of the pillars of the Lean Production System and can be defined as:

Providing machines and operators the ability to detect abnormalities and immediately stop work, then call for help and problem solve. At Toyota, it is also known as "autonomation with a human touch". Jidoka allows us to build quality into each process and to free up people from the need to “watch” machines work.

By following this, Jidoka allows machines to do what they do best, which is to detect abnormalities & stop the process and for humans to do what they do best which is to solve problems.

The key connection between the two is Andon which can be defined as:

A signal that notifies operators, supervisors, and maintenance of problems that are occurring at different places throughout the organization or facility. Typically a worker pulls a cord that lights up a signal board when he or she detects a defect. The best Andons will dictate real-time action.

A call for help has gone out. How the organization responds to this depends upon the Mental Models of the organization. If they respond quickly and swarm all over the problem correcting the defect before re-starting the line, they are experiencing the Mental Models of:

• Problems are gold, treasure them!
• Don’t pass junk down the line

If on the other hand, they either don’t respond or come out and play the blame game, they are demonstrating the traditional (non-Lean) Mental Models of:

• Problems are garbage, bury them
• Make the numbers or else

I encourage organizations who are thinking about putting in an Andon system, to work on their human response system first. Ensure you have the capability to respond quickly and problem solve quickly before attempting to go to line stop.

To succeed Andon, Jidoka and in fact all the Lean Tools require a change in our thinking which is only accomplished when we change in our mental models. Where is your organization’s thinking? Where is your organizations mental models? I’d love to hear from you.

For more on Mental Models, please see Lean Pathways.

Cheers

Al


In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

Lean Outside the Factory - Reverse Magic!
The Beauty of Making Things
What is Breakthrough?, Part 2
What Does Breakthrough Mean? - Part 1

How Do Adults Learn?

By Al Norval (bio)

Adults learn very differently from children.

Children are sponges. Every day is a new adventure in which new things are learned. Somewhere along the way this all changes and we mature and become adults.

Adults on the other hand, only learn what they feel they need to learn. Adult learning is very practical. If I can’t see how this will help me now, then the true understanding and retention rate of the learning will be very low. I’m sure we can all remember the blah, blah, blah of college professors droning on about some mundane topic that was soon forgotten after the final exam was written.

So, what does this mean?

Adult learning focuses on solving problems. More concretely, realistic problems that people have right now.

When teams have problems, leaders have an opportunity to teach and use the problem to raise the capability of their Team Members. This is the power and magic behind kaizen.

We solve problems and learn in the very process of doing so. This is also the basis of Mental model #1 – Leader as a Teacher. Not to teach like a college professor but to teach Socratically by asking question to build the teams capability and guide the Team through the problem solving process.

Cheers

Al

In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

Back to Basics – Visual Management
Back to Basics – Visual Order
Back to Basics – Employee Engagement
Back to Basics – Customer Value

Software is Eating the World – What’s It Mean for Lean/CI?

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Hard to argue with this strong statement. Is there any major organization nowadays that is not an IT organization?

ING Bank, famously, has more IT professionals than Google. Today a Tesla car has more lines of code than macOS or the Windows Vista operation system.

What’s all this mean for the Lean/Continuous Improvement ‘movement’?

Lean/CI practitioners need to raise their games. We have to learn the language, technology and mental models of the digital world.

We have to reach out to our IT colleagues and help them deepen their practice, as they deepen ours.

Lean/CI has had a strong run these past two decades. Most major corporations now in most industries have active Lean/CI ‘programs.’

True, there are still comparatively few brilliant Lean organizations, and most senior executives still don’t understand the methods or the underlying mindsets.

But the Lean/CI tide has lifted most ships, and core concepts such as Value, Waste, Flow and PDCA are firmly rooted in contemporary business practice.

But it’s not enough. Lean/CI has much to offer the digital world. Digitization is an inherently abstract process. Bits & bytes are invisible, as are the circuits that animate a printed circuit board.

The more abstract a practice or technology, the more essential is a counter-balancing engagement with the physical world.

At its best, Lean/CI is simple & concrete. Our old Toyota senseis taught us to continually refine our thinking & processes by removing the unnecessary.

After a while it becomes second nature. Steve Jobs, famously, learned the art of design by studying Japanese calligraphy.

Strategy, problem solving, ideation, rapid experimentation and other core Lean/CI practices require a fluid back & forth between the worlds of reflection & experience.

We go see, reflect on what we saw, and go see again. Such core Lean/CI practices and mindsets can help to enable, focus and refine digitization.

But we have to be humble and open enough to accept that the world is changing very quickly. And we have to work very hard to understand the language, mental models & technology of our colleagues in the digital world.

Good learning, all.

Best regards,

Pascal

Frontiers - Lean & IT

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

By any objective measure, Lean has ‘done well’. Most major organizations have active Lean/Continual Improvement activities. Lean thinking has developed roots far from its manufacturing beginnings and into far-flung fields like healthcare, construction and the process industries.

Yes, there have been dead-ends, detours and growing pains.

Why do so many organizations fail to fully harvest Lean’s potential? How do we sustain Lean as a system, and not merely a set of tools?

How do we engage senior leaders more deeply?

Nonetheless, we’ve made good progress these past few decades.

So what’s next?

Information technology. How to translate the powerful Lean principles methods & principles in this vital, fascinating, yet often arcane field?

There has, of course, been some helpful cross-fertilization. Agile, for example, and its constituent methods (Scrum, Kanban..., are creative expressions of visual management, Pull and PDCA. But my sense is we've barely scratched the surface. (Are respect for people, quality in the process, and Strategy Deployment well understood?)

The obstacles are substantial. Information Technology language, mental models, and gembas are radically different than those in, say, manufacturing, logistics or the process industries.

IT value streams are among the most invisible my team & I have encountered. IT departments tend to be fragmented and often comprise multiple deep silos. (DEVOPS is a valuable attempt to integrate the software development and delivery process, and emphasizes communication and collaboration between product management, software development, and operations.)

On the plus side, IT practitioners are among the most capable and creative people we've ever worked with. As ever, shared experiential learning (Yokoten) begins with a shared understanding. I encourage Lean practitioners around the world to learn the language & business of IT, and to think deeply about how to support our colleagues there. (My daughter and I recently enrolled in a coding course, which took me back to my student days & reminded me I’m a bad coder…)

And I encourage our colleagues in IT shops around the world to learn & adapt the powerful thinking methodologies of Lean.

Should lead to interesting conversations.

Best regards,

Pascal

Lean in the Public Service – Part 1

By Pascal Dennis

Lean (aka Toyota management system) has developed deep roots far outside of manufacturing.

I’ve been privileged to work in sectors as diverse as Healthcare, universities, home building, utilities and software development.

How about the Public Service? Does Lean apply at municipal, state and federal government agencies? I’ll explore this question in blogs to come.

The short answer is ‘Yes’. All work is a process, all work can be improved. Public service is Lean’s frontier and the potential is enormous.

An effective public service creates great value and strengthens a society. (An inept or corrupt civil service is the stuff of Franz Kafka novels.)

What are some of the challenges for Lean in the Public Service? It’s not the people – I’ve found our civil service colleagues to be capable and dedicated.

Civil servants seek and deserve what Deming called ‘pride of workmanship’. They have a right to be involved in designing and improving their work.

But too often they work in dysfunctional management systems, and under antique mental models. The problem is in the system, which senior leaders own.

What are some of the systemic problems? The absence of competition is perhaps the most important. Lean’s heart is value, and value’s heart is the customer-supplier connection (Rule 2 of Lean).

How to motivate kaizen where there’s no competition? How to motivate leaders to build good systems for the 4Ms – manpower, methods, materials and machines? How to develop a meritocracy?

(Can we engage international marketing organizations like, say, JD Power, in developing awards and recognition for excellence in public service?)

The stakes are high, as is the challenge. To our civil service friends and colleagues, full speed ahead.

Best,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

"Too Much School Destroys the Mind..."

By Pascal Dennis

Like many of my colleagues I went to a professional school (Engineering), then a business school.

I dutifully did all my assignments, got good marks and climbed up the ladder.

Nobody told me about the glasses I'd been given. Nobody told me that they would distort my image of the world.

Nobody told me it would take a decade or more to learn to see clearly again. And I was lucky...

People got to professional schools and business schools with the best of intentions.

They want a better job, more responsibility and higher pay -- all worthy & admirable goals.

But my professors never told me they were teaching dysfunctional mental models.

(Getting the Right Things Done and The Remedy express my thoughts on mental models.)

Probably, they didn't even realize it themselves.

They too, were just trying to make their way in their careers, seeking the path of least resistance.

But ideas have legs. Dysfunctional mental models mutate, and debilitate their host.

The result?

Smart, well-educate, capable people who have forgotten the basics.

As my dad used to say (about me), "Too much school destroys the mind..."

Regards,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Greece’s Fatal Attraction

By Pascal Dennis

Chaos in Greece and no end in sight. Entirely avoidable, many say, citing the adolescent behavior of Tsipras, Varoufakis and the Syriza mob.

In previous blogs I’ve reflected on the culture clash between Europe and Greece. Here’s a related element.

Unlike most of Europe, Greece has never gotten over its fatal attraction with far left politics.

Greece’s catastrophic civil war (1946 – 1949) was essentially a proxy war with America and Europe on one side, and the Soviet Union and Warsaw pact on the other.

The communist side was defeated but the slogans remained, and continue to inform Greek politics. Syriza, the governing party, largely comprises Marxists, Stalinists and Maoists, and is inherently hostile to Europe and America.

A sizeable minority of Greek voters – (perhaps as many as the 38% who voted for Syriza) – looks favorably on Cuba and Venezuela. Many believe the fall of the Soviet Union was a tragedy, and look to Vladimir Putin for salvation.

My grandad emigrated to America in 1921, and most of our family followed. My occasional contact with Greek cousins reinforces the above impressions.

Lean practitioners are focused on creating value – services and products that people want and that make their lives easier. We know that increasing throughput or reducing defects in a manufacturing or service line creates value.

We accept the value of brilliant design and don’t begrudge the wealth the flows to a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Jobs and Gates have given me this splendid computer which allows me and countless others to soar.

Better throughput, quality, design creates value and thereby wealth. We’re able to provide more products and services to more people, which in turn allows them to create more value – the benevolent cycle at the heart of a healthy economy.

But Tsipras, Varoufakis and their ilk reject this image. In their eyes, wealth is fixed, and the main question is how to divide the economic pie. Moreover, commerce is wicked and work for pay is exploitation.

These mental models also informed another left wing Greek leader, Andreas Papandreou, in the 1970’s and 1980’s as he turned away from Europe and America, and made friends with – wait for it – the Soviets, Arafat and Qaddafi.

As it happens, around that time major European and American companies were looking to invest in the eastern Mediterranean. Is it any wonder they chose to invest in the much more pragmatic Turkey?

The rest of Europe has learned the discount the far left’s siren song - but the Greeks are in its thrall.

The Greek comedy of errors may climax with the imminent referendum. The NO voters will be rejecting not just the bailout terms, but also Europe and the west.

Best,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Reprise - Beware Initiatives

By Pascal Dennis

Like most people, I went to business and engineering school with the best intentions - get a better job, learn interesting stuff, become a better manager and so on.

But we pick up more than we bargain for - including dysfunctional mental models, which I've written about at length.

We begin to believe that, because we are so smart and well-educated, we can manage from a distance.

And the corollaries:

1. What can front line workers possible teach us?
   


2. Improvement means head office INITIATIVES dreamed up by people -- just like us!
   

Result?

Endless INITIATIVES stream out of head office.

They crowd out real work and often crush our managers and team members.

Everywhere, I see good people struggling under the weight of actual work plus the funny work head office insists on.

Executives are like crows - they like shiny things.

Here's some advice:

1. Resist the temptation
   


2. Put the shiny things on a wall in the Executive metrics room
   


3. Look at them occasionally, but don't do anything
   


4. When the organization has some "white space", pull one off the wall and look at it
   

Then put it back and forget about it.

Here's a reflection point:

At our old Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada plant - we never had INITIATIVES

We had tough performance targets set through Strategy Deployment, and the expectation that we'd figure out root causes & countermeasures.

Result: we focused entirely on making the day's production and improving our management system.

We were free to balance continuous improvement with breakthrough.

We owned our management system.

Best,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Reprise - Why Lean Outside the Factory?

By Pascal Dennis,

I wrote a book about it – (The Remedy). Why did I bother?

Because Lean is about reducing waste & variation -- and most of it is outside of the factory.

The past few decades, factories, and Operations in general, have gotten better and better.

There’s still much opportunity, but in many industries they are no longer the bottleneck.

Suppose you order a new Toyota Avalon, Total lead time (i.e. time between your order and delivery) will be something like 30 days.

How much of that time does the vehicle spend at the Toyota Kentucky factory?

A day or so. Most of the lead time is outside the factory and comprises administration, transportation, and plenty of waiting. So where is the opportunity?

Sales, Marketing, Design, Engineering, Finance and so on are the "undiscovered country".

How do we support the good people in these areas?

Here are a few questions to get us started.

For each zone, ask:

1) What is waste?

2) What is value?

3) What are some core mental models?

If we can build on these to define our Purpose clearly, we'll can start to pull in powerful Lean tools to help us achieve that Purpose (Getting the Right Things Done)

Best regards,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Andon – Putting Quality at the Forefront

Al Norval

In a couple of recent blogs we’ve talked about Jidoka or Built in Quality at the Source. While it sounds easy, putting it into practice is very difficult. One of the primary reasons for this is it requires a fundamental change in our thinking or as we say a change in our Mental Models.

Let’s start by asking what is Jidoka?

It’s one of the pillars of the Lean Production System and can be defined as:

Providing machines and operators the ability to detect abnormalities and immediately stop work, then call for help and problem solve. At Toyota, it is also known as "autonomation with a human touch". Jidoka allows us to build quality into each process and to free up people from the need to “watch” machines work.

By following this, Jidoka allows machines to do what they do best, which is to detect abnormalities & stop the process and for humans to do what they do best which is to solve problems.

The key connection between the two is Andon which can be defined as:

A signal that notifies operators, supervisors, and maintenance of problems that are occurring at different places throughout the organization or facility. Typically a worker pulls a cord that lights up a signal board when he or she detects a defect. The best Andons will dictate real-time action.

A call for help has gone out. How the organization responds to this depends upon the Mental Models of the organization. If they respond quickly and swarm all over the problem correcting the defect before re-starting the line, they are experiencing the Mental Models of:

• Problems are gold, treasure them!
• Don’t pass junk down the line

If on the other hand, they either don’t respond or come out and play the blame game, they are demonstrating the traditional (non-Lean) Mental Models of:

• Problems are garbage, bury them
• Make the numbers or else

I encourage organizations who are thinking about putting in an Andon system, to work on their human response system first. Ensure you have the capability to respond quickly and problem solve quickly before attempting to go to line stop.

To succeed Andon, Jidoka and in fact all the Lean Tools require a change in our thinking which is only accomplished when we change in our mental models. Where is your organization’s thinking? Where is your organizations mental models? I’d love to hear from you.

For more on Mental Models, please see Lean Pathways.

Cheers

Lean Brain Boosters - Making the Invisible, Visible

By Pascal Dennis

Two years ago my colleague, Al Norval, and I were wresting with a tough question.

How do you make Lean principles visible?

Lean thinking, tools & leadership are often paradoxical & counter-intuitive.

Moreover, often they contravene accepted 'wisdom', at least as defined in our business & professional schools.

I've always loved doodling and my recently-published book The Remedy -- Bringing Lean Out of the Factory, which was full of them.

We had a brainwave.

Why not create doodles that expressed Lean fundamentals in a light-hearted, engaging way?

We started with a suite of 12 entitled Brain Boosters - Lean Thinking.

Ya'll seemed to like them, so we followed up with two more suites: Lean Tools and Lean Leadership.

We've been gratified by the response & believe Brain Boosters are a fine addition to the Kaizen toolkit.

Here's how people have been using them:

• Mental Models Self-Assessment
• For each card, have team members individually score the organization 
• 10 = Lean Thinking; 0 = Conventional Thinking
• Plot the results. What do they tell you?
• Pick a few “hot spots” & make an improvement plan
• Reassess again at year-end
• Theme of the Day
• At team huddles, give a card to a team member.
• Ask her to find examples of both Lean & Conventional Thinking & report back at shift-end. Any learning points?
• Rotate on a set cadence so everybody gets a chance
• Lean Training, Kaizen Workshops, Gemba Walks
• Pass out Brain Boosters at training & kaizen sessions.
• Carry them during gemba walks & use to reinforce the basics

From time to time people email us with other innovative uses.

(One company obtained the rights to the images & has turned them into posters, T-shirts, mouse pads and other training aids!)

We'd love to hear more of your stories.

Thanks, as always,

Pascal

Beware INITIATIVES

By Pascal Dennis

Like most people, I went to business and engineering school with the best intentions - get a better job, learn interesting stuff, become a better manager and so on.

But we pick up more than we bargain for - including dysfunctional mental models, which I've written about at length.

We begin to believe that, because we are so smart and well-educated, we can manage from a distance.

And the corollaries:

1. What can front line workers possible teach us?
   


2. Improvement means head office INITIATIVES dreamed up by people -- just like us!
   

Result?

Endless INITIATIVES stream out of head office.

They crowd out real work and often crush our managers and team members.

Everywhere, I see good people struggling under the weight of actual work plus the funny work head office insists on.

Executives are like crows - they like shiny things.

Here's some advice:

1. Resist the temptation
   


2. Put the shiny things on a wall in the Executive metrics room
   


3. Look at them occasionally, but don't do anything
   


4. When the organization has some "white space", pull one off the wall and look at it
   

Then put it back and forget about it.

Here's a reflection point:

At our old Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada plant - we never had INITIATIVES

We had tough performance targets set through Strategy Deployment, and the expectation that we'd figure out root causes & countermeasures.

Result: we focused entirely on making the day's production and improving our management system.

We were free to balance continuous improvement with breakthrough.

We owned our management system.

Best,

Pascal

PS Congratulations to Spain for winning Euro 2012! Splendid tournament - congratulations to the hosts, Poland & Ukraine.

Wonderful creative play by Italy, Germany & others. (Fortitude by the Greek side, at a tough time.)

How to Measure Lean?

By Al Norval

One question I get asked by most organizations I deal with is – How do you measure a Lean Implementation?

The background usually goes like this; management is funding a Lean Transformation and wants to ensure they get a return on their investment. They know how much the cost side of the equation is and so management wants to know how much they are saving. They can then decide whether to continue or not based on the numbers they get.

It’s interesting since there are several mental models at work here. The first one is:

I can manage the business by the numbers so give me some numbers.

and

A Lean Transformation can be reduced to a set of financial results.

The next step usually involves setting up elaborate systems to track savings, both bottom line savings and avoided costs or soft savings. This leads to the ensuing arguments of Inventory savings vs. expense savings and Capital vs. partial head count avoided all of which lead to huge savings but as one frustrated company President I talked to said “At the end of the year my pockets are still empty, nothing is hitting the bottom line”.

What people forget is that Lean fundamentally is a growth strategy that goes like this. If we take waste out of the process and provide more value to our customers, we will sell more and be able to use the additional volume to fill in the unused capacity we have generated through the waste reductions. It’s a benevolent cycle based on providing more value to Customers. If we are only measuring savings, we only see part of the equation.

As organizations realize this, they typically move onto measuring the lean implementation as an in-process measure. Usually, the measure is some form of radar chart with the radar representing various tools, often up to 30 different tools, on a 1-5 scale. This forces operational units to implement tools based on the scoring system whether they need to or not. The problem with this approach is tools are easy to measure but they don’t measure thinking and Lean is based on thinking according to the scientific method.

So, what’s the best way to measure lean?

For an in-process measure I like to use the Lead time of a process, the sum of all the value added and non-value added steps in a process. Taking waste out reduces the lead time. Lead time then becomes a good proxy for how lean a process is. For an end of pipe measure I don’t use any special measures. I look at Safety, Quality, Delivery, Cost and if the organization is meeting its targets and is meeting them by using Lean in the execution of their plans, then they’re doing fine. Of course, this is confirmed by Going to Gemba and checking.

My bottom line - use Lean to close a gap in a business need by engaging people to reduce waste and provide more value to Customers. Measure the value proposition; you can’t go wrong starting with the Customer.

Cheers