NC State of Business

Two of our IES clients recently agreed to talk about what we did to help them improve and expand their businesses.

Cable Assembly used lean manufacturing techniques to streamline their processes, and reported $2.5 million in economic benefit with 40 new jobs created.

Holt Sublimation Printing applied the Eureka! Winning Ways methods to produce new product ideas to help their business grow.

If you wonder whether we have anything to offer you, take a look at either of these videos by clicking on the company name, and hear what our clients say about the services we provided for them. And if it sounds good to you, call us.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines a contagious disease as “a very communicable disease capable of spreading rapidly from one person to another by contact or close proximity.” Lean thinking is often contagious, but there are steps that people take to ensure they and others around them don’t catch it.

How does one keep from catching and spreading the Lean bug?

Get vaccinated. Ensure that you can’t get the contagion by building up resistance to it. Be close-minded to continuous improvement, or be a “concrete head” as our sensei’s used to say in my past jobs.

Clean all surfaces. Wipe away all “germ carrying agents” (e.g., lean project information centers, project status boards, success stories), from work surfaces (walls, whiteboards, etc.).

Avoid close contact. Avoid being in close proximity to others, especially those at high risk of catching the bug. If you are the one infected, limit exposure by staying isolated (in your office) and don’t share your knowledge and enthusiasm.

Quarantine the area. If you have an infected workplace, the best way to ensure others outside of your facility can’t catch what you have is to keep them out. Make sure you avoid inviting in other groups within your organization to see what you’re doing.

Stay inside and avoid crowds. Don’t take opportunities to visit “infected” companies. You may catch their Lean fever.

All these preventative measures will help ensure the contagion doesn’t spread.

On second thought, maybe this is a case where the doctor won’t mind if you get infected. Forget all the above advice and put yourself at risk of catching the Lean bug.

As I travel around working with different companies and hospitals I’ve noticed a definitive difference in the teams with which I work. Very simply, some teams consist of members who are empowered to identify problems and opportunities and to implement their solutions in a controlled manner without constant management involvement and approval. However, some others are paralyzed if the manager so much as steps out to take a phone call. The difference is easy to see very early in events because of the quantity of ideas and the free flow of information as well as the efficiency with which ideas are implemented. Empowered team members feel more confident in expressing their ideas, work together better to identify the best solutions and then immediately set off along the process of implementing them.

Contrast this with an un-empowered workforce where information and ideas do not flow freely, leaving the manager(s) to identify opportunities, identify their possible solutions, develop implementation plans and then make it all happen. The result is that empowered teams often have, by the end of a weeklong session, not only identified significant opportunity but have also begun to realize their benefits with plans to complete implementation very quickly. The un-empowered organization, however, moves much more slowly in implementing generally less effective solutions. Most often, many of these solutions are never implemented at all.

Our current economic conditions will not tolerate the traditional un-empowered mindset of “the boss gives the orders and the workers follow them.” Very simply, managers cannot posses the detailed knowledge of the entire system required to make the best decisions and even when opportunities are identified the organization moves to slowly to capitalize on them before the competition does resulting in a lack of competitiveness. Today’s world requires the best solutions implemented in a controlled fashion but implemented quickly. Failure to rely on the full potential of all team members may well be the final nail in the coffin of some organizations; but ... it’s never to late to start!

It is a common response in tough times to cut training budgets. But just because your training budget may be cut, you can still make progress in employee development. Here are a few low-cost suggestions for tough times:

1. Do effective needs assessment. This can be a great time to step back and identify the core issues you are trying to resolve through employee development. A plant manager once asked me to provide some communication training because the supervisors did not know “how to communicate”. The manager noted that their poor communication skills were affecting shift performance. After some investigation, I learned that there was no formal process for shift-to-shift handoffs. The supervisors were not communicating because they did not meet. So, we structured a handoff meeting and never invested money in communication training.

2. Standardize work practices. Leverage your employees’ talent to establish standard practices in your jobs. Is everyone in a job doing it the same way -- and hopefully the best way? Standard practices provide consistency which can reduce defects and make change easier to implement. Explore using structured on-the-job training methods to gain consistent results.

3. Strengthen your orientation processes. While you may not be hiring new employees, it can be a great time to evaluate the processes and strengthen them. Move beyond paperwork drills for new hires and develop processes that bring people into the culture.

4. Establish a mentoring program. Mentoring can be a great way to transfer ideas and knowledge while developing the skills and abilities of the organization.

5. Evaluate past training. You have invested in training before. Is it paying a return? If not, what can you do to reenergize things to get more impact? Asking the right questions may provide ways to gain improvements over previous training investments.

These are just a few ideas to keep developing employees while not taking money out of the training budget. Preparing for future investments by identifying needs, standardizing your work practices, and evaluating the effectiveness of past investments are a few ways to make progress during tough times. What other ideas do you have?

One of my former colleagues once told me to “never confuse activity with progress.” He said this one day while we were discussing product changeovers in the factory. There tended to be a lot of walking going on from one place to another and many adjustments being made to the equipment. Now, I don’t know if Tom thought of that quote himself, or if is attributable to someone a bit more famous than he, but it is certainly applicable to many aspects of life in general and business in particular. From a Lean Thinking perspective, we are making progress if we are adding value to our end product or service. All other activity is waste. The key is to improve your process so that in the end, most (if not all) of your activity is valuable to your customer.

Here are a few thoughts on how to have more value-added motion at work. Can you add to the list?

Tighten up space. If you have less room to operate within, you will. Like air expands in a vacuum, “stuff” will fill available space in the workplace. Economize your workspace. Conduct a 5S event to remove extraneous materials and then create a work cell where material or information flows continuously from one operation to the next without stopping and turning into inventory. If you don’t leave room for the pile, it will have nowhere to go. This will eliminate the need to keep people “busy” later, moving excess inventory from storage to a place where needed.

Untangle the spaghetti. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Leave the pasta for the bowl. Eliminate aimless or circuitous walking by arranging your workstations in as streamlined a manner as possible.

Move only with a purpose. One day, Yogi Berra and the rest of the New York Yankees baseball team were on a bus ride. Legend has it that one of Yogi’s teammates remarked, "Hey Yogi, I think we're lost." He supposedly replied, “Yeah, but we're making great time!” In our plant or office, we should only be walking (or driving a forklift, or pulling a pallet) if it is connecting two value-adding activities. And this should be minimized as much as possible.

Eliminate unnecessary motion. Shigeo Shingo once said, “It's only the last turn of a bolt that tightens it - the rest is just movement.” Analyze your process to identify and jettison useless activity.

Save your excess walking for your leisure time. Get out for a hike through the woods or take your dog for a walk around the neighborhood. Now that is truly value-added motion!