Taking Lean Beyond Your Four Walls

             

Lean Nation,

As you navigate your quality and process improvement journey, you will inevitably need to engage suppliers and customers in your improvement work.  While you can create and deliver tremendous value within your four walls, truly excellent organizations reach into their entire value chain to take even more waste out of their enterprise.

Many questions arise when facing this opportunity.  When is the right time to move outside your organization? How do you assess the opportunity? What are the logistics for this engagement?  Let me offer a few ideas on this specific topic.  This list is by no means inclusive of all the considerations, but can get you pointed in the right direction.

1) It is easier to engage outside the organization, when you have cleaned up your own sand box first.  Asking a different organization to change while you live in a sea of waste is risky.  Particularly of you are engaging a customer.

2) Ensure you have set the engagement and corresponding activities as a true win/win endeavor.  Value should be created for both organizations.  While you might get excited about the cost saving opportunities for your organization, removing waste form the extended enterprise should result in savings for your partner as well.   With a win-win approach, you can buy yourself some time in renegotiating service level agreements and pricing changes.  Get the benefits, evaluate the results, and share in the opportunities afforded by the improvements.

3)Be sure you have access to the people doing the work.  Bantering about improvement with managers between organizations rarely results in meaningful process change.   In a lean environment process, changes involve lead-times, and cycle times, and takt times.   The result of any new process should be new standard work managed visually.  The people that do the work, should be part of the problem identification and the solution.

4)  The world is flat.  Suppliers and customers often operate in different time zones, in different countries, and in different languages.  Determining how to set up the logistics of the improvement needs to be carefully thought out.  Clearly it would be great to engage face to face in the Gemba. That is not always feasible so technology will need to be utilized.  Translation services may need to be available.  The time we start might be different to accommodate time zone differences.   The good news is platforms such as Zoom and MS Team’s have made virtual sharing easier and cheaper than it has ever been. 

5) Don’t take shortcuts.  It’s easy to move post it notes around on a piece of flip chart paper and declare improvement success.  But spending the time to understand current conditions, gather time observations, calculate takt time, and build the loading diagram will enable you to see the most waste.   This is no simple task. Maybe non-disclosure agreements need to be signed.  There needs to be a high level of trust at a minimum. But creating standard work with processes balanced to takt time enabling flow, and creating pull systems with technology, and eliminating defects is what delivers breakthrough improvements.

I’m sure there are other important considerations in taking lean outside your four walls.  What experiences do you have?  What lessons have you learned?

 

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw

President and Sensei, Breakthrough Horizons

www.breakthroughhorizons.com


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