While studying engineering at Virginia Tech, I also had the opportunity to work as a co-op at a large manufacturing facility. This experience had a formative impact on my early career and provided me with my first exposure to lean principles, such as when I participated in a week-long kaizen event. "Kaizen" is a Japanese word that means "good change" and is a core philosophy of continuous improvement. A kaizen event is a focused, 3-5 day project with cross-function team members participating full-time on a specific improvement opportunity.
Since those early days, I have gone on to serve as a facilitator for kaizen events myself, but the lessons I learned from that first kaizen event still apply today.
The event goal must be urgent and high impact. Always start with 'why' - Why are we doing this event? A kaizen event requires significant time and resources - there needs to be a "burning platform" providing a sense of urgency. The goal of this particular event was to reduce waste and improve efficiency in our largest turbine control box production lines. It was a high impact project with significant potential financial benefits.
The facilitator must be both skilled with the tools and a good match for the culture. Because of the magnitude and potential impact of the event, we brought in an outside facilitator - Toshihiro Nagamatsu, president of Shingijutsu USA Corp, a consulting firm specializing in lean manufacturing. Mr. Nagamatsu had worked for Toyota in Japan, and had an interpreter with him. He provided the overall facilitation and guidance for the event, and had a very collaborative "show, don't tell" approach. He would observe the teams during the day and give guidance, and then he would review our progress at the end of each day at the pitch-out session, where each team reported the day's progress.
Planning is essential. I was assigned the pre-event preparation work of creating a map of the assembly process for this particular unit. The map was built using a combination of Pro-Engineer assembly diagrams and go-and-see consultations and verification. Outlining the assembly process prior to the event proved to be instrumental in facilitating the team's understanding of the process and was used as a guide during assembly. While we could have mapped the process during the actual kaizen event, having a basic map to begin with helped us focus our limited time on improvement.
Pick the right people to be on the team. My team was made up of several operators who had intimate, daily knowledge of the process, two managers, a process engineer from another plant who served as 'fresh eyes', and myself. All of us had been asked if we would be willing to participate in the event, and all of us were enthusiastic and eager to do so.
"Go and See" is not optional. One of the first activities of the event was to actually build a control unit ourselves.We quickly ran into problems when trying to assembly the basic outside frame. The orientation of the pieces was not intuitively obvious, and we did not realize that we had actually assembled the unit backwards until we tried to put the insulating material on later and found it would not fit in the prefabricated holes. We had to unscrew all of the bolts on the frame by hand and start over, a delay that cost us half an hour. Now, an experienced assembler would probably not have made the same mistake that we did, but a newer one might. But there was no method for verifying that the frame was assembled correctly prior to installing the insulation, and all levels of operators would benefit from having visual cues to indicate the correct orientation. Going and seeing the process ourselves enabled us to identify actual improvements. We never would have seen the problems that needed to be fixed if we sat in a conference room theorizing about how to reduce cycle time.
The power is in the many. The team brainstormed solutions, and came up with adding color codes and labels to the frame components to aid with installation. We decided to contact the manufacturer to see what the cost would be of having them add this standardization to the components. What was important was that everyone shared their ideas of how to solve the problem, and then the team selected which solution was most feasible.
Sometimes you have to spend money to make money. Some improvements we found required significant capital, but we were able to justify it with the cost savings. One of these was the purchase of a hydraulic lift to aid in raising the assembled sides of the control unit. Previously, this required several people working together to lift each side into place. In addition to the cost savings through reduced labor time, the biggest impact was to improving safety. In the case of the hydraulic lift, even if it had not been a cost savings, because it improved employee safety, it was well-worth the investment.
Quantify the gains. At the end of the Kaizen event, we tallied the savings of all the improvements we had made during the week, both big and small. We found the hard savings in reduced assembly and rework time to be tens of thousands of dollars. This helped all participants to see the value in spending their time and effort on this focused event, and gave everyone a sense of satisfaction.
In subsequent kaizen events through the course of my career, I have learned more lessons as well which I will share in another post.
