Application Across the Organization
This month's articles provide a succinct summary of effective ways to extend lean thinking and waste elimination from the factory floor to office operations. Great strides have been made in the past 20 years by automating office functions (do the same with less), but not enough attention has been paid to redesigning office processes for efficiency and to meet customer needs better. Taken together, O'Reilly, Drickhamer, Trent and Hammer urge us to pioneer radically new products and services; to operationally innovate through a structured, team approach that extends lean principles from the factory to company-wide business processes.
Is such a grand approach feasible or manageable? Are the methods described consistent and are the gains from their application sustainable? Our experience shows that such transformations are reasonable and attainable even for "average" companies. But they must be accompanied by rigorous management systems if they are to have staying power.
Let's work backwards from business wide processes to new products and services. Processes of any stripe are prime targets for improvement through value stream mapping (VSM) that uncovers waste in existing methods and then guides the design of new processes with less waste, smoother flow and better communication with customers and suppliers. It is true that there is a nice library of canned VSM tools and techniques to apply to factories, but nowadays there is also a rich set of business-wide examples. Of course inventory on the factory floor is easy to see, while an inventory of backlogged insurance claims or of candidates to be hired is hidden in a computer file and may never before have been measured. Sometimes it is easier and more effective to make such backlogs visible through paper folders or display boards rather than using complex computerized systems.
Teams and teamwork are integral to any attempt at lean improvement. We have found that Rapid Improvement Workshops can create as much innovative change business-wide as they do with production teams. However it often takes multiple events before participants cease to view the workshops as "classes" (often passive events for the exercise of the presenter's ego) or "meetings" (wherein a team will seldom make incisive change in a mere three to four days).
Structure is promoted by steps-based methods such as those described in the Trent article. For acute issues, Six Sigma, our QIS or Global 8D promote a Plan—Do—Check—Act approach. Any of these methods must in turn be backed up by a system comprising:
- Standard Work—To set operating standards
- Key Performance Indicators—To track how we are doing
- Goal Deployment—For quantum leap improvement
- Daily Management—Operating to standards and continuous improvement
- Improvement Methods—To improve standards
When this structure is in place it supports innovation in products and processes far beyond the factory floor. And it is this structure, rather than the simple presence of tools such as Six Sigma and VSM that separates the organizations celebrated in this month's articles from the rest.
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