What's the biggest bad thing on the production floor? Let's start with lean management, but do you know what lean management is like in the production workshop?
Lean is a corporate culture of continuous improvement
Lean improvement of an enterprise requires the participation of all employees, the initiative of everyone to discover and solve problems, and the elimination of all forms of waste. This is a process of continuous evolution and accumulation. Its ultimate goal is to achieve the improvement of local efficiency and overall efficiency, and the joint growth of personal income and corporate benefits.
Customers will not pay for your ineffective work
When mobilizing employees to contribute ideas, it is important to emphasize that the company is in great need of suggestions that will help eliminate ineffective work.
What is ineffective labor? Any operation that does not add value to the product is ineffective labor, such as counting, moving, redundant procedures, unnecessary inspections, rework, storage and waiting, etc. are all ineffective labor.
If it is difficult to define whether a certain operation is value-added or ineffective labor, then you can ask this question: After performing this operation, will the customer be willing to pay more?
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Managers are not "fire captains"
In the past, the success of an enterprise often relied on whether the enterprise had the ability to respond quickly and "fire-fighting hoses", but today it requires the kind of "long-term overall improvement" thinking.
Front-line managers must follow the requirements of JIT (just in time management). When quality problems arise, they must immediately expose them and concentrate their efforts to solve them. Instead of dealing with current orders, old problems will reappear in the next batch of large-scale production and become vicious. cycle. Managers focus on the root causes of quality, delivery and other problems in order to solve the relevant problems once and for all. That kind of tinkering and short-term "fire-fighting" behavior is not allowed. Quality and yield problems can be solved step by step by reducing inventory. Lean management (JIT) is not just an inventory reduction strategy; inventory reduction is simply the natural outcome of successfully solving a problem.
Keep motivating employees instead of blaming them
It is unrealistic to ask employees to assume relevant responsibilities when they have not yet had the opportunity to participate and feel that they are also owners of the company. The only way to turn a company's vision into reality is for every employee to take responsibility in some way for transforming the company's culture. People on the front line always have solutions to problems. Many times, front-line workers often solve problems in a few weeks that the management and technical departments have not been able to solve for years.
If an excellent lean corporate culture is not formed, once any problem occurs, employees will always have various excuses: "This is not my problem." How to involve them in the improvement process through training so that "this is not my problem" changes to "what measures can we take to make it more effective?" Finally, when workers improve their designs and experience the joy of success At this time, a sense of responsibility that I had never felt before emerged spontaneously.
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Reform is a gradual process, not a revolution
You must understand that corporate culture cannot be changed and formed overnight. Lasting, incremental changes in the right direction work best if time is available. However, if it is a life-or-death moment, changes should be made in a drastic way. The company's goals for moving forward must be very clear and must be achieved resolutely.
Shift from command to guidance and become a coach for employees
Managers must change from a commanding style to a guiding management style, just like changing from a commander to a coach: Although coaches still have the final power, their job is to cultivate the thinking ability and ability of all team members. Ability to solve problems on your own.
A manager with a facilitator style will say something like this:
"Try your new idea."
"Whatever you think can meet the needs of customers is what you produce."
"You know best how to get this done, so tell me what help you need."
"The more jobs you can do, the better you are."
"If you are empty now, help others or try to make some innovations."
As a manager who is a coordinator, one of his responsibilities is to communicate the overall development of the enterprise to all employees, and to make clear the role of each person in this overall situation. Only when employees have a clear understanding of their roles can they take appropriate actions in participating in management.
The biggest waste is not production interruption
In traditional factory management, there is a large amount of inventory. It can cause much greater waste than interrupting production.
Let us assume that there are three working points A, B, and C in a certain production process. C is stopped (due to parts outage, equipment failure, operator sick leave or many other reasons?), while A and B continue to produce, so that A large amount of parts inventory is accumulated, waiting for C to process. Finally, C resumed production and worked overtime to complete the processing tasks of those inventory parts. At this time, he discovered that there were a lot of defective products in the inventory. What a huge waste!
This is not to say that when a production line is interrupted, everyone in the workshop should be idle or go home; it is that we should not continue to produce semi-finished products just to keep workers idle. Workers can go to other teams to help, receive training, or use this rare and abundant time to hold a free group meeting to use their brains and brainstorm ideas.
The first-class bad thing is not interrupting production, but producing inferior products; the second-class bad thing is the existence of hidden dangers and low efficiency; the third-class bad thing is the interruption of the production process, and customers will not pay for your hard and ineffective work! This is the principle that managers should understand in lean improvement.
