Articles by: Ankit Patel

Daily Stand up Meetings

12/19/14 by Ankit Patel | Uncategorized | No Comments »

Daily meetings are a critical way to set your culture, make improvements, and get a touch on your operations. Have you been a part of a day stand up meeting? What did you notice about your daily stand up meetings? How are you running the meetings? Let’s first take the purpose.

Purpose of a Daily Stand Up Meeting

This will have to be up to you to decide what you ultimate purpose is but here are some to consider:

Performance related
Culture change
Communication
Teaching and Training
All of the above

Your purpose will determine the content of the meetings and should align to the strategy of the organization. Daily stand up meetings are used as an amplifier, they amplify what you want to get.

Structure of Daily Stand Up Meetings

You can do this many different ways, virtually, in person, whole team, partial teams, tiered meeting structure, etc. Here are the key tenements of the structure for your daily stand up meeting:

Scope what you talk about and what you don’t talk about
Have decision makers in the meeting so you can change things quickly
Keep it short , less than 30 min and preferably 7 minutes
If you can stay standing

Once you understand your purpose and structure then you should address your norms.

Norms for Daily Stand up Meetings

The norms for your meeting will be dependent on your company but here are some suggestions:

Length of meeting
Topics in meeting
Dry erase board or projector for data presentation
No distractions
Keep it 70% positive 70% of the time

Now that you have a basics give it a shot and see how quickly you can achieve your business goals.

Lean Value vs. Lean Waste

11/25/14 by Ankit Patel | Uncategorized | No Comments »

People who practice Lean will tel you to to remove waste, make product flow, and reduce over burdening (via standardization). These are great tenants and are the corner stone of nay Lean program. One area that gets ignored is increasing the value. Honestly Lean does a terrible job at focusing on increasing value and creating value beyond just reducing waste. The good news is that there are several tools that will help focus on the value side. Value refers to the job to be done for the customer. The job to be done is what the customer needs/wants. An example of this is a customer walks into a hardware shop and asks for a 1/4 inch drill bit. The customer doesn’t want a drill bit, the customer wants a 1/4 in hole. The job to be done is where you will generate value.

Defining Value

Job Priority – This is how important the job to be done is to the customer.
Solution Priority – This is to what extent the job to be done is unsatisfied
Utility Value – The extent that desired outcome is meet
Situational Value – How accessible is the solution
Market Price – The price is right based on the other factors

Product Innovation

Job Priority, Solution Priority, and Utility Value come from product innovation. This is actually defining the product and making it better to address what the customer is actually valuing. A great way to help with this is the Stanford Design School process. It is highly iterative and empathetic to develop products with a higher value to the customers. Either through utility, job priority, or solution priority. An example of this is Paypal. They created a new way for people to pay for online transaction.

Business Model

Situational Value and Market Price is affected by delivery of the product. A business model canvas is a great way to innovate and find ways to deliver better value to the customers. One example of this is Microsoft 365 who doesn’t charge hundreds of dollars for their software instead just charges a small amount each month and offers cloud services. The product is the same but the delivery method was different.

Lean Line Design Line Requirements Part II

11/12/14 by Ankit Patel | Uncategorized | No Comments »

Now that you have have your Takt time and your Value Stream Maps the next step is to create your station map. The first step is to figure out how many stations you need. This is done by taking your total time in your future state map and dived it by 40% of the takt time. Each station should be around 40% of your takt time for any particular value stream. The 40% allows for flexibility and you will have more stations than people. This allows for flexing production up and down based on volume. You can use another number besides 40% but 40% tends to work well for most cases. If your total time to build a unit is greater than takt time then use the calculation we just mentioned. If it is less than or equal to takt then you have freedom to choose how you want to break apart the stations.

Takt < Total Build time for one unit

Number of Stations = Total Build time / (.40 * Takt)

Takt >= Total Build time for one unit

Number of Stations = logical breakdown of tasks

Once you have your initial number of stations then go through and fill them up with tasks. You should have several work elements and should be able fill the stations with work. Try to come as close as you can to 40% of takt for the work content in each station. It won’t be perfect but get as close as you can. Once you have this information then we create cardboard mock-ups to emulate the new designs. You’ll do a dry run going through the motions of your new line in the cardboard mock up. Your mock up doesn’t have to be out of cardboard as shown by the picture below. It is a mock up of a food production process during the weighing and measuring process. The team used this space to run through a new designed process.

Process for Line Requirements

1) Create your value streams

2) Find your takt fro each value stream

3) Take your total work element times and takt to find your number of stations

4) Assign work elements to each station

5) Test the new production line with a mock up

Lean Line Design Requirements Part I

Lean Line Design Current State and Initial Future State

Leading a Lean Transformation Part I

Leading a Lean Transformation Part II

Lean Line Design Introduction

Lean Line Design Line Requirements Part I

10/31/14 by Ankit Patel | Uncategorized | No Comments »

In previous posts on Lean Line Designs we introduced terminology and introduced the concept of the current state map and future state map. We are now at the point that we need to determine the line requirements. The first step in determining a Lean Line Requirement is to determine the Value Streams the products fall into. Simply create a grid with the rows representing different product types and columns representing process steps. Simply put an “x” where the product requires a particular process step.

Now you have your Value Stream maps. In the example above you have four products but essentially would have two value streams. This means that you will probably need two separate “lines” in your facility to address each value stream. Some facilities have as few as 1 and can have multiple value streams. Once you know this then the next step is to calculate your takt time. Takt is the required run rate to meet customer demand. An easy way to do this is to create a simple forecast based off of the last year’s volumes and build in a 10-20% buffer in those numbers. Once you have your total volume in units for each value stream then you need to use this formula:

Total Time Available for Production [seconds/year] / Total Volume [units/year]

Where total time available for production are the total number of seconds you have available to work minus breaks. You will get a number that will tell you how many seconds you have to build a single unit. This is your takt time.

Lean Line Design Current State and Initial Future State

Leading a Lean Transformation Part I

Leading a Lean Transformation Part II

Lean Line Design Introduction

Paternalistic Managment Is Becoming Extinct

10/17/14 by Ankit Patel | Uncategorized | No Comments »

Paternalistic management is a type of command and control leadership style. In this style of management all the decisions are made at the top and it’s everyone’s job to execute to those orders. Think of it like a father child relationship. The best places where this style works is when you have an industry that doesn’t change very often or very quickly, the work required isn’t complicated and there is a clear understanding of what needs to be done, and there needs to be heavy controls on operations to make sure you are maximizing your return. Think of an industry like the shipping container business, there hasn’t been a major change or innovation in about 50 years.

Mass Extinction

If you would have asked someone in the 1890’s what they wanted, they might have said a faster horse to get them from point A-B faster. Henry Ford came along and invented the model T. Changes and technology bring about change and the model T to a paternalistic management style is automation and robotics. We’re starting to see the beginning of mass automation which will eliminate the jobs and management structures associated with more basic and straight forward tasks. Like the ones you see in the shipping container industry or in a warehouse. The jobs that require people will become increasingly more complex and more connected. In that scenario paternalistic management is actually one of the worst management styles and in fact paternalistic management will be counter productive.

If you have a paternalist management style and want to change here are some helpful tips.

1) Find a mentor or coach to help you change your style

2) Find an industry that isn’t as vulnerable to automation and robotics like services vs. manufacturing

3) Old habits die hard so you’ll need some help FIND A COACH OR MENTOR!

Lean Line Design Current State Map and Initial Future State

10/06/14 by Ankit Patel | lean business system, lean culture, lean transformation, line design | No Comments »

In the last post we talked about an Introduction to Lean Line Design. In that post we introduced terms that we will be using to describe the Lean Line Design process. The first step in the process is to understand what’s possible given your company culture. This is all part of understanding current state. There are working cultures that work better than others when you are trying to do a Lean Line Design. For more details you can watch our 40 minute webinar describing some of the cultural elements at play. The short answer is that you need some sort of collaborative culture to do a Lean Line Design. Lean is about learning and to do that you need to be able to create a safe space for learning to happen. Collaborative (or hero based) cultures tend to allow for that to happen. Other cultures like command and control or political cultures aren’t as helpful and can kill a line design effort before it even starts. Once you are able to create the space for you and the team you then select the team that is cross-functional as well and has a representation of the whole system. The system is defined as every process, department, system, and person involved in the new Lean Line. On your team you will want at least 40% representation of every group. Not everyone will participate at the same level but they should all have a voice in the process. Some departments will have more representation (operations and materials) and the more participation you can get the better the design and the faster the adoption of the new design.

The first technical step in a Lean Line Design is to do a current state stack chart of the process steps. This should be done with a stop watch and observational studies. Here are the steps in creating a current state stack chart:
1) Assign roles to the people doing observations
—> Process observer – write down process steps (work elements)
—> Time keeper – keep times on process steps
—> Waste observer – look for wastes in the process steps as well as any other wastes
2) Set a time to observe the work being done
3) Collect the data
4) Create a current state stack chart (see image below)
5) Based on group conversation remove and reduce work elements you think you can remove and reduce in the future state.

You now have your initial future state stack chart map.

Notice the stack chart on the left is around 120 seconds for a cycle time and the one on the right is around 85 seconds. Once you have done the future state total cycle time then we need to start with the line requirements which include takt time, line balancing, and other constraints.

Leading a Lean Transformation Part I

Leading a Lean Transformation Part II

Lean Line Design Introduction

09/25/14 by Ankit Patel | lean transformation, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Line design is one of the best ways to get bottom line savings quickly with Lean. A Lean line design is the process used to streamline a process to remove waste but doing it systematically. Here are some terms you need to know before we get into how to do a Lean line design.

Takt Time – The pace we need units to come off the production line. It is calculated by dividing the production time (usually in seconds) by the units required over that same time period.
Waste – Defined by the 7 wastes – (TIM WOOD) Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Over Production, Over Processing, Defects.
Machine Time – Time associated with a machine to complete a task.
Operator Time – Time a human operator takes to complete a task.
Drop-off Time – For areas with multiple stations this is the time you expect a unit to come out of the area. For example if you have three machines cutting sheet metal templates and each machine takes 300 seconds then we can expect a unit out once every 100 seconds. The drop off time would be 100 seconds.
Throughput Time – The total time a unit takes from start to finish.
Cycle Time – The time it takes for one station in one area to finish it’s task. It combines machine time and operator time.
Value Add Time – The amount of time at each station that is not wasteful.
Work element – The smallest unit of work that can be transferred to another person.

Let’s take a look at the overall process below:

Current state
Initial future state
Line requirements
Station Layout
Testing
Materials flow
Daily Managment

Each step is critical in getting the results you want when doing a Lean Transformation. Many times people will skip the line requirements and it will cause problems in your process. A typical line design you can get 30-100% increase in efficiency in producing your product as well as reducing your costs structure. It’s not uncommon to turn a cost center (like a repair facility) and turn it into a profit center (outsourced repair center).

Leading a Lean Transformation Part I

Leading a Lean Transformation Part II

09/15/14 by Ankit Patel | lean culture, lean transformation | No Comments »

In part I of Leading a Lean Transformation we explored the business results you can get by doing a Lean Transformation. It’s not uncommon to see successful Lean Transformations improve a business by 30%. However the success rate is very low. Over 70% of change efforts fail the first time around and companies who try Lean report that 2% get the results they expected. In the spirit of Lean we’ll first explore are the root causes of why it fails.

Culture

Culture can be a bit loose and the way we are going to define it is by the way information flows in an organization. The chart on the left shows you the four basic information flow styles and how they are run. The major item to note is that for a Lean Transformation to be successful the company needs to have a collaborative and or hero based culture. If they don’t then the chances of success go down dramatically. For more information on how culture affects a Lean Transformation watch our 40 min webinar.

Collaborative cultures work together and information flows freely among everyone and everything is shared openly. In a hero based culture all information is filtered through a few “heroes” of the organization that are the ones that are looked to for decisions and action. You get a funnel effect with information. In a political culture information is only shared if it benefits the individual that holds the information. You can even have misinformation shared in this type of culture. In a command and control culture you have one or just a couple of people at the top who control all the information and decision making.

The reason why you need a collaborative or a hero based culture is that you are learning when you are doing Lean and the other two environments are not learning environments. What type of culture is your organization? Next we’ll explore other factors like momentum and how to assess where to start a Lean initiative. Here are some related posts that you might enjoy:

How to Influence Using Conversation
How Great Leaders Inspire Action
Lean Six Sigma and Innovation

Leading a Lean Transformation Part I

09/05/14 by Ankit Patel | lean culture, Uncategorized | No Comments »

A Lean Transformation is a way to changing your business. Traditionally it’s about reducing waste, making products and services “flow”, and reducing excess burdening on people. It’s hard for businesses to believe that by changing the way you look at a problem can change the way you perform. Typically business will see a 30% improvement or better to their bottom line after 1-3 years of a Lean Transformation process. Some other notable results from The Lean Way include turning a cost center into a profit center, a company getting on the INC 500 list, and reducing the costs by 50% to turn an unprofitable product into the most profitable one. You can learn more about how the factors that influence a Lean Transformation on our information tab.

The Lean Enterprise Institute has a great video on what Lean Transformation (how Toyota – the founders of Lean -use it). This is a way that can apply to most businesses however only 2% of businesses get the results they wanted from a Lean Transformation (industry week survey 2013). Over 70% of change efforts fail the first time (McKinsey change management study). Combine these two stats and it’s a wonder why companies still try to do Lean Transformations. The reason is around the culture of your company. Certain cultures work better than others to start a Lean Transformation. Before starting a Lean Transformation you have to get your culture in the right spot.

Part II of this series will cover the cultural elements and as we go through this series

Why 5s Isn’t Always the Best Place to Start (Hospital Case Study)

08/29/14 by Ankit Patel | behavior change | No Comments »

Most Lean resources will tell you that 5s is the best place to start a Lena initiative. Some will go one step further and say start where there is a need and go from there. While both are good advice we still see a high rate of failure for Lean (70%-98% depending on the research study). So why is the failure rate so high? The answer is that we ignore the behavioral reasons to why we do things a certain way. To understand this let’s first look at a little bit of history.

Taylorism and Scientific Management

In the late 1800’s Fredrick Taylor introduced the concept of scientific management and revolutionized how we run our businesses. However no matter how great the new ideas were it did have a blind spot and that was with human relationships. It wasn’t until the early 1900’s that people started looking at the human side of change. With Taylorism came the attitude of workers just being a “pair of hands” and we should look at them more as widgets instead of people. This mindset has stayed and has morphed.

Employees are People no Machines

The reason why we see so many failures with Lean and other change efforts is because we don’t look at the human emotions involved. There are many experts who know the technical skills to implement change but very few lack the structure, knowledge, and experience to deal with the emotional component to any change. The real root cause that people resist change (and the cause of such a high failure rate) is usually an emotional reason and not a skills reason. Ironically because people aren’t machines we are now seeing a trend towards machines doing more and more work.

Case Study at a Hospital

A hospital in North Carolina has their internal Lean leader do a 5s event with a department to help them mange their inventory. This department housed critical fluids for patients like saline and other fluids. The department has challenges with too much of their inventory expiring before use. The Lean leader came in and helped them 5s their area and was initially successful. However after a few weeks the managers started going back to their old habits of keeping extra inventory in stock. What do you think happened? Why did the management team go back to their old habits? Most people at this point say that there wasn’t enough accountability and that was true however there was a deeper root cause. I mentioned that they are somehow rewarded by their behavior and it turns out that 35 years ago there was bad weather and they couldn’t get their supply of fluids in and they ran short at this hospital. You can imagine the chaos that would have caused and potentially the number of lives that may have been affected. Because of this one event 35 years ago the department was still hording their inventory. The solution was to address the concern over stock outs and then we test it. Once we agreed to the solution as a team then we could hold them accountable to the new system. If we had just tried to hold them accountable we would have seen disengagement from many of the staff and potentially some turn over. By taking this root cause approach we were able to have a productive solution that helped the people grow vs. a solution that might have been painful to implement and disengaged people. Even though 5s was the right technical tool the first place to start would have been to ask why does the team have this behavior in the first place and let’s address that first before we address the 5s effort.