American Lean Weekday: Leadership | Lean Culture & Intrapreneurship | Lean Methods | Industry 4.0 | Case Studies

Have a sage and wonderful New Year and thank you for listening!

More show notes are here

Since it is near the end of the year and your company might consider Lean training, I thought I’d give you an early present and cover what to include in your Lean training. This is not an exhaustive list- I’m breaking the topics up over several weeks.

Up to this point, we have covered 12 other Lean topics- Lean History, VA vs. NVA, the 8 wastes, 6S, Current state and future state VSM’s, waste walks, PICK chart, RIE’s, A3’s, setting up an LPO and developing a Master Plan and RIE report-outs.

If you cover these topics, I know you will have a very solid start in educating employees on Lean topics that will benefit your company immensely! It’s helpful to add workshops for many of these topics to keep people excited and engaged when we can all get into a training room again!

One of the most important elements of Lean is being able to flow products or processes. Think of a river. You don’t want a bunch of delays in the flow of product or information as items pass through your systems. Delays lead to increased lead time, which affects your customer and impacts cash-flow.

There are many flow tools to use in understanding how you build your product. The first high-level tool is value stream mapping. Then you can use process flow diagrams and product families to understand which parts belong in a family-based upon process commonality.

You can use resource calculations to calculate how many resources you will need to produce a certain volume of product. Once you understand how many resources are required, it’s important to lay out the resources in an efficient manner so your product can flow.

The closer you can come to the product process flow diagram, the better your flow will be, because the process flow diagram shows the most efficient way to build the product.

Spaghetti diagrams- where you follow a part through its current state, visually show the state of your current flow. It’s called a spaghetti diagram because, more than likely, your flow will resemble a bowl of spaghetti.

Now it’s time to develop a future state flow. You can try using cells- self-contained layouts where raw material enters and a complete part leaves the cell. These are great for supporting families of parts.

A key element for setting up a successful cell is balance. It’s important to set up a cell where each step in the operation has about the same amount of work content as the other ones. You want to produce a product from the cells based upon a Takt time- a German word for rhythm or beat. We base it upon customer demand and let you know how often you need to produce a product.

You try to flow your product as much as possible, but when you can’t flow it, you can pull it using a visual signal called Kanban. Kanban is a Japanese word that means signal. It can be a card, it can be an X on the table.

It signals your operators when to do work or when to stop doing work. The purpose is to signal you only when more items are needed. If you don’t have a signal to product items, you don’t build.

This is a powerful tool for controlling inventory and WIP and works well in freeing up inventory dollars.

You might think that setup reduction is only applicable to a machine shop. It’s applicable anywhere you have a setup. Maybe you need to switch between computer software to do your job. That’s a setup.

Regardless, teach the steps of setup reduction. 1. Identify what setup to focus on. This might be a high-moving part. 2. Video the setup. Use two cameras and video the setup. One closer to the setup where you can see the operator and one farther away so you can see where he/she goes. 3. Review the video and write down the setup elements. Mark them as VA or NVA. 4. Either eliminate the NVA steps or do them externally to the setup. Operators might...

Employee engagement is going to make or break you on your Lean transformation. For those that are interested in a successful Lean Transformation, I have a secret for you. Lean is about changing the culture of your organization. Ask yourself, how do I turn my employees into daily problem solvers? One success indicator of employee engagement is having them drive the transformation effort within your company, but how do you get there? Here are five ways to engage employees during your Lean transformation.

First, let’s talk about what the end state looks like. Ideally, you have developed a supportive culture that develops over years. You want a support system driven from the bottom up.

Most organizations are top-down driven. That looks like a typical triangle organization structure. The top leader speaks, and everyone works to carry out those directives.

To truly have culture change, you need to adopt a more supporting servant leadership style of managing. Each level provides support to the one above it, and employees are driving the transformation. It is the leader’s job to provide support and remove roadblocks. This servant-leader culture looks like an inverted triangle.

That’s great, you might say. I can see from the graphic how it is supposed to work, but how does my company get there? How do we drive daily problem solving into the organization and change the culture over time? How do we embed Lean thoughts and processes into our company’s DNA so that this isn’t some flavor of the month program?

Here are five opportunities that you can use during your Lean transformation to get employees engaged and excited about culture change.

This means you have developed a True North vision and your company’s Lean Management System. These two items share with employees which is important to the company. After these are in place, you can reinforce company values and goals during daily stand-up meetings with employees.

If you aren’t having daily 10 minute stand up meetings, begin having them. This is a perfect time to review 1. Safety issues 2. Quality issues and review elements of the Lean Management System. It will take time, but eventually, employees will open up and share opportunities for things to improve in these meetings.

It doesn’t have to be super intense but provide training that introduces employees to Lean terminology and a few key concepts like Value Stream Mapping and Rapid Improvement Events. The key is to have everyone in the company take part in the training. This lets everyone know that you are taking the Lean Transformation seriously and it will not become a book of the month program.

Invite employees to develop Value Stream Maps, take part in 6S activities, and be in Rapid Improvement Events that occur within your organization. One of the eight wastes is Not Listening to People’s Ideas. You must include employees in these Lean activities. They are the ones on the front line every day. They know where the waste is in their processes. Engage them to make improvements within their areas.

Make sure that at the end of every 6S event, Rapid Improvement Event, or Value Stream Mapping event you have them report out to the leadership team. As leaders, make sure you support and celebrate their efforts. Thank them for participating. Recognize that they are nervous during the report out. Celebrate the fact that you have gotten 5-8 more people engaged in the process!

If you follow these simple steps, you will engage employees during your Lean transformation!

As always, it is an honor to serve you, and I hope that you and your company are getting better every day!

What is the purpose of your business? Is it to make money as many people believe? I took finance during my MBA program and finance says your goal is to generate shareholder value. That doesn’t sound like a great rallying cry for employees. “We have to focus on increasing our shareholder value in 2021.” Yeah, no. How about you find better ways to focus on the customer in 2021?

Can you use that to engage and energize employees? I bet so, and if you make improvements in that area, I bet your revenue will increase.

Hopefully, your True North focuses upon the customer. If not, give it a review. Here is LinkedIn’s- “to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”. Nike’s is to “Bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world*”. The asterisk says if you have a body you are an athlete.

Take the time with your leadership team to review your True North and make sure it makes sense.

Now that you have a relevant customer supporting True North, how do you ensure your company walks the walk? Maybe you had outside help in developing your True North and hired a firm to make a nice graphic, posters, etc.

Now the heavy lifting begins. Instilling your True North into the company culture. Every employee has to understand their role in supporting the customer. Supporting the customer has to show up in their employee review language and employee plans.

Begin every meeting reviewing the True North until everyone has heard it 2,000 times and then you have a good start. Ensure your actions and the actions of those you lead to support the True North and the customer.

Now that your enterprise culture change is beginning, map the customer journey from the time they click on the website or pick up the phone until the product or service is delivered to their door. Where are there multiple points of contact required of the customer? What are your response times in your call center? What are your first call resolution statistics?

Use items like value stream mapping and customer journey mapping to “see” where you can make improvements. Make sure these events are cross-functional and have input from employees in every area of the business. Ensure that your IT group is part of the mapping as well, so they can understand there is a difference between pretty and functional. Or high-tech and meeting the needs of the customer.

As a leadership team, develop your improvement plan. Where do you need to focus on improving the customer experience first? Second, etc.? Deploy the resources required to make the improvements.

Establish the correct metrics to measure your performance. Survey your customers. Then survey them again. Consider using the Net Promoter Score to compare yourself to others in your industry.

Ensure the improvement plan is moving forward as planned. Discuss it in leadership meetings. Make sure leaders involve employees across the business. This helps you cement your True North and drive employee engagement.

If you follow these steps and focus on the customer in 2021, you will have an incredible year!

As always, it is an honor to serve you, and I hope that you and your company are getting better every day!

More show notes are here

Merry Christmas to all of our listeners, clients, companies, family and Friends!

Organizations have dramatically sped up their digital transformation activities. The pandemic has made companies consider a digital transformation much sooner than before. Companies of all sizes realize they need to transform. To help guide you, here are the top roles for a successful digital transformation.

Just like it sounds, a solution architect develops the overall strategy for the digital transformation. Think of the solution architect as the techie that can explain software solutions to the leaders in the organization.

They explain how software and digital solutions solve business problems.

Now that you have a system-wide view of your digital transformation, you will need a data architect. Their role is to develop the data management plan. How will your company collect, analyze, protect, and maintain data? These are questions that a data architect answers.

It’s great that you want to undertake a digital transformation, but why? Because everyone else is doing it? The Chief Digital officer understands the revenue streams, Omni channels, new business opportunities, and customer services that will benefit from the digital transformation.

Database administrators do what their title sounds like. They work closely with data architects and ensure data is stored and organized properly. Their primary goal is to ensure data is available when needed. This includes making sure you complete backups, data is seamlessly available from cloud providers, etc.

Because you keep more and more data off-premise these days, i.e. in the cloud, cloud specialists are extremely important. They manage edge computing opportunities and manage business solution software that is kept in the cloud.

These are your go-to employees that can retrieve, gather, and access data. We are in a data-driven world, and these employees help us make sense of the massive amounts of data your company collects. 

They help provide a data-driven approach to decision making. If you want to know the top color of your product that is sold in Aurora, Colorado data analysts can provide that answer.

Remember Blackberry? Everyone had a Blackberry phone. The slang name for them was crackberry because everyone used them all the time. Where are they now? The iPhone came out in June 2007 and it killed Blackberry phones. Why? Because the iPhone had a much better user interface.

You didn’t have to scroll using a little button in the middle of the phone. UX designers focus on developing a positive interface between the customer and the business. They are customer advocates and communicate customer needs to the team building the website, product, etc.

There is no out-of-the-box solution that will meet the needs of your digital transformation. You have many legacy systems that have to stay in place. Systems integrators ensure these systems communicate with each other. 

If you embark on a digital transformation in 2021, these are the top roles for a successful digital transformation. 

As always, it’s an honor to serve you, and I hope this helps you and your organization get a little better today.

More show notes are here

Since it’s near the end of the year and your company might consider Lean training, I thought I’d give you an early present and cover topics to include in your Lean training. This is not an exhaustive list- I’m breaking the topics up over several weeks.

If you cover these topics, I know you will have a very solid start in educating employees on Lean topics that will benefit your company immensely! It’s helpful to add workshops for many of these topics to keep people excited and engaged when we can all get into a training room again!

Last week I mentioned the eight wastes and PICK charts. Pick charts are impact/effort matrices and the letters stand for Plan, Implement, Challenge, and Kill. As you develop countermeasures for the waste you identify on your Enterprise Value Stream Map (EVSM) run those ideas through a PICK chart to select the best ones to implement.

Focusing on the ideas in your Implement quadrant (low effort/high impact) it’s time to schedule Rapid Improvement Events to eliminate the waste. What’s an RIE? An RIE is the implementation method used by thousands of companies to make the change.

RIE’s are focused efforts 2-5 days long focused on a specific area of the business. The goal is to complete 90% of the work or change within the event. Having led over 400 RIE’s, I can tell you they can be company changing.

It’s also important that the RIE’s will make improvements to the overall business KPI’s. Don’t hold RIE’s just to have activity. You are working to make the company better and impact the bottom line. But, before you have an RIE you first need to develop a…

Every RIE should have a project charter, sometimes called an A3 developed for the event. If you don’t do this, you can suffer from scope creep and you won’t get everything completed in your timeframe.

The project charter makes sure you think about what we can accomplish in a 2-5 day timeframe and not try to boil the ocean.

Now that you have your RIE’s identified, it’s important to develop a three-month master plan of events. This provides your company with an implementation roadmap. If you can, give some thought about who to include in the RIE’s so they can get the event on their calendar.

Establish an LPO or Lean Promotion Office where you can display the three-month schedule among other items like the A3’s, and RIE report outs, value stream maps, etc.

Finally, after each RIE, it is important to have the team members make a small presentation to leadership that tells the story of the event. Make sure as the event is happening you take pictures since you will want to include them in the report out.

It’s a chance for the team to share their hard work and for leadership to show their support. These are four more great topics to include in your lean training!

As always, it is an honor to serve you, and I hope that you and your company are getting better every day!

More show notes are here

Digital transformations are important in today’s world. Even if you are an “old-school” manufacturer- you make stuff- you still have to find customers. It could be there are ways to increase the digital aspects of your products. Regardless, this will require change, and the best way to approach it is to unleash your intrapreneurs. Here are five steps for supporting your digital intrapreneurs.

Companies are spending millions on digital transformations. They believe if they install the latest software, they’ll have a digital company. It doesn’t work that way. The latest software might make you more efficient, but it won’t allow you to develop new products. Your internal entrepreneurs- intrapreneurs need to be in charge of that.

One of their first tasks should be to understand what the customer wants and needs. Do your customers want product extensions or increased digitalization of your current products? You digital intrapreneurs should find out from some of your best customers who are also different from each other. This way you hear from customers with different needs and use cases.

If you don’t have an intrapreneurial culture today, leadership representatives will have to remove roadblocks so the digital intrapreneurs have a chance at seeing their offerings all the way through. Choose managers who will go out of their way to ensure the intrapreneurs get the support they require.

Many employees today are digital natives. They have grown up with technology and use it daily- sometimes minute by minute. It’s not an issue of understanding how to use technology- it’s about learning and understanding what to do about digital opportunities.

The opposite is also true. It’s important the intrapreneurs you select understand how to identify digital threats. Make sure your digital intrapreneurs can work with the sponsors to develop entirely new digital use cases if required.

Motivating intrapreneurs isn’t hard. They have an entrepreneurial attitude. The worst thing you can do as an organization is to de-motivate your intrapreneurs by bringing in “professionals” at the end of a project to implement the digital solution.

Allowing them the chance to implement the digital transformation required to transform your products and services or they will bolt your organization. There is no shortage of companies willing to hire them.

It will take time, which you may not have. Work with business leaders to develop an open and creative culture so you can attract and maintain intrapreneurs. Have your middle managers keep an eye out for talent that asks a lot of “why” questions.

Like, why do we do it this way? Have you thought about this? Customer X is doing… These are potential intrapreneurs. Put these five steps for supporting your digital intrapreneurs in place so they become engaged and have a place where they can feel safe and be successful!

As always, it is an honor to serve you, and I hope that you and your company are getting better every day!

More show notes are here

Let’s talk about what 2020 taught leaders and the rest of us, but first a story.

The Voyager spacecraft was leaving our solar system in 1990 and NASA had it take one last picture since it was leaving our solar system. Voyager was 3.7 billion miles from the sun. What it captured has become known as the pale blue dot picture.

Its impact is more than a picture. It shows Earth from the perspective of the edge of our solar system and how insignificant Earth looked. You can barely see it in the picture below. If 2020 has taught us anything, it has taught us to:

If you are reading this or hearing my voice on the podcast, congratulations. You made it through 2020. Maybe you have had family or team members lose someone in their lives. I’m sure you’ve read about the many job losses and changes to people’s livelihood.

Hopefully, you have been spared that kind of impact on your life. It’s easy to complain about the changes you’ve endured as a leader this year. Keep perspective for great things you have had this year and…

It’s more important than ever to act as a role model for those you lead. Given the tremendous strain your employees have been under, it’s important you show them how to act and react when situations arise.

We can’t predict the future, but you can as a leader…

It’s important to believe you will figure things out. Have the belief you make the absolute best decisions given the information you can gather. Have the confidence your team will follow your direction and do their best to carry out the company vision.

Has your company had to pivot? There are those that have done extremely well during the pandemic because they…

Did you grow or create when things changed? I hope we are all aware that fortune goes to those companies that take action. Don’t wait till the right time to take action because that time will never come.

You show up because you want to be a servant leader. You understand it’s important to lead the employees who are lost or have questions. You may not become famous as the pilot Sullenberger when he showed up as a leader in a short time of crisis.

Do it because you want to make a difference in being a leader. Great leaders also aren’t afraid to…

As we transition into 2021 don’t feel like you have to go it alone. Find mentors and others from whom you can learn. Go back and listen to the leadership episodes on my podcast. Hopefully, they have added value to your leadership journey and you can reflect upon what 2020 taught leaders.

As always, it is an honor to serve you, and I hope that you and your company are getting better every day!

More show notes are here

One of the key elements on my American Lean Weekday podcast is the weekly interviews that I conduct with companies on their Lean Journey. These companies are from various industries and are all different sizes. I have interviewed leaders from family-owned businesses to multi-national organizations. This week is a little different, I share the mic with James, a buyer at a Multi-National Fortune 100 company. He shares inside secrets on supplying a Fortune 100 company.

James is unique in that he worked with both a supplier to Fortune 100 companies and is now a buyer from the same supplier base. He has been on both sides of the equation. Some key points:

1.  As a supplier, they grew from 3M to 16M and used their Lean journey as a sales tool.  Their customers included Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Woodward, and other large Primes.
2. These Primes were looking for systems and processes that would improve OTD, quality, and price. They were expecting improvements in operations as well as office processes like accounting.
3. Primes are looking for suppliers that can handle terms of 60-120 days.
4. They want suppliers that are flexible and can handle re-schedules in today's environment.
5. They want suppliers that can communicate in a concise manner.
6. Suppliers that can take on a large amount of work and separate themselves from others are key.

1. Have a website that is brief and includes your equipment, approvals, is current and correct! Supplying a Fortune 100 company means you need to constantly update your website.

2. Share your Lean journey. Include before and after pictures. Be vocal about the improvements that you have made!

3. As a company, your ROI will be greater if you bring in outside consultants to guide you on your journey. They will reduce your learning curve!

As always it is an honor to serve you and I hope you and your company are getting better every day!

More show notes are here