Page 27 - AIMA : Foundation Day Souvenir

be informed via a circular or by delegating the job down the line.
There is a subtle difference between showing and telling. Lean is different in values compared to traditional management. The new or different value systems need to be imbibed and exhibited in behavioural attitudes, it is not a speak thing. Leading is by example. In the twelve to fourteen hours I spent on the Gemba every day, I was teaching them to respect the customer by demonstrating the respect necessary to be given to every subsequent process within the product manufacturing processes. By learning to respect the internal customer they began delivering better value. When they saw me believing in their ability to solve problems, and challenging them to do more, they cultivated the kaizen habit and began to do more. They had understood the importance of customer, kaizen, and respect for people. The old blame game had vanished and given way to collaborative and cooperative work. The workmen felt they were a responsible part of the change. Trust had come into existence and teamwork was built. There was nothing to fear, so the lies disappeared, they were not afraid to experiment with new ideas. Truth, honesty, effort, and earnest work and was encouraged and celebrated by all.
dream, vision, and goals
A dream--a far sighted vision--is necessary to fuel your Lean journey. The adage ‘you will believe it when you see it,’ here means you need to see the possibilities or the picture in your mind first, then you can achieve it. You will realise the results when you believe in your vision and input necessary work to get there. Then translate this broad picture of possibilities as the goals of the company. Break it down into smaller steps for teams to work on them. The CEO must set these aspirational goals for himself and the company, stretched goals will be good. Focus on the process and not the results. Remember good process will always get you good results. Result is the consequence of what you do and how, so, focus on changing your processes and the results will follow. It is important that the CEO himself speaks to the workmen and staff setting the goals and leading them in Kaizens showing the way. This is necessary for duplication (monkey see, monkey do).
When my lean journey started, we faced many problems. One of them was that there were no orders despite having very good products. This led to a temporary closure, necessitating a turnaround strategy to avoid longer or permanent closure. I started by setting myself some goals, such as becoming the number one player in the market; reduction of costs by 50 per cent; empowering workmen to be responsible for and in charge of production without intervention of management; inculcate lean or JIT behaviour in all; give new products protection for eight to 10 years; make competition redundant; develop new markets; become India’s first true lean organisation, etc. I had a time line in mind, but we were basically in a hurry to outperform ourselves. With these guiding lights, I broke them down to daily kaizen activities on the Gemba in every area from marketing to product development to execution to supply chain, with all this work being done seamlessly and concurrently across all stages of the value stream. I had given my team five ‘Zero’ goals even if they were inordinate—zero delay in deliveries, zero waste (defect included), zero lead time, zero inventory, and zero accidents. These five good zeros facilitated all goals.
lean department or not?
My focus was on developing every person into a leader (however unreasonable or overambitious that might sound), which meant everyone had to learn and master all aspects of lean by imbibing and adapting to lean behaviour. So, I did not think it was necessary to set up a special lean department and put them in charge of the education and transformation. I made it everybody’s responsibility in his area of work, taught by me initially and later by my value stream managers. To us this job was to be done every day on the Gemba and not in some remote location. We felt happy with every achievement, and yet, were never satisfied as it taught us that more was possible.
In hindsight we were lucky not to have had people telling us a variety of what to do things. We followed JIT leads from Dr. Schonberger’s book World Class Manufacturing, which, incidentally, is still a good book today. Seeing me walk the talk built trust. My team saw me in action addressing concerns on all fronts—
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