George,
what really ignited team learning and system thinking in our efforts to
adopt "lean" principles as discribed in Womack and Jones Lean Thinking was
a citation I found in that book, stating something like a Toyota man
saying that the only competition he takes serious will come from Germany,
when Germans learn to communicate.
The idea is, that for team learning and system thinking, two prerequisites
are necessary: high educational standards and good communication. High
educational standards are difficult to achieve if you don't have them. But
if you have them, good communication can be learnt quite easily: finger
pointing need to be replaced by understanding the system. Exactly such
understanding require the educational standards.
Finger pointing is a result of a local, fragmented point of view. This
view is prevalent when the factory floor is divided into separated cost
centers. In this view, the main waste is an idle resource. It's always the
others who don't allow me to reduce my cost, or worse, the others efforts
to reduce their cost which induces a mess in my cost center.
In the "lean" approach, the flow of sellable goods is in the center of
improvements. A flow is not a local, but a global, systems property. The
main waste in the flow picture is overproduction.
It is here, where the conflict becomes visible (and for the worker
feelable - unease!). You cannot avoid idle machines without overproduction
and vice versa. Theoretically, balanced capacity would solve the conflict.
In practice we have lot sizes, which change the product mix daily. Thus
balanced capacity is in our case pure planning premise - making
calculations (cost, ROI, make or buy...) easy, but tend to mess up
production, especially, when market demand goes up. Not to mention any
kind of disruptions.
In short, team learning and system thinking is fostered, when the workers
are asked to improve the flow of sellable goods and to formulate their
requirements towards the supporting departments (logistics, industrial
engineering, controlling, development, sales...).
We have started our efforts just 5 months ago, so I cannot tell the big
success story yet. Whether the process will gain (motor) or loose (brake)
dynamic depend mainly on the way we are calculating cost and measure
performance. Lean Thinking has some hints, but is not concrete enough.
Searching for hints on how to deal with these problems, I found the theory
of constaints very helpful.
Liebe Gruesse,
Winfried
--"Winfried Dressler" <winfried.dressler@voith.de>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>