You hear it every week on LinkedIn about how the ‘Toyota Production System (TPS) is great for Toyota but not for everybody else’. Sometimes this is just because they are trying to sell you some other product or that they have had a bad experience with Lean manufacturing. However, this does not make this statement wrong.
In my first line manger role I had just read ‘The Toyota Way’ and got very excited about applying it in practice. I tried to introduce it in a systematic way as laid down in the book. Some of the ideas did not seem to fit with the processes I was working with, but I applied them anyway, as best as I could.
Anybody with any experience in lean manufacturing will instinctively know that this approach does not work. You end up doing things for the sake of doing things, you need to continuously manage systems, nothing really gets better but you end up working twice as hard. Luckily, I know when I am flogging a dead horse and stopped. Also, luckily, I know a good idea when I hear one. I’m also a big Steven Covey fan so I decided to ‘begin with the end in mind’ and ‘put first things first’.
I ran a process laboratory, running experiments for the Technology teams. The main problem was it all took too long, from experimental design to results took three weeks. The CEO wanted this to take less than a week, which of course was impossible. The other problem was every job was fiddly, awkward, and poorly defined. So, I set two goals:
? Make the job easier
⌚ Reduce the time to get a result
It is very easy to motivate people with the task of making the job easier. To put a measure of control in we agreed some boundaries before we changed a process:
- Define the processes’ purpose. Why are we doing the process? We learned a huge amount from this exercise and laid a great foundation for further improvements.
- Don’t mess with areas outside of our understanding. Or if it involved electrics involve the electrician.
- It must make the job easier or reduce its cycle time and it cannot make quality worse.
- Once you have demonstrated that you have improved a process you need to create a procedure.
For each improvement we would talk about the process, observe the process, and apply whatever process improvement tools were useful. As we got more confident and experienced, we made more improvements faster, but we always kept each improvement small and incremental.
Within three years we managed to reduce the test delivery time from 3 weeks to three days! Some of the other benefits were:
?Reduced operational costs by 20% year on year.
?Improved test accuracy and repeatability.
?Made the work easier and a fun experience again.
For more information you can read our case study.
So, what has this got to do with cooking fish? In process manufacturing you quite often cannot stop a process halfway through without risking ruining the product. If you are halfway through cooking a fish, painting a car, heat treating a part, or an esterification chemical reaction, it is next to impossible to stop it in the middle of the process and then re-start and still get the quality right. For process manufacturing you need to ensure you have all the set-up conditions right before pressing go, and the operators must feel empowered to refuse to start an operation.
And what’s this got to do with Toyota? TPS is great but it’s the Toyota way not your way. It is something you should try and emulate and not imitate. You need to follow your own path to improve your business, but always keep your eyes open for good ideas.
Start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible. – Saint Francis of Assisi
If you are looking to learn more, then take a look at our process improvement page.
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