How shops can relaunch and sustain a lean manufacturing program

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Starting your lean journey is challenging; having to restart it is more difficult. Forces and emotions at work might draw your attention away from the effort. Your people may have had a bad experience with a previous initiative and harbor some ill feelings toward a redo.

In an ideal world, previous efforts should never have been disbanded in the first place, but it happens. Let’s explore some of the issues you can face when in restart mode and steps you can take to get back on the journey.

Reasons a Relaunch Is Harder

Anybody been on a diet or two … or three or more? Tried to quit smoking multiple times? The effort doesn’t get any easier the next time you try. The same holds true for your lean journey. Starting again is difficult. One big reason why is the smack your credibility takes for not keeping the lean effort going in the first place.

The credibility erosion can come from several directions. Let’s begin with your employees. How many times have they seen something start with great flourish and then taper away? Do you pick up on the “here we go again” refrain? Faltering and restarting can be particularly taxing on your supervisors and middle managers. Change is hard given the daily pressures of getting products out the door and responding to disruptions in the schedule. So, they fall back into past patterns and practices. You can understand how they might feel a bit like that pickle ball going back and forth over the net!

You also lose credibility with customers. They’ve seen you launch your lean journey and the resulting improvements, but they now see stagnation or decline as your lean practices and methods slip away. In all these cases, the erosion of credibility—both of your company and individual employees—can have a lasting impact.

During the relaunch, you also can send mixed messages about what is important. You’ve already invested in getting your processes to exhibit rhythm and predictability, and when all that backslides because another initiative came along, you lose the discipline and attention to process detail that got early results. Something as basic as letting 5S backslide can negatively affect cleanliness, safety, and waste reduction. Once the effort slips, regaining traction is hard.

Or maybe you got into the rhythm of daily shift-startup meetings but over the ensuing months, the effort just slipped away. When you stopped meeting, what did that say about the importance of communicating with employees?

A final reason restarting is challenging is the real or perceived impression that this “lean stuff” just doesn’t work. The reasons behind why the previous lean effort stopped, whether intentional or simply atrophy, may not have been shared with the workforce, management, or leadership. As a result, employees are left to conjure up their own reasons for the backsliding and harbor whatever feelings about a restart.

If you’re already on the lean journey, now may be a good time to evaluate what you can do to sustain and grow the effort and how you can make it more effective. If you’re in restart mode, it’s time for a relaunch strategy. Just understand that there are no shortcuts. It is hard work.

Steps to Relaunch

The relaunch strategy that follows isn’t exhaustive. Every situation is different, and certain approaches might better suit your company’s unique needs. Regardless, these basic steps should at least point you in the right direction.

The first step is to be honest about why the previous effort stalled, stopped, or failed. Be truthful to yourselves and your organization. An objective assessment should reveal actions you probably do not want to repeat, especially if they were under your control. If they were truly out of your control, figure the best ways you can mitigate the effects of those actions should they reoccur.

Next, evaluate the current state. What is still working? What is dormant? What has simply gone away? You might not need to start from scratch. If employees still have a good understanding about parts of the lean body of knowledge, you can build on that without much rework. However, if you had a solid 5S process before but it has gone away to the point where there is no evidence of understanding or application, you then need to start from the very basics. Don’t assume people know something just because they saw it in the past. Time tends to erode knowledge if it is not used and improved.

During the relaunch, develop a thorough, comprehensive message about why the previous effort didn’t work. What are business reasons for the relaunch (hopefully with renewed vigor), and what results can employees expect?

A bit of humility goes a long way in earning people’s support and engagement. This will help overcome the “here we go again” mentality, which can be detrimental if left unchecked.

Develop a gameplan that ties the relaunch to what is important for the business. This effort should generate business results, make the operations cleaner and safer, and provide transparency to everyone in the organization so people can see the results of their efforts. Showing a direct linkage can be difficult (that is, this 5S effort produced that business result), but even a general linkage helps personalize employees’ physical and emotional investment, whether they’re welders, material handlers, schedulers, or top executives.

Invest in the needed training. Everybody does not need to know everything about lean, but everybody needs to know what is relevant to them. If there is an area where changeover is consuming time in a capacity-constrained situation, then dive deep on changeover methods, 5S, and value-added versus nonvalue-added work. In the area where bottlenecks and distances between operations are making it hard to “see” the process, focus on streamlined flow and cellular design.

Dive deep on what is relevant. Do not be concerned if they were “taught” the topic last year or five years ago. Train them again. It may be a refresher for some, but new knowledge for most—and repetition is a good thing!

Finally, recognize the progress and accomplishments during the relaunch. If someone generated expected or better-than-expected results, or even just put forth an honest effort, be sure to provide some type of recognition. It could be a write-up in the company newsletter, a pizza lunch, or kind words at the daily shift startup meeting. Of course, never forget that one of the most impactful forms of recognition is a simple handshake and thank you.

Intentionally Keep It Going

Try viewing the relaunch as a kind of rework associated with any job flowing through your plant. You want to avoid rework whenever possible, of course, but sometimes you just have to deal with it. Sure, you could have launched your lean journey with enough intention, resources, and attention to sustain and grow the effort, even in the face of distraction. It’s the most desirable path, but it’s not an easy one. If you falter, start the hard work of your lean relaunch. The sooner you do, the closer your organization can move toward being the truly competitive machine it could be!