By Don Kivell
This article is from the Superfactory Archives, an archive of content from the Superfactory website that existed from 1997 to 2012.
You always hear vendors say that in order for customers to successfully implement new products users must first secure management buy-in. In other words, management must wholeheartedly support the change that is being made.
When it comes to putting lean manufacturing in place, management cannot simply provide buy-in. Instead they must commit to doing everything they can to help employees to set up new procedures and keep them running smoothly. Management must be intimately involved in the continuous improvement process, as part of a steering committee.
At Tinnerman Palnut Engineered Products Inc. in Hamilton, ON, a manufacturer with about 250 employees, its steering committee is in the first year of a three-year plan expected to yield a few million dollars worth of savings.
The facility is one of five integrated plants the company owns – the other four located in the US – that are involved in plastic injection moulding, metalforming, finish (meaning heat treating, plating and coating), and automated assembly for automotive and several other industries.
The steering committee we put in place at Tinnerman is made up of the vice-president of operations and its senior managers, who offer, among other expertise and skills, knowledge of the company’s business goals and control over the resources that will be used to make lean efforts fly.
Out of the steering committee we also put in place a lean champion. This can be the president or one of the senior managers. In this case it’s Kit Staley, manager of materials. The individual chosen as a lean champion must have strong knowledge and experience in lean manufacturing and continuous improvement, as well as good project management skills.
Staley works directly with the lean leaders. Tinnerman has three of them, and they facilitate the projects that have been set by the senior managers. Under the lean leaders are team leaders, one of whom is assigned to each project. These team leaders each select their team members.
One of the lean facilitators is assigned to each team as well, to train team members on lean manufacturing techniques and keep the team on track so they achieve the goals set by the steering committee.
Depending on the size of an organization, the steering committee will be larger or smaller, more or less complex. But trust me, the approach can work anywhere. I’ve set up steering committees at a range of facilities, including a plant with nine people and one with 450. They are all improving using the same approach.
It may sound simple, but continuous improvement is, as the name implies, continuous. And the success of the steering committee approaches hinges upon having a comprehensive regular meeting between all team members, lean leaders and facilitators and management. At Tinnerman, this meeting happens monthly.
It’s not an hour-long session where attendance is optional. In fact, it’s a day-long commitment in which management sits and listens to the details of each and every project, good and bad, to determine how – or if – it can assist each team to move ahead productively. The full day of meetings is not an easy thing to maintain at a senior management level, but it’s critical. It demonstrates management’s commitment to the process, and provides time for listening, understanding and the enablement of all lean projects.
One of the most important tasks performed at the monthly meeting is the removal – if possible and viable – of certain roadblocks. These can be financial or logistical. Perhaps, in order to eliminate waste, a machine is required to perform a process, or the order of certain production procedures must be altered. Maybe somebody from maintenance must be made more available to keep a machine from failing and slowing production down too often. The steering committee must try to free up the resources to make these changes happen.
According to Staley, at most companies it’s very typical for middle management to be the group slowing lean initiatives down.. “It’s that middle management group that feels a bit threatened, and we have to work quite a bit with them to make them understand that this is improving their work environment as well as everybody else’s.”
So the regular monthly meeting, besides reminding everyone aware of the importance and benefits of current lean efforts, acts as a deadline to the teams to keep their projects moving forward. They must get all their information up to date as well, so they can report their progress. This process is eased at Tinnerman since teams use a very formal reporting document and everybody reports things exactly the same way on the document.
The document design is critical, because it means everyone in the plant speaks the same language when it comes to lean and continuous improvement. In the past, even Tinnerman lean teams that had to present to their managers’ managers have been well understood.
According to Tinnerman’s vice-president of operations, Ken Barclay, the mobilization of resources to support each project is the true hindrance at a root level. This is because most of the functional units that must be mobilized, whether in maintenance or engineering or another area, already have their own day-to-day responsibilities.
As a result, any change to schedules or responsibilities must be done in an organized and practical way. As managers know from experience, chaos breeds chaos. If you keep getting into trouble and going into firefighting mode, you eventually enter your own permanent firefighting mode. “To break your managers out of this daily routine and begin focusing on a truly continuous improvement initiative isn’t as easy as it appears on the surface,” says Barclay. “And that’s what you struggle with.”
With lean, the biggest challenge is trying to educate everybody on the benefits, because for most it is a brand new technique. And while some people immediately see it as a value, others don’t. It’s a traditional management struggle. Management will say ‘I make the call and that’s that.’ With a steering committee approach, management is now saying ‘No, let’s get together and talk about it and if everybody thinks it’s a good decision then we’ll present something back to you.’
Managers still have the final say, but if everyone does their homework the right course of action will be plainly obvious. Now everybody’s pulling in the same direction, and the steering committee really doesn’t have to do much more than steer.