Daily Checking Processes to Support Student Learning

He describes a process where the previous day’s defects are physically set out on a table and reviewed first thing in the morning - “while they are fresh” hence the analogy to the morning markets.

They started looking at process defects.

Every shortage, every day, was recorded on the board.

Each morning the previous day’s shortages were reviewed. They were grouped into three categories based on knowledge of the cause - just like outlined in the book.

• “A” problems - they knew the cause, knew the countermeasure, but had some excuse reason why it could not be implemented right away.
• “B” problems - they knew the cause, but did not have a good countermeasure yet.
• “C” problems - knew the symptom (parts weren’t there) but didn’t know why.

The mental breakthrough was systematically investigating the reason each and every shortage

After a few months into their kanban implementation, for example, they started turning in card audits with far less than 2% irregularities, and then it was not unusual for a card audit to find no problems at all. Why? They had addressed the reasons why cards end up somewhere other than where they should be. Instead of blaming people, they looked for why people acting in good faith would not follow the process.

This was also an attitude shift - assume a flaw in the process itself, or in communication, before looking for “who did it.”

Eventually the warehouse team had their own morning market. As did the receiving team. As did the parts picking team. As did assembly. Each looked at any case where they were not able to deliver exactly what their downstream customer needed.

About 8 months into this, another group in an adjacent building, was trying to work through their own issues. They came over for a tour. One of the supervisors, visibly shaken, came to me and said

“Now I get it. These people work together in a fundamentally different way.”

And they did. They worked as a team, focusing on the problems, not on each other.

And that, readers, is the goal of “lean manufacturing.” If you aren’t working toward that, then you aren’t really implementing anything.

http://theleanthinker.com/2007/11/24/a-systematic-approach-to-part-shortages-part-3/