Be among the first to get the latest insights from LEI’s Lean Product and Process Development (LPPD) thought leaders and practitioners. This presentation was delivered to subscribers of The Design Brief, LEI’s newsletter devoted to improving organizations’ innovation capability. It is the fifth of five in a series on process development entitled “Making Things Well,” focused on developing superior processes as part of the product development process, specifically the skills of tool, mold, and fixture makers, special machine designers, manufacturing engineers, and everything that goes into knowing how to turn a concept into reality.
I started observing lean transformations in manufacturing companies after Dan Jones, Dan Roos, and I completed The Machine That Changed the World in 1990. And it was exhilarating. I observed ex-Toyota Group Japanese consultants as they led kaizen projects to move machines from process villages into product family cells to dramatically reduce lead times and eliminate practically all of the muda of excess transportation. I started to believe that if this could be done across the industrial landscape a massive lean transformation could be achieved in only a few years. And, as long as I looked only at the results of the initial kaizen barrage in company after company, I could continue to dream of rapid victory.
But then I started to notice what the consultants called the “kaizen newspaper” left at the end of each kaizen. These were flip charts near the cell listing all of the supplementary tasks that would need to be performed to sustain the new level of performance. All of these were challenging because the equipment had been designed for batch production with large buffers between processing steps so that high operational availability with perfect quality was not critical. And when it was, in the new layouts, most of the companies I observed lacked the skills to modify and improve their equipment. (I think it never occurred to the Japanese consultants that companies would struggle with this because in their Toyota world companies had deep resources in tool building, modification, and maintenance.)
I would observe new products being launched with production processes that incorporated none of the learning from the model lines.
On follow-up visits to the sites of kaizen victories, I often observed that the kaizen newspaper was gathering dust and that none of the problems had been addressed. So, performance never reached the anticipated level and often couldn’t be sustained. That was bad enough but much worse was to come. In companies that had had some success in transforming mass production, batch and queue layouts into flow cells that were tightly linked, I would observe new products being launched with production processes that incorporated none of the learning from the model lines. And this became a common pattern.
But not to fear. The OpEx teams that began to emerge in most large companies would deal with this phenomenon through post-launch kaizen. Over time we created a whole world of kaizen as rework for ill designed processes and called this improvement. (My most sobering experience with this was in a household-name American company I visited that had created the position of vice president for reengineering. The energetic leader of this group explained that all of the company’s products encountered significant problems as reported by customers immediately after launch. So, the company had taken the proactive step of creating a team to reengineer products and production processes quickly to address customer complaints! And, no, this was not Tesla.)
The sum-up is that the lean team has typically not been at the table to address the critical second “P” when decisions are made about the right process for each product and the right production technologies as well. How could we do better?
A second “P” worthy of the first “P”
My favorite image of how things could work comes from a visit to the Lexus assembly plant in Kyushu (Japan’s southern island) just before the pandemic. I listened to the report-out of a jishuken project, a multi-month kaizen performed long before the start of production. The team consisted of 20 frontline production associates, four team leaders, the area leader, and one member of Toyota’s Operations Management Development Division (OMDD). This group carries on the tradition pioneered decades ago by Taiichi Ohno, the Toyota executive credited as the chief architect of the Toyota Production System. OMDD is responsible for developing the capability of line managers by coaching hands-on problem solving.
The team had been asked by senior management to rethink their portion of the assembly line for a new product launching in a year that was largely but not totally designed. They were instructed to look for ways to reduce the amount of labor needed while maintaining their current high level of quality while spending very little money.
OMDD’s contribution had been to make the team familiar with the karakuri concepts they had developed on how to take labor out of assembly with simple robotic devices that present parts to each associate just as they are needed. They also planned to automate the unloading of totes of parts from the tugger train onto the roller racks by the lines so that the tugger driver would no longer be needed.
The team was reporting on their plan with the intent to move to design and construction (in-house) of the needed equipment. I have no idea what actually happened as the pandemic descended, and I wish I could have gone back to see. But the takeaway for me was that the lean team, with the help of the new ideas from OMDD, was at the process development table at just the right time to help create a production process – the second “P” — that would be worthy of the first “P,” the new plug-in hybrid EV about to enter production.
So, why can’t every organization do this? I think mostly because the lean team hasn’t really tried to make the case for its presence upstream before launch. (OpEx organizations even face a moral hazard because doing nothing until after launch creates a steady supply of rework!) My hope is that as we move ahead, energetically making the case for LPPD, both “P”s will be present in equal measure.