The amazing challenging power of TPS

9 March 2016 / article

Toyota’s Thinking People System continues to amaze me.

To prepare for tomorrow’s gemba visit of one of their sites, the CEO and COO of this service company used the TPS House to draw the list of challenges they needed to tackle.

COMPETITIVE EDGE: What is the competitive challenge of this site: How is the competition in this particular region? How does it differ from other regions? Where should the site outperform its competitors to find growth?
CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: What is our main customer satisfaction challenge? From looking at customer complaints and customer feed-back, what specific issue should be face to add greater value to our local customers?
PEOPLE DEVELOPMENT: What are the main capability development issues on the site?
OPERATIONAL CHALLENGES: 1) What is our main safety issue on this site? What is our main quality issue on this site? 3) How can we reduce lead-time on this site? 4) what is our main flexibility problem on this site? 5) What is our main total cost problem on this site? 6) What is our main energy performance here on site? 7) is there a morale issue on site?
JUST-IN-TIME: What is the take time for this site? What is the biggest block to continuous flow of work? Where are we batching most?
JIDOKA: What is the principal issue we should learn to see (and call for help) before diving in? What is the next poke-yoke we should work on? Where should we be separating better people’s work from the system’s work?
HEIJUNKA: What planning issue should we tackle to avoid mura, muri and mud right here on site?
STANDARD WORK: Which standards should we look at in detail in the way people work here on site?
KAIZEN: What is kaizen effort are local teams working on we should go and see and listen out?
BASIC STABILITY: Is the 5S plan happening? Are stable teams stable? Is the safety plan vigorous enough?

Granted, that makes quite a bucket list – but the issue here is NOT to create a checklist for what to see on the gemba. The point of this exercise is drawing a unique understanding of the site and – to the CEO and COO’s surprise – the realization that sure, some issues are company specific, but many challenges are absolutely linked to the regional situation and the personalities of the people on site.

Having finished the full exercise, CEO and COO discussed their resulting model of the site and chose the three main challenges they wanted to discuss with the site manager during the gemba walk, mainly one customer challenge, one operational challenge and one people development challenge.

The point was not to tell the site manager what to do, but ask him how he intended to respond to the challenge and what support he needed from corporate to be able to do so, and then check current state and progress on the gumbo itself.

What they were amazed at, though, is how basing the conversation on the TPS led to a completely different perspective on the site, its management team, and the challenges of the company as a whole. This is the amazing power of using TPS as the basis of lean thinking: making you face your own challenges, by drawing a lean model of your business.

Tags: TPS

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Leading author, speaker and researcher, I work on both the "hard" (improve quality, reduce lead-time, eliminate waste) and "soft" (engage people in problem-solving and improvement to develop them to the fullest of their abilities) dimensions of Lean transformation.

I started studying improvement initiatives twenty years ago as part of my PhD. research on Mental Models. I was persuaded by Toyota engineers that to understand lean you had to practice it firsthand and I have been working with supervisors, site managers and now CEOs to leverage their lean efforts into market share, people engagement and bottom line results. You don't know what you don't know and the most surprising thing I've learned as a cognitive sociologist is the value of: see with your feet and think with your hands!

I co-founded the Projet Lean Entreprise and the Institut Lean France. I have written several books and articles about the links between knowledge and management (Managing With Systems Thinking, The Effective Organization, Les Modèles Mentaux), and more recently, co-authored three business novels published by the Lean Enterprise Institute, one about lean turnaround, The Gold Mine, one about lean transformation, The Lean Manager, and a novel about Lean practice, Lead with Respect as well as a Lean manual in French, Le Management Lean.