Demystifying Lean: Going to Gemba

Editor's Notes

• #3: Many different definitions of Lean, some focus on tools and techniques, some focus on waste and cost reduction, and some have nothing at all to do with Lean.
• #10: How profound…if you sell 100 a day you should make 100 a day.
• #18: This sounds simple and straightforward. It impacts the entire span, and every aspect of the value stream, from supply chain performance to customer satisfaction and shareholder value.How is value defined? Three criteria are used: 1) The thing being processed is changed, 2) The customer is willing to pay, and 3) Done right the first time.So the first one is straight-forward and works with products or services. Whether assembling a mobile device or providing weather forecasts, inputs are processed into outcomes.The second criteria, the customer is willing to pay seems simple, but can be tricky when you start asking for customers.JUST BECAUSE CUSTOMERS SAY THEY WANT SOMETHING DOES NOT MEAN THEY VALUE IT!I encountered a Facilities Manger experienced in process improvement. He shared an experience he had with his customers….people who worked in the buildings. After receiving several survey forms indicating that the customers would be delighted with scented candles. Now this seems absurd but I have seen people do stranger things than grant a customer request for scented candles and thankfully the Manager did the prudent thing and dug a bit deeper…..further questioning indicated that the customers really wanted to cover up the musky odor and improve the lighting.JUST BECAUSE CUSTOMERS SAY THEY WANT SOMETHING DOES NOT MEAN THEY VALUE IT!The second criteria, the customer is willing to pay seems simple, can also be tricky…..….especially if you don’t ask.JUST BECAUSE CUSTOMERS DO NOT SAY THEY WANT SOMETHING DOES NOT MEAN THEY DO NOT VALUE IT!Consider the watch making industry in the late 1960’s. Swiss watch companies owned the market 80% market share. The world's first prototype analog quartz wristwatches were revealed in 1967: the Beta 1 revealed by the Centre Electronique Horloger (CEH) in Neuchâtel Switzerland, and the prototype of the Astron revealed by Seiko in Japan. The Swiss walked away from the concept rejecting it as the future of watch making…. Quartz wristwatches have dominated the watch market since the 1980s. Because they are more accurate than the best mechanical timepieces, and the elimination of all moving parts makes them more rugged and eliminates the need for maintenance.The Swiss failed to define value from the customer’s perspective.JUST BECAUSE CUSTOMERS DO NOT SAY THEY WANT SOMETHING DOES NOT MEAN THEY DO NOT VALUE IT!But simply asking customers to define value, or asking them about their requirements or needs is not enough…more often than not customers do not know the best way to match their needs or define value. How many customers told Apple they needed an iPhone?WE MUST DO MORE THAN ASK CUSTOMERS, WE HAVE TO GO TO GEMBA
• #19: JUST BECAUSE CUSTOMERS SAY THEY WANT SOMETHING DOES NOT MEAN THEY VALUE IT!I encountered a Facilities Manger experienced in process improvement. He shared an experience he had with his customers….people who worked in the buildings. After receiving several survey forms indicating that the customers would be delighted with scented candles. Now this seems absurd but I have seen people do stranger things than grant a customer request for scented candles and thankfully the Manager did the prudent thing and dug a bit deeper…..further questioning indicated that the customers really wanted to cover up the musky odor and improve the lighting.JUST BECAUSE CUSTOMERS SAY THEY WANT SOMETHING DOES NOT MEAN THEY VALUE IT!The second criteria, the customer is willing to pay seems simple, can also be tricky…..….especially if you don’t ask.JUST BECAUSE CUSTOMERS DO NOT SAY THEY WANT SOMETHING DOES NOT MEAN THEY DO NOT VALUE IT!Consider the watch making industry in the late 1960’s. Swiss watch companies owned the market 80% market share. The world's first prototype analog quartz wristwatches were revealed in 1967: the Beta 1 revealed by the Centre Electronique Horloger (CEH) in Neuchâtel Switzerland, and the prototype of the Astron revealed by Seiko in Japan. The Swiss walked away from the concept rejecting it as the future of watch making…. Quartz wristwatches have dominated the watch market since the 1980s. Because they are more accurate than the best mechanical timepieces, and the elimination of all moving parts makes them more rugged and eliminates the need for maintenance.The Swiss failed to define value from the customer’s perspective.JUST BECAUSE CUSTOMERS DO NOT SAY THEY WANT SOMETHING DOES NOT MEAN THEY DO NOT VALUE IT!But simply asking customers to define value, or asking them about their requirements or needs is not enough…more often than not customers do not know the best way to match their needs or define value. How many customers told Apple they needed an iPhone?WE MUST DO MORE THAN ASK CUSTOMERS, WE HAVE TO GO TO GEMBA
• #20: This starts with Value Centered Design. Value centered design focuses on defining value, from offering to delivery, between the customer experience and the enterprise objectives. The space from Offering to Delivery is often called the value stream.I worked with a large company involved in technology. They developed and designed new product/service offering in a new market space. As part of the design and development process teams conducted surveys of customers.Now because of the culture and history of the organization about how things are engineered, how things are designed, what is important and what is not in a design, part of the product/service solution included backup power subsystems. To justify this customers were asked if they would like to have this feature in the final design…customers, being who they are of course agreed that the feature would be great…but customers will always take a feature….if it is FREE! There was no other justification for including this feature other than the customer survey.Seems harmless….right? Not so much. The backup power system requires maintenance over time…to the aggregate tune of tens of millions of dollars a year….oh and it sounds an alarm that annoys the customer until it it serviced….all for a feature customers are not willing to pay for!
• #21: This starts with Value Centered Design. Value centered design focuses on defining value, from offering to delivery, between the customer experience and the enterprise objectives. The space from Offering to Delivery is often called the value stream.
• #22: Value Stream is often modeled with the VSM
• #23: Think of the time people spend commuting to work, going from one building to another on a campus, traveling across the country or the globe…oh by the way this doesn’t include the time you were not moving….that is waiting.Consider General Motors introduction of the 1987 Cadillac Allante…aka “The Flying Cadillac.” The body of the Allanté was designed and built in Italy by Pininfarina (of Ferrari fame). The completed bodies were shipped 3,300 miles (5,300 km) from Italy in specially equipped Boeing 747s, 56 at a time, to Cadillac's Detroit/Hamtramck Assembly plant. The bodies were then mated to the chassis. Leading to the moniker of the world’s longest assembly line.
• #24: J&J CEO reduction inventory example. Must eliminate or mitigate need for inventory.Worked at a shipyard…we used to kid them that two most visible made made things from space are the great wall of china and the inventory in the shipyard.
• #25: Difficulty avoided in using the mouse, ease enabled for using keyboard shortcuts.
• #26: Waiting for inputs, files, planes. Waiting on the network, the toll booth, ON THE PHONE. Just like inventory there are a lot of things that can happen while waiting…and most of them are not good. Software is a prime example….wait too long and the customer changes the requirements.Sometimes these things are not always obvious. Some waiting is caused by downtime. Many years ago I used to work with a chemical plat, spent 7 years working there, statistical methods, DOE.They produced commodity chemicals….the customers highest priority need or value was availability…no matter how much they produced they could sell it. There was a clear intersection of customer and producer value…more capacity. The plant required a six week period annually for shutdown maintenance, training, et cetera. This time could be viewed as waiting. By shifting focus from trying to squeeze and optimize more yield out of the operating process, we created a significant increase in capacity by reducing the time devoted to routine mantinenace during shutdown.
• #27: Puerto Rico and tablet production.
• #28: Remember that waste is expenditure without value (as defined by the customer). Years ago I had a client in the business of designing, building, and testing satellites in both the commercial and non-commercial space. Very few designs were ever built more than once, consequently testing, testing at every step in the process and testing redundancy were the watchwords of the industry. They had two basic types of tests: tests of the design and tests of the manufacturing process and product. Testing was viewed as a normal part of the process, and in fact customers were willing, for obvious reasons, to pay for virtually any reasonably justified test.So ingrained was this thought process that when they had an occasion to build two identically designed and produced vehicles the cost of design testing was built into the project budget and not questioned, not even by the customer. Not until other budget realities forced this program to find ways to save money. It turns out conducting the design tests on the second vehicle was over-processing…to the tune of nearly $30 million.Over-processing the toast was not only a waste of and in itself, but also created the additional waste of Defects.
• #29: The case of reworking the grape jelly.An important aspect with this waste is honesty and transparency.Case of the missing applications (in the ceiling) or (the run over brief case, outside Austin with lumber company)
• #30: The case of reworking the grape jelly.An important aspect with this waste is honesty and transparency.Case of the missing applications (in the ceiling) or (the run over brief case, outside Austin with lumber company)
• #31: This starts with Value Centered Design. Value centered design focuses on defining value, from offering to delivery, between the customer experience and the enterprise objectives. The space from Offering to Delivery is often called the value stream.
• #33: If the customer requires 50 per day then takt time is 8 hours / 50 = one every 9.6 minutes.
• #34: Bottlenecks
• #36: Flexibility of work cells. Experience with PCA Professional Service Teams (Team Lead, Consultants, Analyst, Admin Sup)Breaking down software projects into smaller pieces of deliverables, iterations etc. is batch size reduction.
• #38: The case of the database clipboard.
• #39: If you can predict it you know something about it.
• #41: Busy & effective….recently a manger recounted a story about installing and ANDON light….