The 6 Pillars of 6S - Free Posters

In my plant in Avon, CT we do a number of tours sharing our Lean practices and thinking.  It is our way of giving back since we have been fortunate to learn from some many great companies in our region.  The one thing I am most requested for a copy of is our 6S Posters.  We have been doing 6S (5S +Safety) dating back to 2003 and as part of the early stages of implementation we made posters.  These were used to train people in the principles of the 6S's (we actually started wit 5S) and over the years the posters have been continuously updated.  I thought I would share these posters here:

Click on the image of the poster to get a larger version.


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Daily Lean Tips Edition #16

For my Facebook fans you already know about this great feature. But for those of you that are not connected to A Lean Journey on Facebook or Twitter I post daily a feature I call Lean Tips.  It is meant to be advice, things I learned from experience, and some knowledge tidbits about Lean to help you along your journey.  Another great reason to like A Lean Journey on Facebook.

Click this link for A Lean Journey's Facebook Page Notes Feed.

Here is the next addition of tips from the Facebook page:

Lean Tip #226 - Look for the signs of a poor preventative maintenance program to find more opportunity.

Indicators of a poor preventative maintenance program:

• Low equipment utilization due to unscheduled downtime
• High wait or idle time for machine operators during the downtime
• High scrap and rejects indicating a quality problem
• Higher than normal repair costs due to neglect of proper lubrication, inspection, or service
• Decrease in the expected life of capital investments due to inadequate maintenance

Lean Tip #227 - Preventive Maintenance is the Heart of TPM and the Core of Every Maintenance Strategy

Common reasons preventive maintenance programs fail:

1. Too easy to use for “fill-in” jobs
2. Failure to adhere to the schedule
3. Conflict between emergency and P.M.
4. Inaccurate time and work estimates
5. Wrong equipment being maintained
6. Insufficient detail on P.M sheets
7. Equipment failure record not available
8. Lack of monitoring and changing the program

Lean Tip #228 - Material shortage is the single biggest maintenance support function contributing to low productivity.

A shortage of materials is the single biggest maintenance support function contributing to low maintenance productivity.

Typical material–related delays:

1. Waiting for materials
2. Travel time to get materials.
3. Time to transport materials
4. Time required to identify materials
5. Time to find substitute materials
6. Time required to find parts in area stores
7. Time required to prepare purchase order
8. Time to process purchase requisitions (approvals, etc.)
9. Lost time due to:
1. Other work without materials
2. Wrong materials planned and delivered
3. Wrong materials ordered
4. Materials out of stock

Lean Tip #229 - A good inventory system is essential for a productive maintenance function.

Features of a good maintenance inventory system

• Tracks balances for all items including issues, reserves and returns
• Maintains parts listings for equipment
• Track item repair cost and movement history
• Cross references spares to substitutes
• Has the ability to reserve items for jobs
• Has the ability to notify a requester when items are received for a job
• Has the ability to generate work order to fabricate or repair an item
• Has the ability to notify when the item reorder is needed and track to order to receipt
• Has the ability to track requisitions, purchase orders and special order receipts
• Has the ability to produce performance reports such as inventory accuracy, turnover and stock outs

Lean Tip #230 - Visual systems play an important role in systematically eliminating losses.

Visual systems play an important role in systematically eliminating losses. Visual systems save time – time to inspect equipment conditions, time to change parts, time to maintain. Visual systems help to make “complex” equipment data and conditions into useable information for everyone who works on and around the equipment.

Lean Tip #231 - Involve operators in routine maintenance of their equipment.

Involving operators in the routine maintenance of their equipment builds on the “sense of ownership” and recognition that skilled maintenance and engineers or technical people generally address the increasingly more complex equipment problems and tasks. Because operators are often much closer to the equipment, more often than engineering, technical or maintenance people, they can quickly and easily detect problems before equipment performance is detected.

Lean Tip #232 - You clean to improve a machine’s performance – not its appearance.

You clean to improve a machine’s performance – not its appearance.

• Clean to Inspect
• Inspect to Detect
• Detect to Correct

A better looking piece of equipment is just a side benefit. Develop standards for cleaning and inspection for all equipment.

Lean Tip # 233 - Strengthen the relationship of your equipment operators and maintenance personnel.

Team work is essential in any Lean culture. To improve the relationship of equipment operators and maintenance personnel take advantage of good times. Those times during which there are no pressing equipment problems or production deadlines are good opportunities for maintenance personnel to thoroughly review equipment with operators. This helps build proactive, positive relationship among coworkers.

Lean Tip #234 - Practice good equipment management principles to improve maintainability.

Practice good equipment management principles to improve maintainability. For example, replace bearings that require ongoing lubrication with sealed bearings. Review data collected during maintenance activities to determine unsatisfactory equipment component lives. Then specify better components for all new equipment you purchase.

Lean Tip #235 - Implementing Lean practices puts additional pressure on process equipment to perform.

In a system where there is excess inventory and many non-value added activities, the excesses tend to hide bottle necks or constraints to smooth production flow. As a result, as companies reduce waste, they find that equipment, maintenance support, and response time can be bottlenecks to the normal production processes. This can be avoided by tracking the overall equipment effectiveness of the process.

Lean Tip #236 – Learning a new skill requires the combination of 3 key elements.

To learn a new skill requires focus on these 3 things:

Method – The pattern or routine to be practiced.

Practice – The learner repeatedly applies a pattern, following guidelines for deliberate practice.

Coaching – Learner receives guidance in practicing the pattern.

“With practice, training, and above all method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment, and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.” – Alfred Binet (1909)

Adapted from Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata

Lean Tip #237 – Lean Management is about focusing on how solutions are developed not the solution itself.

Traditional management focuses on solutions:

• Establish targets
• Describe solutions
• Provide incentives
• Get out of the way and periodically check results

Lean Management focuses on how solutions are developed:

• Establish targets
• Develop, via practice with coaching, the capability in people to develop new solutions…
• …by having people practice a common way of working, like the improvement kata

Which do you think is more effective?

Adapted from Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata

Lean Tip #238 – All managers are teachers, and their actions determine company capability.

Whether consciously or not, with their everyday words and actions all managers are teaching their people a mindset and approach. So it makes sense to ask, “What patterns of behavior and thought do we want to be teaching in our organization?”

Adapted from Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata

Lean Tip # 239 – Make Practicing Lean Part of Every Day’s Work

Practicing Lean should get integrated into daily line management, not just be an add-on project or event. Make no distinction between day-to-day management, and change management. If you periodically conduct a training event or periodically work on an improvement but the rest of the time it’s business as usual, then what you are teaching is business as usual.

Adapted from Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata

Lean Tip #240 – Ask these 5 coaching questions every day in the Gemba.

1. What is your target condition here?
2. What is the actual condition now?
3. What obstacles are now preventing you from reaching the target condition? Which one are you addressing now?
4. What is you next step? (start of the next PDCA)
5. When can we go and see what we have learned from taking that step?

Adapted from Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata

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Happy Independence Day

The 4th of July is an extremely patriotic holiday where we celebrate the independence of our country, the United States of America. People celebrate with family and friend gatherings, barbecues, parties, games, food, fun, festivals, parades, musical events and fireworks. It is important not to forget the true meaning of the day.

Variously known as the Fourth of July and Independence Day, July 4th has been a federal holiday in the United States since 1941, but the tradition of Independence Day celebrations goes back to the 18th century and the American Revolution (1775-83). In June 1776, representatives of the 13 colonies then fighting in the revolutionary struggle weighed a resolution that would declare their independence from Great Britain. On July 2nd, the Continental Congress voted in favor of independence, and two days later its delegates adopted the Declaration of Independence, a historic document drafted by Thomas Jefferson. From 1776 until the present day, July 4th has been celebrated as the birth of American independence, with typical festivities ranging from fireworks, parades and concerts to more casual family gatherings and barbecues.

Lean Manufacturing is a business method that extends employees independence.  It provides more employees with the tools, methods and authority to make decisions. It creates teams to measure progress and devise new techniques. This leads to higher employee motivation and productivity
as workers are asked to come up with solutions to problems as opposed to having to work with flawed procedures. There is much to be said for greater worker independence in the execution of a lean philosophy. We may not have a day to celebrate like the US but the message is no less important.


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Lean Quote: Freedom, A Chance To Be Better

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better." — Albert Camus

Lean manufacturing provides your workforce the freedom that they need to own and maximize their productivity. In a Lean production plant, the "freedom to control one's work" replaces the "mind numbing stress" of mass production. Armed with the skills they need to control their environment workers have the opportunity to think actively even proactively to solve workplace problems.

Lean is more than the traditional metrics of improved efficiency, reduced costs and increased throughput. The people-centric approach to the application of Lean creates a better future, driven by empowered individuals working in teams, committed to continuous improvement. It is this culture of responsible freedom and trust that allows employees and their organization to realize the positive benefits of Lean and achieve a successful outcome.

The real power of Lean manufacturing is to fully engage our heads and hearts to create habits that result in achievement and fulfillment. This is accomplished by creating an inspirational environment in which people are encouraged to embrace, implement, and live Lean concepts. Lasting results are driven by the spirit of honesty, integrity, responsiveness, freedom, and creativity, built on a platform of committed relationships.



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Lean Thinking and Its Application to Safety

My friend and fellow blogger Dragan Bosnjak, an Italian Lean Practitioner, has published a new work in English.  It is called Lean & Safety and it is a translation of his Italian ebook Security Lean. This ebook talks about lean thinking and its application to work related safety. 

Entrepreneurs think that injuries happen, that they are inevitable. They are take as facts and entrepreneurs think about managing them only to limit economic loss for their company. That’s why they update all their OSHA compliance documents, they ask workers to sign on forms for participating in the training courses (so they can defend themselves in front of the law…), even though these courses are generic, made in conference room, and never describe real work situations and conditions that workers meet every day. And rarely they cause a real improvement of safety conditions inside the company.

They never think however, that practically all injuries can be avoided. How is that possible? Through a serious prevention management using lean thinking principles.You’ll find fundamentals to set safety culture inside your organization.

This ebook seeks to find answers to the following, continually recurring questions:

Why injuries happen?
How can we prevent them?
How can we manage prevention?

Lean and Safety is 57 pages long, and it reads in a couple of hours.  It consists on three chapters: 1) why injuries happen and how Lean can gain you time for safety and uncover waste 2) using Lean to prevent injuries by observing behaviors and problem solving and 3) the importance of leadership and it's influence on the organization' culture.

I think you will find the information in Dragan's book very valuable for creating a safe behavior culture based on Lean principles.  For a small fee you can purchase your very own ebook today on his sales page.


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Improvement Kata Handbook

Recently, I reviewed Mike Rother's Toyota Kata book.  In doing so I came across the Toyota Kata website.  The site is dedicate to the practice of mastering the improvement kata as explained in his book.  

This website has a number of great resources at your disposal but probably the most notable is the Improvement Kata Handbook.  This is a great companion to the Toyota Kata book and can be used train and develop improvement kata thinking and acting in your company.

Improvement Kata Training Materials

View more presentations from Mike Rother

Mike Rother suggests a 3 step process to get started with improvement kata:

I would encourage you to thoroughly review this site and take advantage of this training material. I am sure you will find this information very informative and valuable along your journey. Keep learning, practicing, and sharing.



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The Role of a Lean Leader

My Friend Matt Wrye recently wrote about his role as an internal Lean consultant. He talked about the struggle some management places on Lean leaders between just doing it and influencing change. This got me thinking about my own experience, why this struggle occurs, and what the true role of a Lean leader should be.

Like Matt, I too have found myself in both types of roles. I believe this struggle with how the role is defined has a lot to do with the level of knowledge by management. So let me clarify by knowledge I mean true understand of Lean thinking as a business or management process that goes beyond improvement tools to capture employee development and engagement. I say management because it is often not just one person but a collection of managers that share a similar thinking and approach.

The level of involvement in Lean by the management team often shapes the role of the Lean leader. In my experience the less knowledgeable the management about REAL Lean (Bob Emiliani’s term) the more they think of it as a set of tools the more they want you to just do it. These are the managers that are usually hands-off with Lean and want to see the short term gains to demonstrate they are improving the process. They are focused on the results and outcomes and not the means by which we achieve them. This task oriented approach to management unfortunately is only sustainable while the doer is doing.

However those managers who truly know Lean understand the benefit comes from developing people to think and improve their own process the more they define the role as influencing or coaching. As Mike Rother said in Toyota Kata management must focus on how solutions are developed. Develop, via practice with coaching, the capability in people to develop new solutions. In this view the Lean leader can have the biggest impact coaching or influencing the process of improvement to capture the ingenuity of those in the organization.

In my experience being a coach is the most important aspect of a Lean leader. They are not the ones to come in and do it for you. They are the ones to show you how to do it with confidence so that you will be able to do it for yourself. A Lean leader must be relentless in teaching and expecting learning through actual practice.

The best analogy of a Lean leader that I have heard is related to agriculture. The Lean leader is a farmer not a hunter. Farmers take the long view, and win in the long term. Hunters take the short view, get early gains but ultimately die out. Farmers are shepherds and Lean leaders should do the same.



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