New Japanese Words

There’s a lot of Japanese terms used in Lean … why?

Typically, these terms are used (and misused) in order to convey broad concepts with iconic (representative) terminology. Once properly explained, the term KANBAN can be more descriptive than THOSE LITTLE CARDS WHICH HELP US CONTROL PRODUCT MOVES. However, use of these terms can have a negative effect, especially if the culture of a particular organization is predisposed against all things non-American. Choose carefully the training methods (and terms) you use when conveying lean tools and methods, and you will have a much easier time during your lean implementation.

Well now you can add some more!

[link]

I like:

• kuki ga yomenai: can’t read between the lines or can’t sense the atmosphere
• shouganai: it couldn’t be helped
• kyousei: symbiosis
• do gen ka sen to ikan: something needs to be done
• kawaigari: to cherish or take under one’s wing
• kokumin o kitai ni kotaeraremashita: I lived up to the people’s expectations
• sonna no kankei nee: It doesn’t matter!

Avoid the curse of the active banana!

I’ve often said before that its important to buy into the philosophy behind six-sigma, TQM, Lean, etc and not just focus on the tools. This focuses the organisation on only one level of the four suggested in The Toyota Way (see the image below). By doing this you’ll avoid the, “curse of the active banana“!!

Details on the “active banana” were reported by The Guardian via the Newcastle Journal:

£7 million were paid to consultants in a “Lean” initiative. Part of this process involved using black tape to let workers know where to place their keyboard and stapler. Workers complained that not only is it an enormous waste of money but incredibly demeaning. A union worker said in certain consulting session in Scotland employees were asked if the banana on their desk was active or inactive – and if it was inactive it had to be removed!

These guys should have read: How To Prevent Lean Implementation Failures

Reason #1: Lack of Top Down Management Support
Reason #2: Lack of Communication
Reason #3: Lack of Middle Management/Supervisor Buy-In
Reason #4: Not Understanding That This Is About Your People
Reason #5: Lack of Customer Focus
Reason #6: Lack of Improvement Measures
Reason #7: Lack of Lean Leadership
Reason #8: People Measures Not Aligned With Lean Goals
Reason #9: Using Kaizen Events As The Sole Improvement Measurement
Reason #10: Bonus Pay Systems Where The Only Measure Is Company Profitability

More here and here.

Bookshelf for the Six Sigma practitioner

[link]

ISO 9001 review

 

ISO 9001 review is currently being undertaken by ISO/TC176, the umbrella ISO committee for quality management and assurance. The committee draft will be issued in anytime now with drafts for comment published in the second half of 2007 with publication of the revised standard planned for late 2008. The key messages coming out of the process to date are that:

• the current scope and purpose of the standard, the title and the field of application shall remain unchanged from ISO 9001:2000
• given that the current standard was a step change from its predecessor and caused considerable changes to businesses, changes will be limited in this review
• it will remain generic so that it can be applied to all types and sizes of organisation. This one-size-fits-all approach will see the continued growth of sector-specific requirements and schemes
• any changes introduced must provide clear benefits to users
• the quality management principles (as contained in ISO 9000) shall be applied unchanged
• the process model, as shown in ISO 9001:2000 figure 1 below, shall remain unchanged

I’m led to believe that some of the changes are:

• clause 1.2 – clarify the intent of this clause in relation to when exclusions can be made in clause 7 specifically for service organisations
• clause 5 – consider clarification of application of the process approach to top management
• clause 5.4.2 – consider the clarification of quality management system planning in order to meet the quality objectives
• clause 8.2.1 – clarify the requirement for client perception (monitoring versus measurement)
• clause 8.3 – clarify this clause in relation to service organisations
• clause 8.5 – clarify the differences in concepts between corrective action and preventive action

There has been global growth in certification of 18 per cent across 161 countries.

The top five countries for ISO 9001 certification are:

1. China (143,823)
2. Italy (98,028)
3. Japan (53,771)
4. Spain (47,445)
5. UK (45,612)

with India seeing the largest growth of over 12,000 a year.

Innovation + Six Sigma = Disaster?

Six Sigma … innovation … not compatible … blah, blah, blah

As I’ve wrote time and time again on this blog there is no reason why Six Sigma should stifle innovation. Obviously 3M would disagree: [3M Shelves Six Sigma in R&D]

Critics argue that excessive metrics, steps, measurements and Six Sigma’s intense focus on reducing variability water down the discovery process. Under Six Sigma, the free-wheeling nature of brainstorming and the serendipitous side of discovery is stifled.

Experts agree the blanket approach to Six Sigma is generally not a good idea

Which ones? Name a few ….

Okay, then: Michael Tushman, a professor at Harvard Business School, says:

 

These TQM (Total Quality Management) and class of methodologies that are anchored on reducing variability are inversely associated with what we call exploratory innovation. Methodologies help incremental innovation. The more you apply them in R&D, the less effective they are on exploratory innovation

At least Ron Atkinson (not Ron Atkinson the UK football pundit), board chairman of the American Society for Quality, understands how Design for Six Sigma can assist:

I usually find that once (companies) understand it, Six Sigma aligns very well with engineering methodology. Six Sigma makes sure projects relate right back to the strategic plan of the company,” says Atkinson. Is paralysis by analysis a concern? “(Project) champions can counteract that. They make sure you do not sit on the design phase forever. And there’s nothing to say you have to finish one step before you start the next.” He believes pure research does not lend itself to Six Sigma, but is more the stuff of universities and federally funded projects.

I think Ron hits the nail on the head here DFSS is very powerful as it seeks to avoid manufacturing/service process problems by using systems engineering techniques to avoid process problems at the outset (i.e., fire prevention). These techniques include tools and processes to predict, model and simulate the product delivery system (the processes/tools, personnel and organization, training, facilities, and logistics to produce the product/service) as well as the analysis of the developing system life cycle itself to ensure customer satisfaction with the proposed system design solution.

In this way, DFSS is closely related to systems engineering, operations research (solving the Knapsack problem), systems architecting and concurrent engineering. DFSS is largely a design activity requiring specialized tools including: quality function deployment (QFD), axiomatic design, TRIZ, Design for X, design of experiments (DOE), Taguchi methods, tolerance design, Robustification and response surface methodology. While these tools are sometimes used in the classic DMAIC Six Sigma process, they are uniquely used by DFSS to analyze new and unprecedented systems/products.

 

A graphical flowchart of common DFSS tools can be seen at DFSS Roadmap.

 

Check out Johns comments

Annoyed about transactional six-sigma

It’s interesting to see that Six Sigma is being applied more frequently in transactional environments:

Buffalo, NY (WBEN) – Throughout his successful campaign for County Executive, Republican Chris Collins spoke often of Six Sigma as one of the primary tools to get Erie County moving toward a more prosperous future.

Although this clearly upsets a few people:

I don’t like the idea of running government like a business but the six sigma sounds too much like someone out to make a profit whereas government is about providing services to taxpayers of which they pay taxes for.

And

The whole Six Sigma analysis process is time consuming, resource oriented and costly. There are probably thousands of human-driven operational processes resulting from services provided by the county. To improve them all would take several lifetimes.

As Michael Marx says:

Proclaiming the desire to be a Six Sigma county as candidate Collins has done, only implied that he’ll start looking at processes from a business improvement perspective, using Six Sigma tools to do it. No one becomes Six Sigma overnight. GE has hundreds of thousands of human driven processes, and that didn’t keep Jack Welch from his Six Sigma objectives.

To me this is just a case of becoming jaded by political rhetoric?

Transactional Six Sigma to me simply boils down to: All work is a process, all processes have variability and all processes create data that explains variability. Analyse the data to make improvements and sustain these!

Refer to this link for more information:

The leadership cult of the black swan

I’ve recently read two books by Nassim Nicholas Taleb who is an ex-trader. The first: Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, looks at how and why we tend to assume the existence of patterns where there is only randomness, and assume skill where there is nothing but luck. The second is The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. The Black Swan: which is a study of how we are regularly taken as fools by the unexpected. The chief characteristics of a Black Swan event (so-called because until Australia was discovered no-one dreamt there was any other variety than white) is that they lie outside the realm of regular expectations and have a huge impact when they hit. If a Black Swan was predictable it wouldn’t be a Black Swan, but the fact that we can see only white swans suggests that the shock – if it comes – could be profound.

A Black Swan event was the resignation of Lord Browne from BP, who demonstrated the pitfalls of the cult of leadership. By raising expectations far beyond the capacity of one human to fulfil, hero leaders often end up destroying themselves and wounding their companies. When leaders become celebrities, their firms’ performance starts to decline. Because of a tendency to believe their own press, they attribute success to their own brilliance, blame failure on others, and vastly overestimate their decision-making prowess.

Hierarchy doesn’t work, and no one put the reason for this better than General Electric’s Jack Welch, himself an iconic manager who pioneered the use of six sigma. Hierarchy, he said, defines an organisation in which people:

“have their face towards the CEO and their ass towards the customer”

So the more charismatic the executive, the worse the effect. Investors should take note – when a business leader makes the front cover of Fortune: sell like crazy.

Download this free pdf for more information on the Black Swan.

Enter the 4th dimension – pull world

Lean manufacturing is great! It’s all about ping-pong, football tables, EBay and elephants. But God help you if you haven’t already implemented it, flateto analysis would show, especially if you live in Canada where the dollar is strong, that if you didn’t put it in place by 1995, don’t even bother , no matter what Nick Dieltsien says.

Of course, all of this is complete tosh (noun: Chiefly British Informal – nonsense; bosh). In fact, we are apparently:

… are moving from a world where demand can be forecast and resources “pushed” to the right place at the right time to a world where we need to flexibly “pull” resources wherever they reside when they are needed.

Read more about this here (From Push to Pull)

So in “pull world”, where more automation is sure to help, even maintenance activities will be lean and not include the following wastes

1. Unproductive work – Efficiently doing work that doesn’t need to be done!
2. Delays in motion – Waiting times, delays waiting for parts, machinery, people, etc.
3. Unnecessary motion – Unneeded travel, trips to tool stores or workshops, looking for items, moving mobile work stations around without good reason.
4. Poor management of inventory – Not able to have the right parts at the right time. A complex area that can cause many of the other areas of waste on this list.
5. Rework – Having to repeat tasks, or do additional tasks, as a result of poor workmanship.
6. Underutilization of people – Using people to the limits of their qualifications, not to the limits of their abilities!
7. Ineffective data management – Collecting data that is of no use, or failure to collect data which is vital.
8. Misapplication of machinery – Incorrect operation or deliberate operational strategies leading to maintenance work being done when it needn’t be.

Hmm, will we end-up in pull world? A kind of fourth dimension? I doubt it; but what do you think?

BPM Battles Six Sigma

Ting! There goes the bell.

If you put Business Process Management (BPM) and six sigma in a boxing match, who would you place your money on? Well for a somewhat biased account (towards BPM), download a free pdf to read the full blow-by-blow report, but if you’re in a hurry (apparently):

BPM is about the management of process improvement and ensuring that it is made sustainable within the organisation. It is about the establishment of a business process architecture, process governance, organisational change management capability, sustainable process performance and increasing BPM maturity, to name but a few. Whereas, Six Sigma can be a useful intervention strategy for a business process improvement problem. Therefore, we would see Six Sigma as a potential useful adjunct to BPM.

Hmm, while I see BPM as being able to allow firms to fine tune their processes and possibly make a businesses’ internal processes function more productively I agree with this comment:

Typically it (BPM) refers to the identification of core business processes, assignment of process ownership and definition of measures (and perhaps benchmarks) that indicate the health of a particular process. These measures are often influential in selection of Six Sigma or Lean projects.

What do you think?

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