The start

What is the beginning in implementing lean?  Where to one start?  Training, kaizen, 5S?  These are some of the "million" questions that goes through ones mind when starting the journey.  How do you best convey the message that lean will transform the company in the future.  In the world of instant gratification, how do you best gain trust  from employees that what you are talking about will make a big difference, but at a later time?

Those questions right there is enough to scare away any thought of organizational change.

Well, I started with value stream maps for a few areas of our organizations.  Not in a particular order or place, just picked a few functions.  Called meetings with people who were vocal and started with a (large)blank sheet of paper.  "so guys what happens first?" or "what happens next?" was a common phrase in my vocabulary in these meetings.  The start is a little slow until you start pressing for answers or you assume incorrectly.  My job from there is fairly easy.  Siphering through the opinions was the hardest of my tasks.

Is implementing continous improvement hard?  I don't think so, but then again somedays it feels like i just ran 15 miles in 10 minutes.  It is at times exhausting.  I told my friend Jay that implementing lean sometimes feels like herding cats with a golden retriever.. The most satisfying with implementing lean is to see that moment in people when "the light turns on" and the thinking begins.  That is when you know that you have one more employee that will help you make the organization stronger.

Anyway, back to the start of implementing huge changes.  For the longest time it seemed like i was stuck in the office finding information about current status of the organization.  What parts are we making money on?, what is our capacity? who does what in the organization, how do we measure ourselves, who has the data, etc. 

I choose to figure out capacity.  How much can we make?  how fast?  I collected over 300 parts run times to figure out capacity load and how to schedule based upon each individual load.  By having this data i can now determine where to place people, where to expect downtime and have actual expectations of people.  Wow, what a change that was....  did we know that we underutilize or overload our production by an average of $800 a day?  We are throwing away money every day (~$800) and nobody sees it!