presentation materials. If an experienced lean specialist did this,
it could have been done within a one-week kaizen workshop.- The young engineer did most of the work while working mostly
alone. There was little involvement or buy in of the workforce in
the area. - The young engineer ruled out some of the most important ideas.
For example, she ruled out preheating the molds, which would
have had a major impact. A more experienced manufacturing
change agent would have fought for this. - The objective of 2.5 hours is not a challenging goal, and even
1.2 hours is not a stretch objective for an injection-molding
changeover. A more reasonable goal would have been 15 to 20
minutes, and a stretch objective would be five minutes, which is
done routinely in lean plants. A 15-minute changeover could
have allowed for more changeovers, reducing batch size, and
stillreduced the amount of labor significantly. - The overall value stream became less lean. There was no value
stream map done. After the fact, a map showed that there had
been five days of injected molded parts after molding, before
the changeover reduction activities. By reducing the time of
changeovers, doing changeovers only around lunch, and then
reducing the number of changeovers, days of molded parts
inventory actually increased, increasing flow days. Value stream
mapping would have suggested reducing changeover in order to
increase the frequency of changeovers to drive down inventory.
Plantwide Lean Tools Approach
A close cousin to the hot projects approach is what you might call the “hot tools”
approach. Often when we teach professional short-courses on lean, we discover
the main goals of the participants are to “learn some tools they can apply back
at work.” Tools seem to be the punch line, something really practical. Theories
are nice, but tools work.
Again, we do not want to suggest that there is something wrong with lean
tools. Carpenters, musicians, athletes, engineers, and any other professionals
certainly need to master the “tools of the trade.” This is not optional. What we’re
talking about here is whether the focus of your lean activities early in the lean
process should be on mastering and broadly implementing one tool at a time.
There is a lot of attraction to going wall-to-wall through the plant implement-
ing one tool at a time, as summarized in Figure 19-3. Or, in a multisite company,
you can go across plants. Any of the lean tools can be implemented in this way,