Factory-floor-show

Training workshops up and down the land are like fashion parades. A succession of seductively attired 'lean tools' sashay up and down the catwalk, each promising fat-free factories and, if you carry them off with panache, eternal youth. Take no notice. Lean tools are 5% of what's needed to establish a lean culture, says Graham Salters. Salters should know. Now consultancy Celerant's European head of process excellence, he is a lean specialist with a Six Sigma master black belt and two decades of professional experience in industry and consulting. Even if you deploy value stream mapping (VSM), 5S and all the others, says Salters, those things alone don't give you financial or tangible benefits. What matters, he says, is "engagement": "The way to really make the change," he says, "is working with people and getting them to understand what the problem is." He tells of a 5S campaign in a truck factory. "They had a beautiful 5S scheme," says Salters, "with perfect shadow boards and all the rest of it. But when the operators brought in bags of nuts they just emptied them any old how, and there were cable ties all over the floor. They'd ticked the box, but without the behavioural change behind it, lean and Six Sigma weren't working." And they weren't sustainable. Neil West, Nissan-trained lean best practice dissemination engineer at the National Skills Academy for Manufacturing (NSAM), worries about the programmes that fizzle out. So often he says, he returns to a site six or eight weeks after what he thought was a "great intervention", to find that "because there's no direct attention from an external source, the improvements have dropped back to where they were". In his view that happens for lack of formal recognition - externally-recognised qualifications - of the skills the shopfloor needs to acquire. The NSAM's business-improvement techniques are based on Deming's 'plan, do, check, act': "People are very good at planning and doing," says West, "but they're very, very poor at checking the impact of what's done, then acting on it." Even when they make improvements, they don't make the best of them: "They don't cascade the improvements to other lines and other parts of the factory," says West. That, he says, is down to the reluctance of middle managers to take on ideas from outside their own department. "Middle managers often see continuous improvement as a threat. The recurring theme at the end of the activity is 'this is common sense'. But people don't have common sense." If they did, he continues, "when they'd had a great business impact on a specific area, they'd do the same activity on the next line. They'd have the sense to take it across the rest of the factory. But it's also a confidence thing. It's about levels of authority and what people can and can't do." Salters believes managers are sometimes at a loss to know what their contribution should be. One chief executive, in a company which had been involved in a lean assessment exercise for two years, told Salters, "I don't understand what I should be doing." Salters's answer was simple - to identify the company's weaknesses piece by piece and develop a road map for fixing them. The chief exec's job is to make it happen. And every employee has to understand the role they play if they are to suggest changes which improve the whole company, says Land Rover training team leader Lloyd Neal, a NSAM client: "You can give people the tools to do a job. But until they understand how their part impacts everything else, you will struggle to make sustained improvements." In West's view, "People do lean initiatives and don't align it to the business strategy. They're doing it for doing its sake and not understanding where it fits in as part of their overall business plan." In the experience of Stuart Mitton, a lean practitioner at The Manufacturing Institute (TMI) which supplies training services for the Manufacturing Advisory Service (MAS) North West, manufacturers aren't very scientific about the lean tools they use: "They choose thing piecemeal, and it's seldom that the results deliver the expectations." Before he joined TMI, Mitton had clocked up 20 years' lean and change-management experience in companies like Rolls-Royce and Bentley cars, Rolls-Royce aerospace and Portmeirion Potteries. The tools don't come first, he says: "Before all that you have to have a plan." Surely, by now, there can't be a company in the country that doesn't know, and hasn't developed, a business plan? Not good news: "It's still an issue of grave concern," says Mitton. If the business plan can't be taken for granted, the deployment of vital but elementary 'lean' tools like VSM is also in doubt: "Value stream mapping is still a tool and technique that's talked about but not practised," says Mitton. The good news is that "once people get the hang of it, it makes a big difference". Gloucester-based Francis & Lewis International (FLI) makes telecoms, radar and meteorology towers, masts and poles. When the South West MAS and Leanpal consultant Mark Colvin helped FLI to apply VSM just to the making of tower ladders, that one exercise saved 15% of the cost, or £30,000 a year. But for Mitton, VSM is the starting point, the first of a whole mix of tools and techniques. The Knowsley, Merseyside, factory of ColorMatrix Europe makes liquid colourants and additives for the plastics industry. There, Mitton spent 12 months helping ColorMatrix with lean projects which delivered a £1.8 million increase in turnover, productivity improvements of up to 183%, a £517,000 reduction in inventory and £57,000 waste savings from eliminating defects. Lead times fell from five to three days and on-time delivery to customers rose to a 97% average. After a diagnostic visit, Mitton led a series of VSM exercises to look at current manufacturing processes and pinpoint improvements. Lean manufacturing workshops and 5S implementations followed to allow ColorMatrix to make the improvements they'd spotted. The firm created a new factory layout to improve flow, put a strong focus on standardised work and quality control, and trained all employees in waste elimination. Solid structure In the best implementations, West says, the improvement programme has some structure to it. "Initially what we do is a diagnostic, to establish the current situation. We look at the different areas, look at data." No-one can argue with the measurements, if you choose them carefully: "Data takes away people's opinions. The shopfloor will tell you what the problem is, but ask them to measure it and they can't." So you put a measure in and you can see how much it's improved by. What you start with, says West, is the condition of the workplace: what sort of skills the workforce has, whether there are any standard operating procedures (SOPs), and whether the workforce is multi-tasking and multi-skilled; is there a skills matrix in place? Then you look at how much visual management there is. You need visual control - to be able to see throughput or WIP levels at a glance. And you look for notice boards showing performance levels on the shopfloor. Finally, you should be able to identify the areas that have got problems - or are giving problems - in terms of cost, quality and delivery. You only apply the lean tools when you've identified the areas that have to go furthest to catch up. As for which tools to use then, West compares the tool suite with the tools any tradesman uses in his work - the one you use depends on the job that needs doing. In the end, he says, "everything revolves around waste elimination." But the tool you choose depends on that diagnostic stage at the beginning. "If you had a particular problem with quality," says West, "one of the better tools would be structured problem solving. You gather as much background information around the problem as possible, making it as specific as possible. Does the quality problem happen with a particular machine, at a particular time of day, with a certain component or a certain operator? Are there standard operating procedures and has everyone been trained to them? Is everyone working in a standard way?" Traditionally people have little black books, and each operator tackles the same job differently. Before managers start VSM or any other exercise, says Mitton, they should be clear about what 'value' means in the value stream and where they're going: "They should put together some key objectives for the next 12, 24 or 36 months, then look at how they can cascade that down the business using policy deployment - the whole business, not just manufacturing." His example is sales: "If you're going to grow the business, where is that growth going to come from? Have you got the capacity [to meet that growth]? Sales people don't always have a great comprehension of capacity," says Mitton. They should know more - though they should not allow capacity concerns to interfere with their motivation to sell. Deployment is key, says Mitton. The main sources of value are schedule adherence - on-time delivery; inventory reduction, which is the key to improving the throughput of the factory; and quality control: "That can be a bottleneck, especially in a process industry." The old favourites, in other words: quality, cost and delivery. Solid To achieve those you need people capability, says Mitton. That covers a variety of issues, including the need to develop versatility in skills and the complexities introduced by the need to make sure those skills are available throughout different shift patterns. For Mitton, skills development is part of the capacity picture. Get that wrong and your growth - or, in recession, survival - ambitions can't be met. You shouldn't use all the tools, just the ones you need, says Salters. If you're running a machine shop, he says, it's obvious that you should be looking at overall equipment efficiency (OEE), total productive maintenance (TPM) and single-minute exchange of die (SMED) techniques. Even so, he adds, "they're no good without good everyday management." Mitton still worries that companies adopt the tools superficially. "Most people who say they've done VSM, for example, mean they've just done a process flow analysis. They've not understood the impact of a better picture. Or they might have done [total productive maintenance] on a piece of kit but, unless that's a bottleneck, it isn't going to improve the factory's throughput." And he has a concern about the way some firms approach kaizen, or continuous improvement. For him, it's part of the other tools. Too often, he says, "people think of kaizen as a discrete activity. Any improvement activity is part of a continuous improvement mindset. It's an umbrella. So 5S, VSM, TPM - they all fit under that umbrella."