Bringing Lean Thinking Out of the Factory to Transform the Entire Organization
Pascal Dennis
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The Remedy
Bringing Lean Thinking Out of the Factory to Transform the Entire Organization
Pascal Dennis
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About This Book
Winner of the Shingo Prize for Excellence in Quality Improvement
-From the Shingo judges:
This work has an extremely widespread application as the tools, techniques, and methods described are at a level that achieves the goals of Lean and operational excellence without tying them down to a specific industry or work stream. The book provides practical knowledge for lean champions, managers, and executives driving toward operational excellence enterprise-wide. The story format, and the presentation of this material was excellent, and the avoidance of lean and operational excellence jargon gives the book a wide appealâŚit is a pleasure to read.
The Sequel to the Influential "Lean" Business Novel Andy & Me
The Remedy is a compelling a business fable that shows how Lean quality improvement business practicesâtraditionally associated with manufacturing--can dramatically improve the service areas of your business-including design, engineering, sales, marketing and all processes in between.
Written by Pascal Dennis, a leading Lean consultant, the story follows Tom Pappas and Rachel Armstrong, senior leaders at a desperate automotive company as they try to implement a Lean management system across an entire platform, the Chloe, a breakthrough "green" car. The future of the company is at stake. Can Tom and Rachel, supported by Andy Saito, a retired, reclusive Toyota executive, regain the trust and respect of the customer? Can a venerable but dying company implement Lean practices to every part of their business and learn a new, more effective way of managing?
Shows you how to use the Lean quality improvement method to fix not just a manufacturing system, but an entire company, including management, design, marketing, and supply chain
Written by Pascal Dennis, author of four books on Lean practices and winner of the coveted Shingo Prize for outstanding research contributing to operational excellence
Originally developed by Toyota, the Lean approach to quality improvement has gained a worldwide following and helped turn around enumerable struggling businesses
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The Boeing 737 rose above the LaGuardia Airport tarmac. Across the East River was Manhattanâs symphonic skyline. Below me, Queens was spread out like an abstract expressionist painting, something Jackson Pollock might have produced after a bad hangover. My girlfriend, Sarah, is rubbing off on me. She loves art and literature. When she isnât teaching kindergarten in Hoboken, she is guiding me through the Metropolitan, Guggenheim, and Frick galleries, and through the experimental art galleries that flourish in Brooklynâs nooks and crannies.
I donât mind at all. As an engineering student, my electives were usually art, literature, or psychology. My pals looked at me cockeyed but all that learning served me well when I became an auto plant manager.
Tom Papas is my name. Our family name is Papachristodoulou. My brother Harry and I shortened it, we said, to fit on the back of our football jerseys. Harry is a PhD biochemist, a big wheel in pharmaceuticals, where you can charge 80 bucks for a little pill. Iâm plant manager of New Jersey Motor Manufacturing (NJMM), which is part of Taylor Motors. We transform substandard processes, a spaghetti-like supply chain, and rigid management system into the Desperado, a magical muscle car the public loves. What do we get for our efforts? Negative margins and a catastrophic balance sheet. But I donât have to tell you how Taylor Motors is doing. Youâve heard it all.
Rachel Armstrong, our formidable senior vice president, has summoned me to headquarters in Taylor City, a Motown suburb synonymous with our company. Would she offer me the job of Vice-President of Continuous Improvement again? I turned it down once before because of all the travel requiredâtoo hard on my children.
NJMM, and manufacturing in general, is one of Taylor Motorsâ few bright spots. During the past five years Iâve become the toast of the company, the superhero credited with resurrecting the NJMM plant, and regaining some luster for our brand. Superhero thinking is a problem for us. If something good happens, we assume heroismâas if the normal functioning of our management system is incapable of producing great results.
At NJMM we make our production numbers every dayâwith minimal overtime. Our quality is the best in the Taylor system, and world-class in our segment. (Still way behind Lexus, though.) The new Desperado sports car has been a hit and the brand has regained its mystique. Sales, however, are down 25 percent since the economy collapsedâbetter than most car brands. Iâve been able to keep all our people employed. But I fear that J. Ed Morgan, our nefarious CFO, may try to chop a shift.
When our plant was facing extinction five years ago, I told my team that we were going âback to schoolâ to learn âLean,â the business system Toyota made famous, and thatâs been deepened and extended by the worldâs best companies
Our team members took it to heart, taking Lean books home with them, reading, reflecting, and practicing what theyâd read. People are still learning. Not just managers, but also team leaders and team members. I made a deal with them. You do everything I ask of you, and I promise nobody will lose his or her job because of improvement work.
Since then, members of the NJMM team have become teachers through our on-site Lean Learning Centre. Weâve now put more than 200 senior managers, engineers, and team leaders through our âboot camps.â As a result, thereâs a growing network of Lean learners in our manufacturing division. Losing a shift, if thatâs what Ed Morgan is planning, would be a terrible blow to NJMM morale, and would make a liar out of me.
The jet settled into its cruising altitude and the flight attendant offered us refreshments. It was a fine spring day. I had some water with ice and looked out the window at feathery clouds and a bright blue sky. I thought about how I got here.
Weâve been lucky at NJMM. Our sensei1 is Takinori (Andy) Saito, an ex-Toyota heavyweight I coaxed out of retirement.2 Andy has played Virgil to my Dante, leading us out of a manufacturing inferno. Every door that Andy opens leads to three other doors. At times I feel weâre more screwed up than ever. Problems are painfully obvious, root causes elusive, and countermeasuresâreal countermeasures, not Band-Aidsârare. Yet weâre winning quality and productivity awards! I always feel, âHow could they give us an award? We have so many problemsâŚ.â
Socrates expressed it well: The more I know, the more I realize I donât know. Andy laughed when I told him. âTom-san, I have been practicing for 40 yearsâand I still feel like a beginner!â
Toyotaâs recent fall from grace clearly pained Andy and reinforced how difficult it was to sustain Lean excellence. âTo support growth, we must grow senseis, Tom-san âŚâ
Andy was encouraged that Toyota had applied its core principleâStop production, donât ship junkâwhile they sought root causes. He was heartened that Toyota had accepted responsibility and not thrown their supplier under the bus. There was much reflection in Toyoda City, he told me. Hansei, the Japanese call it; the sincere acknowledgement of mistakes and weakness, and the commitment to improve.
I had a number of chats with my pal Dean Formica, who was Paint Shop General Manager at Toyotaâs Kentucky plant.
It was an emotional topic for him. âLots of soul-searching around here, Tommy. Weâve had two tough years in a row, after 60 good ones.â
âWhatâs the root cause, Dino?â
âI agree with Saito-san. Weâve grown faster than our ability to develop senseis. Our system is a way of thinking and being. You canât absorb it overnight. You need to study for years under the guidance of a capable teacher.â
âYou certainly have lost senseis,â I commented. âPeople like me have benefited. Working with Andy has changed my life.â
âWe miss him,â Dean said.
I felt a twinge of guilt. âI can imagine ⌠So whatâs next?â âWeâre going to bear down and relearn our system. Toyota University is up and running. Iâve signed up to be an instructor. Weâre going to do everything we can to regain our customersâ trust. I love this company âŚâ
Andy taught me to draw things out, to express ideas and learning points with simple sketches. My journals are full of them. Figure 1.1 shows my factory doodle.
FIGURE 1.1 New Jersey Motor Manufacturing
Weâve tried to connect our processesâStamping, Welding, Paint, and Assemblyâwith simple visual management. That means using kanbansâsimple signals that tell suppliers what to make. In Stamping, kanbans are triangular pieces of metal that tell operators what to make, how many, and where to deliver it. In my dadâs restaurant, kanbans are the chits that waiters and waitresses push through the serving window. In your car, the gas gauge acts as a kanban, telling you when itâs time to fill up.
For us, customer means anyone in our downstream process, and supplier means anyone in the upstream process. Suppliers in our plant provide the volume, mix, and sequence that the customer consumes. But hereâs the catch, they supply only at the required rate and quality level, no more, no less. âSimple handshakes,â we call it. We also try to make problems noticeable and involve all team members in their solutions, rather than trying to pin the blame on individuals. Pretty simple, really.
Andy taught us that a problem is simply a deviation from a standard, and that problems were treasures. Problems tell us how we can improve. Each year we try to focus our improvement work through strategy deployment or hoshin kanri, the worldâs most powerful planning and execution system.3 We found strategy deployment tough the first few years but are getting the hang of it. In a nutshell, it involves:
Defining True North, your strategic and philosophical objective.
Identifying the obstacles preventing you from achieving True North.
Engaging everybody in the company in the solution.
Applying and sharing what youâve learned.
Again, pretty simpleâbut hard to do. Iâve learned that complexity is a crude state. Simplicity marks the end of a process of refining.
Our factory is a part of a vast management system that includes marketing, design, engineering, the supply chain, and our dealer network, not to mention all our business processes, including Finance, Purchasing, Information Technology, Human Resources, and Planning and Scheduling. We have 10 global design centers and 8 global engin...
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Citation styles for The Remedy
APA 6 Citation
Dennis, P. (2010). The Remedy (1st ed.). Wiley. Retrieved from https://www.perlego.com/book/1007138/the-remedy-bringing-lean-thinking-out-of-the-factory-to-transform-the-entire-organization-pdf (Original work published 2010)
Chicago Citation
Dennis, Pascal. (2010) 2010. The Remedy. 1st ed. Wiley. https://www.perlego.com/book/1007138/the-remedy-bringing-lean-thinking-out-of-the-factory-to-transform-the-entire-organization-pdf.
Harvard Citation
Dennis, P. (2010) The Remedy. 1st edn. Wiley. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1007138/the-remedy-bringing-lean-thinking-out-of-the-factory-to-transform-the-entire-organization-pdf (Accessed: 14 October 2022).