3 Mistakes Learned From Multi-Year Lean Implementations

In this week’s issue, I’ll break down three mistakes I’ve learned from years of assessing and implementing continuous improvement programs in multiple plants in Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

In a world focused on quarterly short-term results, I’ll provide a perspective on what I would have done differently if I had to do it all over again.

By avoiding these mistakes, you’ll increase your chances of accelerating your continuous improvement program results while developing your team for the long term.

In my experience, continuous improvement implementations struggle because they focus more on the shiny aspects of continuous improvement versus the more boring but sustainable building blocks.

You can get started with Continous Improvement Tools but you will not sustain changes with Tools alone

Mistake 1: Focusing too much on being a Tools expert versus building expertise in identifying and eliminating waste.

Tools like 5S, SMED, TPM, and so forth are important in a continuous improvement program.

More often than not regrettably, teams spend too much time on the tools when they are not as versed in the wastes these tools help address.

If I had to do it all over here’s how I’d shift that focus from tools to waste elimination:

• Start by training teams early on 7 categories of waste for office and production processes

  • Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Overprocessing, Defects)

• Use process observations (also called Gemba walks) to drive identification of those wastes in their processes

• Train teams on a framework for reducing waste

  • Eliminate/Combine/Reduce/Simplify is a good framework

  • This is also where specific tools can be brought into play

• Create a cadence for repeating this with the teams by building improvement implementations as part of our daily huddles

Looking back, driving an acute awareness of the 7 categories of waste (T.I.M.W.O.O.D) and the relentless, structured pursuit of their elimination in service to customers be they internal or external would have gotten more converts early in our Continous Improvement implementations.

Mistake 2: Not Focusing on Leaders’ Standard Work Early Enough

Early on, we had many improvement events that we would come back a few months later to find the gains had not been sustained.

Why?

Simple! We were focused on the improvement event as opposed to the management activities which supported the improvement afterward. This is an all too common story in continuous improvement.

When I learned this, it changed how I thought about continuous improvement programs. My unlock became “It’s about the system, not the event”

If I had to do this all over, I’d have focused on helping leaders establish leaders’ standard work early on to sustain the continuous improvement events and processes we were putting in place.

Mistake 3: Not providing a framework and context for leveraging problem-solving training

This is the most underrated area I see in continuous improvement implementations.

What I would see is training on problem-solving for a few team members which is great.

The issue is when we do not give them context for where and how to apply the training which I saw often.

If I had to do it all over, here’s what I would put in place to drive focused and sustainable problem-solving.

• Define key performance indicators which would be captured daily or weekly at the point of action in the teams.

• Train the team on capturing planned results and actual results as part of their huddles.

• Train the team on capturing occurrences of wastes, interruptions, and reasons for misses during the day in a check sheet or Pareto chart.

• Apply problem-solving techniques on the top wastes/misses so there is a context for problem-solving

• Review the problem-solving funnel from the checksheet/Pareto top issues regularly and keep problem-solving them

All 3 mistakes above are avoidable if you take a long-term view to continuous improvement and spend the time to drive more waste awareness, focus on systems, and provide context for effective problem-solving.

Have a great week.

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