A TALE OF THE UNLEAN KAIZEN ACTION
If there is poor planning, then even a Kaizen action can be unlean!
The PDCA Cycle
Many many years ago (close to 20!) I was sitting in a pub with a Toyota colleague and we were discussing the PDCA cycle. On a napkin my colleague drew a visual representation of this. It looked like this: (refer to my book The Lean Dairy Farm for a whole section about this PDCA cycle.)
Our conclusion: that in traditional businesses people tend to jump in and do things without much planning. This leads to a lot of WASTE which has an impact on how long implementation takes and also on the quality of implementation. Generally without planning, actions will take longer to do and be more prone to problems and frustrations popping up.
Lean business = PLAN
In a lean business, significant time is spent in PLAN to ensure that when you finally go to implement an action or project, it is efficient, effective and you get the right result. I will do a seperate post on this sometime as it is a very important concept of lean.
Remember – ALWAYS FOLLOW THE LEAN PDCA – PLAN Do CHECK Act!!!!!! But spend the most time in PLAN and CHECK – if you do these steps correctly then the DO and ACT are quick and efficient. If you don’t, you will no doubt implement things with waste…..
A farm Kaizen to save time & cost
How does this relate to us…… Well a few weeks ago we finally made a change to reduce our MOTION and TRANSPORT waste. We moved our calf meal silo from one part of the farm to our dairy shed that is two km up the road. This is where our calves are raised and fed.
This improvement will save probably a good 45 minutes in transporting meal from one place to another – a big waste! Not only will it save time, having feed at the point of use will make the job easier for our team. Further, it will be easier to check feed quantity and ensure we have JIT (just in time) supply. It will also reduce a lot of unnecessary tractor usage which will save us diesel costs and maintenance costs. So a great outcome overall – definitely makes sense. A great lean improvement.
When there is no PDCA
So here is the non lean part. We needed a crane truck to lift the silo and transport it. The truck company happened to phone one morning to say that they can be there in an hour to move the silo. As it was a random call, and we just said “yes sure” instead of stopping to think, it meant that there was actually no PLANNING time. Problem 1 – no PLAN.
So the crane truck showed up. The crane truck driver hadn’t seen the job so it took him some time to ponder how he was going to do the job. WAITING waste. Then we had to quickly grind the bolts from the ground as we didn’t have it ready. More WAITING for truck which we are paying by the hour. After a lot of hassle to load the silo on the back of the crane truck, we were off down the road to reposition the calf meal silo at the dairy farm. It was all looking smooth…..
More WASTE!
The crane truck arrived at the new location but again hadn’t seen where we were thinking of positioning the silo. We hadn’t really thought about it either as no PLANNING. So then there was some more time wasted working out the best orientation for the silo. Next as it was an extremely wet week, the crane truck drove up the track but got stuck in the mud and started slipping down the bank. This required extra REWORK, MOTION and WAITING waste because now one of our tractors had to be taken off the farm (which was needed for feeding out during our busy calving period), so that my hubby Mat could use the tractor to tow the crane truck out of the mud.
Next, the trailer with the silo had to be off loaded as the whole thing was too long and heavy and there was risk everything will topple down the bank due to the load. More towing, more pushing with the tractor and more waiting and rework for everyone (Motion, Wait, Rework waste). Finally after about 2 hours the silo was lifted off, then there was more rework, and fidgeting around to get the truck off the mud, connected to the trailer again and towed safely back onto the tanker track. More wasted time, motion and rework.
More Waste as no Check & Act
Well you would think the waste ended there…. but unfortunately it did not… The feed truck came to fill the silos the next day and informed us that they could not fill the calf meal silo. Why not? Because we had positioned it with the opening at the back thinking it would be fine but we hadn’t done the CHECK part of PDCA had we? Once the silo was on the ground we should have completed the CHECK part of PDCA. This would have confirmed that everything was ok: the silo was accessible, it was easy to use and so on. In the end the meal truck is managing with our opening at the back without us having to rotate it, but it isn’t ideal. Perhaps one day we will do more REWORK to rotate it around again!
Take out – always do PDCA
And that is where our unlean story ends. Unfortunately these kinds of situations happen every day on our farms. We often don’t realise that they could have and should have been prevented, saving us time and money. What turned into a several hour process, should have been a smooth 1-2 hour process with proper planning and coordination.
Moral of the story – PLAN Do CHECK Act. Don’t let WASTE creep in to your day!!