The highlight of this week was a Kaikaku-tour to the Douwe Egberts Factory in Joure (NL), where we witnessed an example of an ideal steering and accountability structure based on perfectly aligned KPI’s.

I continued with facilitated 2 more Kaizen workshops where each participant was coached to come up with one Kaizen to reduce at least one of the 8 wastes on their own workstation.

Thirdly, after reading a Dutch book about social media in business environments, I asked a question concerning our Lean implementation in Linked-in groups I participate and our company’s internal social media network, to experiment with knowledge gathering for specific actions using Social Media.

This week I trained the first of five mini Kaizen workshop (for a entire shift) on how to implement kaizens in our plant. The goal was to teach people to focus on improvements they can implement themselves.

During my Gemba-walks I coached three operators one-to-one with implementing their first Kaizen in practice and facilitated six more kaizens of other operators.

I also spent one day in production, working with the operators to learn about the problems they encounter in our process industry plant. I even found a task which was not yet included in our Processmap or timestudy.

Tools visualize the problems, but the people solve them

- Mike Rother

In ‘The Lean Manager’,  Ballé & Ballé distinguish two different management styles: Traditional management (management through systems) and Lean Management (Management-based on solving problems). In this novel, a factory in France undergoes a Lean transformation in which the seven steps of management based on problem solving are completed. In addition, the three principles of continuous improvement are described: creating clear goals (1), five questions to manage Kaizen (2) and Genchi Genbutsu (3).

“Toyota Kata” by Mike Rother (2010) distinguishes itself from other books on the Toyota Production System in the way he describes the means of the tools that are used in Lean implementations. Tools like Heijunka (leveling of production) and Kanban are used within Toyota not with the goal to be implemented, but as a tool to find the next improvement.
The continuous learning necessary to implement the tools is described by Rother as the improvement Kata, where Kata is Japanese for ‘organizational routines’. In addition to the improvement kata Rother also describes a Coaching Kata, which describes the need to coach people in sustaining the improvements in their processes.

Toyota has developed its production system around eliminating three enemies of Lean: Muda (waste), Muri (overburden) and Mura (unevenness) (Liker, 2004).
Muda is the direct obstacle of flow. As written below, there are 8 distinctive types of muda which all lead to waiting times, and therefore longer lead times in a process. Simply taking out the muda does not work. Usually, there is a reason why the muda is there and this reason often has to do with the other two enemies: muri and mura.  This means the three enemies of Lean are interrelated and should therefore be taken into account simultaneously.

Muda is the Japanese word for waste and includes non value adding activities that prevent flow and lead to longer lead times. We consider all activities as non value adding, that a customer would not be willing to pay for if he would have the chance to decide. Originally, (Ohno, 1988) defined seven types of waste, all of which are interrelated. A little later, an eighth waste was added to the Toyota handbook (Liker, 2004).
Here are the eight different wastes as descibed in Lean Transformations (Panneman, 2017), each with an example of that waste production and in the office environment and lean tools on how to find and eliminate them. As Mnemonic device, the first letters of the eight wastes form the acronym DOWNTIME.

The Toyota Production System is a system built around minimizing three factors influencing a process: Muda (waste),Mura (variation) and Muri (overburden). These three together form the 3M Model. This article offers some more theory on Mura – variation – and how to reduce it. Variation exists in many forms and influences efficiency of a process in multiple ways.  There is variance in customer demand, variance in product mix, variance in production methods within a plant or within processing times and variance in way of working.

Muri, or overburden, means that operators or machines are pushed through their natural limits, which leads to problems (Liker, 2004). The quality of the output suffers because of the state of the machine or person performing the output is in, which means muri leads to muda (Hines, Found, & Griffiths, 2011). This article describes a big part of a chapter in my book Lean Transformations, which explains how you can understand muri in both the machine environment as well as the human resource management (Panneman, 2017).
One example is the overheating the battery of an old car which leads to breakdowns (=defects), or using heavy software on your personal computer that does not have the memory power to do calculations quickly, which leads to waiting time.
In terms of human muri, being stressed can lead to you wanting to do something really quickly, which usually leads to more defects. Or even worse, you get overburdened and cannot work at all for a while.