A little 5S for a rainy day

One of the things I have commented on a few times has been the British cycling/Sky Pro Cycling teams approach to continuous improvement, or as they call the it the “aggregation of marginal gains”.

So what has this got to do with Lean Manufacturing well nothing and lots.  Nothing in that this a is about sport and about cycling which is one of the odder sports out there (one I am passionate about).  If it takes you 3 weeks to work out the winner of a race, how is that efficient?  And to keep your customers interested, i.e. deliver value to them you end up cramming in a collection of extra competitions such as points and KOM you end up with a messy picture that confuses some newer customers.  And in other ways it has everything to do with Lean.  Lean is simply about understanding and delivering customer value and increasing the amount of value you can deliver most often by eliminating waste.   For Team Sky, value is getting the sponsor’s logo as much positive exposure as possible and the best way is by winning races. 

Bike races like the current Giro d’Italia or Tour de France can be lost or won by the smallest of margins.  Last year the difference between first and second and the Giro was just 16 seconds.  Small differences count in these races.  

Ready for rain 

 “Each rider gets a rain bag, and Sky's feature labeled pockets for each piece of clothing to decrease the time spent searching for the right item. Mechanics will dole out clothing out of the car as the riders roll along. Photo: Caley Fretz | VeloNews.com”

  “A pocket for each type of clothing on the Sky rain bags. Photo: Caley Fretz | VeloNews.com”

Imagine the situation, rain has started to fall.  The cyclist calls over to the support car for gloves and a rain jacket to keep warm.  In the crowded confines of a car the team mechanic grabs the wrong size jacket and gloves for the cyclist.  Time is wasted as the right kit is sorted and the cyclist performance is risked as they get cold and wet. 

It is attention to detail as simple and possibly mundane as this that makes the difference.  Some people would say its just doing simple 5S and a good example of ‘Set’ and in ways it is.  What is more important is the reason it is done is and that is to increase the chance of winning and who doesn’t want to win. 

Quality issues

If you are looking for examples of quality issues check out You Had One Job! http://hadonejob.com/

oh they just continue

Fast value

Step one in Lean is understanding value.  And it is amazing how wrong companies can get this, one guy who gets it is Frank Williams of Williams F1.

When a colleague brings him a new idea or product to try he says: ‘Does it make the car go faster?’ …if it doesn’t they don’t use it.

Understanding value should be that easy.

Hat tip to Richard Maun for the quote.

Boy Scouts can do lean

One of the joys of life is I'm still learning, and a few days I learned of the link in thinking between Boy Scouts and Toyota Production System/Lean.  The similarities are two fold.  First is they are both learning organizations and second is how the learn.

I'm just going to comment on how each organization learns because it is so critical to their success and so simple.  They both "Learn by doing".
If you are experienced in Lean you will have realized that most of what you have learnt and know how to do has been by doing.  You may have first been exposed to an idea through a book, blog, coach or video.  You however only really learnt how to X by doing X.  Toyota and other Lean/learning companies put incredible emphasis on learning and doing.  The Scouts do the same.
The Scout Method has 7 elements, Learning by Doing is one of those elements.    From Wikipedia:  "Scouts games are full of practical action. This holds the participant's attention and gives the Scout hands-on experience in how the theory works."  One of the great parts of Scouting which any 12 year involved will tell you is they do things, sometimes tents fall down and more often than not canes will capsize.  The key element is that even if the event is not the success it was originally envisaged as everyone learns something.
So if Scouts can do, what is stopping the rest of us?

Edit:  I came across this from J Liker - The Toyota Way

Kiichiro’s  father  sent  him  to  the  prestigious  Tokyo  Imperial  University  to
study mechanical engineering; he focused on engine technology. He was able to
draw on the wealth of knowledge within Toyoda Automatic Loom Works on cast-
ing and machining metal parts. Despite his formal engineering education, he fol-
lowed in his father’s footsteps of learning by doing. Shoichiro Toyoda, his son,
described Kiichiro Toyoda as a “genuine engineer” who:
… gave genuine thought to an issue rather than rely on intuition. He alwaysliked to accumulate facts. Before he made the decision to make an automo-bile engine he made a small engine. The cylinder block was the most difficultthing to cast, so he gained a lot of experience in that area and, based on theconfidence he then had, he went ahead. (Reingold, 1999)His approach to learning and creating mirrored that of his father. After World
War II, Kiichiro Toyoda wrote, “I would have grave reservations about our ability
to rebuild Japan’s industry if our engineers were the type who could sit down to
take their meals without ever having to wash their hands.”

5S where

A little fun post today.  Can you identify where this shadow board is from?

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One part of 5S which is often over looked is its ability to tell a story.  Here if a knife is missing trouble is about to start.

Common sense

I had the good fortune to be helping Productivity Alberta with a session they were running on innovation at the Dicky Days Innovation Conference at the Telus Spark.  First thing the Telus spark look awesome and a lot of fun.  The amount of good noise coming from the kids (small and big) touring said only one thing, they were having a lot of fun.  The second thing, I learnt something I had never considered before.  Common sense has its own perspective.  What is common sense now, may not have been common sense before.
The example I was given was that it was common sense a few hundred years ago that the world was flat.  Of course it was you only had to look out at the horizon and you could see it was flat.

Photo - Flickr Simon Ska

This got me thinking how much "common sense" do we hang on to?/it  There is the adage that is slowly being worked away that mass production and scales of economy are cheaper than only making what you need.  How many other ideas of common sense am I carrying around?  The question that follows on is how do you challenge the current common sense; how do you create an environment where the current common sense can be challenged and a new common sense built?

Those are big questions, and ones for me to think some more on.

In reflection

Jim

SMED for home

One of my very first posts was on the simplicity of SMED, this post is another example that SMED should be simple. 
When doing a SMED exercise with clients one are we consistently find takes longer than it should is fiddling with equipment to get the right setting. This example only has 2 settings, the rightway up or upside down and I was getting it wrong as often as I'd get it right.  This little problem was plugging my phone in at night to charge.  I'd grab the cable and try my luck:

Black on black, while maybe looking good did not give me much of a chance to always get it right.

Now with a white do on black I get it right every time.  Chance is out of the game, I don't need to guess.  The second advantage is that I tend to plug the phone in last thing at night and the white does makes the cable easier to see, saving me needing to turn the lights on in the entrance hall.  So the white dot in fact removes two steps from the simple task of plugging in a phone to charge. 
In truth the saving is minimal each night, but added up savings like this are what make Lean and SMED/QCO's work.

The white dot I found made life that little easier so I repeated it.  I can now tell which way is up on all my USB, HDMI and assorted cables.   A critical part of Lean is the Plan, Do, Check, Act cycle.  And this is last step is what ACT is about, when you find a solution that works, standardize it.  Ask "how do I make xx part of our standard work and where else can I use xx?".
The white stuff is call sugru and has almost endless uses.