Page 194 - How To Implement Lean Manufacturing

172 Cha pte r T e n

In this case, as is always the case, leadership was
needed to improve this situation. Again, I cannot say
“Remove the barriers that
it better than Deming, so I wrap up this section with
rob the hourly worker of this some words of his also from The Deming Route to Pro-
right to pride of workmanship. ductivity and Quality.
The responsibility of manage- This story-within-a-story shows the manifest
ment must be changed… ” power of transparency. Once the workers could
—(Point 12) “see” what was wanted through clearer goals, and
once they could “see” what they were doing through
better metrics, they simply performed better and the
“Institute leadership. The system improved. The workers were already moti-
aim of leadership should be vated; they simply needed the proper tools and then
to help people, machines and they could make the system perform at a higher
level.
gadgets to do a better job.
This is their story.
Supervision of management
A story that is repeated way too often.
is in needs of overhaul, as well
At some level, this is your story as well. Don’t
as supervision of production forget it.
”
workers.
—(Point 10) Back to Transparency
W. Edwards Deming
Just how did the greater level of transparency work
for the future activities? First, now the hourly pro-
duction was more accurate and we could determine if we were performing as planned.
At the top of the hour, the supervisor would enter the production rate, which was now
within 48 units of being exact; or accurate to within four minutes of the schedule. Second,
if we were off schedule, we could look at:
• The rejected product segregation bins to see if we had a quality problem, or…
• Look at the Andon log to see if downtime had been a problem, or…
• Look at the cycle-time information to see if the process was performing to cycle
time

Generally, once we had this information, it was easy to focus our attention on the
specific problem machine or issue, for Rapid Response PDCA.
We were not done improving the transparency of this system, but we had been
able to improve significantly. Earlier, we were trying to solve problems 24 hours after
they happened and having very low success rates. Now we could find out nearly all
the data we needed to solve most problems in a 15-minute window. We had made
significant progress and it was largely due to the transparency we had built into the
system.

Transparency and Imagination
Transparency is one of those concepts that is truly ripe for development as part of Lean
manufacturing—we are only limited by our imagination. With transparency, along with
the SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Dies; quick changeovers) and poka-yoke technolo-
gies, there simply is no end to what we can develop to fully exploit these tactics. Just
keep two concepts in mind.