Principles of Continuous Process Improvement
2.1.1. PROCESS FOCUS
Principles of Continuous Process Improvement
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efore continuous process improvement can begin, one must first understand what must be improved. Therefore, defining value in the eyes of the customer is of great significance. The value, as defined by the customer, must be clearly identified and communicated so processes can be continually modified to meet customer demand and requirements. This requires that every stakeholder in the process know what the value is in the eyes of the customer and what to do if the process is not creating value (Model and Application Guidelines 2010, 11). Dr. Shigeo Shingo said:Improvement means the elimination of waste, and the most essential precondition for improvement is the proper pursuit of goals. We must not be mistaken, first of all, about what improvement means. The four goals of improvement must be to make things: easier, better, faster, and cheaper. (Model and Application Guidelines 2010, 11)
Creating a culture of continuous process improvement is achieved by building a foundation of continuous process improvement principles. The following are the principles of continuous process improvement:
1. Process focus
2. Identification and elimination of barriers to flow 3. Match rate of production to level of customer demand 4. Scientific thinking
5. Jidoka
6. Integrate improvement with work 7. Seek perfection
2.1.1. PROCESS FOCUS
My first lean teacher, or sensei, was a former North American Toyota plant manager with an abrupt manner. He’d mutter to himself, “What is the process; what is the process?” as we walked the shop floor in the decidedly pre-lean plant where I used to work. I’ll admit - I had no idea what he was talking about.
I was new to lean and thought its focus was on getting results you know: safer, better, faster, cheaper. I was missing the point. It’s not that lean thinkers are indifferent to results, quite the contrary. Lean thinkers understand that results are so important that they can’t take their eyes off the processes that produce the results. Apparently there isn’t a Japanese
phrase for “Take care of the process and the process will take care of you” It would have helped my sensei help me to understand a deeper, clearer picture of lean. Consider Figure 2.1.1-1 for the subtle but impactful difference in thinking between a lean mentality and a conventional, or batch, mentality.
Lean only seems like a systematic approach to get results such as reductions in lead time, cost, space, inventory, and so on. Lean is an improvement system first and foremost. In it, maximizing value-adding activity and reducing non-value-adding activity is the central tenet. Do those things, and cost, space, inventory, defects, and injuries will surely be reduced, but as side effects, collateral benefits. The main thing is to focus intensively on the process as it operates to see where it misses, is delayed, or stumbles.
Those are among the clues for the best next places to work on improvement.
If you don’t focus on the process, you miss the clues and are left wondering what went wrong. This is a common occurrence in a conventional, results-oriented world because measures of results are by their nature retrospective. How did we do yesterday? What were our results for last week? Last month? Last quarter? Last year? You can answer the question, because you almost certainly have many measures of results. But beyond the rare catastrophic event, without measures that reflect a focus on the process, you can’t explain what caused the target to be missed. Without process focus, the trail grows cold and you’re left speculating on what happened that undercut your results.
Focus on the Process
So, how do you focus on the process? Process focus, like many aspects of lean, is simple in concept. It isn’t particularly difficult in practice, but it’s quite different from a conventional, results-focused approach to managing an operation. For line managers, it entails both deploying at least some of your time differently and learning to look for, ask about, measure, and teach different things.
Allocate Time to the Floor
Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot just by watching” The first aspect of process focus is the standard lean advice: Go to gemba weekly if you’re an operations executive, most of your time if you’re a team leader, and proportionally for positions in between. How much time? Thirty to 45 minutes a week for executives, and 80% of your time every day for team leaders in repetitive manufacturing, less for slower cycling processes.
Go to the place where and when the process is operating, talk with the people doing the work, observe the process as it is being executed. The idea is to ground yourself in regularly refreshed information about the reality of the process’s operation. You can do this only by actually being there and watching it operate, conversing about the work with those performing it, and looking carefully at frequently updated process measures annotated by the task level performers.
Look at the Process in Actual Operation
To be most useful, your observations should allow you to compare what you see with a standard, with expected performance. Are you able to tell whether standardized work is being followed? Does the practice you see match the documented definition of the process where standardized work might not be able to be posted? Does the actual time to complete tasks match the expected time?
The main focus of floor time is to watch the process, ask the people doing the work how the process has been running, and look closely at the process measures. Consider how what you see and hear compares with what you expect. What is the reality the people on the floor regularly deal with? When actual outcomes fail to meet expected outcomes, ask people about it. What happened? How often does it occur? Where is it documented, and can you look at it? Is problem solving under way for this issue?
Measure the Process to Highlight Misses and Glitches
Most operations have a plethora of results measures but a dearth or complete absence of process measures. A process measure frequently (depending on the speed with which the process cycles) focuses on actual versus expected performance of the process. For a process that produces complex engineering drawings, frequently may mean daily or twice daily. For an order or claims processing area, frequently might mean four times a day. For a high-volume repetitive manufacturing process, frequently may mean every pitch, as often as every 9, 12, or 15 minutes or at a minimum every hour. With changeover times, whether of production equipment or hospital operating rooms, frequency means each changeover.
The purpose of process measures is to identify, isolate, and highlight process misses. This is the distinguishing characteristic of the mind-set continental divide in lean. In the conventional world, we’ve been trained and reinforced to work around problems, to cover them for now so we can hit the schedule. By contrast, the lean thinker devises measures to highlight problems, even if a temporary workaround is necessary. Process measures address the question, “How long do you want to wait to learn if your process is operating normally or if it’s headed into a ditch?” When time is available, the lean thinker returns to the problem data captured on the process measures and mines them, looking for the root cause and then eliminating it because lean is an improvement system.
Teach the Importance of Process Focus
When you’re on the floor, people may ask, “Why do we need to track production so closely? Why are you micromanaging us? Don’t you trust us?” Assuming you’ve put a daily accountability process in place, or some other means to respond to the process problems identified by floor-level value-adding workers, the answer is straightforward. It is the brief lesson on problems as opportunities to improve.
Process measures allow us to micromanage the production process, highlighting problems.
Those problems are often “delegated up” to team leaders, supervisors, managers, or others who have the discretionary time to focus on them and drive them to root cause corrective action. Make the bargain explicit: “You identify the production problems that interrupt or slow you down, and we’ll eliminate them or give you a good reason why not” When you keep your end of the bargain, it’s very persuasive. Further, this discussion on the floor allows you to deliver a 90-second lesson about lean’s focus on finding and eliminating the sources of delay, interruption, and frustration routinely experienced by those who perform the value-adding work.
In many ways, process focus is at the heart of putting lean into practice. When we concentrate on the health of the process, we can be more confident about the results it will produce. Process focus means leaders will have to learn some new skills, use some new measures, and reallocate some of their time to spend on the floor. But without doubt, when floor time is structured, intentional, and informed by the concepts and tools of process focus, the benefits are worthwhile. Leaders and task-level people alike are more engaged with each other and with improvement, you come to grasp the day-to- day reality of your production process, and you experience a steady stream of clues about the often small possible. Sometimes this is referred to as “reducing the time between paying and getting paid” with an intentional focus on reducing the time to convert material or information into the customer’s required product or service so that the producing organization quickly satisfies the customer and can be paid back for its investment as soon as possible.
Unlike traditional improvement activities, lean suggests that the focus of change initiatives should not be on cost reduction but on time reduction: time to design, time to buy, time to produce, time to sell, and time to collect cash. When the focus of improvement efforts is reducing the time between paying and getting paid, then, among other things, costs will be dramatically reduced. When lean principles serve as guiding principles, and the “tools of lean” are effectively engaged as a means to making value flow faster, processes can be systematically changed to better reflect “customer is first” thinking, a key philosophy of lean.
In order to flow value to customers faster, lean practitioners must understand the following:
What customers value as well as how people and processes are combined to create, add, and deliver this value
How to design processes that maximize value delivered while minimizing waste, fluctuation, and overburden
Why businesses must organize around flows critical to customers, and why it is imperative to identify when flow is interrupted and how to eliminate those barriers to flow through countermeasures and continuous improvement