© Martin Brenig-Jones and Jo Dowdall
FIGURE 1-1: The TPS house.
Toyota’s Taiichi Ohno describes the TPS approach very effectively:
All we are doing is looking at a timeline from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing that timeline by removing the non-value adding wastes.
The TPS approach really is about understanding how the work gets done, finding ways of doing it better, smoother and faster, and closing the time gap between the start and end points of our processes. And it applies to any process. Whether you’re working in the public or private sector, in service, transactional or manufacturing processes really doesn’t matter.
Think about your own processes for a moment. Do you feel that some unnecessary steps or activities seem to waste time and effort?
We must point out, however, that simply adopting the tools and techniques of the TPS isn’t enough to sustain improvement and embed the principles and thinking into your organization. Toyota chairperson Fujio Cho provides a clue as to what’s also needed:
The key to the Toyota way is not any of the individual elements but all the elements together as a system. It must be practiced every day in a very consistent manner — not in spurts. We place the highest value on taking action and implementation. By improvement based on action, one can rise to the higher level of practice and knowledge.
Perhaps this is why Toyota didn’t mind sharing the secrets of their success. It might be easy to replicate certain practices and adopt certain concepts, but it is not easy to replicate a true culture of Continuous Improvement.
Building people first
“First we build people,” stated Toyota chairperson Fujio Cho. “Then we build cars.” Figure 1-1 shows that people are at the heart of TPS. The system focuses on developing exceptional people and teams that follow the company’s philosophy to gain exceptional results. Consider the following:
Toyota creates a strong and stable culture wherein values and beliefs are widely shared and lived out over many years.
Toyota works constantly to reinforce that culture.
Toyota involves cross-functional teams to solve problems.
Toyota keeps teaching individuals how to work together.
Being Lean means involving people in the process, equipping them to be able, and feel able, to challenge and improve their processes and the way they work. Never waste the creative potential of people!
Looking at the lingo
You can see from Figure 1-1 that Lean thinking involves a certain amount of jargon — some of it Japanese. This section defines the various terms to help you get Lean thinking as soon as possible:
Standardization seeks to reduce variation in the way the work is carried out, so that everyone operates the process in the “one best way.” This highlights the importance of following a standard operating process or procedure. In the spirit of Continuous Improvement, of course the “one best way” of carrying out the process will keep changing, as people in the process identify better ways of doing the work. You need to ensure the new “one best way” is understood and fully deployed.
Heijunka encompasses the idea of smoothing processing and production by considering leveling and sequencing:Leveling involves smoothing the volume of production in the production period, in order to reduce the ups and downs and peaks and troughs that can make planning difficult. Among other things, leveling seeks to prevent “end-of-period” peaks, where production is initially slow at the beginning of the month, but then quickens in the last days of a sale or accounting period, for example.Sequencing may well involve mixing the types of work processed. So, for example, when setting up new loans in a bank, the type of loan being processed is mixed to better match customer demand, and help ensure applications are actioned in date order. So often, people are driven by internal efficiency targets, whereby they process the “simple tasks” first to get them out of the way and “hit their numbers,” leaving the more difficult cases to be processed later on. This means tasks are not processed in date order, and people are reluctant to get down and tackle a pile of difficult cases at the end of the production period, making things even worse for the customer and the business.
Jidoka concerns prevention; it links closely with techniques such as the Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA), which are covered in Chapter 13. Jidoka has two main elements, and both seek to prevent work continuing when something goes wrong:Autonomation allows machines or processes to operate autonomously, by shutting down if something goes wrong. This concept is also known as automation with human intelligence. The “no” in autonomation is often underlined to highlight the fact that no defects are allowed to pass to a follow-on process. An early example hails from 1902, when Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of the Toyota group, invented an automated loom that stopped whenever a thread broke. A simple example today is a printer stopping processing copy when the ink runs out.Without this concept, automation has the potential to allow a large number of defects to be created very quickly, especially if processing is in batches (see “Single piece flow” below).Stop at every abnormality is the second element of Jidoka. The employee can stop an automated or manual line if they spot an error. At Toyota, every employee is empowered to “stop the line,” perhaps following the identification of a special cause on a control chart (see Chapter 8).Forcing everything to stop and immediately focus on a problem can seem painful at first, but doing so is an effective way to quickly get at the root cause of issues. Again, this can be especially important if you’re processing in batches.
Just in Time (JIT) provides the other pillar of the TPS house. JIT involves providing the customer with what’s needed, at the right time, in the right location and in the right quantity. The concept applies to both internal and external customers. JIT comprises three main elements:Single piece flow means allowing single units of product to flow through the process step by step. When processing in batches, batches (or bundles) of individual cases are processed at each step and are passed along the process only after an entire batch has been completed. Delays are increased when the batches travel around the organization, both in terms of the transport time and the length of time they sit waiting to be actioned. At any given time, most of the units or work items in a batch are sitting idle, waiting to be processed. This represents excess inventory and can be costly. What’s more, errors can neither be picked up nor addressed quickly; if they occur, they often occur in volume. And, of course, this also delays identifying the root cause. With single piece flow, we can get to the root cause analysis faster, which helps prevent a common error recurring throughout the process.In a single piece flow system each person performs an operation and makes a quick quality check before moving their output to the next person in the following process. Naturally this concept also applies to automated operations where inline checks can be carried out. If a defect is detected, Jidoka is enacted: the process is stopped, and immediate action is taken to correct the situation, taking countermeasures to prevent reoccurrence. This concept is a real change of thinking that moves us away from processing in batches.Pull production is the second element of JIT. Each process takes what it needs from the preceding process only when it needs it and in the
