To encourage employees to work together in improving business processes bottom-up, tools need to be introduced to facilitate them. This is what the market of methodsstands for for. The Lean philosophy includes both technical and cultural aspects. It is important for the organization to choose the right tools fitting the specific situation the organization is in and encourage the right cultural aspects necessary to use the tools properly. Simply copying implementations of other factories seldom leads to extraordinary results. The Lean tools need to be built from within the organization, bottom-up, to make sure all employees learn how to use them properly.

 This week, safety played an important part in my work. In our factory we currently experience the link between ‘number of near misses’ (unsafe situations) and the ‘number of accidents’. The number of handed-in near misses has reduced drastically in 2013 compared to 2012 and unfortunately we now have more reported accidents in the 5 months of 2013 than we had in the entire year 2012. To keep daily focus on safety issues we have multiple tools to our disposal.

  This week, I learned to distinguish three levels of Visual Management.

  This week we made plans for a trial in production in visualizing our production schedule at shift level. One of the gaps in our Steering and accountability structure pointed out by Solving Efeso was the use of a monthly and weekly production schedule, which are not cascaded into a daily or hourly production plan. At the shop floor, OEE is measured, but there is no clear visual signal which shows whether or not customer orders are delivered in time.

  This week the operators from the Autonomous Maintenance group set a new goal for themselves: reduce the administrative burden in production. They set-up a brown paper in a room with all the different check lists and forms operators need to fill in during their shifts at different workstations, which sometimes also need to be digitized as well.

  One of the highlights this week was the implementation of a supermarket for packaging materials in one of our production halls. There are two production lines in the hall of which the new supermarket contains 21% en 84% of materials which the operators can pull for use. The warehouse checks and refills the supermarket daily. Reducing the need to order and check for available materials each shift reduces the workload for operators with 500 hours in sending and ordering materials per year.

This week we evaluated our new accountability meeting we implemented to improve the link between our meeting structure and our KPI breakdown. New in this meeting was the way the KPI’s were set up on the communication board: all KPI’s are shown in green and red squares.
in 15 minutes, 6 A4 forms are discussed which show results from all standard work in all value streams like safety rounds, 6S audits, breakdowns and OEE and production planning. After these 15 minutes there is some time scheduled to discuss problems of each value stream which are not part of the standard work tasks.

Because of the success of this new way of visualizing KPI’s (on a high level only: done/not-done, ok/not ok) we will improve our communication cells in the factory as well. The KPI’s which now contain up to six trending (mostly computer generated) charts will be replaced with one A4 paper where all behavioral indicators are shown

  Who should be following up on kaizen (or improvement suggestions)? Is it the group leader, a support group (like our Lean facilitating team) or someone else? In our factory, around 20% of suggestions (like machine modifications) handed in by operators cannot be implemented by the person suggesting it and therefore need support and resources from our technical staff.

This week, trough our internal social network, I learned about a tool to measure the level of consensus in a team for a certain decision. Measuring consensus helps deciding whether or not to continue a discussion about the decision. The tool to use is the FIST TO FIVE, where all participants are asked to vote for the decision with their hands: