Throughout this year, I've presented a series of articles that demonstrate how adopting Lean Principles in your operation can greatly improve production, enhance quality, motivate your team and satisfy your customers (all of which lead to a healthier bottom line).
Those management articles have covered the five core principles of Lean, which are: 1) Identifying the value of your product or service; 2) Mapping a value stream to your operation; 3) Creating a production flow based on that map; and 4) Understanding how upstream efforts affect downstream production. You can look back on previous articles by visiting my author page.
The fifth and final principle is no doubt the most difficult part of the Lean equation: The non-stop quest for perfection throughout all levels of production.
Simply put, this principle involves constant monitoring of your production process to eliminate problems, issues and redundancies that creep up and stymie progress, and addressing those issues to continually improve the way things are done throughout the shop.
Like everything else in life that withers and deteriorates over time, if you've come this far in perfecting your production process and then leave the process untouched, waste will slowly infiltrate back into the process, disorder will occur and eventually the process as a whole will devolve.
That's why this fifth Lean Principle is so important: You and your team must look for continuous improvement in your process and be vigilant against the waste that will eventually manifest itself.
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Defining continuous improvement
The pursuit of perfection starts with a unanimous understanding within the team of precisely what continuous improvement is. Does a continuous improvement idea enhance the quality of a step in the production cycle? Will it reduce steps? Is it safety related? Will it affect overall quality and delivery performance?
The key to continuous improvement is to ensure any specific idea involving the production process impacts the system as a whole and not just one silo of production. It's common to reduce waste in one process and subsequently increase steps or create issues downstream.
So it's great that the team is embracing the thinking that there's a better way to do a particular task, but it's important that the issue (and the solution) isn't addressing the “flavor of the week” problem, which is a very easy trap to fall into.
The solution has to be a sustainable improvement. It addresses an issue that is not a one-time event, but has been measured (or tracked) over time and clearly defined as a systemic problem. From there the team goes to work to develop a solution to fix the issue, executes a strategy for implementing it on the shop floor and validates (through continued tracking and data collection) to gauge the impact of the solution on the entire system.
Eliminating waste and tracking the data
If the average repair job takes 16 hours to complete, why does it take eight or nine DAYS to cycle the vehicle through the repair process?
A continuous improvement program is constantly searching for the answers to that question. It employs team members who are on the lookout for every form of waste (see my waste column at ABRN.com/eliminatewaste) and share a common mission of eliminating those various forms of waste.
This starts with data collection which tracks movement, time and distance traveled. How many times are team members walking around looking for a tool, a part or a manager? How often do they have to stop their work to ask questions? How often do they struggle with a vehicle they're not familiar with? How many times are they idle waiting for work?
Tracking this data can be cumbersome, but it's well worth the effort. And it doesn't have to involve expensive tracking software. It can be as simple as monitoring a series of clipboards to track the data and identifying how many deficiencies are showing up in the repair process.
Your team is the key
A continuous improvement program will only work if everyone is on board. That begins at the top with leadership fostering a culture that advocates for perfection, provides the training and tools that team members need to identify waste and evoke change, and rewards the team for solving issues and contributing to the ongoing success of the program.
Often within shops, it's the years of industry and management experience that sometimes gets in the way of looking forward. It's always hard to change mindsets and dispel the notion that there's no time to train. It's hard to break out of our comfort zone and out of the way we used to do things in our industry.
But to see progress, leadership and team members all have to believe that there's always a better way, and continue to engage and challenge each other to identify waste and redundancies in the system and come up with ways to address those issues.
What's interesting about shop environments in our industry is that they're normally made up of a team members who possess a mix of different and distinct skill sets. This makes it easy to form different task forces to develop solutions while utilizing the various skill sets within the team. And the people doing the work will always find a better way.
Communication, too, plays a huge role in this process. From lunch-and-learn sessions and regular huddle (or pitch) meetings, to multi-shop conference calls (to compare notes) and ad-hoc meetings when needed, an ongoing dialogue needs to take place so that the constant flow of ideas resonates throughout the shop.
And those ideas and solutions, if they're developed by the team, will often be much simpler (and in turn, less costly) than the practical solutions often devised by most management teams. Further, those shops that implement the solutions developed by team members will generally have the most engaged personnel. And those proud employees will stay with the shop for a very long time.
Continuous improvement begins at the top with a careful vision. If the team understands and accepts the vision, then it will be so much easier to produce a quality product, enhance the experience within the shop, boost the quality of life for the entire team and provide that "wow" experience for the customer.
Your job as the leader
Shop owners have the most difficult role in the continuous improvement process simply because it requires the ability to objectively look at their own business and be willing to accept change. That's hard to do when you've got an inventory of vehicles on the lot, two technicians out sick and payroll to meet in a week.
But to make this process work, you must possess a degree of leadership that drives the thought process and provides the necessary coaching that puts the team on the same page and gets everyone to understand (and buy into) the goal. You have to bring the team together to discuss the areas that need improvement. Plus, you have to be the cheerleader who motivates forward-thinking and recognizes the different talents and skills of your team members.
Patience is a virtue in this role. Too often team members will present an idea that only addresses the issue of the week. Instead of immediately shooting down the idea, take the time to hear them out. Talk through the ways that their solution will improve the process systematically while adhering to the principles of the shop.
By doing this, you'll quickly observe growth among your team members as they begin to understand the difference between a quick fix and a systematic solution.
Then, after they implement the systemic change and witness the difference it makes in the overall process, your role is to recognize their contributions in some form. Recognition could be anything from cash or gift cards to company-wide praise. The important thing is realizing that those team members have stepped outside of their everyday comfort zones to identify an issue within the process, and have utilized their expertise to develop a solution designed to help the entire operation. That's a huge step, from an owner's perspective, and one that truly warrants recognition.
If you can stretch their minds, they'll respond by expanding your operation.
Chasing the brass ring
So now that you've read this entire article on the quest for perfection, here's the plain truth: Since we humans are imperfect beings, our processes will be imperfect. Simply put, perfection is impossible to fully achieve. It's an ever-changing moving target. But if you and your team are committed and striving to hit the target, you'll see system-wide improvement on levels you've never seen before.
