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UPDATED JULY 17, 2009
Interesting Books:
"Good to Great" Jim Collins
"The World is Flat" Thomas Friedman
"Raging Fans" Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles
"Who Moved My Cheese" Spencer Johnson
"Machine that changed the world" J. Womak, D Jones, D Roos
Thought:
Something to consider
Letting your customers set your standards is a dangerous game,
because the race to the bottom is pretty easy to win.
Setting your own standards-and living up to them-is a better way to profit. Not to mention a better way to make your day worth all the effort you put in to it.
Seth Godin (1960- )
Kaizen Continual Incremental Improvement EVOLUTION
Kaikaku Revolutionary Improvement REVOLUTION
LEVERAGING FIVE WHY'S
Get the most for your effort.
When I was a boy, my grandmother used to read me nursery rhymes to entertain me and teach me about the world. One has resonated with me for years:
"For want of a nail the shoe was lost
For want of a nail the horse was lost
For want of a horse the warrior was lost
For want of a warrior the battle was lost
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost
All for the want of a nail."
This little poem displays the heart of the five-why problem-solving method that's used mainly in the automobile industry, especially the Japanese auto industry. Basically, five-why analysis is a fundamental approach to thinking, based on the logical linkage of elements into a cause-and-effect analysis. Look at a problem and ask yourself, Why did this happen?? Then with each specific answer, repeat the question about five times and you will typically end up with a rather solid root cause. In the poem above, the problem was that the kingdom was lost. The series of why questions leads you through the loss of the battle due to not enough soldiers, and ultimately due to not enough nails in the hands of the blacksmiths.
It's a simple process of logical connections. It's a method for problem-solving that gets to some hard-to-identify causes and gives you the opportunity to see the issues that have a leveraging effect on the overall process. The beauty of this simple process is that it gives you great leverage when properly deployed because it takes you to the root of the problem.
Sophisticated problem-solving
Across industry today, you will hear about many advanced problem-solving methods. Popular methods such as Six Sigma approaches, red X approaches, Kepner-Tregoe processes, and others have a definite place in the our world. Some problems are extremely complicated and involve a number of interrelationships.
Sometimes these tools are essential. We all know that if you organize the information about the situation and combine it with properly collected and analyzed data, precise solutions can be found. Most problems don't require this extreme level of structure and analysis. In fact, many people are intimidated by the statistics and data collection so they stop the problem-solving analysis before they even try, and the organization suffers by having the problem and its effects linger longer than necessary.
A key success factor of any company is to get everyone in the organization involved in the continuous improvement effort. To improve you need to overcome the constraints of today and make your world a better place. In reality, the pursuit of continuous improvement means that your people are engaged in problem-solving.
In The Toyota Way (McGraw-Hill, 2003), Jeffrey Liker explains that the pinnacle of operational effectiveness comes from Toyota's emphasis on problem-solving. Toyota sees this as the main driver of competitiveness, get everyone in the company involved and working on solving problems. What's Toyota's main approach? Five-whys. It's simple. It's logical. It's effective. It looks deep for true root causes. Everyone can do it.
The "therefore" test
The therefore test has proven to be a very reliable method to check the logic of the five-why analysis. When using the five-why method, it's tricky to keep everyone's logic straight. Humans have an enormous capacity to think, and we often clutter our thoughts with extraneous information. While five-why is easy to explain, it's hard to do at first because we will often bring in biased thinking or related information that isn't on the critical path of the root cause. We often get off on tangents and need a method to keep our thoughts in order.
To do the therefore test, you read the key findings of the analysis in reverse and insert the word therefore between each step. If the stream of logic makes sense in reverse, then the logic is probably solid. In the poem,The Kingdom and the Nail, the therefore test would look like this:
The blacksmith did not have enough nails, therefore
The horseshoe was not attached, therefore
The warrior could not get to the battle, therefore
The army was outnumbered, therefore
The battle, and ultimately the kingdom, was lost.
This simple test can verify the logic of the five-why and help people see where they're off on a tangent and give them an easy means to stay on track.
The leverage point
The worst kind of problem you can have is one that your customer discovers. Most plants have problems and they work to minimize the effect of the problem. If they find the issue and keep it away from their customer, they encounter inefficiencies and that's all. If they have the problem and it gets to their customers, not only do they have the inefficiency, but they also have risked their reputation and violated the trust of their customers. This potentially can affect the company for years, because the customer, in good faith, exchanged their money for your product, and the product failed. They can rationalize that the company has violated their trust. A broken trust can remain for years, and rational thinking can sometimes disappear.
In the five-why approach, a customer problem has at least three root causes that must be found:
The specific cause: Why was the bad product created?
The detection cause: Why did the bad product get through our inspection process?
The systemic cause: Why were our production and inspection processes so weak as to allow the customer to be at risk?
The specific cause
When most people think of problem-solving, they think of the specific root cause. You have a discrepant part, some machine or process wasn't performed correctly and you think you have found the issue. For example, if there's a rattling noise in your car and you tighten the loose screw, you haven't necessarily found the problem because the rattle went away.
Great problem-solving will dig past the symptom (the loose screw) and look at the operation responsible to install and tighten the screw to get to the root cause. It could be a worn tool bit, a defective motor, or operator fatigue. Any one of these are potential root causes that need to be confirmed to find the true root cause.
The detection cause
Every company deploys means to check their work before it goes to their customers. If problems can happen (and they almost always can), the companies that do the best job at protecting the customer from their problems win in the short and long run. The short term is lower customer satisfaction costs, such as repair, replacements, and rework.
The long-term benefit is enhanced reputation and increased customer loyalty. Although shutting off the cause of the problem is great, there's double gold to be had by analyzing the inspection and detection system to determine how the problem products escaped. When you protect the customer, you have preserved their trust. When they trust you, they are more willing to pay a premium for your product thereby increasing your profits.
Typically there are three aspects that repeatedly surface as holes in the detection system:
Inspection scope: The inspection process has a gap and is not looking for the specific defect. In your planning, you did not think the defect would occur or you took a risk that it wouldn't happen.
Inspection reliability: The method you have for detection is limited in some way to consistently find and filter the defect. This could be limited by a state-of-the-art process in cost-effective detection, which is especially true in subjective or appearance-type problems.
Detection bypass: Defects normally found by inspection processes get to customers because the products didn't go through the normal inspection process. In industrial settings, operators will sometimes place suspicious parts in a box, which looks like finished products, and someone else will take the box over to finished part inventory, skipping the detection process completely. This lack of discipline bypassed the inspection process.
Differences in customer expectations standards: When customers' expectations and your standards are misaligned, problems often happen. If you make flip-open cell phones and get constant complaints from mothers with small children, the problem could be that the children are playing with the phone, inducing, Nonadult-like, stress on the phone.
While there are other causes for inspection and detection problems to occur, these three areas account for more than 80 percent of the holes in the detection system.
The systemic cause, the greatest leverage point
Extending the five-why process to the systemic arena is where the huge leverage occurs. In the systemic leg, the problem-solver is looking at the overall management and development system that created the production and detection systems. The problem-solver asks, Why was the process that we handed to the production people not adequately robust?
We must look at the management system and the development system, including product, process, and inspection designs, and understand how the engineers and managers let the production people have weak processes in the first place. It can be an approach, a disciplined execution, or business practices and standards that allow the production processes to be insufficient.
By examining systemic issues and finding a root cause, and fixing it, you create massive leverage for your company. These systemic issues touch each and every product you make, current and future. An improvement at the system level spreads across all products and all programs. This is maximum leverage. This is the heart of Toyota's process and this is where true competitive advantages are born.
When you look at a problem and have the resolve to look past the superficial causes and go deep to the systemic ones, you win and win big. Be the king in the kingdom. Would you like to lose your kingdom for the want of a nail? I doubt it. Have the strength to nail problems down completely.
About The Author
John J. Casey is a strategic thinker and coach for quality and productivity improvements. John is a consultant for the Whitehall Group in Troy, Michigan, and has held key leadership positions for GM, Chrysler MSX, and Nummi (Toyota). John is chairman of the American Society for Quality-Automotive and a past board member of the Automotive Industry Action Group. In addition, John is the author of Strategic Error Proofing: Achieving Success Every Time through Smarter FMEA's (Productivity Press, August 2008).
FIFTH GRADE WISDOM DEFINING GOALS AND MEASUREABLES
Tips from a ten-year-old
by Dave Heberling
When my daughter, Anna, was in the fifth grade, her teacher asked the students to write down their personal goals. Anna's goals are still displayed in our home, so we obviously feel that there was something special about this assignment.
1. Help others
2. Get good grades
3. Speed up work
4. Be a little neater
Not bad for a fifth grader, huh? Could you do better? How? Is there a similar list of goals posted for you and for your company? If not, you could learn something from a 10-year-old.
It recently dawned on me that Anna's list cuts to the heart of what manufacturers strive for and what many quality gurus recommend. I'll try to explain the connection.
Please consider the importance of having your goals or objectives clearly identified for all to see. (If you can't explain where you want to go, how can anyone tell if you're making progress?) In manufacturing, we also like our goals to be concrete and measurable, so we can quantify how much progress we're making. We'd also like to widely distribute convenient status reports, sometimes known as metrics.
Let's consider Anna's goals:
HELP OTHERS
This involves giving back and making sure that the needs of others are met. For a manufacturer, others include customers, coworkers, employees, those managing the company, and all who live and work in the immediate vicinity. Helping these people includes meeting their requirements, answering their questions, maintaining great relationships and a great place to work, ensuring that you deliver desired results, and even being a good corporate citizen. Does your company give back to the community? Do you have measures in place to prevent or minimize all types of pollution? My company's quality policy is evidence that it is headed in the right direction. It's focused on meeting the needs of our customers, our employees, the company itself, and those around us.
GET GOOD GRADES
For manufacturers, this can mean several things. An obvious connection is in customer satisfaction, an area in which companies typically receive customer evaluations indicating how they?re doing. The customers do the grading, and if they're not happy, the assessments reflect that. Wyoming Steel sends out annual surveys to customers, tabulating and distributing the results throughout the company, and pays attention to all improvement opportunities. More broadly, this goal requires us to keep learning and to put what we learn to good use to attain desired results or improvements. Do your employees know more now than they did last year? Are they using what they?ve learned to help your company operate more effectively?
SPEED UP WORK
There are many approaches and levels to improving productivity. There's more to it than simply keeping busy or working fast. How error-proof and efficient are the work processes? Everyone could be busily creating bad products or completing tasks that don't contribute to the bottom line. Manufacturers today must be highly productive while they continuously improve quality, perhaps by implementing corrective and preventive measures, holding kaizen events, etc. If your workforce is trained and empowered to help eliminate waste from the operation, great strides can be achieved in a manner that all employees can take pride in. That's what lean manufacturing is all about.
BE A LITTLE NEATER
Anna's intent was to make her work more legible and to organize her important items, so she could find whatever she might need. Manufacturing also needs documentation to be easy to comprehend, so we can avoid misinterpretation. We also need to store our items, tools, raw materials, parts, documents, so that it's clear where everything belongs and such that anything not in use will be found at its designated location. This helps ensure that we provide a safe workplace (see goal No. 1) and that we don't waste time looking for things (see goal No. 3), and it's clearly a 5S concept to maintain a place for everything, with everything in its place (see goal No. 4).
Anna's goals touch on crucial concepts underlying much of what we do today as we strive to apply the ideals of quality management to manufacturing. As it happened, Wyoming Steel Supply was active in all these areas when I made the connection between its efforts and Anna's list.
See the table below.
Quality Policy
Wyoming Steel Supply will actively demonstrate our full commitment to serving the needs of customers, employees, the company itself, and the community, as detailed below:
Commitment to Customers
Providing quality products and services through:
Dedication to fulfilling requirements
Relationships and collaboration
Seeking win-win scenarios
Maximizing value for the customer
Qualified, committed employees
Technical support
Standardization
Commitment to the Company
Ensuring financial strength and viability through:
Business planning
Responsible growth
Cost management
Embracing change
Maximizing profitability
Continuous improvement
Registration
Commitment to Employees
Sustaining individuals? well being, through:
Maintaining a safe, healthy environment
Treating each other like family
Recognizing contributions
Cultivating trust, fairness, and respect
Commitment to the Community
Being responsive to the needs of:
The community around us
The general public
The environment
Anna gets points for her goals, simplicity and for her wisdom beyond her years. Good luck in your efforts to use goals, metrics, lean manufacturing, 5S, and other quality tools to drive continuous improvement in your company.
About the author
Dave Heberling has spent 27 years in labs and quality departments being responsible for characterizing sheet steel products, developing quality systems and improvements, and helping resolve customer issues. The biggest chunks of that experience were at Armco/AK Steel and SOS Metals. Dave is now pleased to be directing the quality effort at Wyoming Steel Supply Inc., a steel service center in southwestern Ohio that is registered to ISO 9001:2000.
CHANGE IN THNKING LATERAL vs LOGICAL
A physics exam question asked students to describe how they would use a barometer to measure the height of a skyscraper. One student who failed the test contested that his answer was correct. He was given a second chance to defend his position, verbally, to the professor. When the student didn't answer right away, the professor challenged him stating that he didn't have an answer after all. At this point, the student said that he had lots of answers, only he wasn't sure which answer the professor wanted. He started by giving the following answers:
Tie the barometer to a string and lower that from the roof of the skyscraper. When it touched the ground, add the length of the string with the length of the instrument and calculate the height of the building.
Go to the caretaker's office and offer him the barometer in exchange for a look at the buildings plans to get the height of the skyscraper.
· Go the boring route of calculating the difference of the pressure at the base and at the top of the building to determine the height of the skyscraper.
Most of us would have thought of only the last solution because that is how we are taught to think logically. However, lateral thinking is more fun and can sometimes lead to easier and better solutions.
Going the logical route doesn't always produce the best answer, but we're taught to think logically in school using a step-by-step method. In a sense, logic makes for boring solutions and can take away our ability to think freely. Logic can limit our thinking and often our ability to explore new solutions. Here's another example to prove that concept:
Many years ago, in a small Indian village, a farmer had the misfortune of owing a large sum of money to a village moneylender. The moneylender, who was old and ugly, fancied the farmer's beautiful daughter, so he proposed a bargain. He said he would forgo the farmer's debt if he could marry his daughter. The farmer and his daughter were horrified by the proposal.
The cunning moneylender suggested that they let providence decide the matter. He told them that he would put a black pebble and a white pebble into an empty pouch. Then the girl would have to pick one pebble from the bag:
· If she picked the black pebble, she would become his wife and her father's debt would be forgiven.
· If she picked the white pebble, she need not marry him and her father's debt would still be forgiven.
· If she refused to pick a pebble, her father would be thrown into jail.
They were standing on a pebble-strewn path in the farmer's field. As they talked, the moneylender bent over and picked up two pebbles. The sharp-eyed girl noticed that he had picked up two black pebbles and put them into the pouch. He then asked the girl to pick a pebble from the pouch.
What would you have done if you were the girl? If you had to advise her, what would you have told her? Logical analysis produces three possibilities:
· The girl should refuse to take a pebble.
· The girl should show that there were two black pebbles in the pouch and expose the moneylender as a cheat.
· The girl should pick a black pebble and sacrifice herself to save her father from his debt and imprisonment.
The girl's dilemma cannot be solved with traditional logical thinking. To not marry the moneylender and to have her father's debt forgiven, none of these choices will work. However, thinking laterally, she was able to come up with this creative solution. The girl put her hand into the moneybag and drew out a pebble. Without looking at it, she fumbled and let it fall onto the pebble-strewn path where it immediately became lost among all the other pebbles.
Oh, how clumsy of me, she said. But if you look into the bag for the one that is left, you will be able to tell which pebble I picked.
With the black pebble remaining, it must be assumed that she picked the white one. Because the moneylender dare not admit his dishonesty, the girl changed what seemed to be an impossible situation into an extremely advantageous one.
This and the first example enable us to see the difference between lateral and logical thinking. It helps us redefine the problem statement and see it in a different light. It tells us that most complex problems have a solution. It also shows that either we don't attempt to think or haven't been taught to think laterally. Fortunately, there are many tools (e.g., brain-storming, mind mapping, flowcharting, etc.) that can help us expand our thinking to arrive at creative solutions. While logic has its place and we cannot do without it, let's give our brains some lateral thoughts. For a change, stop thinking logically!
About The Author
About the author Akhilesh Gulati has more than 18 years of experience in operations and process improvement, innovation, design, and quality management. Gulati is a Six Sigma Master Black Belt, past section chair of the American Society for Quality, a former senior examiner for the California State Quality Awards, and a principal of PIVOT Management Consultants. He holds bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Michigan and an M.B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles.
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM PROCESS INTER-RELATION
You don?t have to be blind
by Denise Robitaille
Three blind men sat in the market place. One said to the others: ?Would it not be a wondrous thing to know the nature of an elephant?? His companion agreed, ?Yes, it would indeed be wondrous.?
A merchant standing nearby overheard the men?s conversation. He went over to the trio and said, ?I have been listening to your conversation and I believe that I could get an elephant and bring it here to you. Is this something you would like?? The three men nodded eagerly, saying, ?Yes, oh please, sir. This would certainly help us to know the nature of an elephant.?
The merchant went away and returned several hours later, leading a docile pachyderm. The first blind man stood before the great beast and felt his long, muscular, curling trunk. As he sat down, the second man rose and, standing before the elephant, he felt the animal?s two sturdy front legs. Finally, the last blind man, who had been sitting behind the elephant, rose and felt the creature?s insubstantial tail. When they had all finished, the merchant led the elephant away.
Afterwards, the men sat down and began to discuss what they?d learned about the nature of an elephant. The first blind man said, ?An elephant is like a great sinuous snake, curling and grasping. It is flexible and strong.? The second blind man said, ?Why, no! An elephant is like two great trees rooted to the ground. It may be strong, but it is rigid and not easily moved.? The third blind man was utterly befuddled. He protested, ?An elephant is not strong at all. It is a small and wispy thing that blows in the slightest breeze.?
The men argued long and late into the night. But they could never arrive at a conclusion as to the nature of an elephant, because none had beheld the entire beast.
This delightful tale comes to us out of India?s rich folklore. Like so many of the older tales from around the world, it?s always a little surprising to see the applicability to our modern lives.
The three men are attempting to understand something without having adequate information. No matter how hard they try, they can?t come up with a correct image of the elephant because each has segmented and incomplete facts. They also are hampered by an inability to perceive the various working parts as a whole. The rigid legs that can plant themselves firmly make it possible for the animal to use its trunk for lifting. And while first impressions may suggest that they are unmoving, additional observation would let us see that elephants travel extensively. There?s a lot that goes into understanding the nature of an elephant.
It?s this same concept that underlies the systems approach to management. To be able to manage an organization?s multiple processes effectively it?s essential to understand how they?re interrelated and the effect that each component has on the other member parts.
Cultivating this approach will help you to improve the effectiveness of many of your processes. The following are tools that help get the complete picture.
· Root cause analysis: Provides a better understanding of the nature of a problem by considering the various, sometimes seemingly unrelated, contributing factors.
· Corrective action: Provides a clearer view of all the elements that need to be considered when developing and implementing an effective corrective action plan.
· Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA): Provides a broader perspective on the factors that could cause a product defect or a process breakdown.
· Communication: Provides effective and inclusive communication to ensure that the interests of stakeholders are not ignored and that individuals understand requirements and instructions.
· Design control: Provides consistent adherence to practices that ensure reviews of requirements, risks, supplier issues, manufacturability and capacity constraints.
A systems approach to management is nothing more than ensuring that everyone understands your organization?your entire beast.
About the author
Denise Robitaille has helped companies in diverse fields achieve ISO 9001 registration. She's an RAB-certified lead assessor, ASQ-certified quality auditor and senior member of the American Society for Quality. Robitaille is also a member of the U.S. TAG to ISO/TC 176, the committee responsible for updating the ISO 9000 standard series. She's the author of numerous articles as well as The Corrective Action Handbook, The Preventive Action Handbook and The Management Review Handbook, all published by Paton Professional
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