Gemba walks jim womack pdf

Also by Jim Womack

The Future of the Automobile, with Alan Altshuler, Martin Anderson, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos

The Machine that Changed the World, with Daniel T. Jones and Daniel Roos

Lean Thinking, with Daniel T. Jones Seeing the Whole, with Daniel T. Jones Lean Solutions, with Daniel T. Jones

GEMBA WALKS

by Jim Womack

Foreword by John Shook

Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc. Cambridge, MA USA lean.org

Version 1.0 February 2011

http://www.lean.org

© Copyright 2011 Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc. All rights reserved. Lean Enterprise Institute and the leaper image are registered trademarks of Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc. ISBN: 978-1-934109-30-4 Design by Off-Piste Design February 2011 Library of Congress Control Number: 2010939596

Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc. One Cambridge Center Cambridge, MA 02142 617-871-2900 • fax: 617-871-2999 • lean.org

http://www.lean.org

For Dan, with profound gratitude for more than 30 years of gemba walking together.

FOREWORD

Lean conversation is peppered with Japanese terms. Consider the term “kaizen,” which is now understood as the structured, relentless approach to continually improving every endeavor—even beyond lean circles. The use of the term “gemba” may be a little less widespread, but it’s no less central to lean thinking. Gemba (also spelled “genba” with an n) means “actual place” in Japanese. Lean thinkers use the term to mean real place or real thing, or place of value creation. Toyota and other Japanese companies often supplement gemba with its related term “genchi gembutsu” to emphasize the literal meaning—“genchi” like gemba means real place, and “gembutsu” means real thing. These terms emphasize reality, or empiricism. As the detectives in the old TV show Dragnet used to say, “Just the facts, ma’am.” And so the gemba is where you go to understand work and to lead. It’s also where you go to learn. For the past 10 years Jim Womack has used his gemba walks as opportunities for both. In these pages, he shares with us anew what he has learned. The first time I walked a gemba with Jim was on the plant floor of a Toyota supplier. Jim was already famous as the lead author of The Machine That Changed the World; I was the senior American manager at the Toyota Supplier Support Center. My Toyota colleagues and I were a bit nervous about showing our early efforts of implementing the Toyota Production System (TPS) at North American companies to “Dr. James P. Womack.” We had no idea of what to expect from this famous academic researcher. My boss was one of Toyota’s top TPS experts, Mr. Hajime Ohba. We rented a small airplane for the week so we could make the most of our time, walking the gemba of as many worksites as possible. As we entered the first supplier, walking through the shipping area, Mr. Ohba and I were taken aback as Dr. Womack immediately observed a work action that spurred a probing question. The supplier was producing components for several Toyota factories. They were preparing to ship the exact same component to two different destinations. Dr. Womack immediately noticed something curious. Furrowing his brow while confirming that the component in question was indeed exactly the same in each container, Dr. Womack asked why parts headed to Ontario were packed in small returnable containers, yet the same components to be shipped to California were in a large corrugated box. This was not the type of observation we expected of an academic visitor in 1993. Container size and configuration was the kind of simple (and seemingly trivial) matter that usually eluded scrutiny, but that could in reality cause unintended and highly unwanted consequences. It was exactly the kind of detail that we were encouraging our suppliers to focus on. In fact, at this supplier in particular, the different container configurations had recently been highlighted as a problem. And, in this case, the supplier was not the cause of the problem. It was the customer—Toyota! Different requirements from different worksites caused the supplier to pack off the production line in varying quantities (causing unnecessary variations in production runs), to prepare and hold varying packaging materials (costing money and floor space), and ultimately resulted in fluctuations in shipping and, therefore, production requirements. The trivial matter wasn’t as trivial as it seemed. We had not been on the floor two minutes when Dr. Womack raised this question. Most visitors would have been focused on the product, the technology, the scale of the operation, etc. Ohba-san looked at me and smiled, as if to say, “This might be fun.” That was years before Jim started writing his eletters, before even the birth of the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI). The lean landscape has changed drastically over the past 10 years, change reflected in Jim’s essays. From an emphasis on the various lean tools for simple waste elimination in manufacturing firms, attention has steadily shifted to a focus on the underlying management principles, systems, and practices that generate sustainable success in any type of organization. Also, the impact of lean continues to grow, moving from industry to industry, country to country, led by a growing number of practitioners and academics and other lean thinkers. Entirely new questions are being asked today of lean, as a result of the practice of the Lean

Community, most of whom have been transformed by Jim’s work. Receiving praise for all he has accomplished in inspiring the lean movement that has turned immeasurable amounts of waste into value, Jim always responds with the same protest: “I’ve never invented anything. I just take walks, comment on what I see, and give courage to people to try.” “I just take walks, comment on what I see, and give courage to people to try.” Hmm, sounds familiar. Toyota’s Chairman Fujio Cho says lean leaders do three things: “Go see, ask why, show respect.” Yes, Jim takes many walks, as he describes in these pages. And in doing so he offers observations on phenomena that the rest of us simply can’t or don’t see. He has a remarkable ability to frame issues in new ways, asking why things are as they are, causing us to think differently than we ever did before. Saul Bellow called this kind of observation “intense noticing.” Ethnographers teach it as a professional tool. Lean practitioners learn it as a core proficiency. But simply seeing—and communicating—lean practice is but one way that Jim has inspired others. Jim gives encouragement in the real sense of the term: courage to try new things. Or to try old things in different ways. I don’t know if there’s a stronger embodiment of showing respect than offering others the courage to try. Without Jim’s encouragement, I certainly would not be here at the Lean Enterprise Institute. I probably would not have had the courage to leave Toyota many years ago to discover new ways of exploring the many things I had learned or been exposed to at Toyota. But I am just one of countless individuals Jim has inspired over the past two decades. And with this collection of 10 years of gemba-walk observations, be prepared to be inspired anew.

John Shook Chairman and CEO Lean Enterprise Institute Cambridge, MA, USA February 2011

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION PURPOSE Purpose, Process, People Lean Consumption Repurpose before You Restructure PROCESS Taking a Value-Stream Walk at Firm A Creating Basic Stability The Power of a Precise Process Lean Information Management The Wonder of Level Pull PEOPLE Bad People or a Bad Process? Making Everyone Whole Fewer Heroes, More Farmers The Problem with Creative Work and Creative Management Respect for People MANAGEMENT From Lean Tools to Lean Management What I’ve Learned about Planning and Execution It Takes 2 (or More) to A3 The Problem of Sustainability From Staffs Conducting Programs to Line Managers Solving Problems The Mind of the Lean Manager Homicide by Example? The Work of Management Modern Management vs. Lean Management

TRANSFORMATION Shopping for a Sensei The ‘Right’ Sequence for Implementing Lean Substituting Money for Value-Stream Management We Have Been (Lean) Thinking Dueling Sensei and the Need for a Standard Operating System Mura, Muri, Muda? Kaizen or Rework? The Worst Form of Muda Constancy of Purpose Becoming Horizontal in a Vertical World DIFFUSION Lean Beyond the Factory Manage the Contract or Improve the Value Stream? Thinking End to End The Missing Link Lean Thinking for Air Travel Creating Lean Healthcare The Tipping Point? The Joy of a Greenfield THE GREAT RECESSION Mega Mura Bubble Trouble A Large Enough Wave Sinks All Boats MISUNDERSTANDINGS Deconstructing the Tower of Babel How Lean Compares with Six Sigma, BPR, TOC, TPM, Etc. Just-in-Time, Just-in-Case, and Just-Plain-Wrong Move Your Operations to China? Do Some Lean Math First Gross Domestic Product vs. Gross Domestic Waste Adding Cost or Creating Value?

Creating Value or Shifting Wealth? MISADVENTURES The Value of Mistakes [previously titled, Beach Reading] Necessary but Not Sufficient THE GREAT CHASE A Tale of Two Business Systems The Lean Way Forward at Ford Why Toyota Won and How Toyota Can Lose The End of an Era HISTORY THAT’S NOT BUNK A Lean Walk through History Nice Car, Long Journey Respect Science, Particularly in a Crisis The End of the Beginning Hopeful Hansei: Thoughts on a Decade of Gemba Walks INDEX

INTRODUCTION

Gemba. What a wonderful word. The place—any place in any organization—where humans create value. But how do we understand the gemba? And, more important, how do we make it a better place—one where we can create more value with less waste, variation, and overburden (also known, respectively, as muda, mura, and muri)? I’ve been thinking about these questions for many years, and learned long ago that the first step is to take a walk to understand the current condition. In the Lean Community we commonly say, “Go see, ask why, show respect.” I’ve always known this intuitively, even before I had a standard method, and even when I labored in the university world where it seemed natural to learn by gathering data at arm’s length and then evaluating it in an office through the lens of theory. Now I work in an opposite manner by verifying reality on the gemba and using this understanding to create hypotheses for testing about how things can work better. I learned long ago that the most productive way to walk is to follow a single product family or product design or customer-facing process from start to finish. As I do this I look at each step with the eye of the customer and from the perspective of those actually creating the value, asking how more can be achieved with less. Over the past 30 years I have tried to take as many walks along as many “value streams” as I could. Nearly 10 years ago, in the aftermath of September 11, I felt the members of the Lean Community should be in closer contact, and so I started writing down and sharing my thoughts and observations from these walks. They took the form of my monthly eletters that have been sent in recent years to more than 150,000 readers around the world. These have sometimes been based on a single walk, but are often the merged insights of many. In handing off the baton of leadership at LEI to John Shook in the fall of 2010, I wanted to bundle up the findings of these gemba walks. I have organized these eletters by the most important themes and now present them to the Lean Community in one volume. In reading through my letters, I found one critical topic—lean management—where I had not written all I wanted to say. So I have composed two new essays, The Work of Management and Modern Management vs. Lean Management, and placed them at the end of the section on Management. I also found myself reflecting on where the lean movement has been and on what I need to focus on in my future walks. My thoughts are presented in a final essay, previously unpublished, titled Hopeful Hansei. I have tried to treat my letters as historical artifacts, produced at a specific time and informed by a visit to a certain place. Thus I have largely resisted the temptation—felt by every author—to improve them. However, I have removed some material that is no longer relevant and corrected a few errors of fact. More important, I discovered in reading over the letters that on a number of points I wasn’t as clear in explaining my ideas as I should have been and once thought I was. Now, after reflection and a bit of kaizen—the C and A steps in Dr. Deming’s plan-do-check-act improvement process —I hope I am. This said, it’s important to make you aware that these letters were never written to some grand plan. They were driven by problems I was hearing from the Lean Community at a given moment or by what I was encountering on the gemba, often accidentally while looking for something else. Thus there is some repetition of themes. And some important issues—notably standardized work and lean accounting—get very little attention. In addition, the essays are no longer presented in the chronological sequence of their composition. I have instead grouped them by categories that I have devised after rereading the entire collection. While I think this is helpful to the reader, many essays—including the first one on Purpose, Process, People—could easily be placed within several categories because they address more than one topic. To deal with the difficulty this may present for readers with a specific issue or question in mind, an index of the themes, topics, terms, individuals, and organizations covered in the essays appears at the end of this book. I do think these eletters—which I will refer to in this book as essays to denote their modest modification from

the originals—stand the test of time. But most need to be placed in context: Why this topic at this time to address this issue? What is the connection of this essay to the others? I have provided a context with commentaries prior to or after each essay. In these brief passages I reflect on why a given topic is important or offer additional insights I have gained subsequent to my walk and writing of the original essay. A book recounting gemba walks could never have been written without a gemba to walk. Lacking any of my own, excepting LEI, I have had to ask for help from many members of the Lean Community. And you have been invariably helpful in granting me what used to be known—a long time ago when I was in high school—as a “hall pass,” a permit to roam freely in your organizations and often to ask awkward questions. I will always be grateful for the help I have received from so many, and I hope I have been true to my promise to reveal nothing uncomplimentary about any efforts of yours that are identified by name in my essays. (Of course, I found many things to criticize anonymously and many more things to remark on privately during or after my visits, I hope for a good end.) I could never have had such productive visits without others to walk with me, both in person and in an intellectual dialogue. Foremost among these is Dan Jones, my frequent coauthor, sometime cowalker, and constant cothinker about all things lean for more than 30 years. Many of my walks and the resulting essays tackled a certain topic, took a specific form, or arrived at certain conclusions after collaborative lean thinking with Dan. And a few summarize our joint work in the books we have written. I have been truly blessed to have such a friend for more than half of my walk through life. I was lucky again nearly 20 years ago when I encountered John Shook. There are many walks I would not have taken without John’s urging, perhaps most memorably my walk through Ford’s empty Model T factory in Highland Park, MI (see back cover). And on many other walks I would not have noticed the truly important thing without John’s sensei guidance. In addition, several of the essays are involved centrally with John’s contribution to the promotion of value-stream mapping and A3 thinking. We are still walking together as John Shook takes on the leadership role at LEI, and I join Dan in the role of senior advisor. I trust that we will keep on gemba walking together for years to come. Finally, anyone who knows me knows that I’ve needed lots of help just finding the starting point to take my walks. For many years the team at LEI has struggled daily to keep me pointed in the right direction. I thank them all, but I’m especially grateful to the following: Helen Zak and Rachel Regan helped me determine which gemba to visit, especially when many members of the Lean Community suggested their gemba, and my time was limited. They also read and organized for my review the many comments I received. Jean Krulic figured out how to get there, got the plane tickets, found a hotel, and provided comprehensive directions. She was also my refugee when things went wrong en route, as they often did. (Air travel is not a capable process!) Jon Carpenter figured out the expenses and tactfully refrained from asking (as was his right as LEI’s CFO) whether the benefits were always greater than my costs. Tom Ehrenfeld edited my monthly eletters for the nearly 10 years I wrote them, and he provided invaluable advice in putting this volume together. It’s hard to put up with an editor who constantly tells you that you can do better, but I have tried to grin and bear Tom’s advice, with major benefits for my readers. Chet Marchwinski, in his role as LEI communications director, and Josh Rapoza, LEI director of web operations, prepared the eletters for sending and tried to catch any errors. George Taninecz, as project manager, guided this volume from start to finish with a schedule that kept staring at me sternly as I kept thinking of other, easier things to do instead. Thomas Skehan, as with practically all LEI publications, gave this volume its look and feel. The high visual and tactile quality of our publications at LEI over the 13 years I ran the organization owes everything to Thomas and nothing to me. Jane Bulnes-Fowles played the final, critical role at LEI of efficiently and effectively coordinating production planning and the distribution and launch of the book.