Is your metal fabrication shop's lean manufacturing journey sustainable?

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This is the third installment of a three-part series about serious questions regarding your lean journey and continuous improvement efforts. The first question was Are you dabbling or are you serious? The second was Are you balancing tools and philosophy? Here’s this month’s question: Is your lean journey sustainable?

After approximately seven years of columns in the Continuous Improvement section of The FABRICATOR, it is time to explore these overriding issues. We’ve explored the specific tools of lean, addressed how a person might behave in certain positions through specific role descriptions, and identified ways to resolve challenges and conflicts destined to occur as you progress through your lean journey. This three-part series should help you step back and reflect on the bigger picture.

Starting and advancing your lean efforts does come with cost and disruption. But if done well, the returns will outweigh the investment many times over. The downside to failing to start or letting the effort backslide is that you fail to recognize the improvements and may put your company’s viability at risk. This is serious business.

What Is Sustainability?

A sustainable process performs without heroic effort, nudging, cajoling, or begging. It happens as a natural course of doing business. Instead of pushing to maintain momentum and avoid backsliding, a sustainable process provides you the time to focus on continually improving the process to achieve even greater results.

Sustainability in your lean journey enables your company to perform up to its potential. The speed and intensity may vary from time to time, but you are always moving forward. The absence of sustainability means you will backslide. As I’ve described before, it’s like a big rubber band trying to pull the organization back to pre-lean levels of performance and practices. There simply is no sitting still.

With proper direction, training, and freedom to try new ideas, you’ll find it much easier to maintain momentum. Break the momentum and the restart becomes very difficult and disruptive.

How to Identify Sustainability

What does sustainability look like? It will vary from company to company, but several examples will illustrate a desirable state where lean can thrive.

Exhibiting Rhythm and Flow. Regardless of whether your operation is low mix/high volume, high mix/low volume, or something in between, an effective lean operation will operate with rhythm and flow. To get to this state, you must be practicing many of the methods, tools, and philosophies in the lean body of knowledge. With rhythm and flow, you get predictability and consistency.

Metrics Trending in the Right Direction. You have a balanced set of metrics that focus on both outcome measures (lagging indicators) and upstream process measures (leading indicators). Upstream process measures provide an early warning that you might not achieve the results you want. You must focus on not only the spot results but also the trending results over time. The trending results tell you whether you are getting better and serve as a catalyst for continual improvement.

People Are Engaged. The full spectrum of people, from the top floor to the shop floor, are engaged in appropriate ways to support your lean journey. Executives and managers set direction and provide insight into what is important. Supervisors have the tactical perspective and enable actions for improvements. Frontline employees are trained, developed, and enabled to execute tactical plans and seek better ways to do the job. Everybody has a role, all are invested in developing their capabilities, and each person understands how they impact the customer.

Operations Are Always Customer-visit-ready. A sustainable lean operation is customer-visit-ready at all times. No need to shut the operation down for half a shift the night before the visit. No need to go through special cleanup because that potential customer will be walking through. When you are customer-visit-ready, you simply open the door and let them in, regardless of the day or the shift. Wise organizations make this a significant part of the marketing strategy and use this readiness as a key differentiator.

Not About Finding Who Screwed Up. The sustainable lean organization recognizes the importance of being process-focused. What is the condition of the processes we provide our employees to work in? Frontline employees are smart. They will find a way to work around lousy processes. So, the best way to deal with this is to go study the processes rather than go find who screwed up. Involve employees who work in the process so they have skin in the game to make the better process work. This sets the stage for frontline initiative to pursue continuous improvement—not the status quo.

You probably can identify characteristics relevant to your company that add to this list. That’s OK. This is an example of how the sustainable organization takes the lean body of knowledge and applies it using judgment and discernment. Make it reflect your organization and your needs.

How Can You Influence Sustainability?

Sustainability is not gained passively. Effective lean is an action-oriented team sport. You make it happen. It does not happen by accident. You can influence your company’s sustainability in four ways:

1. Be vigilant - Remember a famous politician’s saying, “Trust, but verify?” This can be applied to your lean journey. With respect for people in a mature lean organization comes trust. But that does not mean you abdicate your responsibility to “know what you know” rather than “think what you know” about the state of lean progress. Be vigilant and watchful.
2. Listen - Effective leaders know how and when to listen. Sometimes you may not like what you hear, but it is necessary to get the unvarnished truth, or at least different perceptions. Good or bad, what you hear provides a base for action and improvement. Remember, no status quo.
3. Measure - Develop effective measures to provide baseline and trending information. Measure a few items that provide deep insight rather than many items that result in diluted and fragmented deployment of resources.
4. Communicate - Communicate as openly, honestly, and frequently as possible to give people the information they need to be engaged and invested in making improvements that evolve the lean journey. Although some communication topics will be general and relevant to the whole organization, other topics will be tailored to an employee’s level or function within the organization. Relevant knowledge is power—for everyone.

A Lean Journey Isn’t Static

If you don’t sustain your lean journey, then you won’t grow and evolve. Your journey will not be static. Of course, you can imagine how dynamic the early stages of the journey are. Everyone has lots of new ideas, unusual activities, and demonstrable results. It is easy to pay attention.

But what about later in the lean journey? A mature lean organization won’t have as much fanfare. Other “shiny objects” come along and challenge your attention. Do you stick to the lean fundamentals, tools, and philosophy that got you to a greater level of performance, or do begin to backslide? This is a challenging time for sustainability.

Does effective sustainability require you to be the vocal and loud cheerleader? Not necessarily. In some cases, vocal cheerleaders make sense provided they cheer for substantive improvements—that is, evidence of shifts along the lean maturity curve and positive impacts on customer satisfaction.

What about “quiet” organizations that don’t make a big deal about the lean effort? They might not use the lean language or preach the lean philosophy every day, but if they’re effectively practicing lean, helping their people understand lean by weaving it into their day-to-day work, and quietly going about their business while getting the results and demonstrably evolving the organization, that’s OK. They’re still sustaining and growing.

Sometimes the quiet organizations are sustaining while the loud organizations are playing lip service and might be in real danger of backsliding. How you make the sustaining of your lean journey visible, whether outwardly emphatic or quietly under the radar, is a matter of judgment and discernment for you, your leadership, and your organization.

Reflection is a powerful thing. This three-part series is intended to challenge you to think about the bigger picture, adjust or fine-tune your approach, and use the lean body of knowledge to help your company be as successful as it deserves to be.