Kaizen

Comment

Comment by Cathy.Ethier,P.Eng.,MSME , MBB on August 3, 2008 at 2:53am

I had gone through a very intense Lean Deployment Program by kicking off a Kaizen Blitz approximately every second week. I focused on increasingly complex areas like production planning, billing systems, office, logistics and IT, while training two juniors running Kaizens with 5S focus, as well as balancing the production lines (flow). I would typically prepare the Kaizen event coordination with the project sponsor for resource allocation, drafting preliminary time studies , as well would coordinate all team scheduling , agenda , training materials and gathering other subject information. I do not find the team selection of a big importance. I had to run Kaizens with a wide variety of people, some had members barely had any education and I had to send time to teach them how to present on PowerPoint in front of executive management , on the contrary some members were seasoned professionals or management team members. I find it critical to keep the team focused and target the team to success. For duration of one year I facilitated over 20 Kaizen events with a total project befits close to one million dollars a year.

I had created an agenda broken down to 30 minutes increments that I revise and collaborate with my team during the Kaizen kick-off. My Kaizen events are extremely structured to avoid the rick of losing the team members around the facility “trying to solve the world hunger”.

My project sponsor would kick off the Kaizen Event on Monday at 8 a.m. with debrief of current state of performance. Then I would introduce the team to Six Sigma Lean Concepts by providing one hour training. Then I assemble the team in our workroom and we will focus in the Objective sheet and observations of the current state of performance. It is critical to define what is in scope and what is out of scope of this project, while keeping in mind that the expectation is having a rapid improvement but limited in scope in small increments. The team would go through the following key steps:

Monday: Training; Team name, Define objective, what’s in scope and what is out of scope , observation , data collection

Tuesday: Discovery; target sheet, pictures, Spaghetti , root cause , date reports , tag and clean, separate, 3P meeting with management for debrief of our Progress, Problems , Plans

Wednesday: Do; Implement changes, take pictures, make test trials , simulations to compare data before and after. Find and Fix, Brainstorm and Implement, break down the line, move equipment, 3P meeting with management

Thursday: Re-Do & Document; Evaluate results of the change , gain commitment by key stakeholders, standardize, teach, practice and deliver Control Plan, 3 P meeting with management

Friday: Debrief; Final Review, Prepare the team to present PowerPoint Presentation in front of executive management, evaluate benefits – translate the results into dollars and cents ; Final Presentation at 10 a.m.

30 Day action items follow up and the financial matrics is becoming an integral part of the Financial Business Performance in the Profit and Loss reports.

Daily meeting minutes will include:

1. Review Action items from the prior meetings. Review, revise agenda.

2. Brainstorming

3. Test/ Measurement results -Things gone wrong / things gone right (TWTR)

4. Test/ trial Matrix results / Summarize the new data
5. Root Cause / Drill Deep and Wide
6. Develop a new process.

7. Create new action items / open issues list
8. Consider upstream/ downstream issues

10. Develop communication plan

10. 3P-s

11. Evaluate meetings/ Agenda for the next day
12. Other items.