It is not necessary to provide any explanation of the state of the world. Everybody is getting more updates than necessary, many are living it, and many more are fighting it. As a society we have a responsibility to put our interests on hold for the greater good of protecting the vulnerable and keeping overburden out of our health care system. For the majority of us who are fortunate that we simply need to stay home and wash our hands to do our part, it can be difficult to sit and wait because we want to do something to help. The world has changed and when the time comes to start the world back up we will have that opportunity.
Until then, I’d like to challenge us to consider how we want to go back to things. We can go back to the routine and do what we have always done to get what we have always got or, we can take inspiration from what we are living through right now and change for the better. This is not new, the Japanese government had to rebuild their economy in the 1950s and did so with great success. They did it again in the 1973 oil crisis and it finally caught global attention in the 1990s.
One of the Japanese pioneers of this way of thinking was an engineer at Toyota Motor Corporation named Taichi Ohno. The cumulation of his work, learnings, and teachings became known as the Toyota Production System which is the gold standard of Lean organizations. Mr. Ohno summarized Lean in a single sentence in his book, Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production: “What we are trying to do is reduce the timeline from the moment a customer places an order to the time we collect the money and eliminating all the non value adding wastes in between.”
Please consider who your customer is and think about what it is that they truly value and consider what activities bring them this. The challenge of lean is to change the way you think and behave so that everybody in the customer/supplier relationship wins with the elimination of all activity that does not directly benefit the customer (waste). Waste is specifically categorized in Lean literature as over production, inventory, transportation, motion, defects, over processing, waiting, unrealized potential and unsafe practice. Lean Practice is structured to recognize these and eliminate it through learning, standardization, experimentation, and repetition.
Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA) is traditionally an exercise to help design products or processes by considering the systems or components that can fail and developing countermeasures to eliminating these failures. Consider exposure to Covid 19 and the rules that public health agencies have asked us to follow as the countermeasures. We are asked to stay home which completely eliminates the risk of exposure. A positive test for Covid 19 requires a mandatory quarantine period and people at risk are asked to self quarantine for the 14 day gestation period. We are recommended personal protective equipment (PPE), Social Distancing, and frequent hand washing when we need to leave our houses which is a layer of physical protection when we put ourselves into riskier environments. Can you think of an area of your working life that could be made more effective for your customers if you could simply eliminate a failure with as dilligently as we practice social distancing or hand washing?
Many of us use the 80/20 rule in our day to day language to describe a small percentage of the job that delivers the majority of your earnings or losses. Even simpler we say the most bang for your buck. The philosophy comes from an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto who first discussed the importance of the vital few. Today 80/20 analysis is a critical part of how successful organizations get the most bang for their buck. In the context of this pandemic the critical few are the most vulnerable, the equipment necessary to keep them alive, and the safety equipment necessary to protect the ones who protect them. Can you think of the vital few customers, processes, tools or equipment that you can give extra effort to?
Takt time is a term that describes the ideal manufacturing or processing pace for a given activity. Takt is the German word for drum which describes a pace and it is calculated by dividing the working time (typically in a shift) by the number of units customers demand in that period. In a recent meeting we considered if it was possible to apply this philosophy to determine how many ventilators Canada may need. Another example to consider is the speed that N95 masks need to be manufactured. The calculation is easy, it is simply working time available divided by the units required for that period. The challenge is making sure that you produce quickly for your own needs but you have to be mindful that an incorrect optimistic requirement puts people at risk while an incorrect pessimistic estimate keeps valuable equipment and material out of the hands of somebody that needs it.
Just in time inventory is first documented in Ohno’s book mentioned above. It was inspired during tours American automotive plants in the 1960s and the concept of American supermarkets created the idea of translating the retail shelf stocking into parts and material supply in Japanese plants. The breakthrough was achieved by stabilizing demand and production with coordinated delivery. This pandemic is not predictable and there is a global shortage of critical personal protective equipment and cleaning agents. I recently heard the statement from a reputable reporter that “just in time and lean supply chains do not work” in this pandemic. There is merit in this statement and while it is correct to point out that there is not enough supply at the moment to have a global safety stock for this equipment I do not think that the statement was made with a full appreciation of lean and just in time. One thing to consider is that a just in time inventory is only as good as the anticipated demand and it is true that there could have been a better response to it. However, it is also true that lean and just it time can be a big part of the solution and the response to this problem by getting what the customer needs to them faster. Factories are working longer shifts to meet the demand, trucks are picking them up, planes are flying them around the world, trucks are moving them again, and they are distributed. Products are getting delivered in record time all over the world. Entire factories are being redesigned and more supply is being introduced to help fight this battle. Lean practice can help organizations introduce new products by designing facilities in a manner that minimizes work in process inventory, steadily improves quality, minimizes waiting times, and maximizes throughput. A change in direction like this may be necessary for some organizations to survive.
Hospitals in Canada are funded by provincial governments and the provincial health authorities have been early adopters of Lean out of necessity because of the scarcity of budgets and funding. You will be hard pressed to step into a hospital without seeing lines on the floors or walls to help patients and families find the diagnostic imaging department. You will not likely step into an examining or treatment room that is not well labelled and fully supplied. You will likely find that all the necessary surgical tools for surgeons are on hand, clean, laid out in sequence, and placed into their hands exactly when they need them. This same level of harmony will follow the patient to a hospital room, to the nurses’ station, through treatment, and discharge. Everything carefully laid out to a structured plan and repeated but most patients leave feeling treated as an individual. In the face of a new enemy they are forced to change their plans daily under increasing demand as more and more workload is put onto them. There is tremendous commitment to the care of patients demonstrated. Can we honestly say that we show up like this? Are we as willing to adapt to changes in working conditions, processes, and hazards like our care providers have?
There is no doubt that the world we live in has changed. We all have a responsibility to do our part to limit the productivity of Covid 19 by isolating, distancing, protecting, and cleaning. The more effective we are at this first exercise will determine when we can begin restructuring our lives, communities, and industries. When that time comes there is a tremendous opportunity to improve those same lives, communities, and industries with the flexible and sustainable skill of Lean Practice. A small group of us use it already but it is fortunate that there has been enough of its principles have been applied for our protection and benefit. Society as a whole is showing that it can be put to work effectively so there is no reason why we cannot take what we have learned and apply it to our vocations, our communities, and ourselves to make a better world that is more prepared for the next time we have to face a crisis.