ISO 9001 and Lean

Friends, Not Foes, For Providing Efficiency and Customer Value

Douglas Meyer

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367188245
• eBook ISBN: 9780429647895
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

ISO 9000 is a comprehensive set of international standards for quality management and quality assurance. These standards ensure that companies effectively document all aspects of their quality management to show transparency and efficiency within all processes. They are not industry specific and pertain to organizations of any size.

Continuous improvement is a key facet of the ISO 9001 standard (the particular standard that specifies requirements for a quality management system), but it does not explain how to implement or maintain this improvement. Lean production methodologies surely provide this crucial and tactical information. Adding Lean production methodologies to quality management systems effectively focuses these improvement activities. In the long run, it will save companies much time and money.

This book, written in the novel format, discusses the symbiotic relationship between ISO 9001 and Lean as both can be seamlessly integrated. It shows how Lean provides the process improvements that are required by the ISO 9001 quality management system – Lean is crucial for identifying and removing waste from your processes, which ultimately creates greater customer value. In addition, the book shows the crucial financial benefits of this integration. This novel clearly illustrates that these two systems can function effectively is one understands the complex balance of standardization and change. ISO 9001 is clearly controlled and audited while Lean is often empowering, less meticulously audited, and rarely controlled.

While presenting interesting characters and interactions, this fictional story embeds real-life manufacturing speak with a message of the importance of successful synergy between Lean practitioners, production leaders, and quality departments.

1

AOP: Acronym-O-Phobia

Herein begins the story of a team of manufacturing employees committed to serving their customers with top quality products in the most cost effective way in order to help their organization succeed. Manufacturing requires strong leadership, empowered employees, and increasingly efficient, controlled processes. Sound simple? Read on.

“How in the world do you think we should handle all of this new age thinking on empowerment and engagement?” asked Janice as she scratched her head in her normal fashion when anything new came out of the Lean department. “You’d think that we don’t need boards and Post-it® Notes to follow up on concerns, since we already have notebooks, emails, bulletin boards, meetings, and then our normal work order system that’s pretty easy to log into.”

“What do you mean, new age thinking?” asked Doug. “We’ve been ‘suggesting’ a suggestion box for more than 30 years. Don’t you realize that all we’re trying to do is to make the suggestion box more visible and actually demonstrate that we truly care about our employees’ ideas? Then, of course, we want to get them engaged in the solution!”

Janice responds, “Well then, are you saying that the new terms around here—empowerment and engagement—are our new vocabulary for actually paying attention to people who add value to our organization? We’ve always done that! In fact, the last time that I checked, our Production leadership has no locks on their cubicles or doors and there is no service fee for going to talk to anyone around here. So, why do you call it ‘new’?”

“Not so fast with that assumption,” Doug replied. “We all know how much we care about our employees when we call them by that precious acronym FTEs. Full-time equivalents? Do you think that’s empowering? We go through more management fads around here than a tabloid newspaper has stories for Big Foot. It’s time we actually started to get serious about what we do here. Or would you rather just be an average Joe in the world of work force reductions and outsourcing? We need to really show some integrity around here. We are constantly broadcasting that our employees are our most valuable asset, yet when they come up with an idea, we simply don’t listen. We really don’t. We get back into that mode of always seeing people as wanting to complain, wanting the work to not be…. work.”

Janice is rather bothered by Doug’s whole arrogant statement. In her world, it often appears that the Lean department is simply creating waste, not removing it. Waste in rebranding a system that has been tried 10 times before, now has a new acronym, and is spoken of like it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. “We are never opposed to good ideas, Doug. Everyone, at least in the Production departments, understands the metrics and knows we always must do more with less. If it isn’t TPM, it’s TQM or VDM or DMAIC or PDCA or some other new way of saying we are rebranding the old way of saying we must work smarter, not faster. We put in time every day, all day, usually about 11 hours a day, simply trying to make sure that we meet our goals and satisfy our customers. We get new problems popping up every day and hardly have time to document each one and make sure it never comes back. It is simply not that easy. We know we need to improve. We hear it from management, we hear it from Quality, and we hear it from HR. All of them are paid solely on what we produce, NOT on what they produce. Most of the departments in our organization are made up of good people, but they sometimes lose sight of the fact that without producing a part, we don’t satisfy the customer, we don’t create revenue, and they don’t have a job! Oh, how I wish that everyone could really see how important my employees are, and how rebranding something ‘empowerment’ or a Lean Management System isn’t enough, when all along we know it is simply the next regurgitated management theory someone pulled out of a Business Strategy book. That, my friend, is simply bogus. It won’t work with my employees. They are smarter than that. I only wish everyone else realized it. Not only are they smart, but they are also the ones that make product for us. And, if I might add, for our families!”

Door SLAMs! Mike Gurlack enters Janice’s quaint glassed-in office and interrupts the lingering silence after Janice’s soliloquy on the value of people. “Where in the heck is Norton!? I’ve been paging him for more than 5 minutes and it seems he must be more interested in reading his social media ticker than he is in getting the yoke machine to run! Doesn’t he realize that his job is not to be the HR representative for all his Twitter fans, but to actually come out and fix the equipment when we are down and Bilher #4 needs parts?!”

Janice looks squarely at Doug in a manner that communicates clearly “see, I told you so” and goes out to pursue solving this next emergency drill. “So, Doug, when you get a chance, post something for me in regards to celebrating another empowered manager going out to save the day from the evils of one of the 7 deadly wastes—machine idle time….” What a poignant comment thrown across the bow of Doug’s attempt to convince Janice to implement his new Lean Manufacturing System (LMS).

The door closes behind Mike and Janice. Doug is left alone in the aquarium-like office, swimming by himself. He knows how important it is to engage employees. He knows how the principle of “Seeking First to Understand, Then Be Understood” truly is the right way. But he simply can’t figure out how to resolve the issue of the “tyranny of the urgent” in the midst of employee engagement and empowerment. It’s a manufacturing conundrum that needs a solution. When we talk about making sure that all employees are involved in the process of continuous improvement, we can easily get a little glassy-eyed. Doug understands how some people like to immediately discount a new idea, sometimes because they have been jaded by so many past experiences that end up going down a dead-end pathway. They aren’t interested in jumping on board with any new fad. They aren’t interested in jumping into any program sponsored by the PLT (Plant Leadership Team). They know it always takes boots on the ground to make sure whatever the PLT says really gets accomplished. If leadership doesn’t go to the “Gemba,” they don’t get it…. Hmmm….

“Did I just mention the term Gemba?” he thinks to himself. “Why do we want to call it a Gemba? Isn’t it better to simply state that I am going to go out to the floor, to the place where value is created, and see what is going on?” Just then, production employee Jim Bouges comes into the office. He seems eager to talk about something.

“Hey, have you seen Janice?” he asks. “Yeah, she just went out to Bilher #4 to see if she could help get support there to get it up and running,” Doug replies. “Oh,” he musters. “I just wanted to check with her on what to do about our new team starting to 5S the Bilher #2 machine. It seems like everyone is excited to work on it, but we got into a big argument about how many S’s are really part of the project. It seems like Ron wants to add a sixth S, and Sharon wants to even add a seventh S. We spent so much time talking about how many S’s we need, we didn’t even get to explain what we really need to do. Everyone knows how important it is to keep the sensors clean, given how Mary almost got hurt when she was trying to clean the machine without knowing all the safety rules. So, I had heard that we had this new Lean guy in the organization, and I recognized your picture from the email announcement. I suspect you know all the acronyms and can help our team get back on track. That’s why I stopped in.” “Well,” Doug said, “That sounds like a real dilemma you and your team got into. I wonder why in the world people do such things. Why don’t they just let it slide by and get back to business and getting the project done? Are we creating this situation? What do you think?” By the way, Doug had recently heard that the Japanese had managed to Lean the 5S process down to only 3S’s. Now, that sounds like a Lean idea!

“I am not sure I can answer the question for everyone, Doug, but for myself, I think we have spent too much time and energy teaching people new buzzwords and acronyms. Every time we get a new manager or a new Lean guy, they all seem to want to put their own slant on things. They own their new job and want to be seen as a leader. They want to talk in the latest politically correct manufacturing speak. It seems rather trite to me. To us on the floor, we don’t need another three-letter description of common sense and we certainly don’t need to use another language to describe things that mean ‘getting out and finding out what is really going on.’ In fact, most of the time that type of ‘management speak’ turns us off almost immediately. If there is anything good we could say about it, it’s that it gives us something to talk about at lunch!”

“Really?” Doug mused, “I understand that this is certainly your view point, but you are definitely implying that this is more like a general consensus out there. After you put it so bluntly, which I thank you for, I truly get what you are trying to say. We get paid more to talk in a foreign language so that we might persuasively convince you that we are educated and professional and that we should use big words so we sound that way, right?”

“Yep, that is the frustrating part about new acronyms and new theories. They are simply rewrapped common sense. They don’t do what you really want them to do: Help the people. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like this company and I am glad I have a job, so I can go home and put food on the table. It’s just that calling it 5S or 6S or even 7S simply doesn’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Author
• Chapter 1: AOP: Acronym-O-Phobia
• Chapter 2: The Real Issue
• Chapter 3: ISO What?
• Chapter 4: Lean on Me, When You’re Not Strong
• Chapter 5: It’s Not Always Bad to Bring Work Home with You
• Chapter 6: All for One and One for All
• Chapter 7: Friends at Last
• Chapter 8: Keeping Things Rolling
• Chapter 9: Letting off Some Steam
• Chapter 10: Getting Total Leadership Buy-in
• Chapter 11: History Repeats Itself; Historians Repeat Each Other
• Chapter 12: Excellence in Leadership
• Index