How Kaizen-ready are you? Find out by taking the Kaizen Institute's Kaizen Quiz. If you'd like to cram for the exam first, check out these books: Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success. Gemba Kaizen: A Commonsense, Low-Cost Approach to Management. On the other hand, if you're just plain sick of studying, you might want to try playing a little game: The Manufacturing Game But please brush up on the rules first! Get in the Game

Yukio Sugiyama is a small, middle-aged Japanese man who speaks only a little English; he addresses the group through an interpreter. This method of delivery is distracting, but far less so than the anxiety that charges the conference room we're sitting in. It's a Monday morning, the first day of the TRW Fenton (MI) ABS Plant's fourth Gemba Kaizen event, and about 50 of us are nervously listening. Almost no one here has ever participated in an event like this. Many of us don't know one another. Some know each other altogether too well.

As if this uneasiness isn't enough, we are being subjected to a dose of Sugiyama's wicked sense of humor. He puts an overhead transparency on the projector with a bold headline: "American 3-S," an obvious parody of one of the most basic principles of lean, the 5-S's. But instead of "Sort, Simplify, Scrub, Sanitize, Sustain," the transparency reads, "Should be, Someone, Sometime." A self-conscious titter comes from the crowd as we see the truth in this cultural stereotype.

Sensei Sugiyama helps out with one of my group's ideas for improvement. His principle for designing workstations is that operators should never have to turn around—all parts and tools should be directly in front of them, exactly where they are needed to complete the work instructions.

Sugiyama laughs too, but it's apparent that he is laughing with, not at us. He is adamant that this week he wants us to take immediate actions and clearly report what we see and do, rather than just speculate and make nebulous plans for the future. Since Fenton is a return visit for him, his expectations of the plant are high. Furthermore, he says, the expectations of his employers are high— Sugiyama lives and dies by the continuous improvement of the plants he visits.

His career as a sensei with the Japanese Shingijutsu Co., Ltd., has brought him to facilities throughout the U.S. in a number of industries, from aerospace (Boeing) to appliances (Maytag), but TRW is his first automotive client. Not that it really matters which industrial sector he's dealing with; the lessons Sugiyama teaches are always drawn from his 30 years as an engineer for Hitachi in Japan. He does not solve his client's specific production problems himself—that is for the plant's people to do on their own. His mission, rather, is to teach these people how to see things the lean way, to act as their guide as they master this new Eastern philosophy.

Getting Floored
Over the course of the week following our first meeting in the conference room, the lessons were plentiful, starting with Sugiyama's first bit of instruction: Lean is learned through experience on the floor. (The sensei could not stress enough how important it is for managers and engineers to get out of the offices, not just to walk through the plant, but to actually work on the line.)

Setup TRW Fenton is a 188,500-ft2 facility that began production of ABS units in 1988. It has about 575 employees that build over 60 different parts for several customers (predominantly Ford and DaimlerChrysler). For this event, four areas in the plant were selected for improvement and each one assigned to a team of approximately 10 people. The teams were composed of a mixture of management, operators, and outside participants from other TRW facilities or suppliers. Few of the participants had much specific knowledge of the area in which they would be working. Goals On one assembly line, the team was actually continuing work begun at an earlier event. They were to draw up plans to downsize the line by converting it to a U-shaped cell. In another assembly area, the team sought several improvements: increased throughput, reduced work-in-progress, reduced change-over time and 5S improvements. In a machining area, the team sought only to reduce scrap. On the assembly line my team worked on, the goal was to minimize machine downtime and improve first time through, while also addressing ergonomic and quality issues.

Therefore, my team's basic organizational strategy was to start each morning with a brief meeting to update our progress from the previous day and outline what we hoped to accomplish in the next eight hours. Then we'd hit the floor in smaller groups to tackle specific assignments. Each day would wind up with our team leader meeting with the other team leaders and the sensei for a progress report.

On the first day, our first task was to take cycle times for every operation on our line. This proved to be particularly interesting because cycle times had already been calculated a few months before, and pretty much everyone who had any experience with the line agreed that they were accurate. According to these "before" numbers, the real bottleneck should have been the final test station. But after we hit the line with stopwatches and notepads, we found a shocking reality—it wasn't.

The real culprit that was slowing the line was a bar code scanner that was incorrectly hooked up… sort of. It's not that the scanner wasn't working—it was—but it was just taking too long to perform its scan. The reason? When the line was first configured, the scanner worked well. But as the product being run on the line changed, the line itself also saw some changes and something unforeseen in the new configuration had affected the scanner's performance. Once one of the techs rewired it, no more problem.

So Monday's lesson was an especially important one: Get out there on the floor and figure out what's really going on. It may be entirely different than you think.

Everyday People
On Tuesday, the realization began to dawn on us that our biggest challenge in making improvements didn't necessarily come from the equipment, but from the people. This is not to say that there was something lacking in the workforce. Quite to the contrary, as everyone in the plant was exceptionally motivated. But that's part of the issue—when you have 10 kaizen team members with different ideas about what needs fixing and another 10 operators on the line with their own ideas, well, that's what leadership and teamwork are for.

Fortunately, I think we had both, and the key here was communication. One of our first changes to the line itself involved removing an operator that we had judged redundant from our cycle time measurements. This person was performing the task of transferring parts from the end of the conveyor line to the test stand. So we moved the test stand closer to the end of the line and let the tester unload the line directly.

This change was a good thing, as it freed up over 10% of the labor needed to run the line. But to look at it from the perspective of the operator who was reassigned to another area of the plant is to consider the fact that perhaps this person really liked working on this line. In our case, we made sure that there was an open line of communication between our team and the operators. That way we wouldn't make changes that ruined someone's day, or so we hoped. Taking care of your people is paramount.

Stumbling Blocks
But then on Wednesday, our day got ruined. We had big plans that came to a crashing halt when the area manager told us that there had been a production schedule change. This left us temporarily unable to implement any more improvements, or quantify the ones we'd already made.

Cardboard engineering helped one group redesign a very large line into a very small cell. The group built a mock-up of the entire cell and worked through each station to confirm cycle times. The new configuration will reuse only the equipment from the old line that performs quality-sensitive operations; the vast majority of the work will be manual, including the movement of the part from station to station. This chaku-chaku line concept will be manned by only one or two operators; its capacity can be scaled up simply by adding another one. By implementing this plan, TRW will be able to continue building an ABS unit for a vehicle that had been scheduled for termination, but instead is continuing to be produced in very low volumes.

This predicament was brought on by the unfortunate timing of the kaizen; it took place on the final week that our line was running an ABS unit that would be moving to another line in the plant. Since we were kaizen-ing the line for its operation without this lame duck product (which did have very different cycle times), it would have been useless to proceed with our plans. Furthermore, when one of the customers increased its order at the last minute (i.e. that morning), the line had to shift into overdrive to try and "meet the truck." Needless to say, no one working on the line was too keen on our team getting in the way.

So we went into backup mode. We took this setback as an opportunity to work on 5-S improvements that included taping off the floor, making signs, and cleaning up the clutter. While this may not have been the most exciting thing to do, it was vital to increasing the likelihood that our other changes would stick after the event ended. A well-labeled area visually reinforces the philosophy of continuous improvement. Wednesday's lesson shows that things don't usually go as planned and a successful kaizen effort needs to be flexible.

TGIT?
Thursday was really the final day left to whip the line into shape, as Friday was devoted mostly to giving our final reports. We set to work with a number of ambitious projects that included:

Moving one station to the opposite side of the line, so that two operators could be closer to one another, thereby increasing their ability to help each other; meeting with a supplier over a quality defect in a supply of parts that had been found earlier in the week; attempting to correct an ergonomic issue with a parts bin that was too big and poorly located for the operator to pick parts from it. (Two different ideas were tried, neither one of which completely solved the problem, however further work on this issue was planned.)

Sadly enough, at the end of the day, we realized that we still had a long list of ideas that we hadn't had the time to implement. Not to mention that some of our improvements would still need some tweaking before they became a part of the standard operating procedure. In preparing for our report the following day, we made it clear that we felt we had only scratched the tip of the iceberg. Since our area was one that had not been extensively kaizen-ed before, this was to be expected.

And besides, isn't continuous improvement always just scratching the tip, only to have more of the ‘berg come to the surface?

Endgame
When it came to delivering our report, I must sadly admit that our team was not the cleverest of the bunch. While we used a relatively benign series of overhead projector transparencies and explanations from our team members, one team went Hollywood and made an excellent little video. It wasn't overly complicated—they just shot some footage and edited it in-camera. Not only was this superior in the "picture is worth a thousand words" sense, but the thought process necessary to make the video must have given rise to a number of potential improvement issues in itself. Sugiyama was also pleased with this group's efforts, perhaps because their visual explanation could be understood even without interpretation.

Sort of: It's basic, but it still has to be done. Taping off areas for everything and labeling everything is not anal-retentive, it's just good management. And everything means everything. A grade-schooler should be able to easily identify most anything on the plant floor.

One thing that we kaizen participants did have a bit of trouble interpreting from the Japanese is the concept of a "water spider." The water spider is basically a jack-of-all-trades who would stock the line, fill-in for an operator who needed to use the bathroom, or just help out if someone gets behind. In his final comments, Sugiyama stressed the importance of getting operators interested in performing this task, something that he felt no team had done quite sufficiently. (In my team's case, the operators on our line were not exactly warm to the idea, as it seems to be a difficult job. But as is usually the case, a bit more encouragement and education would go a long way here.)

In the final analysis, our Gemba Kaizen produced some definite improvements and made strides towards TRW's ultimate goals. But when you're chasing something inherently unattainable like lean, there's no real advantage to patting yourself on the back too hard. No, perhaps the best thing about finishing a lean event is that it only creates so many more opportunities for the next one.

Quotable Issues
I can't believe that the sensei wants us to just change things so quickly. I'm used to being required to have a meeting and get approval from my supervisor for something like this.
   —An engineer, commenting on his team's efforts to rearrange a workstation. The supervisor was very concerned with the radical changes going on in the area, but supportive in continuing to work the bugs out after the kaizen event was over.

One piece-flow is a great idea, but it doesn't really work.
   —A kaizen participant who had never seen a line that operates as a true pull system. While plant management in Fenton is designing all of its new lines and production systems to facilitate this, they are currently running in batch mode because that's the way things have always been done. Perhaps the most challenging thing about this from the perspective of kaizen is that the operators are always watching the station behind them, rather than the next one down the line. This is a very hard attitude to break when making only incremental improvements. However, as new product comes into the plant and a model lean line begins operating, it will provide a hands-on training experience for the operators, providing the "proof" that pull can work.

We're not able to run this line right now because we don't have any parts from the other line.
   —An operator, while waiting to go back to work. Ironically enough, this person was standing next to several racks of "parts from the other line." But they weren't of the correct product that had to ship that day. Reducing work-in-process in this area was recommended as an objective for the next lean event.