The second S in our BASICS model stands for Sustain (see Figure 7.1). Sustaining means it is self-sustaining and improving. It means you don’t have to check. It is not dependent on a person but is now part of the company’s culture. It means we welcome audits and look forward to visits from any outsider that can highlight gaps and give us opportunities to improve.
Figure 7.1 The BASICS six-step model for Lean implementation—sustain. (Source: BIG Training Materials.)
Document the Business Case Study
Once we have completed the implementation we use the chrono file, which we have kept updated throughout each BASICS step, to put together the final summary and results of the project.
The Key to Sustainability—Why People Resist Change
We all resist change, it is our basic human nature. Some changes, however, are easier to accept than others. If you’ve ever noticed, change that agrees with our way of thinking is accepted easier, but we truly resist changes we consider as negative. If people around you don’t buy into the Lean changes, and consider them as negative, what does that tell you for your chances of sustainment and long-term success?
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Think back to the change equation introduced earlier. Your organization has completed a project and is now at the sustain portion (or the S in the equation).
As we mentioned earlier, the sustainment portion is the hardest part. Undoubtedly this is not a new concept, as every book and teaching out there says the exact same thing. But why is it so hard?
Believe it or not, it references back to the same change equation we gave you earlier. If your C (compelling reason to change) wasn’t truly compelling enough, then there’s no way you can overcome the resistance to change. Remember, this was a multiplication equation, which means if the C becomes zero, the whole equation fails.
Is leadership continually using PDSA on their change equation to make sure that the organization is still on the same course of action and that the tools put in place match up with their compelling reason for change?
The other answer at the core of this sustainment issue is accountability and discipline. This starts with leadership but cannot solely rely on leadership. The system must be built upon these fundamental principles. Every operation put in place needs to ensure operators or leaders are accountable for their actions, held responsible, and given a consequence when they meet or fall short of their goals. Every action has an equal yet opposite reaction. If the workforce meets a goal, it is just as important to celebrate the success of the team or individual as it is to impose a negative consequence if we fail.
Below is a section that Fred Lee writes in If Disney Ran Your Hospital *:
Accountabilities drive structure and structure drives culture. Because this concept is so fundamental and powerful, let me repeat that. Accountabilities drive structure and structure drives culture. Any leader who is striving to change the culture … would do well to ponder this key principle: You can’t change the fruits of a tree without changing the roots. … but here is where I want to indicate how powerful Disney’s simple principle of making courtesy more important than efficiency is. It strikes at a cultural root. Do you have a tree rooted in structures that support this rule, or do you have a tree rooted in structures that support primarily the fruits of unit efficiency?
But now we come to a surprising paradox: by putting courtesy and service first, our problem with phony efficiency virtually disappears. So do problems with communication and teamwork between departments. One rule, if followed by all departments, aligns the entire culture. Talk about an elegant model!
This means that we can actually get the fruits of overall corporate efficiency when we subordinate departmental efficiency for the sake of courtesy and responsiveness (the most important aspects of service). Figure 7.2 demonstrates the line of thinking behind this paradox. The ultimate shortcut to getting the best overall efficiency is to focus on service and make it more important than efficiency.
Figure 7.2 Line of thinking behind the efficiency paradox. (Source: If Disney Ran Your Hospital: 9 1/2 Things You Would Do Differently [Kindle Locations 765–770], Fred Lee, 2004. Second River Healthcare: Bozeman, MT. Kindle Edition, with permission.)
As long as department directors have to answer only for their own labor costs, cross-functional savings and teamwork are not likely to happen. And the waste will go unmeasured and unnoticed as it gets invisibly absorbed by the organization.
Place service above efficiency, however, and the internal customer will speak up and document the waste caused by poor service delivery. Working together as internal service provider and customer department, these inefficiencies would be identified and addressed in a culture of teamwork and responsiveness instead of competition.
Again, this one rule can change the entire management culture more dramatically than 20 team-building retreats. What top management needs to figure out is how to foster a climate in which departments and their managers are held accountable and rewarded for service instead of being punished for it, as they would be under conventional hospital budget monitoring and accountability systems.
Sustaining Lean
The key to sustaining Lean isn’t a separate step; instead, it’s doing all the previous steps to the fullest. Sustainment isn’t a separate concept or set of tools; instead, it is implementing the system and providing training with accountability and discipline woven throughout.
In order to sustain, one has to ensure that Lean gets built into your quality system and becomes part of the fabric of the organization. Companies must create a problem-solving culture and make sure systems are in place to problem-solve and update the standard work on an ongoing basis.
Creating the Lean Culture—The Four Things to Sustain Lean
It is interesting to note how we all know what it takes to build a Lean culture. The question is, why don’t we do it? David Mann suggests in his book, Creating a Lean Culture,* there are four areas to focus on in order to create a Lean culture:
1. Leader standard work
2. Visual controls
3. Accountability
4. Discipline
Leader Standard Work
The concept of standard work extends to the leadership that supports the sustainment of the overall system. This means every employee, up to the CEO, has standard work as a basis for their jobs. The higher one is in the organization, the less standardized the work. David Mann describes leader standard work in detail:
“Whether you are a supervisor or CEO, you may wonder why you need leader standard work. One reason is it helps manage your day, and the other is to set an example and role model the behaviors desired from the rest of your organization.”
Critical components of a Lean initiative are developing standard work for processes routinely performed, eliminating errors, providing role and task clarity, and decreasing variation within an activity, task, or process.
Standard work must become part of the fabric of the workplace, which means it should be part of ISO, QS, or other standards that apply to your business. By ingraining the Lean processes in your formal policy and procedures, it will make it much more difficult to revert to the way it was before.
Once the Lean culture is in place, it is important when hiring to communicate the new Lean expectations during the initial interview. Each person must know from the very beginning they are expected to follow standard work and contribute daily improvement ideas.
Once developed and implemented, it is important to audit standard work. This ties into the CHECK part of our BASICS model (see Figure 7.3). Auditing is the job of the supervisor and leadership and produces what are called layered process audits. Once our initial Lean project is implemented, there are several sustaining tools including:
Figure 7.3 Standard work audit sheet. (Source: BIG Archives.)
■ Training within industry (TWI)
■ 10-cycle analysis
■ QC circles
■ Point kaizen events
■ Ongoing daily kaizen
■ Company-chartered continuous improvement groups
The ultimate vehicle for sustaining, regardless of the approach, is capturing improvements in the standard work.
Ten-cycle analysis is the process of filming or observing a job for two to 10 cycles or more, and then obtaining the cycle times for each activity (see Figure 7.4). It is a great tool for auditing standard work or performing an operator analysis for machining or quick-cycle operations. The way the tool is designed, if one does not follow the standard work, it makes it immediately obvious. This is because it becomes difficult to fill out the 10-cycle analysis form since the operator is no longer performing the steps in the correct sequence.
Figure 7.4 Ten-cycle analysis example. (Source: BIG Archives.)
Visual Controls
Visual controls, as we discussed earlier in the text, are of paramount importance to sustain Lean. Building in the ability to make the abnormal immediately obvious in all processes will highlight areas that need a quick countermeasure and then yield candidates for the PDSA cycle.
It is a given in this discussion that standard work is in place, and processes are stable and capable. The more visual the process, the easier it will be to manage and sustain the process. Visual controls should be part of our standard work.
Accountability
Accountability means you meet your commitments. We have a saying: “If you say you are going to do it, then do it; otherwise, don’t say you are going to do it.” It also means you will do the best job possible by the time promised. A culture of organizational accountability is critical to sustain Lean.
Once we implement Lean in an area, it should not only be sustained, but also continuously improved. There is a common phrase one often hears when discussing behaviors: “You get what you expect, you deserve what you tolerate.” This saying reigns true throughout many of life’s situations, including the workplace. Ultimately, as a manager or supervisor, “you get the behaviors you reward.” This is part of systems thinking. These behaviors can be desired or undesired.
The goal is to convert the undesired to desired behaviors by changing the reward system. No matter what our role is in the organization, most of us want to understand what is expected and be empowered to achieve it.
To be successful, we must provide clear direction aligned with organizational priorities, and create processes to do our jobs safely and efficiently. We need to be able to obtain the right tools and supplies to do our jobs and leave our employees feeling like they accomplished something and are part of a winning team. This is impossible to achieve if processes, areas, or people are out of control and processes are not standardized. The combination of Lean and change-management tools will help make us successful.
Discipline
Discipline is welcomed in Lean thinking and can be internal or external. From an external standpoint, it is following the rules, and if not, being subjected to some type of negative reinforcement. However, internal discipline is the ability we develop in ourselves to adhere to a plan, follow the rules, get to meetings on time, adhere to standard work, follow checklists, etc.
Discipline should be viewed positively as a quality for each of us to develop. Discipline is a key ingredient in the recipe for Lean environments, as without discipline, there is chaos. We need people to have the discipline to follow standard work, put things back where they belong, get back from breaks on time, start on time, follow through on audits, conduct root-cause analysis, and create the continuous improvement environment.
Long-Term Sustainment Tools
Hoshin
Hoshin Kanri is arguably the world’s foremost strategic planning system. Put in other terms, hoshin kanri is a structured planning and implementation approach to manage change in an organization to provide desired results necessary for the organization’s success.
Hoshin Kanri provides an opportunity to improve performance continuously by disseminating and deploying the vision, direction, and plans of the corporate management to the top management and to all employees, so that people at all job levels can continually act on the plans and then evaluate and study the feedback results as a part of a continuous improvement process.
Hoshin Kanri is the strategic planning and execution (deployment) process designed to ensure that the vision, mission, annual objectives, goals, and resulting action items are aligned and communicated throughout the organization. It is a systems approach to manage change in business processes. Goals are agreed upon and implemented by everyone (consensus building) from the top management to the shop-floor (frontline) level.
In this process, the organization develops a vision statement to encourage breakthrough thinking about its future (next three to 20 years) direction. Work plans are developed based on the collectively chosen vision statement, and progress toward them is periodically monitored through performance audits. It is a system of goal definition and deployment using the plan, do, check, act (PDSA) improvement cycles that must be led by the CEO.
The senior leadership is ultimately responsible for establishing the objectives, strategies, goals, and PPMs to address the organization’s issues for the coming year. The catchball process can be implemented using “issue” teams or management quality teams. These teams consist of the functional managers and senior leaders that are most involved with a particular strategic issue. Together, they formulate objectives and strategies to best address the critical business issues at hand. The organization’s leadership should be convinced that successfully implementing the selected strategies will make it possible to achieve objectives and resolve issues. Listed in the following are the components of the Hoshin plan.
1. Statement of purpose
2. Determination of breakthrough objectives
3. Business fundamental objectives
4. Development of plans that adequately support the objective
5. Review of the progress of these plans
6. Changes to plans as required
7. Continuous improvement of the key business fundamentals
8. Organizational learning and alignment
Hoshin Planning Is Critical to Sustaining
Managers and employees participate in setting their annual targets and developing the strategy and detailed action plans to meet the high-level vision and goals. This provides bottom-up participation. This back and forth process is called catchball and uses something called an “X-matrix.” The X-matrix visually depicts the linkages between each level in the organization and shows the person on the floor how what they are working on is directly linked to the company’s vision and goals (see Figure 7.5).
Figure 7.5 Hoshin X-matrix. (Source: Pat Grounds Consulting Training Materials.)
Create a Sustain Plan (See Figure 7.6)
Even after we implement standard work, audits, and Hoshin planning, one of the things we are always asked by any company, or any person, is, “Yeah, we get all that … but how do we sustain it?” Our response always revolves around the idea that there is no silver bullet. What is required is a system of accountability and discipline, driven from the top leadership. We build this accountability using a tool called a Sustain Plan, which is typically used as part of the project exit strategy but can be implemented earlier if we feel that there is a lack of leadership-driven focus.
Figure 7.6 Sustain plan example. (Source: BIG Archives.)
This plan is owned by the area’s manager or director and is followed up monthly or quarterly. The plan can become part of the Hoshin plan or Goal Deployment Process (GDP). The plan has the following components:
■ Ongoing implementation strategy
■ Deadlines
■ Tools
■ Training plan
■ Communication plan
■ Responsibilities
■ Resources required
The plan may combine some of these elements but each element should be covered. This plan is customizable according to industry and level of success with the tools, but the concept always remains the same. This is a report card put in place by you and your company to hold yourself accountable to the system.
Leadership Coaching—See, Solve, Tell
The coach’s responsibility is to coach the learner on the following:
■ Learning to See
■ Learning to Solve
■ Learning to Tell
It can be a Lean kaizen, system implementation, or rapid improvement event. The goal of the coaching is to understand the thought process. The coach does not always give the answer; but also, does not let the learner fail.
This is the balance between system thinking, tool execution, and soft skills. The learner’s mindset should not only be based on hitting the target condition; but, even more important, is to focus on how the target condition is reached.
Reaching the target condition requires going through the PDSA steps (see Figure 7.7). These small projects are repeated over and over in small PDSA cycles in order to achieve the challenge. One simple technique we use to help is called T.A.PE.—Target, Actual, Please Explain.
Figure 7.7 Ongoing PDSA cycles. (Source: BIG Archives.)
Using this process will help the learner articulate the gap to standard in a short concise way. This coaching process must be consistently used to help the learner gain a deeper understanding of the process and the current standard. Here are a few aspects of leadership coaching:
■ Trying to understand the learners’ level of knowledge.
■ Going to the gemba to see what the person has learned.
■ Teaching using a rapid PDSA system, i.e. countermeasures adding complexity or making the work simpler.
■ How visible is the problem?
■ Focusing on solving one action or obstacle at a time versus a 100-line item open-issue sheet.
Tools we can use in this process include:
■ Using a block diagram to show the process steps
■ Use of 10-cycle analysis
■ Developing key metrics, both leading and lagging
■ Understanding current condition in both KPI form as well as trying to describe in words the current condition
■ Developing future state condition both in KPI and words
■ Using PDSA to keep teams on pace
Keeping kaizen storyboards at the gemba will foster participation and make the work of the team visible for all to see. When developing the storyboard we always want to use pencil, and paper sticky notes to keep updates simple and real time. Use simple language like you would use when speaking to people who know nothing about the process. The storyboards should also be developed by the team, not marketing or leadership. It’s not about being pretty, it’s about being effective and understanding the tools.
We believe using coaching is a form of leadership development and combining it with continuous improvement helps integrate the people and the process.
Creating these habits and daily routine helps develop a culture of continuous improvement and will allow your organization to develop true Lean leaders. This mindset change is one of the keys to sustainability and long-term cultural change.
Upgrade the Organization
As we progress down the Lean maturity path, we need to focus on improving the organization. There is a tool we use mentioned in the book called Good to Great by Jim Collins. Once we define the new vision for the organization we need to review the organization chart and look to see if we have the right people on the bus and they are in the right seats. This is the start of succession planning. During our coaching of leaders we teach them that there is also a selfish reason to develop your people. Because if you don’t develop your people, then there is no one to take your place, which means you can’t move up in the organization.
We suggest reviewing the organization every six to 12 months because as the vision evolves we have to constantly ask ourselves if we have the right people in place to take us to the next level. If not, what do we need to do to develop them?
This does not mean the responsibility is totally on the company. Part of the process is training each person on the team, and that they need to be the best they can be first. This means looking for ways they can help understand where the weaknesses are in their behaviors and skill sets and look for ways they can self-improve.
The leader and the team member need to identify what they think are the gaps separately. Then the leader and team member need to meet to discuss the gaps (weaknesses) and then discuss where they have differences and agree on a development plan for the next year.
The company then needs to agree on ways to continue to develop them. Every employee should know what the plan is for them over the next one to three to five years. This assessment between the leader and employee is necessary to keep them focused and challenged to continually improve themselves. Eventually the goal is to get away from annual planning and make it a rolling 12 months.
As companies move more toward Scrum culture and teaming organizations, this assessment may become more team-based versus individual-based. Even so, the individual and the company both share in their ongoing development responsibility.
Part of the goal of ongoing leadership coaching each employee and team is to continue to help them evolve and increase their skill sets and problem-solving mindset as well as living the company’s values through their behaviors.
The other change we make is to move toward value-stream or product-focused organization design and support it with a scrum-of-scrums‒based culture.
Span of Control
An area where we see companies fail is in having too large a span of control for their leaders, particularly first-line leaders. We have seen direct supervisors have 30–60 people directly reporting to them for day-to-day activities. This system is unmanageable and results in lots of firefighting. Many companies have lost their shop-floor management system to implementing daily reactive solutions and chaos.
Toyota has a different system. At Toyota there are teams of six to eight people that report to a team leader. The team leader has responsibility for training, improving standard work, and responding to andons, as well as assisting the group leaders on certain tasks. They don’t do disciplinary action.
The group leaders do the disciplinary piece and coach the team leaders in problem-solving. It can take 20 years or more in Japan to become a group leader. The group leader normally has five or six team leaders reporting to them. The group leader functions as a first-line supervisor over team leaders and team members. They focus on cross-training, hiring, monitoring staffing, ensuring, and appraising team-member job performance. They develop and maintain positive team-member relations, emphasizing safety, quality, efficiency, productivity, cost reduction, and morale.
To show how different this is from most companies … Do you have a team member handbook? Do you have someone focused on cross-training? Do your supervisors lead hiring decisions?
Managing by Fact
Lean is about being able to manage by fact and understanding all the data related to the as-is or current-state process and what it can deliver. The data captured in the baseline phase provides the foundation for the calculations and comparisons for the improvements as we methodically move through the phases.
In the quest of gathering accurate data, we repeatedly ask people how long it takes to complete activities within a given process. Most managers and staff provide their best estimate; however, when we video or use a stopwatch on the process, they are almost never correct. Once we walk through the tools, they are very surprised to see how far off their estimate was from the real data.
As soon as someone says, “I think” or “it was,” or “it should be,” we know the person is not sure and what they are stating does not meet our goal to act on fact.
We must always question the data we receive from people and computers. The data must be accurate if we are to develop measurable baseline. The baselining phase sets the stage for the Lean initiative. You can’t possibly know how much you have improved if you don’t know where you started.
Suggestion Systems
Suggestion boxes do not work. The best suggestions systems are where ideas are generated from the frontline staff, run by the team and team leader for discussion, and consensus is reached on how to implement it. Then the ideas are piloted, given a chance to work, and then refined and implemented. Once implemented the standard work must be updated. Truly Lean companies don’t worry about ROI or even tracking the number of ideas. It just becomes part of the culture.
Do not monetarily reward team members for ideas. If you do, then people will only give you ideas if they get paid for them, will argue over what they got paid, why someone got paid more than they did, etc.
Do recognize people for giving ideas, i.e., pat on the back or public recognition etc. The culture should encourage everyone to contribute and implement ideas every day. One tenth of 1% is just fine but do it every day.
Problem-Solving Thinking
We refer to problems as “gaps.” We don’t focus on the good; we look for and try to surface the bad. At Toyota, they are not concerned as much with the “good,” because this is expected. For us the definition of the word gap is the void between the standard, current state, and the target (future state). Thus, a discovered gap anywhere in the process becomes a starting point for continuous improvement. Toyota doesn’t have the word Lean. They call it “Daily Kaizen.” This is an important distinction.
Incorporate problems solving methodology into your culture—utilize small PDSA cycles over and over and over again. Work toward zero defect production and transactional processes.
How to Keep Track of Your Progress
There are many ways to keep track of your progress. One is to put together a timeline of major improvements or milestones (see Figure 7.8). You can use your value-stream maps to keep track of your progress as shown earlier in the book. The VSM will give you your overall progress with reducing process time and storage time (see Figure 7.9). You can also use a high-level assessment or health check as seen in Figure 7.10. We have also been experimenting with scrum and scrum-of-scrum techniques to accelerate implementations and keep track of overall progress.
Figure 7.8 Timeline example. (Source: BIG Archives, ETG—Environmental Testing Group, Baltimore, MD. Formerly part of Bendix Communications Group.)
Figure 7.9 Example of tracking progress using VSM. (Source: SME Value Stream Mapping, Donnelly Mirrors Portion of the video.)
Figure 7.10 High-level implementation plan with status modeled after the book The Leadership Roadmap, by Dwane Baumgardner and Russ Scaffede, 2008, North River Press: Great Barrington, MA. (Source: Mike Hogan and BIG Archives.)
The Authors Would Like to Leave You with this Ultimate Challenge …
We say the goal of Lean is to create a culture where 80% of your ideas come from the shop floor or office and then we implement 96% of them. This is what we call daily kaizen. Can your existing culture support this? If not, there is still work to do. Remember, having no problem is the biggest problem. No matter how much you have improved, there is still room for more.
Dr. Shigeo Shingo used to do an exercise with his P-course classes. He would wet a towel and pass it around the class and have each person squeeze it. Toward the end each student could still squeeze out a drop of water. This was a great analogy for finding waste.
The other example we like to use is small improvements are where it’s at. Every once in a while, you will get a big one, but the goal is small, incremental improvements every day. We use snow for analogy. Each snowflake may seem insignificant but eventually it turns into inches (cm) and then feet (meters) of snow. Each idea on its own may seem insignificant, but eventually we create a snow-storm.
We sincerely hope this book helps you unleash the ideas and engagement of those who do the work, while giving you a good, granular, structured approach to implementing the BASICS of ongoing Lean Improvements.
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* If Disney Ran Your Hospital: 9 1/2 Things You Would Do Differently (Kindle Locations 765–770), Fred Lee, 2004. Second River Healthcare: Bozeman, MT. Kindle Edition. With permission.
* Creating a Lean Culture, David Mann, 2005. Productivity Press: New York; 2013, 3rd edition, CRC Press: Boca Raton, FL.