Fixing the Pain with Lean Thinking

Joe walked into a doctor's surgery convinced he was not long for this world. He sat patiently waiting for the doctor, who was running 30 minutes late, but finally it was his turn. The Doctor, an elderly and portly man with a beard that would make Santa proud, asked what the problem was. Joe explained that everywhere hurt, he said that when he touched his shoulder it hurt, if he touched his chest, his hip, both his legs and his face. The situation was serious said Joe, he'd been on Google and was convinced it was terminal so needed to know how much time did he have to live? The doctor listened, nodded then explained to Joe that everything was going to be ok and that it was his finger that was broken!

So, what has this dad joke got to do with lean? Well, it's not unusual to find that within an organisation without any lean thinking everything hurts. Finance hurts because shipments don't go out on time and there's lots of work in progress (WIP) so cash is tied up. Dispatch hurts because things come in bursts and they can't do things fast enough to meet the departing trucks, production hurts (everywhere), support services hurt because they are running around fighting fires to get things out and operations hurt trying to get things out, please everyone and manage to keep up with their rework and keep everyone suitably busy. They feel that the situation is terminal, except it's not. It's anything but, from a lean point of view, it's an incredibly exciting opportunity to learn and understand the real issues within the organisation. The 1^st challenge, however, is to convince everyone that they shouldn't try to fix everything at once, it's not possible!

Lean is about Flow 

If we remember that fundamentally lean is about flow and eliminating anything that inhibits that flow it's actually not unreasonable to think about it in the same way as your blood pumping through your body and the barriers to flow there are thickening of the arteries, blockages that, left un checked will lead to a heart attack. So, you need to prioritise where to look at first. Now an interesting side note here, we chose the word prioritise carefully, it's origin is actually Latin, it comes from prior which is traced back to 'former or elder', i.e. something must come before another, so to prioritise is to put one thing in front of another, you have to chose one thing. When they are looking for blockages in your arteries, they look for the worst one 1^st then the 2^nd worst and so on, your organisation is the same.

From a lean point of view, we are looking to remove the waste from your processes, anything that doesn't add value, things that your customers just don't want to pay for, these are the lean wastes that we have spoken about before. Again you can't go out and do this universally within your organisation and remove waste all over the place but the issue is you may not be working on the right place, your blockage may still be there, you could still be heading for a heart attack. You need to discover your constraint, the thing that hurts your flow the most and start there. There are many ways you can do this, you can absolutely Value Stream Map your process, and at some point, you really do have to do this to really understand all the waste and what flows in and out of the value stream in terms of materials, people and information but you may not have the time to do that. If the pulse of the business is slow and faint, then you don't have time. The best way to find your problem is normally the simplest, go to the Gemba.

Get to the Gemba 

The Gemba, where the actual work done, or value is added is where you need to be. You need to go there and observe, look at what's happening and ask questions. Walk your entire process start to finish and really look and think, is this the area that is going to kill us if we don't fix it? Look around for WIP, if there is a lot of it then it's a possible bottleneck in your process, but it may not be THE bottleneck. Keep going and see if the WIP builds up or not as you walk along, remember that the WIP has multiple factors however. There is the physical WIP that you can easily see, if there are pile and piles of things then that's easy and obvious but you also need to look at the time element, just because there is piles of work at an area doesn't mean there is piles of time locked up there, that process may well move incredibly quickly, it's processing time may be very short, but be blocked by something else, a process method, a tool or even the next process. Keep walking, keeping track of the WIP & Processing Time at each area, when it suddenly drops or even dries up it's a good chance the process prior is a place to start really digging into.

Now you have found your blockage, your broken finger, start looking for the cause of this. This is where we can start looking to apply some of the lean tools that are available. We must engage the people working in this area first and foremost and ask questions, follow a 5 why process, you aren't looking to blame anyone, you are looking to learn from them! We can observe what's happening, we can calculate TAKT times, we can apply SMED processes if that is applicable, or batch sizing in fact we can do all number of things to remove this bottleneck and start flow in the process.

The challenge then is once this area flows the other areas need to keep up, you cannot and should not look to optimise one part of your process without thinking about the entire process optimum. What I mean here is that if you zoom out a bit and look at the process as a whole, as a black box, you will only ever get things out of the box as fast as the slowest element. Hence the optimisation of the processes needs to be done with this in mind, it may well mean that you cycle round your processes optimising and re-optimizing until you achieve the best you can across the entire system. As part of this you need to document what you have done, you need to create standard work that is repeatable across the entire operation no matter who is put there, this is another fundamental of lean and is actually a massive enabler for improvement and creativity which we will talk about in a later post.

Stepping Back to go Forward 

It's easy to get sucked into believing that the entire organisation is broke, that things can't change. Talking a step back, zooming out and then taking a lean thinking approach to fixing things. Prioritising them into the correct order of attack means that you can quickly see benefits for the work and changes that you are doing and as the pulse of the organisation starts to return you can move faster and be more dramatic in the things you try, the experiments that you take to make the changes. By taking a lean thinking approach you start to look at things differently, you see it as an interconnected system that needs to be looked at as a whole but you also understand that the thing that causes the pain is not everything, but one thing, find it, fix it and move on to the next part that hurts less.