All Posts Tagged With: "process thinking"
Go to the Gemba
Here’s one of the best arguments I’ve seen for process thinking: “Value flows horizontally, yet organizations are organized vertically. That’s a problem.”
The observation was made by James Womack at IndustryWeek’s Best Plants conference earlier this month. You can read IndustryWeek’s article about it here. Womack is the author of books on lean and the Toyota Production System. His latest book, Gemba Walks, was the subject of his conference speech.
Gemba is a Japanese term that means “the actual place.” For an organization, it means the place where the real action occurs, where products are built or services performed. A gemba walk is a “management practice to grasp the situation before taking action,” Womack said.
How do you do it? According to Womack, you select a value stream, gather all the managers from all the vertical functions that touch the value stream, and then walk together along the value stream, talking to the people who are working it about its purpose and the process.
Womack encourages CEOs and COOs to participate in the gemba walk along with customers, suppliers, and value-stream leaders, but the primary participants are those responsible for the value stream and those whose roles directly touch it.
The goal is to gain…
27Apr2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige and Process Improvement
“Have you seen process owners or other organizational structures that sustain cross-functional process improvement?”
Brad Power poses this question at the end of his article, “Where Have All the Process Owners Gone?” (HBR, January 7, 2011). Anyone who’s been following Baldrige.com or been involved with integrating Baldrige or evaluating Baldrige assessments knows that some of this country’s best examples of “organizational structures that sustain cross-functional process improvement” are Baldrige Award winners.
The Baldrige model is a process model. The first six of seven categories in the Baldrige Criteria ask how you design, manage, and improve your key processes, while the seventh category requests the results of those processes. Each Baldrige Award winner has found its own way to improve processes, some of which include process owners and most of which use similar quality tools and techniques.
They have also developed systematic approaches to sustaining process improvement. Power bemoans the fact that too many organizations attempt process improvement by establishing process owners, only to revert to functional management in the end. He suggests six reasons for this; none of these reasons hold true at Baldrige Award winners.
- Attention shifted. Organizations lose their focus on process improvement when senior leaders are distracted by new or more urgent issues.…
Keys to Successful Process Improvement
The Baldrige model is all about process improvement. The first five categories in the Baldrige Criteria focus on an organization’s key processes in leadership, strategic planning, customer relationships, measurement, and your workforce, and the sixth category asks how you design, manage, and improve these processes.
Baldrige Award winners achieve what many organizations attempt, which is to realize the benefits of process improvement in world-class results. Why do they succeed where others fail? Brad Power attempts to answer that question in “What the C-Suite Needs to Do for Process Improvement?” (HBR, December 15, 2010) He draws on 30 years of experience as a consultant to identify three reasons that process improvement initiatives fail:
- Organizations optimize processes within functions and departments rather than across them. Your most important processes involve multiple functions and departments.
- Frontline workers can’t properly contribute to company goals when they lack information about how to have an impact on them. Organizations that integrate Baldrige use strategic planning and performance measurement systems, as well as frequent communication, to show workers what the organization’s goals are and how everyone contributes to reaching them.
- Top managers can’t realize the substantial benefits of process improvements if they, rather than workers, identify what needs to change. The people…
The Perils of Process Atrophy
A process wants to fall apart. It can be efficient and effective. It can do exactly what you hoped it would do. But you cannot leave it alone, because if you do, it will deteriorate. It will get loose and sloppy, quality will suffer, speed will be lost, and results will decline.
The Baldrige Criteria ask two questions about how you keep your processes intact:
- How does the day-to-day operation of your work processes ensure that they meet key process requirements?
- How do you prevent defects, service errors, and rework and minimize costs or customer productivity losses?
The Criteria also ask how you improve your processes. Managing and improving your processes is an ongoing, neverending activity. In “Embrace Systems Thinking” (IndustryWeek, October 26, 2010), Jill Jusko talks with Robert Martichenko and Kevin von Grabe about building a lean fulfillment stream. Martichenko points out that managing and improving your processes requires developing problem-solving skills across the organization. According to Martichenko, 96% of the initial problems in supply chain and logistics can likely be solved using pareto charts, fishbone diagrams, and the “five whys.” That is probably true for work processes in any part of your organization, and the good news is, developing proficiency in these three…
28Oct2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Differentiates Baldrige Award Winners
Part 1 of 3
Over the last twenty years working with dozens of organizations on Baldrige assessments and with five Baldrige Award winners, I’ve identified seven characteristics that differentiate organizations with sound management systems from those without. Here are the first two:
1. They think process. All work is process. The process flows through people: those who supply it on the front end, those who use those materials to produce products or services, and those customers who receive the products or services.
Companies don’t naturally think process, often because their structures prevent it. They organize around functions—finance, human resources, operations, administration, etc.—but processes, especially those processes critical to a company’s success, are not bound by functions. They are cross-functional. Mediocre companies manage their functions but not their processes. When problems occur, they blame them on departments or work units or, if their “culture of blameology” is really mature, on specific individuals. W. Edwards Deming believed that less than 4% of the problems any company faces can be attributed to individual employees. Leaders blame people when they should be blaming—and managing—the process.
2. They act on data. At Medrad, the world’s leading manufacturer of disposable medical imaging products, the mantra is: “How do we know that?” No…
26Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Benefits of Process Thinking
The Baldrige model is a process model. Leaders who feel like people or parts of their organizations are pulling in different directions can use process thinking to pull them together.
Process thinking builds a customer focus. Process thinking begins with a rock-solid understanding of customer requirements. Each process concludes by delivering products and/or services that serve those requirements. Process thinking contributes to a customer focus by making it easier to identify and eliminate work that does not add value to customers.
Process thinking improves quality and cycle time. Core processes cut across functional boundaries. Improving these processes means improving within the functions, but it also means improving between functions. The cross-functional nature of process thinking brings new perspectives to old ways of doing business. Cross-functional and customer focused means decisions are made based on the needs of the customer, not the needs of the function.
Process thinking reduces costs. A process orientation allows you to take huge amounts of costs out of the system while still improving customer satisfaction. It keeps your eye on both objectives simultaneously.
Process thinking helps drive fear out of the organization. The functional organization encourages blame. If something fails, someone must be at fault. Process thinking means blaming the process, not the…
19May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Real Heroes
Toyota’s front-page fall-from-grace has rivaled that of Tiger Woods, a business world parallel to the sporting world’s latest scandal. No wonder. Our business publications, from BusinessWeek to Fortune to Fast Company to the Wall Street Journal, weave their stories around the companies and executives who have risen to the top today. It is a cult of personality, no different than the teams and stars in the athletic world or the TV shows and actors in the entertainment world. We read about a company’s breakthrough performance or an executive’s startling turnaround and we place them on a pedestal and feel betrayed when they fall off.
They always do, of course. No company or leader can sustain performance excellence indefinitely. There are Baldrige Award winners that have failed after they received the Award, but so what? The Baldrige Award doesn’t guarantee unending success. It simply recognizes that, in the year it was received, that organization was one of the best-run organizations in the country. Next year, who knows? It’s like winning the Super Bowl one year (not that I’d know what that’s like, living in Minnesota) and expecting to win it next year and the year after, ad infinitum.
We’re focusing on the wrong thing. Baldrige Award…
24Feb2010 | Steve George | 2 comments | Continued
