Lean & 5s' in Construction - Oct 07 #27

****************** The Challenge of Lean
From Lean Enterprise Institute

The Challenge of Lean
Purpose – Provide value to customers cost effectively and consistently in order to prosper.
Process – Through the primary value creating workflows for design, make, and ship, and the streams that support them.
People – By engaging employees who do the value creating work (including those in the support streams) in sustaining & establishing process

Defining purpose & establishing people in an integrated business system is the central task of management in Lean.

****************** Lean in Support Functions
Lean construction applies to the shop and field and also to the various support and admin functions in a company. To be a world-class performer, contractors need to reduce the waste in support functions too. This includes reducing the cycle time to develop an estimate, the time to do detail drawings, and the time to order tools or material. It also means reducing the time it takes to recruit and hire new employees, or to pay an invoice. The same Lean tools used to reduce non-value-added waste in operations are just as useful in the support areas.

According to Ralph Keller, president of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence, one of the biggest hurdles in doing Lean is identifying metrics to measure and track performance in these support areas. While contractors have been measuring field productivity and WIP for years, few measure support functions. Ralph explains:

“There seems to be a cultural resistance in many organizations to putting performance metrics in place for traditional overhead functions, but you can't improve what you don't measure, so having metrics in place is a required first step. How many of you know the average time it takes to recruit and hire a new employee? Or how long it takes your accounting group to approve credit for a new customer, what your average time to market is for new products, how much of your sales revenue is from products that are less than X number of years old, or how long it takes for a purchase requisition to become a purchase order (and how many approvals are required)?

“I recently heard the horror story of one organization where a capital purchase requisition took months and had 107 approval signatures before the equipment was ordered.”

All work is a process including work performed by the support areas. These support processes can be value stream mapped and non-value-adding steps identified and eliminated.

Mr. Keller tells this story: “Years ago, a friend of mine told me about his frustration at spending so much time improving the operations in his company's manufacturing area, and yet having it still take over five days to ship a build-to-order product. His team had reduced the manufacturing lead-time on these customized products to a matter of hours, but the administrative time for order entry, credit approval, engineering and generating shop packets took five days. This particular company produced stents that cardiologists were ordering for people with blocked coronary arteries. How would you like to wait over five days for one of these devices if you had a heart problem -- all because of ineffective administrative processes?”

While construction does not directly deal with saving lives, we build facilities that do, and that enable all companies to provide products and services. When we reduce our costs of doing business it benefits the entire community. Improving the processes that support the crews in the field makes it easier for those crews to be more productivity. What processes do you measure and how are you going to improve them?

Source: “Continuous Improvement -- It's Not Just the Shop Floor”, By Ralph Keller
IndustryWeek, Monday, October 1, 2007

**************** Innovation - One Million Solutions
Mathew May describes what some call the DNA of Toyota.

“One Million - That’s how many ideas Toyota implements each year. Do the math, that’s 3000 ideas a day. That number, more than anything else, explains why Toyota appears to be in a league all their own, playing offense on a field of innovation, while their competitors remain caught in a crossfire of cost-cutting.

“Here’s the thing: it’s not about the cars. It’s about ideas. And the people with those ideas. But not just any ideas. Mostly tiny ones, but effective ones nonetheless – elegant solutions to real world problems. Not grad slam homeruns, but groundball singles implemented all across the company by associates that view their role not to be simply doing the work, but taking it to the next level …every day, in some little way. Good enough never is. When an entire organization thinks like that, it becomes unstoppable.

“Like a number of other market leaders, Toyota recognizes that companywide innovation is a matter of assembling a group of talented people in an environment where innovation is required by everyone at every level. To create that environment, Toyota employees systems and structures that neutralize the typical barriers to ingenuity and release individuals to realize significance through their work.

“The cumulative effort is astounding: Toyota has a market value worth nearly as much as all the other carmakers combined. What’s difficult to understand, though, is what Toyota associates have known all along: their vaunted automobiles and assembly techniques are simply visible outcomes, the direct result of a hidden process much closer to the bedrock of human creativity and interaction.”

Mathew E. May, Elegant Solutions – Breakthrough Thinking the Toyota Way

**************** Last Planner System® Assessment
How are you doing in your project planning system and in using the Last Planner System®? Take this simple assessment to evaluate your progress:

Scheduling
1. Is the master schedule divided into phases?
2. Are the phase schedules updated routinely and revised if necessary?
3. In doing the detailed phase planning and scheduling, are all trades that will work that phase involved in planning it?

Look-Ahead Planning
4. Is a Look-ahead Plan maintained, with one week added each new week?
5. Is each foreman/superintendent required to provide weekly status information regarding constraints on the activities listed on the project Look-ahead Plan?
6. Are make-ready actions assigned each week?
7. If make-ready actions are assigned, is it done in writing?
8. Do you follow the rule that only allows activities into the weekly work plans that have had all constraints removed that could be removed before the start of the plan week?

Weekly Work Plan
9. Are the weekly work plan forms completed each week by each Last Planner (foreman)?
10. Do the weekly work plans include appropriate make ready needs?
11. Are the weekly work plan assignments adequately defined; e.g., is the work to be completed during the week specified, is it defined properly, etc.?
12. Are foreman able to say "no" to work assignments that they cannot reasonable commit to being done within the week?
13. Do the weekly work plans include workable backlog?
14. Do you hold weekly coordinating meetings?
15. Are the previous week’s weekly work plans reviewed in these coordinating meetings, PPC calculated, and constraints (reasons for non-completion) identified?
16. Is there an analysis of selected constraints, root causes identified and assignment or request for corrective action made?
17. Do the weekly coordinating meetings cultivate a culture of teamwork; driving out fear, blame and finger pointing?
18. Do you post weekly PPC for all employees to see?
19. Is your Percent of Planned (work) Completed (PPC) increasing?
20. Do the PM and senior operations managers see the Variance Report at least monthly?

What is your score? If you answered YES to all 20 questions, you are well on your way to successfully implementing the Last Planner System®. If you can answer YES to 10 or more of these questions, you have a great start. If you cannot say YES to at least 10, you have great opportunities to improve. So where do you start? Look at the questions you answered "No" and determine what actions you need to do to improve. If you have any questions about any aspect of the Last Planner System®, contact Dennis Sowards.

* Last Planner System® is a trademark of the Lean Construction Institute

**************** Quick & East Kaizen
Hal Macomber challenged a client to a first-month Quick and Easy Kaizen (QnEK) goal of an average of 4 ideas for each member of the team and a minimum of 3 ideas for each person. There were four teams. He reported that while none of the teams met the goal, they did have 38 people recorded 130 improvement ideas. That’s an average of over 3 adopted improvements per person per month or 36 per year. World-class is 20 plus a year. This is a great start for a construction company!

Hal said a key reason for this success is great management support. Managers encouraged and coached the employees in how to share and implement their ideas. Management made a game of it by offering lunch at the team’s choice of restaurants for the team with the most QnEKs ideas.

Source: 08/08/07 – QnEK Blog – Hal Macomber

**************** Learning Opportunities
You may be interested in attending one of these training seminars or presentations by Dennis Sowards:
Oct. 22, 2007 – Lean Works in Construction – an update of recent research - Las Vegas, NV SMACNA National Convention, contact: wwwsmacna.org
Oct. 25, 2007 – Performance Measurement - How to Use Measures to Manage and Improve Performance - Phoenix, AZ – Sponsor: PIPE & 469 JAC, contact Cathy at pipetrust@qwest.net
November 6-9, 2007 - Traditional Lean Tools - Ninth Annual Lean Construction Congress, San Francisco, CA, Contact Johna Clark at jgclark@leanconstruction.org for additional information.
May 6, 2008 – 5S’s in Construction – ASQ National Conference, Houston, TX

***************** A Quick Thought
Consider what Taiichi Ohno said about the purpose of the Toyota Production System:

"The Toyota production system is based fundamentally on the absolute elimination of waste. Why is waste generated in the first place? With this question, we are actually asking the meaning of profit, which is the condition for a business's continued existence. At the same, time we are asking why people work."

For more information about Lean applications to construction and especially the 5S’s contact Dennis Sowards at his office at 480-835-1185 or his cell at 602-740-7271 or at his web site: www.YourQSS.com