Insight, opinion and commentary for the leaders of Lean Enterprise Transformation from some of the world's leading experts.Crossing the Lean Rubicon
July 15th, 2006 - by Bill WaddellOver the past week or two I have been in a couple of manufacturing plants, and talked to the execs from a couple more, and there seems to be a common thread among them - first, their lean transformation is not gaining the traction and generating the results they expected, and second, they have made half hearted commitments to value stream management.
There is not a lot of doubt among the folks that set off to beome lean that the value stream - the entire process from receipt of customer order to receipt of customer payment and every step in between - must be the central focus. Most companies start down the value stream mapping path, and a few even assign someone to the job of ‘Value Stream Manager’. Very few, however, really make a fundamental shift in their management thinking.
I am more and more convinced that the real commitment to lean - the crossing of the Rubicon - is when the company (1) changes the accounting system to collect cost by value stream, rather than by cost center; and (2) breaks up the support staff fiefdoms and assigns the staffers to work for the Value Stream Managers.
Not much is going to come from value stream optimization efforts when the basic financial planning and control tools are still focused on isolated operations. And not much is going to happen when the people tasked with the job of managing the value streams do not control any of the management resources needed to do the job.
Willingness to restructure the cost system and break up the support staff organizations is very much an acid test of senior management understanding of lean, and commitment. Everything up to that point can be controlled and tempered by the existing management infrastrcuture - the new value stream managers, or participants in kaizen events and six sigma projects can’t rock the old boat too much. But when the power tools of management are put in the hands of people with a value stream focus, that is another story all together. Change will take place radically and quickly, and the change will not be easily undone.
July 20th, 2006 at 12:13 am
I think, another problem is, that we are used to separate the world into 2 groups: thinkers and workers. If we belong to the thinkers, it´s hard for us to accept, that workers can be also empowered to think and take more control over their process.
I just developped a piece of software, that optimizes the way, how products are stored in a warehouse. It sounds plain to me, that I train and support some warehouse guys to use it on their own, because it´s their warehouse and not mine.
However, I met people, who are used to perform this optimization work for years from a remote head office, telling the warehouse guys what exactly to do. They just don´t see, how a worker, to whom they were giving commands for years, can suddenly be in a role to use his own brains to run a software and implement the results himself, limiting the head office guys to just support in case of questions.
If an average worker today is able to find and download free mp3 songs from the internet, create video albums and install a home cinema on his home pc, why do we think, that he is unable to handle a user-friendly company software?
So, the first thing, when You really want to implement value stream thinking is to tear off the wall in Your head between thinkers and workers. You will be surprised to see, how clever some of Your people are.
Regards,
Josef