When I start with a new client, I teach two things right away: the five principles of Lean and a method for getting measurable results quickly, called DMAIC. Together they give a leadership team a shared way to find waste and fix it at the root.
The Five Principles of Lean
Specify value in the eyes of the customer. Everything works backward from here. Who’s paying you, and what exactly are they paying for? It’s more than quality and price. Customers pay for time and for innovation, including ideas that solve problems they don’t know they have yet, and they want all of it faster than they did a few years ago. That’s why Lean is often called time-based management.
Identify the value stream and eliminate waste and variation in it. The value stream runs end to end, and the very end is the ultimate “Big C” customer who actually uses the product or service. This is the patient in the hospital, the person using the toothpaste, or the driver of the car and the tires that are on it.
Make value flow to the pull of the customer. Building a pile of inventory and pushing it out with special deals is the old way. Lean responds quickly with what customers want, when they want it, accurately and in a way that’s easy for them to use.
Involve, enable and empower your employees to make the changes. Lean is something you do with your people, not to your people. Leaders who try to impose it on a team get compliance at best.
Pursue excellence continuously. You’re never done, because improvement is an ongoing discipline. No one today wants a perfect six-sigma floppy disk.
DMAIC: The Method Behind the Principles
Define. Start by defining the current state, the voice of the customer and what value means in the customer’s eyes. Get clear on your mission and your expectations before you touch anything. A well-written charter will spell this out.
Measure. Measure how the work gets done today, including how long things take, how many touch points and tasks there are, where the gaps sit and how much inventory is piling up. I compare it to a medical physical. Your doctor takes a set of measurements and compares them to standards, and that’s how you find out what’s out of whack. In process work we call those findings undesirable effects (UDE’s)..
Analyze. This is where the root cause tools come out. If the checkup shows high blood pressure, the next question is why. A process works the same way, so you ask why orders are late or why this one step takes three days. Then you drill even deeper using the “Five Why’s” analysis tool.
Improve, or better yet, Innovate. The I in DMAIC has traditionally stood for “Improve.” Lately I’ve been encouraging teams to think “Innovate.” This is because there’s no point improving something you could eliminate altogether. This is where the team makes positive changes at the root cause level impacting multiple undesirable effects (UDE’s).
Control. The C is about holding the gain. You lock in the change with standards, measurements, visual control, Poka-yoke (mistake-proofing), 5S, and policy so the old way doesn’t creep back in.
Seeing It in Your Own Business
Once a team understands the principles and the method, we pick a representative value stream, usually one serving a large and important customer, and run DMAIC on it from end to end. That’s what wakes people up. I hear leaders say things like “I didn’t realize it took that long” and “I had no idea we had that many steps.” If your Net Promoter Score is slipping, that’s an undesirable effect too, and it has a root cause you can find and fix fast.
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