This week on 5 Questions we meet Ken Rolfes, a very active member of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence.
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1.Who are you? What organization are you with? What are your current Lean-Oriented activities?
After 30 years in operations and general management, I am currently President and founder of KDR Associates, a five year old consulting company dedicated to educating and enabling client business leaders and their organizations to achieve high-performance results.
Current activities include coaching, educating and guiding lean management system development for clients to either begin or accelerate their lean journey. Our goal with each client is to enable them to achieve bottom-line results and top-line growth from their continuous improvement efforts.
2.How, when and why did you get introduced to lean and what fueled and fuels the passion?
In 1980 as a Purchasing Manager in the electronics business I had a "wake up call." I was sourcing a power supply and found that I could purchase a completely assembled, tested, and delivered power supply from Japan for less than I could buy the materials in the U.S. As an Industrial Engineer with a Masters in Finance, I knew something had to be different with their business process. They were not selling this below cost. Investigation led me to discover that alternate methods of manufacturing were being used, which was then referred to as The Toyota Production System or Just-in-Time. I knew at that point for companies survive, we had to change the way we did business.
My quest for knowledge about this system led me to research companies like Toyota, Kawasaki, and even Hewlett Packard who were using Just-In-Time. Later in the mid-1980s the formation of AME, provided me the opportunity to visit, see and learn first-hand the principles, tools, and methodology of the Toyota Production System. As operations manager, I was able to implement them in my plant, see the results first hand and avoid being "outsourced." I was hooked.
Today the world economy has brought global competition to everyone's front door. What fuels the passion is that I have children and grandchildren who depend on the continued success of our U.S. economy. Lean Management Systems have demonstrated time and time again superior results over our traditional management systems to ensure the viability of a business.
3.What is the most powerful aspect of lean?
The most powerful aspect of lean is that it enables the entire organization to contribute to creating growth. The techniques and activities differ according to the application at hand, but they have the same underlying principle: creating value for the customer and redeploying non-value-adding activities into ones that add value to sustain the business and fuel growth.
4.What is the most misunderstood or unrecognized aspect of lean?
The "respect for people" principle continues to be unrecognized, ignored, or misunderstood by most senior managers. Lean addresses this in its definition of waste and the involvement of people in improving the business.
Unfortunately, Lean is viewed by many as efficiency or cost reduction methodology, and the way managers like to learn about Lean is through industrial touring. It is very difficult to see the "respect for people" principle in operation during industrial touring. Consider for example the automotive industry, the plants display many of the lean tools we have learned about, yet the adversarial employee-management relationship that persists hinders company performance. "Respect for people" is the principle that enables real customer focus and continuous improvement. It also is the biggest challenge for management.
5.What in your opinion is the biggest opportunity for lean in today's world? How can that be accomplished?
If by today's world you mean the current economic environment and all its ramifications including energy and global warming, that is a huge question.
The economic conditions today require companies to take a hard look at their internal organization and work processes to find ways to do more with less. Most companies depend on the 15% of the organization in management positions to provide ideas to solve business problems. The biggest opportunity is to educate every person in the organization on the business they are in and engage their mental abilities to provide ideas and make improvements. In this current financial market having long extended supply chains consuming energy and requiring high working capital investment becomes questionable. Company leadership needs to reduce the emphasis on outsourcing to low labor cost countries and task their organizations to shorten lead times, reduce energy usage and waste generation. Lean provides the systems thinking and considers all of the process interactions to give informed people the tools to act on these challenges. How this is accomplished is to view people as the resource for answers rather than a cost problem.