Tag Archives: 5S

5S

Do car dealers use the lean thinking from the manufacturing process?

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This is on the heels of recent posts about customer services. This morning, in the pouring rain and a howling gale, I dropped my mother’s car off at the garage for repairs. I hadn’t been there for about 7 years but was instantly reminded of why I stopped – shocking organisation which resulted in hassled staff and poor customer service.

Looking at what was going on I couldn’t help thinking, they could do with some Lean thinking here. A bit of Gemba Mat wouldn’t go amiss either. Admittedly it wasn’t a Toyota dealership, but I’m sure the manufacturers they represent would employ some sort of Lean thinking. Why on earth hadn’t it found its way out here?

This is what I experienced:

  • Lack of signs. The service department and sales were opposite sides of a main road. There was nothing obvious to say this and I initially went to the wrong place.
  • Drop off time. I was only offered 8.30am as was everyone else. This had negative consequences.
  • At drop off time the area around the Garage is highly congested with people dropping off vehicles, commuter traffic and the local kids heading to school.
  • There aren’t enough ‘service’ parking spaces at the garage. You either need to park on the main highway or in a nearby street.
  • If you are being collected, your lift will have to park some distance away; a big deal if it’s raining like today.
  • Everyone booking in at 8.30am leads to long queues and delays at the booking desk.
  • People are hassled because they are running late, this translates into irritation with the booking clerk.
  • The booking clerk gets annoyed, and a vicious circle develops with the next customer in line.
  • Just to add the icing on the cake, the detailed information provided over the phone hasn’t found its way onto the partly prepared paperwork, so they ask you all the same questions again. Fine when you know your vehicle intimately, not so good when dropping off your mother’s car.
  • Finally, you know that the car won’t be seen until at least 2pm.
  • Now proceed to work….. “Have a nice day”….. No thanks to the garage.

I know there is a better way.

I’ve experienced it in other garages.

Had the garage taken even a cursory look at the process they would have seen so much opportunity to improve the flow and end up with happier customers and (I’m sure) happier and more engaged staff.

My suggestions to improve:

  • Multiple booking in slots during the day. Even a morning and afternoon session would reduce the congestion and have considerable benefits.
  • Better signs – let people know what’s happening and where. All pretty straightforward visual management / 5s activity.
  • Please use the diagnostic information you get over the phone.

I do find it amazing that this was the customer facing end of a highly efficient manufacturing organisation that uses approaches like lean, yet it doesn’t seem to travel beyond the factory gates. I wonder why?

So, what’s the PONT?

  1. Some systems and processes are set up in a way that they cause blockages which results in an inefficient service and customer dissatisfaction.
  2. Customer dissatisfaction can have a negative impact on staff which leads to a ‘vicious circle’ developing.
  3. There are straightforward techniques like Gemba Mat which help improve processes and flow. They are widely used in vehicle manufacturing and could be adapted and applied by car dealers…….. please have a go.

But there is hope at the end of this tale. I’ve just come across the book featured in the picture. ‘Creating Lean Dealers’ by David Brunt & John Kiff. It was a Shingo Prize winner for research award in 2010 so well worth a read. I’m going to recommend it when I pick up the car, today hopefully.

“Car manufacturing has been transformed by lean over the last 20 years, yet car dealerships have remained virtually untouched – until now. “

Gemba Walks, Kaizen the Elvis way…..”walk a mile in my shoes”

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This is a prelude to a post on the Gemba Mat improvement technique I saw used an IdeasUK networking event at Ricoh in Telford. Gemba Mat is a beautifully straightforward and effective improvement and employee engagement approach that is worthy of a build-up so I’ll leave you in anticipation.

Gemba is a version of the Japanese term Genba that translates as “the real place”. In the world of Kaizen and continuous improvement it’s come to mean the work place; the factory floor, the hospital ward, sales floor or where a service provider interacts directly with the service user or customer.

The basic idea is that problems within a process or system will be visible, so the best place to go and look for solutions or improvements is the Gemba or workplace. Taking time to carefully look at the work process, as it happens, will help you to see what needs improving. Two things stand out here for me:

  • Dedicated time is spent focusing upon the work to identify improvements; and
  • It’s done at the workplace: not in a meeting room, on an ‘away day’, via a focus group or a survey of staff.

The Gemba Walk is just an extension of this idea where people walk around the work place, gaining understanding and looking for improvements.

It doesn’t have to just apply to a manufacturing environment. This post from the IT Managers Inbox  gives some clear advice on how to carry out Gemba Walks as an IT service provider.  “Gemba is not your desk”. “If you seek solutions to problems that need to be fixed, go to Gemba. If you want to see the work behind the reports, go to Gemba. If you want to show leadership, go to Gemba. Go to where the work is performed and observe and engage with those who do it……Gemba Walk is a technique that can help you deal with the problems that arise every day and be more effective at managing the people who solve them”.

When you sit back and think about it Gemba Walks could be seen as having some similarities with time and motion studies, back to the floor exercises (much-loved by the reality TV people) and MBWA. Management by walking around (MBWA) is often mentioned in the same breath as Gemba Walk (see the Wikipedia article). However I think that the emphasis of these approaches can miss the importance of employee engagement. For me it’s not just about managers seeing something that needs improving, and getting someone else to do it. The real positive for me is the prospect of the people doing the job, getting involved and doing it themselves, a key part of employee engagement. More about this in the Ricoh Gemba Mat post.

So, what has Elvis got to do with Gemba Walks you might be wondering? Well it seemed obvious to me, if you want to understand what someone else is doing “walk a mile in their shoes”.  There are probably some more heavyweight scholarly things I could have quoted for this, but I do very much like the idea of ‘doing Kaizen the Elvis way’ (and a link to this Elvis song pleases my wife). The lyrics are well worth a read but the chorus goes:

“Yeah, before you abuse, criticize or accuse,

Walk a mile in my shoes”. .

Just sing it loud next time you are out in the Gemba.

So what’s the PONT?

  1. To improve a process or solve a problem it helps to ‘walk a mile in the shoes’ of the people who operate it.
  2. Managers being visible and walking around the shop floor / work place / Gemba will help their understanding of what happens, and improve their decision making.
  3. Visibility will also help to improve reputation with the troops.

5s and improvement – divergent views?

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US Interstate 5 South (I5S). My 5s image, obscure maybe, but I like it.

US Interstate 5 South (I5S). My 5s image, obscure maybe, but I like it.

I recently posted about the use of 5S and visual management in hospitals as a method for organising work and improving processes. 5s has evolved from Japanese manufacturing techniques and being widely applied to all sorts of activities, including public services. It’s an interesting area and I’m learning a lot about how it’s being used and possibly misused.

What’s intriguing how 5S and Kaizen seem to polarise views, a bit like Marmite, people love it or hate it, or here comes  salvation or damnation. I wanted to share some of my learning which helps inform what I’m thinking. There are likely to be a few posts on this, so the Interstate 5 South, (I5S)* sign might reappear.

The types of things I’m hoping to cover are:

  1. The links with complexity thinking, using the Cynefin Framework. This is a good
    explanation of complexity thinking which is highly relevant to this topic;
  2. Adoption versus adaptation of practice between situations. It’s not just about picking up simple best practice from one place and blindly implementing it elsewhere.
  3. How the continuous improvement approach can help (or hinder) employee engagement
  4. And probably a few other things like Kaizen.

As a starter, here are two You Tube clips that illustrate very different perspectives:

  1. Toyota 5s is a series of images showing how the 5s approach has been successful applied to their manufacturing process. Even the Cleaners Trolley gets the full 5S treatment. Not much you can argue with here, a hugely successful company and loads of clever people have written books and produced videos about how good their approach is. That’s all good, but how well does the approach travel? Is it relevant to other industries and practices?
  2. Office 5s Gone Wrong This is a view on the potentially disastrous implications of blindly applying 5s in a non manufacturing environment, a Marketing Department. It’s hilarious and pretty close to reality if you believe this newspaper report about HMRC in North Tyneside. Putting tape around the pencils and staplers (and bananas!) on your desk apparently happened in some big public sector organisations.  If you want to get into it a bit deeper into this Mark Graban posted the video with a transcript available on his blog post. If you want to learn more about 5s his leanblog is worth a look.

So, what’s the PONT?

  1. 5s does work well as an improvement approach for lots of processes
    in lots of environments, particularly manufacturing..
  2. There are some situations where its application needs careful consideration. You need to think about your own contex, why you are applying the tecnique and what you want to achieve.
  3. Over zealous application of 5s, or any other improvement technique, can have disastrous consequences. (see office 5S video & HMRC article)

*You might be wondering about my 5s image, sorry it’s a bit obscure. All of the standard 5s images are just so serious and technical and to be honest they put me off. Anyway, I like Interstate 5 South, the picture reminds me of happy days on road trips in the US.

5s and visual management in hospital

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Sanitising your hands isn't a new invention.

Sanitising your hands isn't a new invention.

This is another experience to come out of my visit to hospital. I couldn’t help notice how much effort had gone into 5S and visual management on one of the wards. Good news I thought as I’d heard a lot about how it is being used to improve effectiveness in hospitals.

5S (sort, set, shine, standardise, sustain) is a method for organising the workplace which has evolved from Japanese manufacturing techniques. It is now being widely applied to all sorts of activities, including public services, as part of an overall continuous improvement, Kaizen type approach. Also linked to this are visual management  or control techniques which deliberately use visual signs or symbols to help improve a process.

Lots of people are into using these approaches as methods of improving process outcomes. A quick look at You Tube will get you an extract from Family Guy illustrating the need for 5s in hospitals, whilst some more serious videos give a good explanation of what 5s is all about, in straightforward terms. The gist is, if you can see where things are and what needs doing, you’ll get the job done more efficiently, rather than wasting time looking for things. All good news and just the sort of approach that I wanted to see as a patient. The application of these approaches in hospitals has had many benefits, and there is plenty of evidence to prove it.

One of the things that interested me though was the longevity of these initiatives. Once the enthusiasts have left to evangelise elsewhere what happens? Well I might have got an answer from my stay on the ward. One of the successes of the 5S approach was the use of background sheets for hand sanitiser dispensers. These were a different colour to the hand sanitiser gel and allowed you to see if the translucent dispenser was empty. They also had a nice big “clean your hands” slogan prominently displayed. A really good visual management initiative in the fight against hospital acquired infections.

This specific application however relies upon the background sheet and the dispenser being positioned with the dispenser on top of the background sheet. But this is not what I saw during my stay. The background sheet and dispenser sat adjacent to each other. Completely not what was intended. No obvious reason why, maybe they had got new dispensers and this is how the maintenance people had fixed them? Whatever the reason, it wasn’t doing what was intended, and nobody seemed to notice. A great visual management initiative that seemed to have run into the sand.

So, what’s the PONT?
1. Things like 5S and visual management are good improvement techniques but they need people to own them.
2. Once the evangelists have gone away things can lose momentum.
3. For practices like this to succeed, everyone has to understand and believe. I suspect whoever placed the dispenser next to the background sheet, not on top of it, neither believed or understood.

Sanitising you hands isn’t a recent invention.  If you are interested, there are thousands of pictures of hand sanitiser dispensers on Flickr. People do have diverse interests!

Kaizen! Toast v Beer, Who Wins?

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Welsh Toast

Wales shaped Toast, how good is this. Genius!

I love You Tube, it a great resource for sharing and learning but sadly not widely used by public services (in many organisations it’s blocked, like most social media). I’m also quite interested in beer, so this grabbed my attention, particularly when you throw in Kaizen.

Amongst the dozens of You Tube videos on Kaizen, these two really caught my attention, Kaizen Toast and Kaizen Beer! Both practically explain the principles of Kaizen but from slightly different angles. I thought it would be a bit of fun to compare them and see which one wins, so here goes.

As the enlightened know, we will need some quantitative data and some contextual narrative information for this. The numbers are accurate, but not always believable, the narrative is believable, but not always accurate. If we put them together we will get something accurate, believable and overall convincing.

Toast v Beer Kaizen – Metrics Table (17 June 2011)

Indicator TOAST! BEER! Why use this indicator?
Views 59,177 5,129 More might mean better?
Likes 19 9 User feedback, excellent
Dislikes 5 2 More customer feedback, even better
Comments # 13 4 Level of feeling & opinion generated
Comments +\-ve 40\60 ish 90\10 ish Hmm, hard to judge what they mean
Duration 5.12 min / 30 mins 9.30 min Too long = boring (potentially)
Awards Shingo No Someone else thinks it’s good

Well, Toast looks like the winner, but let’s consider the narrative behind the
numbers.

Toast Kaizen, is produced by the Greater Boston Manufacturing Partnership and is presented by their Shingo Prize  recipient Bruce Hamilton. The video gives an introduction to Toast Kaizen, applying Kaizen to a familiar setting, the kitchen, and a familiar process, making toast. If you want the full 30min version (available in 11 languages) you’ll need to buy it ($99). A quality You Tube video which Kaizen enthusiasts and learners will no doubt enjoy.

Beer Kaizen! , this is a very funny take on the world of Kaizen, focussing on a ‘work activity’ I can really understand, drinking beer with my friends. The 9.30 mins flew by and I think I actually learned a lot about Kaizen. My personal beer distribution system is now worthy of a Six Sigma Black Belt. Even an untrained operative (kids friends), or reluctant/resistant workers (my kids) can now successfully serve me up a beer. Actually the video is a homage to the Toast Kaizen video, but it does the trick very cleverly.

So what’s the PONT?

  1. Hopefully you’ve picked up a bit of learning about Kaizen by watching those videos. Lots of things on YouTube are great resource, it’s not all keyboard cat (excellent though it is!).
  2. Humour is used in both of these videos, a great way of getting learning transferred.
  3. Different things work for different audiences (beer for me), I think that both videos are winners, nice one guys.
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