Starting a LEAN Journey

One of the most common questions I get asked is: How do I start my LEAN journey? The best analogy I can give you is that building a sustainable LEAN journey is like building a house. You begin with the foundation.

All too often people get excited about the lean tools, such as 5S, value stream mapping, and cycle time reduction. However, we need to think about these tools as levels/floors of the house, not the foundation. Without a solid foundation, the house will fall down, or in lean terms, you will not get the sustainment you desire.

There are four crucial ingredients to building this successful foundation. To make it easier to remember the four ingredients, all you have to do is remember LEAN (Lead, Educate, Apply, and Network).

Lead

All too often I hear stories of business leaders who, after learning of the benefits of lean, tell someone on their staff to “go do that lean thing.” Meanwhile, the business leaders continue their nonlean practices and behaviors. In this environment, lean will not succeed. All leaders in an organization must be aligned with the true purpose, values, principles, and vision of lean. Remember, a leader by definition is the person who goes first, and the business will always be a product of the leader.

Lean is a companywide mindset. Admittedly, you can achieve some isolated sustainment without having complete leadership alignment, but you will never get the cultural shift, value creation, and process changes you’re looking for across the company.

Educate

Lean education has two distinctive steps. First, you have to educate the entire company on what lean is. People fear the unknown and will make up what they don’t know, so make sure everyone knows what the LEAN journey looks like and what it means to them. Second, you have to pick your lean champions who are going to be educated in the lean principles, methodologies, and tools. Choose these people wisely; they will be the ones leading the way and coaching/training the rest of the team.

I am a big reader, and I’ve read many lean books since starting my LEAN journey in 2010 that have helped me learn. Here are a few of the books I recommend you pick up.

• Andy & Me
• The Machine That Changed the World
• Lean for Dummies
• Toyota Culture
• Kaizen Express
• The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership

Apply

How do you eat an elephant? Answer: One bite at a time. Now that you have the leadership and education, it is time to apply the knowledge. Your biggest goal at the start of a LEAN journey is to prove and share the results of lean initiatives to show everybody the benefits. Choose a problem that has a relatively small scope, where clutter and lack of organization are the root cause, then pull together the stakeholders and execute a 5S (sort, straighten, shine, standardize, sustain). Once the kaizen (improvement) is complete, show everyone how much easier the work is; tell them people aren’t working harder, yet they are achieving better results; show the value that was created, and ask everyone for feedback on where else they can use this new 5S tool. Once you get some smaller problems resolved and more people eager to join the journey, then it’s time to move on to bigger kaizen.

Network

Do not try to reinvent the wheel; many people before you have started on and have been successful with a LEAN journey. In fact, if you were to reach out to your immediate network, I believe you would be surprised to find people who are starting on or are well down a lean path. Talk to your suppliers, customers, industry associations, friends, and family to see whom you can connect with to share and compare lean notes. The biggest thing you will learn from your lean network is that you are not alone—we all have the same challenges.

By approaching these four ingredients in order, you give your LEAN journey a far better chance of sustaining for the long term. Starting a LEAN journey can be an intimidating task, especially when faced with laggards, hurdles, and missed targets. However, if you focus on these four ingredients and are disciplined in practicing them, I know you will travel far along your LEAN journey.

Mike Nunn is operations team leader at Ideon Packaging and is Lean Black Belt certified. Mike can be reached at 604-524-0524, miken@ideonpackaging.com, or followed on Twitter @mikednunn.