Issue link: https://industrialmanagement.epubxp.com/i/249982
In his book Managing to Learn, John Shook described the gemba as any setting in which individuals are creating value for the customer. This description goes beyond the manufacturing shop floor, which is how most lean practitioners describe the term. By going to the place where work is done, leaders gain firsthand, personal knowledge so they can understand the real situation and what needs to be fixed. After all, processes cannot be analyzed or understood from offices. Managing performance data from a distance carries huge negatives for leaders, as such practices could hide the reality of the situation. Leaders who have been at the gemba can make decisions and take responsibility for problem-solving – and that is the surest way to train future leaders. Many organizations are developing a standard for their leaders that includes checklists for what should be observed during the gemba walk. More important for every department is to create value for the customer at the gemba by eliminating the non-valueadded work that increases the product price, reduces quality and delays delivery. neither involved the fan. The fertilizer company needed to fix the process to eliminate the downtime instead of concentrating on the fan, which would have kept the issue at the problem-fix cycle. Without real observation at the gemba, the kaizen team could not have realized the true issue. This example reveals how many problems are hidden and cannot be discovered from reading the performance data. If a machine is waiting for loading, the problem could include having no orders to process, transportation issues, a work-in-process inventory issue or all of the above. Downtime could have associated activities such as searching for tools, searching for spare parts, waiting for operators and other issues. In any case, production wastes need to be eliminated to reduce lead-times and meet the customer takt time (the customer demand rate). Employees who do the work each day should be taught how to surface these issues in a visual board so leaders can see them and support improvements. The basic steps of any problemsolving process through the plan-docheck-act (PDCA) cycle are: Don't rush the solution 1. Define the problem relative to the ideal (plan). 2. Break down the problem into manageable pieces (plan). 3. Find the root cause of the problem (plan). 4. Set the targets for achievement (plan). 5. Select the suitable solution from different countermeasures (plan). 6. Implement the plan (do). 7. Revise the outcomes as expected (check). 8. Find out what is going wrong, adapt, adjust and then repeat the cycle (act). Take the example of a fertilizer company that struggles with machine downtime. The issue, which involved a poorly performing centrifugal fan, reduced production availability by 20 percent. The fan vibrated a lot and suffered balancing issues. By shutting down the fan for balancing four times in a month, the company lost thousands of dollars from production and maintenance. Everyone in the factory believed that this was a direct maintenance problem related to machine balancing, so maintenance should design a solution. Instead of moving forward on that belief, a kaizen team was assigned to observe the situation. After two days at the gemba analyzing the process, the team concluded that the problem was a process design issue. And of the two process issues causing the difficulties, 24 Industrial Management As you can see, the plan phase is invoked five times before proceeding to the do phase. This is to ensure both the quality of the implementation and that the selected countermeasure will solve the problem. The plan phase cannot be Many problems are hidden and cannot be discovered from reading the performance data. created without a daily observation at the gemba. And finding the root cause of any issue requires a deep observation at the gemba, gathering facts, discussing things with the process operators and developing the best countermeasure from different alternatives. Unfortunately, many leaders would jump into the do phase without spending enough time observing the situation to find the root cause. The most enjoyable part for the leader is the "do," but jumping to the do means not enough time has been spent on understanding. A quick fix might not solve the real problem and could create wastes in other linked areas. Proper lean decision-making assesses a set of potential countermeasures rather than just one approach. This minimizes risk and allows people who do the work to discuss different ideas from a wide range of potential scenarios to implement the best solution, a fix that will solve the issue without creating other problems or wastes. Often, those countermeasures are first developed and taken from different people at the gemba. After selecting and testing the countermeasures, the continuous improvement leader should draw a Gantt chart and define target deadlines based on the recommendation of people who do the work. Define the rest of the activities, such as who will do the plan, how they will develop the plan, and when and how the work will be done. Finally, assign responsibilities for each deliverable and confirm targets and dates. In recent decades, the quality issue often has been tackled via Six Sigma improvement initiatives. Six Sigma collects data and runs it through statistical component-correlation, regression and analysis for variation. Even though some output results are statistically significant, in many cases Six Sigma teams don't truly understand what is going on. At Toyota, rather than immediately turning to complex statistical tools, the genchi genbustu process (shortened