Just Keep Tightening the Screws

By Bill Waddell

One of the first questions we ask when visiting a business for the first time is: “What is your current production status?” We then listen for what unit of time is used in the response. If the answer is something like, “We hope to ship 500 units this month”, we’ll then recommend driving the business on a weekly basis, instead of monthly.

What does this accomplish? Most companies conjure up a disproportionate percentage of production and make a disproportionate percentage of shipments in the last week of the month. Plants have learned all of the tricks necessary to pull out all of stops and overcome obstacles by brute force to make the numbers. Go ahead and announce that you’re no longer interested in monthly production, shipments and budget performance. Instead, measure everyone on their performance to each of four equal weeks.

There will be a great deal of pain as all of the routine problems come to the surface - poor vendor deliveries, long set ups, machine reliability problems, etc... But sooner or later, the plant will figure it out. When they do, change the measurement criteria to daily performance. Then to hourly.

Every time you put pressure on the system to execute consistently in smaller time increments, you are forcing more variability in the processes to come to the surface. You can overcome a vendor shipping three days late if you have all month to do it - it's impossible to overcome parts three days late if you have to make the week. It will not take long before the old tools - and the brute force approach - won't get the job done. As is gets harder and harder to reduce set up times and fix quality problems, plant management will be more and more receptive to Lean. You won't have to convince anyone to learn SMED - they will be desperate to learn Shingo's set up reduction techniques and principles.

I learned that from a guy who buys small, under-performing manufacturing companies and whips 'em into shape. He had neither the time nor the inclination to be “hands on” with driving Lean transformations in all of these companies. Instead, he drove them to shorter performance intervals. When they squealed loud enough, he suggested that they go out and learn something new about Lean. Through this method, he created motivated management teams, eager to become Lean, if for no other reason than to get him off of their backs.

It works.

Bill Waddell is a LEAN Affiliate and president and founder of Best Manufacturing Practices. Over the past 20 years, he has worked with a variety of large to mid-sized companies including recent engagements with Copeland Corporation, resulting in the Emerson Electric President's Award, and with United Defense, resulting in their Aberdeen plant winning the U.S. Navy’s Best Manufacturing Practices Award. Bill also played a key role in the turnaround efforts at Cincinnati Microwave and McCulloch Corporation. His experience includes working with Maquiladora plants in Mexico and with offshore plants, particularly in southern China.

Bill is the author of a number of articles on virtually every aspect of lean. He is a co-author of “Rebirth of American Manufacturing” and is currently working on a book with Hiroyuki Hirano, Japan’s leading authority on lean manufacturing and industrial engineering