Lean – First Steps

All of a sudden, Lean and Six Sigma have become the keywords that are used by everyone in Latvia now. And suddenly nobody argues with me that improvements are possible, although the majority doesn’t even understand what it is and how it works.

Very many people have asked me – where to begin? With 5S, SMED, VSM, Kaizen or something else?

Here we go. If you start introducing Lean in Latvia, in an environment that is totally unprepared for changes (and, in my opinion, it is true for some 80% of Latvian enterprises), then nothing is going to happen. Any, even consecutive action will stop at the moment of its implementation or at the moment when a consultant leaves the company. As a result, many, even good, Lean or optimization projects fail because they are owned by the consultant and not by the business.

So the first thing to start with is to win support from at least 2/3 of senior management for Lean or a thrifty approach to production. If there’s no support, let’s forget about it and get back to it after a year, when the situation is even worse and a necessity of changing something arises. The next thing is to achieve that Lean is ordered by a business and there’s a particular person whose head will roll if something isn’t working.

The next thing I would do in implementing Lean… However strange it may sound – making elementary changes that create noticeable changes. When the changes are made, nobody can even imagine that it could have been different. The changes usually cost nothing more than changing the sequence of things or processes and changing the accessibility of them. As a consequence, if it isn’t measured in terms of money at that moment, all those involved can clearly understand that a change in a positive direction has been made.

Only after that you can get down to VSM and other things. Although now I’m telling lies a bit – I’m drawing VSM at the very beginning. It is my map, and with its help I don’t lose the track of what is going on. Every time I approach a machine, I can measure its flow time, uptime, cycle time, stand-by time, work in progress etc. Moreover, I can do it independently of the others, without causing any stress, but the next planning time I can offer to solve some critical problems.

My experience is that slogans don’t work. I think that also the boom of Lean is going to cease after some 2 or 3 years, similarly as ISO9000, Total Quality Management and other offerers of happiness came to the end at some point. What really work are basic things that bring in a bit of money every time I touch upon them… It is convincing.