Often organizations are attempting to mimic the Toyota Production System (TPS) without achieving the success that Toyota has received. These companies are finding that their most of their kaizen improvement activities are not positively impacting the overall corporate financials. For example, Delphi winning many Shingo Prizes but still has financial difficulties. Described later is a pragmatic enterprise process that addresses these issues and more.
An article, “The Open Secret of Success: Toyota turns the concept of innovation on its head, shares it and still wins,” made the following points relative to these issues:
* For a long time Toyota has long been the most profitable and innovative automotive company, overtaking GM’s 77 years run of selling the most cars.
* For Toyota, innovation is more than improving processes on an incremental basis.
* The production reinvention in Toyota’s automobile production dealt more with how things are made, which resulted in building cars faster and with less labor
* Focus in the Toyota approach has been more on steady improvement moving down the field; i.e., as opposed to going for long touch down passes
* In most companies, their top-down organization result in difficulties with the transference of responsibility to the front-line worker
* A corporate hope that things will turn around using a crash-diet approach just does not work. This approach is not unlike one starving their self for a few days thinking that this will result in a life-long thin body.
* Toyota has a regular sustainable diet approach that does not expect dramatic immediate results. This approach requires a lot of self discipline because it is harder to sustain. The system of Toyota is easy to understand but hard to follow.
When organizations try to mimic the Toyota Production System (TPS) hunt for areas to improve approach, perhaps through the execution of team-improvement kaizen events, they only to discover that the big-picture metrics did not improve. What is often not determined is that much improvement can be made in a portion of the business that is not the overall constraint of the overall business; e.g., example, we might improve the manufacturing of slide rules; however, engineers are not now buying slide rules.
In the U.S. what US companies often do at the executive level when they want to make improvements is hire a new CEO and/or executive team. Often these hirings include a golden parachute that is very attractive even if the business does not improve. Often what is later found is that this “silver bullet” approach did not work and they then get rid of the hired executive and/or team and try again. This approach is not consistent with what Toyota has been doing.
What organizations need is a long-lasting overall no nonsense enterprise governance system framework that leads to the three Rs of business; i.e., everybody doing the right things, and doing them right, and the right time. This need is accomplished through the Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) system which can lead organizations to the best areas for kaizen event and other improvement efforts; e.g., a sales process focus instead of a manufacturing focus if we have excess manufacturing capacity.
A whitepaper that describes this system is “Corporate Performance Management: The Integrated Enterprise Excellence System”
This paper references a Going Beyond Lean Six Sigma book (and the Balanced scorecard enhancements) and has deployment case studies in a video and an American Management Association article.
on Dec 4th, 2009 at 9:17 am
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