Best practice

How do you keep everyone focused on eliminating waste? Brian Fluetsch of Sunset Air, Inc. in Lacy, WA has a very practice approach. He explains, “One of the best things we did is to continue our MUDA meeting every Wednesday. I do minutes of every meeting and distribute them to each participant. If people are held accountable for their actions or lack there of, they normally will rise to the occasion.”

Constancy of purpose

James Womack reminds us to stay focused. He writes, “The first of Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s 14 Points is "create constancy of purpose for continual improvement of products and service to society." When I first read this many years ago it seemed so simple and obvious. How could anyone not have constancy of purpose?



“Now that I'm older and wiser, or at least older, I have discovered that this simple attitude is often the missing element when managers set out to create a lean enterprise. Organizations start with the best intentions, launch a lean program, gain some initial results, lose their focus (perhaps as a result of an economic crisis?), and backslide to their original state of performance. They then set off again with the best intentions . . .

The power of constancy of purpose hit me with particular force recently when I visited a firm that started its lean journey fourteen years ago and has truly practiced Deming’s first point. I found the story so compelling that I would like to share it.



“It's about Bob and Ed although these are not their real names. (They have requested that I not identify them for fear of being overwhelmed with lean tourists.) In June of 1995 Bob approached me at a conference I had organized and announced emphatically that he was going to create a true lean enterprise. Because I had heard this statement of good intentions many times before and because Bob was only a plant manager in a large firm with many plants, I told him frankly that I doubted he would get anywhere. But I pointed out a few other people at the conference he might talk to if he needed specific advice on how to get going. And I never expected to hear from him again.

About two months later Bob called to announce that he and his controller Ed had gotten started in their plant and that they wished me to inspect what they were doing. Then they wanted me to give a pep talk at a company-wide operations event for all plant managers as their first step in spreading the word.



“I went with some trepidation. There is nothing more awkward than visiting eager managers in the first flush of lean enlightenment who need to hear how little they have actually done and how far they need to go.



“But at least I was not disappointed with the opportunities at hand. Their massive facility was organized in process villages for all fabrication activities. An inaccurate MRP scheduled all operations, there were turnbacks everywhere for rework, there was no visible standard work, and there were large inventories between each processing and assembly step. The facility had approximately .5S (as opposed to 5S), the primary workforce was disengaged, and the management team below Bob and Ed was firefighting with no focus on the big issues. The predictable result was long lead times, poor on-time performance to customer schedules, costs much higher than necessary, and a company in financial distress. In sum, everything that could be wrong was wrong with the exception of a few model areas where Bob and Ed had tried their first experiments.



The one thing the plant did have going for it was Bob and Ed’s constancy of purpose. As I walked through the operation, I quickly realized that I had been wrong at the conference. As I met the team they had formed, saw the boldness of their initial experiments, and felt their extraordinary intensity, focus, and tenacity on the gemba, I knew they would get somewhere and that it would be worth my while to observe. So I have been back four times over the years to check on their progress. What did they do? Their first step over the first four years was to identify the basic product-family value streams and to create flow by removing unnecessary steps and lining up the remaining steps adjacent to each other in process sequence.



As they did this they soon learned that they needed to create basic stability by making each step both capable (in terms of good quality every time) and available (in the sense that every piece of technology was able to run when it needed to run to support flow in the process.) Achieving this by introducing rigorous standard work, quality at the source, and a plan for every machine was their second step, pursued as Bob and Ed were being promoted to Operations and Improvement leaders for all of the firm's facilities.



“Bob and Ed's journey is inspiring “Indeed, as I look at the last fourteen years, I ask what would have happened to the world economy if every plant manager and controller had had their constancy of purpose to completely transform an entire management and business system. What if by doing this every manager in every firm had increased labor productivity nearly six fold, cut the needed space per unit of output by 75%, achieved nearly perfect quality with 100% on-time delivery to customers, steadily improved margins, and rapidly grown sales? We would be living in a very different and much better world. So following their path must be the challenge for the rest of us.



“As we set off, I need to emphasize one additional point, perhaps the most important. Bob and Ed started their journey in the trough of a major recession in their industry. As their firm struggled to fund development programs in 1997 it was acquired by a giant firm completely unaware of what they were doing and managed on different principles. Most managers would have been completely distracted – like most managers today at this traumatic point in history? They would have lost their concentration, just trying to get through the day under new ownership. But these managers had set a course and they sailed steadily ahead through some very rough seas. This is the real challenge for all of us now -- to seize the current crisis, set a steady course, and turn today’s chaos to a useful end.”

Measuring Waste

As an industrial engineer in the utility industry we often did work measurement studies on the overhauls of large generating plants. We would measure the amount of time a worker was doing work, moving material, and idle. I have come to understand that, though we thought we were measuring waste, we were not!



Greg Howell, of the Lean Construction Institute, explains that while work sampling will capture idle time of workers, this approach does not consider overproducing as waste. He points out that high utilization of labor, a positive measure of work sampling, is likely to reduce system throughput. He further explained, “We also know that typical time value analysis on a value stream in manufacturing shows a very small amount of time is spent doing value adding work. Using the work sampling data could mislead you to conclude construction was better than manufacturing in this regard when in reality idle workers are not the measure of the time value analysis. Labor utilization in a crew does not measure waste in construction. It measures the amount of time people are busy with no regard for the quality produced or whether what is produced is needed at all.”

Learning Opportunities

You may be interested in attending one of these training seminars:

• March 19, 2009 - Job Planning that Really Works – The Last Planner System, – Phoenix, AZ – Sponsor: PIPE & 469 JAC, contact Cathy
  
• March 20, 2009 – Lean Works in Construction – San Diego, CA – Sponsor: SMACNA of San Diego, call 619-460-5362. Must be a SMACNA member company to participate
  
• April 16 & 23, 2009 - Making Meetings Work for You (must attend both session), – Phoenix, AZ – Sponsor: PIPE & 469 JAC, contact Cathy
  
• May 14, 2009 - Problem Solving Lite (No Carbs) - Getting to the Root Cause, – Phoenix, AZ – Sponsor: PIPE & 469 JAC, contact Cathy
  
• Sept. 17, 2009 - Customer Loyalty by Design, – Phoenix, AZ – Sponsor: PIPE & 469 JAC, contact Cathy
  
• Oct. 15. 2009 - Introduction to Lean in Service, – Phoenix, AZ – Sponsor: PIPE & 469 JAC, contact Cathy

Contact Dennis Sowards if you want a customized workshop exclusively for your company



Other Lean Events

March 6, 2009 - Last Planner Initiative - Lookahead Planning at DPR Construction, Inc., 1450 Veterans Blvd., Redwood City, CA 94063 Sponsored by DRP. For more information and to register see https://www.regonline.com/lookahead <file://localhost/lookahead>

March 11 – Nor Cal Lean Construction Institute Chapter, Rancho Solano Clubhouse, Fairfield, CA - 6:00 PM-9:00 PM - Pacific Time, Contact: Theresa Robinson at trobinson@tcco.com or 916.554.7944

March 26 – 27 – Lean in Public Sector Construction - UC Berkeley - Lipman Room in Barrows Hall, sponsor: P2SL see: http://p2sl.berkeley.edu/events.htm

April 2, 2009 - San Diego Community College District will present their Green and Lean efforts. – Sponsor: LCI So Cal Chapter - San Diego. Contact - Sandra LeDrew sledrew@childsmascariwarner.com

April 8, 2009 - Nor Cal Lean Construction Institute Chapter, Rancho Solano Clubhouse, Fairfield, CA - 6:00 PM-9:00 PM - Pacific Time, Contact: Theresa Robinson at trobinson@tcco.com or 916.554.7944

A Quick Thought

"Failure to change is a vice! I want everyone at Toyota to change and at least do not be an obstacle for someone else who wants to change."

-- Hiroshi Okuda, Senior Advisor, board member and former chairman of Toyota Motor Corp.



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

PRIVACY STATEMENT: I respect you and your privacy. Your name or e-mail address will never be sold, traded, rented or bartered, or given away - nor will it be used for any other purpose than to communicate with you. Period.



If you find this newsletter helpful, please forward it to anyone you know who will benefit from this information. You may help them improve their company.