Theory in Practice

Theory Meets Reality In The Heartland by Bill Waddell:

An old boss of mine was fond of saying, "There are few things in life more tragic than to see your beautiful theories murdered by a gang of brutal facts," usually when I approached him with a hare brained idea about turning one of our manufacturing systems inside out.

Those who only think about theories don't accomplish much. And those that don't have theories don't either. To achive success, theories need to be put to the test and modified as evidence shows flaws in the theory.

"Knowledge is built upon theory... Rational prediction requires theory and builds knowledge through systematic revision and extention of theory based on comparison of prediction with observation." (Page 102, The New Economics by W. Edwards Deming).

Lean Manufacturing Success

K&S makes first shipment to China by Buzz Ball

The award was given for K&S Wire's continuous improvement in manufacturing excellence and its implementation of "lean" enterprise principles into its everyday operations.

It is because of these principles that Schwartz was able to make the announcement about the shipment to China.

"We took the order to construct 111,000 wire frames that will hold flip-flops," said Schwartz. "Because of our 'lean' principles, our price was better than could be found in China. This is a first for us and I hope we will have many more in the future."

K&S Wire manufactures a variety of steel CNC wire forms, grills, grates, guards, display units and custom products for various other manufacturers and for consumer use.

Executive Vice President Dave Padgett said the employees manufactures 20 to 25 different items every day.

The company recently completed a 30,000 square foot addition, which is the sixth expansion in the company's history. The work force has grown from three in 1995 to between 90-110 this past year.

It is great to see such success stories in the press.

via Using Lean to Ship to China

More lean thinking articles

Deming's 14 Obligations of Management

Deming and his 14 Points with comments from the Random Thoughts from a CTO blog.

• Curious Cat's Deming on Management
• Deming's 14 Points on the Curious Cat site
• 2 minute webcast of Deming (and Robert Reich) on constancy of purpose
• Constancy of Purpose definition
  

La-Z-Boy Lean

La-Z-Boy changing production lines to compete with China:

But in an attempt to better compete with the overseas market, the Neosho plant, along with six others in its division, is transitioning to the Lean Cellular Manufacturing method. In the new concept, the chair or sofa is manufactured by a team within a cell, thus eliminating separate departments. No jobs will be lost in the transition from batch-and-queue to lean cellular.

"Basically, we will have teams building the chairs from start to finish," said La-Z-Boy Midwest Human Relations Manager Billy Meyer. "Right now, we have three cells up and running, but by the end of the transition, we will have 37 cells."

Great news. It is good when companies take the improvement strategy to cope with changes in the marketplace.

The primary purpose of the new concept is to increase product numbers. The cells have become so efficient that it has cut the manufacturing time of a chair down from two and one-half days to just three hours.

"This is now a three-hour process from start to finish in the cell, "said La-Z-Boy Midwest production manager Bill Snow. "The process ends with a 12-point inspection. The cell members will not get paid for the piece until it is taken to where it will boxed. But eventually, boxing will take place in the cell as well."

I agree with Mark Graban that a piece rate pay system is a bad idea.

Via Lean Manufacturing Blog

Six Sigma and the Mobile Workforce

Six Sigma and the Mobile Workforce by Lynda Finn and Sue Reynard:

This type of data collection also helps process owners or managers spot systemic problems that appear across processes. For example, a process
owner reviewing all field agent reports may detect problems appearing in more than one location. Now, a fix made in one location can be incorporated into MTA based systems so all agents will benefit immediately. This type of systemic leveraging of learning and improvement is what generates the biggest payoffs from Six Sigma investments.

The Art of Work

The Art of Work by Ann Marsh:

These companies are now using Csikszentmihalyi's ideas to learn how they can get the best out of their workers or create more compelling connections with their customers. Without flow, there's no creativity, says Csikszentmihalyi, and in today's innovation-centric world, creativity is a requirement, not a frill.

Excellent books by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1991. People enter a flow state when they are fully absorbed in activity during which they lose their sense of time and have feelings of great satisfaction.

Creativity : Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1997. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with exceptional people, from biologists and physicists to politicians and business leaders to poets and artists, the author uses his famous "flow" theory to explain the creative process.

Funding Invention Vs. Managing Innovation

Funding Invention Vs. Managing Innovation by John Hagel and John Seely Brown

But if we shift our attention from invention to innovation, we begin to see a much broader horizon. Innovation -- the ability to create and capture economic value from invention -- is what really drives both the economic prosperity of nations and the shareholder value of corporations.

Innovation isn't just confined to commercialization of new products. It can also build upon creative new practices, processes, relationships, or business models, and even institutional innovations such as open-source computing -- invention occurs in all these domains. And while breakthrough innovations can generate significant economic value, sustaining that value requires a capacity for continual incremental innovations.

Related Posts:

• Innovation and Research and Development
  
• Managing Innovation
  
• Effective Innovation
  
• Fast Company Interview: Jeff Immelt
  
• Innovation and Customer Focus
  
• Gary Hamel's Idea Hatchery
  
• Innovation in Organizations
  
• Zero Defects
  
• Inside Google
  
• The 70 Percent Solution
  
• Not the End of Process
  
• The Innovation/Productivity Quotient
  

Lean Continuous Improvement

Continuous Improvement -- Taking A Big-Picture Approach To Lean by Jonathan Katz, Industry Week:

Northrop Grumman Newport News geared its lean value stream toward meeting customer commitments rather than strictly using it as a means to improve production. The company is constantly measuring its progress on customer contracts by using scorecards that help managers determine how close or how far they are to meeting customer agreements. Through this process, the company has saved on materials, stock time and labor. This includes a 58% materials savings in the torch repair cell, a 61% reduction of touch time in the shipyard and a 5.8-day reduction in dock-to-stock time.

Army - Lean Six Sigma

Army Adopting Lean Six Sigma

"We've already identified well over 20 processes that are Army-wide processes that we want to take on using Lean Six Sigma. . . We're on the very beginning of making Lean Six Sigma, and the disciplined approach that comes with that, a major part of the way the Army does business," said Maj. Gen. Ross Thompson III, Army G-8.

The Army Materials Command has long practiced Quality Management methods.

Red River Army Depot web site Feb 2006:

Red River Army Depot's (RRAD) management philosophy has been Total Army Quality (TAQ) since the late 1980s. RRAD used other concepts of quality management during the early 1980s and before. However, in June 1991, the Department of Defense implemented a competition program among all the services. The premise of the competition program was to achieve cost savings through efficiencies generated by competing workload among the services and private industry. This change by external forces influenced and redirected our view of the depot's future and intensified our transformation to Total Quality Management.

List of Previous President's Quality Award winners (used to be Baldrige based until the award criteria were changed in 2002).

• Army Material Command Lean web site
• Lean Government - Iowa
• More Lean Government
• Public Sector Continuous Improvement Site

Lean Thinking in Scotland

The man who would save Scottish industry by Terry Murden

Ross says: "Lean thinking can be applied to almost any process, but the key is the involvement of those who actually do the work. I passionately believe that companies, councils and the NHS can make major improvements across all their key measures once they learn how to involve their staff in the elimination of wasted time."

The article offers few details but is another example of "lean" ideas being voiced in the popular media.

Warwick Business School is due to publish the results of a survey in early summer into the effects of employing kaizen and lean principles into the public sector. It will include an analysis of the work at Aberdeenshire Council.

This report might provide some details on lean government.

Single Piece Flow

Single Piece Flow by Rich Weissman:

The transition from batch and queue to lean manufacturing involves converting to single piece flow...

In traditional manufacturing, specific operations were done in batches by departments that specialized in individual manufacturing tasks like machining, welding, assembly, and test. Through the integration of lean induced cellular manufacturing processes, cross-trained employees produce just the amount of completed products that are required by other internal operations or the end customer. By eliminating complex set-ups, buffer stock, and large batches, lean companies are able to reduce lead times, increase flexibility, reduce inventories, and improve product quality.

More lean manufacturing and lean thinking articles

Management Glossary, lean terms: Takt Time - Kanban -

Leading Six Sigma

Leading Six Sigma: Launching the Initiative by Roger W. Hoerl and Ronald D. Snee. An excerpt, of a chapter of their book, Leading Six Sigma: A Step-by-Step Guide Based on Experience with GE and Other Six Sigma Companies discussing the deployment process for Six Sigma.

The project must be tied to the bottom line in some way. The project scope should be for improvements that are attainable in the four to six month time frame. An unrealistic scope (often referred to as a "boiling the ocean" project) is probably the most commonly encountered cause of project failure. Projects that are not connected to business priorities or that have too many objectives also need further refinement. Projects with an "identified solution" should be handled by a project manager instead of Six Sigma, or as mentioned earlier, be redefined to omit the specified solution in favor of allowing the Six Sigma methodology to identify the best solution.

More articles by Roger Hoerl

Lean Accounting article from SME

Keeping score with lean accounting cost management by Jerry Solomon:

We changed the format of our income statements. We made them simple. For each value stream, all of the payroll expense is in one bucket called processing costs. There is another bucket for all of our variable costs. We exclude elements outside the value stream, like property taxes or insurance.

Now the income statements allow the folks to clearly see and understand what was spent on labor, how many units were produced, and the labor cost per unit. It's pretty easy.