A facility cannot be improved from the conference table. It requires you to go out onto the shop floor and observe the work, asking questions to ensure your understanding. You may be surprised why some things are done. It may be because someone learned a method that was made obsolete by technology but no one asked him to stop. It may be because an employee learned a method from a coworker, much like someone would in a craft guild. Best practices can be proven and distributed, and wasteful practices can be stopped, but only if a new set of eyes is there to question them.
Learning to See involves:
- Spending time on the shop floor where the work is done ("Gemba"),
- Fully understanding the process by asking questions of those doing the work,
- "Stepping out of the smoke" to see its cause,
- Fully understanding non-value adding work, by close observation of the process over a priod of time,
- Maintain pulse or single piece flow as the guiding principle for improvements, and
- Simplify the process, to make it easier to detect regression to prior methods.
Stepping Out of the Smoke
“You can observe a lot by watching” is perhaps Yogi Berra’s greatest observation. It is why every text about Lean Production stresses the need to go “gemba,” to literally the place the work is done. It requires only a few people to watch a process to observe how to improve it — for most processes the people don’t need to be especially knowledgeable about the process to be able to contribute. The only requirement is that the observers are not engulfed in the smoke of production; they need to be able to step out of it and see the smoldering issues. Usually, this means that the people not be directly responsible for the work they are observing.
As an example, I observed a very large motor rewind that was to be done as quickly as possible so the customer could resume production. This was a large and strategically important repair for the service center.
The skilled winders doing the work were so committed to a fast turnaround that they were quite unaware of the extra movement they were doing. The foreman was so concerned about the speed in which everyone worked that he was totally unable to look forward a few steps – to think through the repair. No one involved with the repair was able to learn from the several mistakes that were made; they were either “too busy to think about what’s already been done,” or too afraid of punishment for errors they might have done on this critical job to warn others, who often stumbled into the same error.
A small handful of other employees who were not assigned to the job were told to watch the work and write down their observations. Not only were they able to see and record non-value added activities being done by the crew for future use, they were able to bring some of the activities to the attention of the foreman during that job to speed the work and reduce errors. Their observations were quickly incorporated into a future state value stream map and decision tree that made the next similar job run smoothly.
Reason to Kaizen
Another thing you can do is find out why mechanics leave the work area. Is it to help others? To get parts? You can do this by observing them or by having them maintain a sheet with columns representing each of the reasons and placing tic marks in the appropriate column. When reasons start to become apparent, get them together to "kaizen."
Simplification
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. said "I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity." In Lean, we have to get to the other side of complexity to find simple solutions. I'm comfortable with anyone observing the work, making notes, getting worker clarification and listing possible simple Visual Management solutions for discussion amongst a larger group. Lots of annotated photographs and a facilitator will be needed for that discussion to keep people (who often know little about Visual Management) from imposing their solution. The discussion would lead to a number of things that would be tried during the next time that work scope is done, and perfected in future ones.