This year, for the first time ever, 1 percent of companies report that they offer unlimited paid leave.
Studies have long shown that — believe it or not — such flexibility actually makes workers more productive and engaged.
The movie subscription service Netflix has had unlimited leave for a decade.
... traditional vacation, in fact the whole 9-to-5 workday, is a "relic of the industrial age." Swasey says Netflix values workers who can manage their own time.
Some of the psychology explaining how people work - which also helps business people see the connection between how the mechanics of people matches Lean practices and why it engages employees.
David Rock
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeJSXfXep4M&w=425&h=349]
another link if that doesn’t work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeJSXfXep4M
Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation
George Koenigsaecker is a principal investor in several Lean enterprises.
George was with the Danaher Corporation, where he was President of the Jacob's Vehicle Equipment Company (whose Lean conversion is featured in the book, Lean Thinking by Jim Womack and Dan Jones) and Group President of the Tool Group, then the largest business unit of Danaher. He also developed and implemented the "Danaher Business System", a comprehensive Lean enterprise model. He has held senior management positions in Finance, Marketing and Operations with Rockwell International and Deere & Company. He is a graduate of the Harvard Business School.
Key points:
“I think the encouraging thing is that if you look at public, stock that you could have purchased from 1987 on, when we started the original transformation at Jake Brake, it has been the highest performing public market stock per, articles in the USA Today and so on. So it has been able to take lean lessons and apply them and get financial performance from them. It’s also the expert in the transformation journey. They’ve grown from a few hundred million dollar business to 12-billion dollars and continuing to grow today. And they do it by acquiring companies and transforming them to lean.”
“One is that Danaher and others that have been successful at the lean journey recognize that you have to change senior leadership behaviour. To do that you’ve got to get your CEO and direct reports to think differently about how they do their work. And companies that are very successful at this, pretty much have a required executive immersion program of some sort.”
“If you improve in all the dimensions that you can improve, every line item on your income statement and your balance sheet, everything you can measure financially or operationally will move in a good direction. If you have higher quality, you do it with shorter lead-times, you do it with lower costs, you do it with a more involved workforce. In a sense, you keep that moving, no one will ever be able to capture you. And if you go through an income statement, you’ll have higher revenue because you’ll have higher quality and shorter lead-time and faster product development. You’ll have lower cost at production because of productivity gains. So higher revenue, lower costs works good on an income statement.
You get to the balance sheet and if you’re a manufacturing company, you’ll have lower inventory levels because of flow. You’ll have lower capital equipment because of better utilization through things like TPM and SMIT, and eventually redesigning capital equipment to fit with a lean environment. So on your balance sheet side, you’ll have less of the working capital, you’ll have less of the fixed capital, and often, as you generate more money, you’ll end up with less debt, so you may have less debt on your balance sheet.”
“too often it has been treated like a program and hasn’t led to ultimate success. It is a system that takes a lot of hard work because you have to restudy every process, let’s say five times over a ten-year period as you begin to use that as a way to generate results and build the culture. It’s something that requires senior leaders to have the humility to admit they don’t already know everything about this subject and go back and do some personal learning.
It’s a system that doesn’t allow them to hire someone and delegate it to them because in the end they still won’t know what they’re doing and whether they’re doing the right thing. If you’re going to do something that is fundamentally a significant culture change, that’s going to have to be led by the chief executive officer or it isn’t going to happen. It can’t be led by someone lower level that you delegate it to.”
Publish date: September 2008
Superfactory
www.superfactory.com
By John M Rubio and
George Koenigsaecker
Long article and highly recommended to read, a few key points:
Manufacturing company leaders cannot wait for the economists to officially declare a recession, as defined by two or more consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth.
Now is the time for business managers to assess the direction of their lean efforts and respond to recessionary pressures. If they wait until it is painfully obvious that they have to make changes, company performance will inevitably follow the sales line down and struggle throughout the recession..
Leading Lean Indicators
Toyota’s four “true north” metrics center around
1) human development,
2) quality,
3) lead time and cycle time (delivery), and
4) cost and productivity.
As a word of caution, the key metrics that managers let slide are always the ones that lead to serious problems in a couple of years. The four true north metrics are all related, improving one supports gains in the others.
Following traditional cost-cutting methods, when sales begin to slide most executives will evaluate each line item on the budget and cut those that don’t seem to have an immediate impact on the business. Training programs and continuous improvement efforts are typically the first to go.
It’s not easy for company leaders to see the immediate impact of such cuts on the business.
If they truly regard employees as their most valuable asset, then leaders must invest as much in employee development as they do in any hard assets. Such investments typically deliver a 10:1 return or better, which is far above other investments. This is as true in boom times as it is during a recession.
“Too many company managers embrace popular programs, like Six Sigma, ignoring waste reduction and other variability reduction methods that can also provide huge improvements.
Unfortunately, quality gains can take a long time for customers to notice, and even longer for customers to believe that they will be sustained. In fact, it might take up to three or four years for a company to reap the full market benefit of any quality gains. Even though managers cannot count on such improvements to pull them through a recession they still need to keep grinding them out.
Publisher: Manufacturing Engineering
May 2007 Vol. 138 No. 5
George Koenigsaeker, Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation
Many of those on the lean journey often ask the question: "How do we sustain our lean effort? What will it take to truly continue on the path?" While there are probably a number of answers to this question, I would like to suggest a few derived from my own experiences.
excellent article, highly recommended for senior leadership to understand
George Koenigsaecker,
Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation
Published in Manufacturing Engineering March 2006 Vol. 136 No. 3
FIND THESE ARTICLES AND READ THEM. THEN REREAD THEM.
Published in Manufacturing Engineering
November 2005 Vol. 135 No. 5
George Koenigsaecker, Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation
Key Points:
Very few companies have figured out how to achieve a lean transformation.
One of the common failures of leadership in the lean transformation is a lack of understanding of what's really achievable with lean.
We thought a transformation could generate enterprise productivity gains of, say, 40%. But we found firms that had lower unit volume than ours--in similar products--that were running at 400 - 500% of the output per person at benchmark US operations.
a first step for senior leadership is to participate in a Value Stream Analysis (VSA), an effort that usually requires a multiday commitment. When you build a value stream map and analyze the data, you always find that the time when nothing is happening to the product (or, in the case of administrative processes, to the data) is in the high 90% range. Often the value-adding time is less than 1% of the time the material or data/information spends in your organization.
This is often the first time senior leaders realize how much waste is built into the way work is organized today. In addition to productivity gains, typical gains achieved in the 3% of firms with successful lean transformations noted in the survey above would include:
A reduction in lead times of 95%,
A reduction in accident rates of 95%,
A reduction in customer complaint/reject rates of 95%, and
A reduction in floor space of 80+%.
As a senior leader, you need to get some "learning," or you won't have the minimal knowledge necessary to manage the lean transformation. In addition, something that is transformational by definition involves a lot of change management. You cannot delegate change management to someone who has not been there before, is lower in the hierarchy, and has less of the clout needed to manage the politics of change. Given the magnitude of change, the team wants to know that the leader is also going there.
Finally, you must address resistance. There are always late adopters who will resist anything new. They cannot be left alone. If you leave them alone, they will become a cancer and, like any cancer, they will metastasize throughout the organization unless they are eradicated. Dealing with them can be tough stuff, and if the process of addressing resistance is not understood and led from the top, it won't get done. ..
LONG ARTICLE, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation
By Koenigsaecker, George
Publication: Manufacturing Engineering
Monday, March 1 2004
excellent article, highly recommended you find and read more than once.
Key points:
They had increased their product range by four-fold to grow out of the "oil crisis." This type of growth usually messes up productivity, but they actually doubled enterprise productivity during the same period, and reduced average unit cost by 26%.
They also could make every product every day, had 90% fewer customer complaints, etc.
Conversion of the operations side of a business typically proceeds in three waves…
One of the things that make this stage difficult is that you have to do it yourself. My sensei would deride us for buying equipment-"catalog engineer" was one of the worst things they could say about you. But you find that to do this on your own you need to build up a group of skilled associates who can design and build machines-and more importantly, conceive of different approaches to designing such machines. This means that you may need to add skilled trades personnel, and some key engineering/design folks. These people look like "overhead" in traditional manufacturing thinking, and are usually the first persons fired when business slows.
…calculations indicated that this feature alone increases the productivity of a cell by 140% -i.e. output per person is 2.4 times that of the basic cell
*Design to takt time. A machine was not to be able to make a part in less than 1/2 of takt time. Like many of the easy-to-understand aspects of lean, this one is hard because it is 180 away from normal practice, which is to design a bigger, more capable, and faster machine than we need-"just in case."
George Koenigsaecker, Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation
From Manufacturing & Technology News
May 16, 2001 Volume 8, No. 9
another long article, full of learning, highly recommended for the CEO learning to turnaround their org to obtain and read.
KEY POINTS
I'd put Jake Brake today as approaching lean. They are making 4.8 times as many engine brakes per hour than they were a decade ago -- a 480 percent output increase. That is the kind of metric that is possible with a full-scale lean conversion.
Q: What are some of the difficulties in starting a conversion away from batch and queue to flow manufacturing?
Koenigsaecker: We have a mindset that if you apply a tool, you've done it and you're done. So we go in and build cells, apply standard work and typically get on each pass a 40 percent productivity gain. But to get the 400 percent gain you have to pass it at least 10 different times. You must restudy the process over and over.
That is a counter-intuitive thing. People say the words continuous improvement, but we just don't believe in continuous improvement. The idea that you can take a series of tools and apply them again and again to the same area and every time you apply them you find new levels of waste and new ways to improve doesn't feel right. If you take 10 firms that started on lean, eight of them quit after the first pass because they got a significant improvement of 40 percent. They thought that was the end of the journey. It's a small number that have actually learned the lesson that if you keep applying the tools the gains keep coming.
… they were producing four times as many product models because they were trying to grow their way out of the recession with proliferation. So their job got four times as hard but they got twice as productive and reduced their unit costs by 28 percent.
It caught my attention. I thought, "Wow, if they could do that we can be in big trouble."
Rockwell Automotive was a producer of heavy truck components and was usually number one or number two in North American market share in every product we made. We thought we were a pretty good benchmark. We found firms making identical products that were running at 400 percent of our productivity level and 10 times our inventory turns and one-tenth our defect rates. There were huge, order-of-magnitude differences.
One of the shocks for us was that they weren't just four times as productive in the factory. As we double checked, we found that they were on average four times more productive in all the staff departments when you measured in terms of company sales per person in the finance department. That really reaffirmed the magnitude of what I had seen at Yanmar, which wasn't even lean yet.
CEO's, executives and leaders - the following articles will help you understand continuous improvement and its bottom line impacts. They are written by George Koenigsaecker, a principal investor in several lean enterprises, and is President of Lean Investments, LLC, a Private Equity organization with an emphasis on manufacturing. Koenigsaecker is a Board Member of the Shingo Prize, the international award for "lean enterprises," and is a board member of The Association of Manufacturing Excellence, Ariens Outdoor Power Equipment, R W Baird Capital Partners Advisory Board, Simpler Consulting, Watlow Electric Corp., and Xaloy Inc.
From 1992 until 1999, he led the lean conversion of the HON Company, a $1.5-billion office furniture manufacturer. During this period, his efforts resulted in a tripling of volume, and culminated in HON Industries being named by
Industry Week
magazine as one of the "World's Best Managed Manufacturing Companies."
Prior to joining HON, Koenigsaecker was with Danaher Corp., where he was President of the Jacobs Vehicle Equipment Co. (whose lean conversion is featured in the book Lean Thinking by Jim Womack and Dan Jones), and Group President of the Tool Group, the largest business unit of Danaher. In addition to leading the lean conversion of these operations, Koenigsaecker developed and implemented the "Danaher Business System," a comprehensive lean-enterprise model.
In addition, Koenigsaecker has held senior management positions in Finance, Marketing, and Operations with Rockwell International and Deere & Co. He is a graduate of the Harvard Business School.
Start with:
Leadership 2005
Manager’s Guide 2001
- restudy the process over & over
- How he found out about lean, some examples
- Make problems visible so they must be solved
Seeking the Lean Machine 2004
- Reconfigure production tech.
- Right sized Machine design & build
Leadership 2005
- due to lack of senior leadership involvement
- productivity gains 400%, understanding how much waste exists
- typical results & payback time
- No successful instances where CEO did not have hands on
Strategy Deployment 2006
- Improvement efforts expected results each pass
- 2 parts to strategy deployment
- Not knowing what org will look like
Sustaining Lean 2007
- firefighting, today’s predominant culture
- process improvement payback 90 – 120 days
- learn through personal application
- Required kaizens for managers
- Necessity for leadership participation regularly
- Continuous improvement is never ending
Perseverance Pay Off 2008
- 10:1 payoff investing in employees
- Reducing lead times to grow 3-4 x industry rate
- Cost of labour, revenue per square foot
- Rarely lay off people, engaging in productivity measure
- Freeze hiring during recession
Interview AME 2010
Author of Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&w=480&h=390]
my notes for easy access to key points when away from my computer
1/6
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVFQ78HbJK0&w=480&h=390]
2/6
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI3gkwxc_Ds&w=480&h=390]
3/6
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqvCj-J8noE&w=480&h=390]
4/6
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePUwc2wFlq4&w=480&h=390]
Automation
5/6
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u45s8hk-zf0&w=480&h=390]
The back stories products, services, experiences are now very important differentiators.
Notice the arrow between the Ex
6/6
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KCZzSKT-HE&w=480&h=390]
Daniel Pink
The Surprising Science on Motivation
The City of Cape Coral, Florida
The City has initiated a “Lean Government” program for simplifying and streamlining various business processes. The goal is to reduce overall process times, increasing quality and lowering cost.
3. What other governmental entities are doing "Lean"?
In Florida, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Department uses Lean. Nationwide, the City of Fort Wayne, Indiana and the State of Iowa have been leaders in this effort.
Staff’s goal is to take this effort completely in-house within just a few years.
July 2, 2009
Cape Coral’s “Lean Government System” Program Receives International Recognition
The City of Cape Coral’s “Lean Government System” has received the Strategic Leadership and Governance Award from the International City/County Management Association. Cape Coral was one of 10 local governments receiving recognition for outstanding programs.
In August 2007, the City of Cape Coral implemented the Lean Government System. A cross-functional team of City employees is established to map and dissect existing processes, eliminate the unnecessary steps and redesign the process to allow service or information to flow more efficiently. All employees (front line, managerial and executive) are included in the evaluation, planning and implementation of the Lean processes, which ensures that all employees have a voice in the changes.
Some of the many successes include:
• Team reduced the time to obtain a permit for construction from 21 days to 8 days.
• Time required to hire a firefighter went from 66 days to 30 days.
• Lot mowing time was reduced from 52 days to 19 days to mow the grass once and send a notice of violation to the property owner.
• The cycle time for first reviews in Site Plan Development initially decreased to five days from 28 days. The time currently is eight days.
The City of Cape Coral is working with other local communities to share and assist in implementing a Lean initiative in their areas. In October 2008, the City partnered with the Florida City/County Management Association, the Center for Florida Local Government Excellence and the John Scott Dailey Florida Institute of Government to offer a Lean Government workshop to surrounding municipalities. Participants included Marco Island, Collier County, Punta Gorda and Palm Beach County.
The ICMA advances professional local government worldwide. Its mission is to create excellence in local governance by developing and advancing professional management of local government. ICMA provides member support to more than 9,000 city, town, and county experts and other individuals and organizations throughout the world. The management decisions made by ICMA's members affect 185 million individuals living in thousands of communities, from small villages and towns to large metropolitan areas.
Lean techniques seek to improve product and service quality while simultaneously reducing waste and labor costs. For food service operators, the additional trick is to link such improvements to customer loyalty.
For one operator, this effort meant tackling unpredictable demand and excessive error rates and wait times (ten minutes for simple sandwiches) on orders. The operator mapped daily changes in demand to highlight fluctuations, introduced a self-service counter, and redesigned kitchen and food preparation procedures to standardize sandwich making and eliminate waste, which consequently fell by 40%.
Meanwhile, labor costs dropped by 15% and service times improved by one-third. Best of all, sales increased by 5% and margins on affected products more than doubled, since employees could spend more time influencing customers and less time apologizing to them.
