Progressive Lean: The Overall Idea of It, Part Two
In my last post, I was laying the groundwork for my reasons for changing my approach to implementing lean.
The rest of the story has to do with a client I had. The client had been implementing lean with another consultant for about a year before I got there. They had conducted about ten "excellence events" and were happy with them but didn't feel that the overall idea of lean was really taking hold across the organization. They learned about Progressive 5S at a conference they went to and decided it would be a good way to get the whole organization working together on lean.
(A bit of backstory: Most of the excellence events...you might call them kaizen events...had focused to one degree or another on 5S. Most of the shop, though, not having experienced an excellence event, was pretty unorganized. Top management had been a bit non-committal to 5S activities, preferring to see hard cost reductions. The company hired a world renowned quality consultant to look at all their operations. At the top of his report: You need to clean up and organize the place if you're serious about quality. Top, middle, and front-line management got really interested in 5S after that.)
So they started rolling out the version of Progressive 5S they had learned at the conference with my help and it worked pretty well.
I spent some time thinking about the flow of Progressive 5S and found that I could broaden it to include all the activities of lean, from planning through sustaining. I came up with the 10S or 5S X 2 rubric (I need to nail down which it is...I kind of like that 5S X2). I've been using it with two other clients and it's working well.
Remember, the approach I'm going to relate to you isn't just focused on 5S. It started as Progressive 5S but my version is Progressive Lean. Progressive 5S only addresses 5S. In Progressive Lean, 5S is integrated into a broader progressive deployment that also includes set up reduction, value stream mapping, cell creation, structured team problem solving, pull systems, and so on.
In my next post, I'll go into some of the advantages I'm finding with Progressive Lean.
The rest of the story has to do with a client I had. The client had been implementing lean with another consultant for about a year before I got there. They had conducted about ten "excellence events" and were happy with them but didn't feel that the overall idea of lean was really taking hold across the organization. They learned about Progressive 5S at a conference they went to and decided it would be a good way to get the whole organization working together on lean.
(A bit of backstory: Most of the excellence events...you might call them kaizen events...had focused to one degree or another on 5S. Most of the shop, though, not having experienced an excellence event, was pretty unorganized. Top management had been a bit non-committal to 5S activities, preferring to see hard cost reductions. The company hired a world renowned quality consultant to look at all their operations. At the top of his report: You need to clean up and organize the place if you're serious about quality. Top, middle, and front-line management got really interested in 5S after that.)
So they started rolling out the version of Progressive 5S they had learned at the conference with my help and it worked pretty well.
I spent some time thinking about the flow of Progressive 5S and found that I could broaden it to include all the activities of lean, from planning through sustaining. I came up with the 10S or 5S X 2 rubric (I need to nail down which it is...I kind of like that 5S X2). I've been using it with two other clients and it's working well.
Remember, the approach I'm going to relate to you isn't just focused on 5S. It started as Progressive 5S but my version is Progressive Lean. Progressive 5S only addresses 5S. In Progressive Lean, 5S is integrated into a broader progressive deployment that also includes set up reduction, value stream mapping, cell creation, structured team problem solving, pull systems, and so on.
In my next post, I'll go into some of the advantages I'm finding with Progressive Lean.
Posted by George Bohan at Monday, September 26. 2011 
Categories: How to Implement Lean Manufacturing
Categories: How to Implement Lean Manufacturing
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