Strategy Planning and Deployment: A Tool to Achieve Excellence

Strategy is not about doing the important things but rather the process of choosing and deciding the plan forward.

Image Source: Morsa Images / E+ / Getty Images Plus

Traditional planning methodologies focus on steering an organization in the direction desired by top management, often referred to as management by objective (MBO). Unfortunately, as we know, you can’t achieve the desired results by just dictating individual targets.

Companies must determine ahead of time what the vision and direction will be. A proper strategy must assign clear responsibilities and show what resources are to be committed. Metrics and timelines must be defined. Management must decide what core elements are to be deployed and when.

Strategy deployment is the system for setting management’s compass toward True North. It is a tool to align people, activities, and performance metrics with strategic priorities. It enables members of the organization to work together in the most creative way to achieve the strategic intent.

Strategy is not about doing the important things but rather the process of choosing, the responsibility of leaders to grasp the situation and decide the plan forward. I always tell others that strategy deployment is a focusing mechanism. This is about sharpening your focus by selecting the vital few breakthrough objectives. The job of management is to steer towards those priorities that will bring the organization into alignment with customer demands.

To learn more about creating a strategic plan, aligning employees to execute, and how to check and adjust as needed head over to Quality Magazine's publication "Strategy Planning and Deployment: A Tool to Achieve Excellence."

The Role of Lean Daily Management in Sustaining a Lean Culture

Image Source: Morsa Images / E+ / Getty Images

Many companies that experience great success with Lean hold kaizen workshops to rapidly implement Lean tools. It’s no secret, however, that many of these companies find that the improved system quickly reverts back to its non-Lean state. The problem is that Lean is a people-dependent system.  All the Lean tools, such as posting standard work, require people to use them daily and if they do not understand them, or care about them, the tools will quickly decay. We need to develop people so that they want to use the tools for daily improvement. There is no single tool that develops people, but there is a methodology that can aid in their development often referred to as Lean Daily Management.

Lean Daily Management is a systematic strategy for building Lean habits and managing continuous improvement and daily operations in the workplace. It involves multiple aspects, such as Leader Standard Work and Lean management routines, visual management boards, daily accountability, and problem-solving where the work happens (Gemba).

Lean organizations make use of Lean Daily Management systems, a structured process to focus employee’s actions to continuously improve their day-to-day work. Lean Daily Management empowers employees to identify potential process concerns, recommend potential solutions, and learn by implementing process changes. Lean Daily Management, if done right, can be a critical tool in any organization’s toolbox to engage frontline staff in problem-solving and to deliver customer value.

...

Read more from my article published by Quality Magazine: The Role of Lean Daily Management in Sustaining a Lean Culture

With Lean day-to-day management, employees are empowered as they play an active role in detecting and resolving problems.

The Secrets to Creating an Effective Value Stream Map

Business is growing more competitive every day. In order to keep up with customer demand and expectations, companies are having to work faster and be more efficient than ever before. Value stream management is an emerging business process intended to gauge the flow of value into business resources and activities as well as the flow of value back into the business.

Value stream mapping helps a business oversee the complete end-to-end activity cycle and measure the success of that activity cycle. In short, value stream mapping helps a business see what works and what doesn't. This lets a business focus on beneficial initiatives while reducing or limiting less-valuable activities and initiatives.

What is value stream mapping?

Value stream mapping is a tremendously valuable tool for improving a process. Well suited for a broad range of industries and processes. A value stream map is a visual depiction of the flow of materials and information that provide the customer with a product or service.  

To understand value stream mapping, we need to first understand what a “value stream” is. Simply put, a value stream is a series of steps that occur to provide the product or service that their customers want or need. In order to provide the product or service that the customers desire, every company has a set of steps that are required. Value stream mapping enables us to better understand what these steps are, where the value is added, where it’s not, and more importantly, how to improve upon the collective process.

The value stream map provides us with a structured visual image of the key steps and corresponding data needed to understand and intelligently make improvements that optimize the entire process, not just one section at the expense of another. It also describes the lead time of various operations and can be used as a starting point for analyzing necessary activities and the amount of waste in the value stream.

Value-stream mapping is a useful tool for grasping the current situation and for planning improvements. A current state value-stream map depicts the current situation as is. A future state value-stream map depicts what the value stream should look like after planned improvements have been implemented.

You can learn more in my article published in Quality Magazine: The Secrets to Creating an Effective Value Stream Map

Value stream mapping is a powerful tool that reveals every step of your activity cycle, helping you identify what drives success and what doesn't. By spotlighting high-impact initiatives and streamlining less valuable ones, you'll optimize efficiency and maximize results. Discover what truly works and transform your business today!

Podcast: Why Quality Professionals Should Consider Kaizen

I recently wrote an article for Quality Magazine on Kaizen where I explain why kaizen is a valuable tool that probably not enough companies take advantage of. If you want to be able to look at your process, if you want to uncover what pains you, these are the kinds of things that Kaizen allows you to do. 

A few weeks ago I sat down with Michelle Bangert, Managing Editor, for a podcast to introduce the article.

Michelle: So much has changed with lean and Kaizen, but is there anything you think today that quality professionals should know about Kaizen?

Tim: Yeah, I think it's a really valuable tool. Probably not enough companies do that. I think it's kind of a concept that maybe is foreign to a lot of people, but it's really just an improvement idea that allows us to get a group of people together, continually look at opportunities for improvement. So if you want to be able to look at your process, if you want to uncover what maybe is, it pains you, if you want to be able to do that, these are the kinds of things that Kaizen allows you to do. So it allows us to challenge the status quo, things that we take for granted, get the right people in the right room and come up with a new process to do things better, more efficiently in the future.

Michelle: I love that you said, if it ain't broke, don't fix it policy. It's still, let's keep fixing things and make it better because someone's doing that. And so we have to keep up. So that was very smart. That's probably the better way. Definitely. So can you remember the first time you were involved in a Kaizen event or one of the early ones you did?

Tim: Yeah, one of the earliest ones I probably did was on the shop floor. You know, I think there's a difference between doing it in the office and doing it on the shop floor. And certainly on the shop floor, you can do things that are physically transformational, you can pick up the machinery of the cell and move it around. So those are very exciting. So I did a Kaizen event that was around changing the physical layout. So we did things that were very, I guess, traditional where you might pass the product along to an area. And we wanted to do a change where we would consolidate the footprint of the cell and do more U-shaped manufacturing cell and parts would be provided from the back of the cell and you would do a certain amount of the work content and you would pass it to the next operation instead of what was more traditional manufacturing. So that was the first Kaizen I ever did and I think you know you probably can read lots of stories online about the U-shaped cells and doing that kind of configuration. But for small piece parts, that's a very common approach to do that. But different than you might tackle in the office, first office guys than I ever did was a value stream mapping activity. Typically in the office, you can't see the waste, the same that you might see in a factory. So you have to map out the processes and you might walk it visually. You pick a process and try to walk that from a customer standpoint and understand all the processes that occur there. So typically a value stream map might be a way to do that technique.

Michelle: Definitely a lot of value, regardless of which approach you're doing. Makes sense. Can you think of any that were especially memorable, whether in a good way or a bad way where one worked really well or maybe didn't work the way you wanted?

Tim: I think the ones that are most memorable are the ones that I think people say that something couldn't occur there or somebody might be challenging. So certainly when I was at wire mold, we had that Kaizen area that They said the group leader was really resistant to change and you know this couldn't be done and I took it as a personal challenge to see what we could do there. So I think people felt that somebody was adversarial there. The group leader was somebody that was against change and it really wasn't the case. It was trying to get to understand like, where they came from. And it wasn't that they were against continuous improvement. They actually had suggested lots of ideas for improvement. They didn't want to be changed. They wanted to be heard. So I went in there with the tact of, well, why don't you just try it, you know. If I prove me wrong kind of mentality, right? You know, let's just try it this way. If I'm wrong, then, you know, but then, you know, so be it. We'll try it your way. So I always took that mentality, like try to listen to what they have to say, because they're making the product. I'm certainly not the expert in making the product. And so if you can get them to listen to what you have to say, and you can listen to what they have to say, generally that compromise will get you a solution in the long run. But I was able to get their ideas incorporated in the design. Obviously, it's a much better Kaizen that way. That one success led to three or four different Kaizens in that area, and we were able to make significant change that way. But I like it when someone says that we can't do it, or that they're really against continuous improvement. Those are the challenges.

 

Listen to the rest of the interview here:

https://www.qualitymag.com/media/podcasts/2594-quality-podcasts/play/317-why-quality-professionals-should-consider-kaizen

The Kaizen Mindset:10 Steps for Executing a Successful Kaizen

Production team members discovering opportunities and trying solutions during a Kaizen. Image Source: Tim McMahon

An essential element in Lean thinking is Kaizen.  Kaizen is the Japanese word for a “good change” (Kai = change, Zen = good) or change for the better.  It’s a continuous improvement tool to make work easier, safer, and more productive by studying a process, identifying waste, and applying small incremental improvements that ensure the highest quality.

Kaizen thinking is based on making little changes on a regular basis: always improving productivity, safety and effectiveness while reducing waste.  Western philosophy is often summarized as, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." However, the Kaizen philosophy is to "do it better, make it better, improve it even if it isn't broken, because if we don't, we can't compete with those who do."

Many business leaders envision Lean initiatives as massive endeavors that require long training sessions, big meetings, and complete overhauls. Yet the reality is that some of the most successful Lean initiatives begin with a commitment to creating a culture that’s focused on small, continuous improvements. It’s the only way to achieve long-term success.

Kaizen involves every employee - from upper management to operators. Everyone is encouraged to come up with improvement suggestions on a regular basis. This is not a once a month or once a year activity. Once we make this way of thinking normal the lack of any sort of event goes away. The ultimate goal is a culture of continuously looking at processes with an eye for improvement.

In my recent article published in Quality Magazine I share the benefits of Kaizen, the reasons why many organizations fail when implementing Kaizen, and 10 steps for executing a successful Kaizen. Click here to continue reading.

Obeya - Introducing The Lean War Room Article

Projects are important for generating growth for organizations. Successful projects don’t just happen; they require hard work and collaboration from both project managers and team members to ensure all tasks are completed and goals are met, on time and on budget. However, many projects ultimately fail or are abandoned because the team does not work together to achieve shared goals. To avoid this unfortunate fate, project managers can find help with visual management and the Obeya room. Creating an Obeya room is akin to creating a “war room,” a command center that draws together leaders from across departments in an organization.

I recently authored this article “Obeya - Introducing The Lean War Room” for Quality Magazine which helps you understand the process behind the Obeya room, how to use the room efficiently, the benefits of one, and virtual Obeya Rooms.

You can learn more by reading the full article here:

https://www.qualitymag.com/articles/98010-obeya-introducing-the-lean-war-room

Lean 101: An Introduction to Lean Manufacturing

Source: Smederevac / iStock / Getty Images Plus via Getty Images

I recently authored the below article on Lean 101: An Introduction to Lean Manufacturing for Quality Magazine and wanted to share with A Lean Journey audience. Creating a good foundation of Lean starts with learning the fundamentals. 

The core idea of lean is to maximize the customer value by minimizing the waste within value chain. This thinking is comprised of five fundamental principles that create a framework for creating an efficient organization. By evaluating our processes for sources of waste and eliminating these inefficiencies we promote productivity and growth. This optimization of the value chain is done through rules that structure activities, connect customers and suppliers, and facilitate flow of materials and information.

To learn more about the basics of the lean thinking check out the following article:

https://www.qualitymag.com/articles/96687-lean-101-an-introduction-to-lean-manufacturing