04/01/2012 by Andrew Nicholson.

Just a quick note that the new national (UK) MAS website is at http://www.mymas.org/,

with a link to a new searchable Register of Consultants

http://www.masdirectory.org/mas/Manufacturer/index.php

Posted in Benchmarking and Assessment, Lean, General | Print | No Comments »

09/07/2011 by Andrew Nicholson.

In previous posts we’ve looked at the “technical” side of increasing output - the tools and techniques. Now let’s look at the “people” side of things - how to get more from employees.

Most of us want to know what’s expected of us, we like to have something to aim for and we like to feel we’re making progress towards a worthy goal.

Usually, it’s not difficult to provide all of those things in the workplace. But too many of us don’t. Here’s how:

1. Agree on two or three important objectives that are relevant to the work team - probably based around quality, productivity and service.
2. Find some simple ways to measure them.
3. Agree on regular targets - monthly, weekly, per shift, per hour.
4. Make sure they’re visible to everyone in the work area.
5. Display actual performance regularly and visually (electronic display or hand-written whiteboard).
6. Recognise good results immediately.
7. Train, help and encourage the team to solve any performance problems.
8. Find ways to recognise and reward those who contribute the most. Be creative!
9. Actively manage the performance of those who don’t contribute.
10. Lock in the improvements
11. Celebrate success
12. Keep at it!

Posted in Recognising Success, Lean, General | Print | No Comments »

06/06/2011 by Andrew Nicholson.

I attended a great workshop session last week by EEF about the need to ensure that training is designed to produce measurable business benefits. Like all good learning activities it got me to thinking. Despite the economic downturn one question I’m rarely asked by clients is: “What tool is going to save me the most money most quickly?”

If you spend a significant amount of time on set-up’s and change-over’s the answer is very simple: SMED.

In my view SMED is one of the best Lean tools available, bar none!

 I had yet another perfect example of this a couple of weeks back, with an engineering client. They make small batches of tubular steel frames for OEM’s of chair and bath products. Inevitably, batch sizes are getting smaller, lead times are getting shorter and they’re needing to develop - and prototype - more and more new products. So set-up’s and changeover’s are becoming more and more of a problem. They knew they had to improve and they were keen to learn how. The answer proved very simple: SMED!

I spent some time with the production manager and team leader planning a half-day  SMED session.  

Two weeks later we got together the team who worked in the production cell and they spent about 40 minutes learning about SMED in a practical workshop session. As always, I told them: ”If you haven’t yet applied SMED then typically you can halve change-over times fairly easily”.

Then we had half an hour or so of prep. time to make sure we each knew exactly what we were going to do. We spent about half an hour video-recording an actual change-over then back to the training room. There we spent a further hour and a half analysing the video using a SMED spreadsheet, and brainstorming improvement ideas.

Result: the team immediately identified a series of low-cost / no-cost improvements. Some could be implemented immediately and others will take 3-4 weeks to complete fully. Reduction in change-over time: 52%.  

Much as I’d love to, I can’t run these on-site SMED sessions for everyone who needs them. So a while back we took all of our training materials and put them together into a simple trainng package. It’s got the analysis spreadsheet, a 2-page “how-to” guide and a short video animation with voice-over showing you step-by-step exactly how to do the analysis. And you can download the whole package from our website for only £16.95 (USD 29.50): SMED Training Package. And if you don’t find that that’s the best payback you’ve ever had for a training product I’ll give you a full refund!

Whether you use our help or not I urge all of you with significant set-up and change-over times to start using SMED as soon as you possibly can. It’s quick, simple and the payback is tremendous!

Posted in Lean | Print | No Comments »

17/05/2011 by Andrew Nicholson.

It’s easy to assume that a machine is a bottleneck simply because work stacks up behind it. It seems obvious - the machine cannot keep up with the required pace of production. So the Capital Expenditure request gets written or the owner gets his or her chequebook out, the new machine arrives and everyone’s happy. Everyone that is except all of the folk who had better things to spend the money on.

No-one wants to be the party pooper but here’s the Painful Truth: sometimes you don’t really need to spend all that money. In reality, the machine can often produce enough to keep up with customer demand.

In previous posts we’ve talked about Overall Equipment Effeciveness (OEE) as a great way to measure how much good quality output you’re getting from a particular machine or process. In fact we recommend that you consider measuring OEE regularly on all critical / bottleneck machines / processes.  But for the moment let’s just keep it simple and jump straight to some practical money-saving tips…

At this point if you’re well advanced with Lean and you’re regularly hitting OEE levels above 80% then you can stop reading now and instead go away and review progress against your policy deployment  goals. For the rest of us, read on for some practical money-saving tips…

Money-saving tip #1: measure how much of the available time the machine actually performs value-added work, i.e. producing output that the customer will pay for. You’ll be amazed! You spent all of that money and the **** machine is only working half of the time! Measure all of that lost time and what it’s spent on. Things like break-times, set-up’s and changeover’s, break-down’s, scrap and defects, running at lower speeds, not producing right first time, etc, etc, etc. Sounds familiar? Pick the biggest ones and get the team looking at ways of reducing them. Here are some examples…

Money-saving tip#2: look at staggered break-times, improved production scheduling, effective materials supply. In other words, make sure that you always keep the machine running and you always keep it fed with work. If this is a problem area for you, it’s time to learn about Drum-Buffer-Rope: aim to maintain a buffer of materials to feed the machine and feed it at the rate required to keep up with customer demoand (the “drum beat”).

Money-saving tip #3: if the machine needs a warm-up / start-up period, where possible make sure this happens before the start of the working shift. For example - if employees are on site and raring to go (*cough*) at 7.00 am, arrange for someone to come in earlier to warm up the machine. Same applies at the end of shift. 

Money-saving tip #4: if you’re losing too much time on set-up’s and changeover’s, you need to apply SMED. In my humble opinion SMED (”Single Minute Exchange of Dies”) gives the biggest, quickest payback of all of the Lean tools and techniques. It’s easy to learn, easy to do and often gives dramatic savings. The first time you apply SMED it’s common to halve the time taken, usually with little or no cost. Excuse the shameless plug here but you can download our SMED training package and learn how to do it in less than 20 minutes for less that £20 (less than $30).

Money-saving tip #5: crank it up! You’ll often hear lots of “reasons” why the machine can’t run at its full rated speed. “It keeps breaking down”, “Quality deteriorates”, “We can’t keep up”, etc, etc. Try it! Measure it! Often the anticipated problems are far less serious than expected. If you do get problems, you’ll then know exactly where you need to focus some improvement effort.

If you’ve already bought that new machine when you didn’t really need to, well at least you’ll know better next time. If you’re just about to buy it, then before you do have a look at these tips. They might just save you a fortune.

If you’ve any examples of your own please submit them here and I’ll post the best one’s (sorry about the delay for moderation but I’m afraid it’s the only way we can avoid being hijacked by spam).

In future posts we’ll be looking at yet more ways to increase factory output so watch this space - or better still, sign up to receive new posts automatically by email. Until next time - keep it Lean…….

Posted in Lean | Print | No Comments »

03/05/2011 by Andrew Nicholson.

Recent surveys of manufacturers confirm what we’re seeing at the moment - many are struggling to meet increasing orders. We’re being called in by more and more clients who simply can’t keep up! Sounds like a great problem to have you might say, but if you don’t take the right actions immediately to increase your manufacturing output you can find that you quickly run out of your customers, your cash and your sanity!

Time for some home truths.

Many manufacturers throw money and resources at the problem and end up killing their profits and running out of cash. We run a great factory simulation exercise - Factory of the Future - that illustrates this perfectly. Everyone’s working flat out but costs go up, quality goes down and delivery performance goes out of the window. Sounds crazy but those of you who’ve taken part will smile as you remember seeing it with your own eyes.

So how do you get it right?

Well, let’s not get into the finer points of Theory of Constraints at this point - let’s just keep it simple.

First of all we need to look at what’s holding us back. We need to identify our true bottlenecks. We all know that a bottleneck is that part of the process where the capacity / throughput is lower than anywhere else. But we often jump to conclusions about where the bottlenecks are, usually because we see lots of work building up behind them.

I’ve seen six-figure sums spent on increasing the capacity of “bottlenecks” that aren’t really bottlenecks at all so if you want to save your money - and perhaps your job - please read on…

I can’t emphasise this next point enough - WE MUST MEASURE THE TRUE THROUGHPUT at the activity / operation. Many times we find that we do in fact have sufficient capacity and that the problem is not one of capacity. 

The next step is to look at how much time is available at the activity / operation and how much of this time is given to useful productive work. Then we can look in detail at the non-productive time, find the root causes and tackle them. Often we find that these revolve around poor planning of labour or poor production scheduling.

In a future post we’ll look in more detail at next steps. In the meantime if you’d like to read up on bottleneck management you might enjoy the classic book “The Goal” by Goldratt, written in the form of a story rather than a textbook. If you’re a UK manufacturer and would like our help have a look at our website page on how to  increase factory output.

Posted in Lean, General | Print | No Comments »

10/12/2010 by Andrew Nicholson.

Do you know it’s “Plain English Day” today?  The Plain English Campaign is a group who fight against the use of jargon and gobbledygook in public information from private and public service organisations.

We try very hard to be jargon-free, but how should you define jargon?  Surely one man’s jargon is another’s everyday language, particularly when related to the industry you work in?  In the business improvements sector there are lots of opportunities to use specialist vocabulary.  Words like:

5S      CANDO      Kaizen      Kanban      Muda      SMED      and lots more besides.

They are common enough terms in our day-to-day operations, so are they considered “jargon”?  (If you’re really keen to know what they are, you can consult the Lean Glossary of Terms!)

We consider jargon to be meaningless phrases - phrases that use lots of words where one or two will do; language that confuses the message, rather than clarifies it.  So what meaningless phrases would you get rid of?  What makes you cringe when you hear it?

Here’s a selection of our most annoying jargon:

“at the end of the day”
“at this particular moment in time”
“telling it like it is”
“thinking outside the box”
“it’s not rocket science”
“I personally think …”
“I always give 110%”

… but I bet I’m guilty of using some of them!

Posted in Lean, General | Print | No Comments »

05/12/2010 by Andrew Nicholson.

Since my early days at Hewlett Packard I’ve been a great fan of the Malcolm Baldridge Award. In the US it’s a highly renowned and much-coveted Award and many organisations use it as a tool for benchmarking, assessment and performance measurement. In Europe it’s been “translated” into the EFQM Business Excellence Model.  

The principles on which it’s based are very simple but most people and organisations find them very difficult to apply consistently and well. Personally, I find it reassuring in some ways that Award-winners will typically score around 500 or 600 on a scale of 1,000.

I’ve always thought that if you spend your life telling other people how important it is for them to improve how they do things then  you’ve got be serious about improving your own approach. As the Americans themselves put it: “You’ve got to eat your own dog food!”

Which is exactly what the Baldridge folk themselves are doing, with the ”New” Baldridge Award.

Here are some comments from the “Baldridge Blog” (my title, not theirs!) http://www.baldrige.com/baldrige/baldrigestate_programs/the-new-malcolm-baldrige-award/: 

“The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award came into being by act of Congress in 1987 at a time when the quality of many American products suffered by comparison to that of the Japanese. The criteria for the Award aligned with the teachings of great quality gurus like Deming and Juran. The goal was to improve quality so that American businesses would be more competitive.

Today, the Baldrige criteria address all of the elements that contribute to an organization’s success and sustainability, including quality, and are not limited to use by businesses. In fact, business accounted for just over 14% of this year’s Award applicants.

The name change precedes changes to the Baldrige criteria that the Baldrige program indicates will be available shortly. The 2011-2012 model should show significant improvements over the previous version, particularly in the customer focus area. Stay tuned for more details.”

Posted in Benchmarking and Assessment, Recognising Success, Lean | Print | No Comments »

05/12/2010 by Andrew Nicholson.

Congratulations again to James H Heal!  Shortly after their successful Excellence in Business Award 2010 from the Yorkshire Post, they’ve won the “Manufacturer of the Year” award organised by the Halifax Evening Courier.  This award honours Calderdale’s strength and expertise as a centre of manufacturing excellence and the winner had to demonstrate the following:

• A modern and efficient approach to manufacturing and marketing
• A commitment to excellence in its products and service
• A highly successful trading performance, preferably based on new and improved products as well as established lines
• A strategy to reach new markets and improve reach within existing ones
• Where applicable, a commitment to research and development

 Congratulations to everyone as you continue on your Lean Journey! http://textile-testing.blogspot.com/

Posted in Benchmarking and Assessment, Recognising Success, Lean, General | Print | No Comments »

06/11/2010 by Andrew Nicholson.

It’s incredibly rewarding when our Lean Leaders demonstrate by their actions that they really understand what improvement is all about. That they really “get it”. Yesterday I saw another great example of this at one of our clients - it’s what I call “True Lean” Leadership.

Chris was given the job of improving her plant’s environmental performance and achieving ISO14001 accreditation. She quickly identified waste management as the main priority. It caused lots of problems and cost a lot of money. She used “go see” - she tracked waste streams throughout the plant and she saw them all end up in the same skip / dumpster. Then she went and visited the company’s waste contractors. She took some of her colleagues. They watched as their waste skips were emptied out into the yard and a whole crew of people spent hours manually sorting the contents back into their different types. Waste in every sense of the word! Pretty clear that her colleagues needed to sort the waste streams at source and not mingle them all together.

Problem solved?

Of course not.

Why?

Because the changes meant getting people back at the plant to change the behaviours of a life-time.

So - she put together a presentation to explain to her co-workers why it was important, what they needed to do and - most importantly - what’s in it for them.

She presented this first to a whole room full of Lean experts during a best practice visit to another of our clients (who had just been shortlisted for the Factory of the Year Awards) - no pressure there!

She asked for comments and feedback.

She then acted on the feedback and changed her whole presentation.

Yesterday she showed her new presentation to her Plant Manager and me.

It was one of the simplest, clearest presentations I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen - and delivered - thousands over the years). Straightforward, hard-hitting and persuasive.

Next week she’s delivering her presentation to every employee in the plant.

And then a whole load of people from the Factory of the Year plant are going to visit and she’s going to show them how to do it!

I’ll leave you to identify how many examples of effective Lean implementation you can pick up on here. How much of Chris’s approach can you apply in your own improvement activities?

And finally, I’ll leave you with a challenge - if you were Chris’s boss, how would you recognise her efforts and how could you help her to help her colleagues change their behaviours?

Posted in Lean | Print | No Comments »

30/09/2010 by Andrew Nicholson.

Saw a really good example of this at one of our clients earlier this week. Their Marketing Manager and Designer went out to vist a representative sample of their customers and end-users. They saw exactly how their products were used, met with the various people involved in specifiying, buying and using the product and asked loads of questions. They found out all sorts of useful information and loads of things that they can do to improve the product, better their competitors and do more business. As per the Kano model (see the earlier blog post) there were one or two “dissatisfiers” - little things that really anoyed the end-users. There were some simple changes that will improve the product and make the customer happier. We even brainstormed some ideas of how we could delight the customer. Over the next year this will undoubtedly lead to happier customers and more sales. It’s all about using the Lean approach to add more value for your customers and it’s a great win-win.

Posted in Lean, General | Print | 1 Comment »