Your Marketing Machine: Lean in Manufacturing

Lonnie Wilson, the owner and principal of Quality Consultants is an expert in Lean Manufacturing techniques and applications. He not only instructs management professionals in the applications of these lean techniques; he is an on-the-floor-implementation professional. His new book, How To Implement Lean Manufacturing, was released by McGraw Hill, August 2009.

Listen to answers like this in part 1 of 2 of the podcast;

Joe: What makes sustaining them so difficult for people? You put a process in, this is what we are going to do from now on. What makes that tough?

Lonnie: Boy, I'll tell you ‑‑ now that is a great question and I get asked that question frequently. It seems to be almost obvious that people would say "Well, OK, we made this gain, now let's sustain it." It's a whole lot better to build on progress than deterioration. The truth of the matter is that people in real life ‑‑ people have tremendous, tremendous problems sustaining the gains. I think the single, biggest thing that I can put my finger on is the business' attitude towards problems. I find, particularly in the West, and I don't like to make a Japanese/Western dichotomy, but at some level there is.

I find, in the West, that we look at problems as a royal pain in the "tush." We don't want them. The fewer problems we have, the happier we are. Some of my Japanese clients, when they find a problem they almost celebrate it. They recognize they found a weakness in the system. The system is, therefore, deficient and now we have got a way to improve it.

They look at problems as opportunities to make their system better, and I think that carries over into then, how they finish up those problems. Once you have solved the problem ‑‑ to sustain it, there's a whole series of activities you need to do. You need to maintain it. You need to standardize it. All of that is just good old‑fashioned hard work.

To me, that is the most fundamental thing that I find that makes people ‑‑ makes companies ‑‑ shy away from sustaining issues, is first, how they view the problem. I think the second thing is that once a problem gets fixed, it's very easy to jump to the next problem, because you don't have any more symptoms.
What happens is you take on the next problem. Everybody's interested in progress, so they want to make more and more progress. They forget that the last thing they fixed maybe isn't fixed completely. It's fixed enough so they don't have any current symptoms, but it's going to reappear at a later date.

That discipline that it takes to think through the possible future problems, put fixes in place for things that haven't even gone wrong; anticipate what might happen. That just isn't quite as sexy as moving onto the next problem and solving it.

The third thing that I find that really prevents sustainability, is our system of goals and objectives. You'll very often find out that companies have all kinds of production and financial goals and profits, and those are far more important than quality goals. One quality goal we implemented in one place that was particularly progressive, was the goal of zero for things we really didn't do that well.

They made a list of the problems that reappeared and put them on the list of "things we didn't do really well." Then they made that a highlighted issue within the company. That company was the very best of any that I've ever worked at in my 40 years at sustaining the gains.