Business leaders, doctors, healthcare executives, and government leaders filled 50 roundtables and brainstormed how to improve healthcare and cut costs in the region at Crain’s Detroit Health Care Leadership Summit October 15. They produced what Crain’s called Eight Big Ideas.
These include the usual: The technology solution--online health information exchange. The up-supply solution—more primary care providers. The reduce demand solution--make people live more “healthily”--financial incentives for employees to lose weight and quit smoking. The rule of law solution--Michigan should mandate health care price transparency. The down-supply solution--Reduce overcapacity of some facilities.
But Idea 6 shows that lean (but don’t call it that) has gained some traction: “Use skills developed by auto industry engineers to improve efficiencies and streamline processes of hospitals and physician offices to improve quality and reduce costs.”
Leaving aside the question of whether wind is better than coal or solar better than gas, wind turbines are going up fast. Well, sort of fast. The wait for a turbine, I hear, is measured in years. A case where demand is greater than supply.
There are at least three hard-hit industries I can think of that should be jumping at the chance to go to this conference—automotive suppliers, machine tool builders, and companies like Caterpillar that build mining and construction equipment.
Just one turbine contains 8,000 components: metal parts, sensors, hubs, rotors, blades, shafts, and tower sections. That’s a lot of value added, and the turbine manufacturers aren’t going to do it all themselves.
So what capabilities do you have that you can leverage to enter the industry?
First, you need a record of building highly reliable products from design to serviceability. It’s no simple matter to repair a wind turbine, and catastrophic failures are not unknown. And achieving reliability requires lubrication systems, electronics, remote maintenance information systems, and other stuff I know nothing about.
Related to reliability is quality. Do you have six sigma expertise embedded throughout your company? GE is one of the big time OEMs, and they speak six sigma there. Auto suppliers have tremendous talent in this area, and if you need it, the industry has released a flood of talent. Find those folks now, before the improving economy absorbs them.
Wind turbines have some REALLY BIG THINGS in them. That’s where some machine tool builders and makers of big equipment should be looking, not waiting for their old markets to return. Really big parts require expertise in metallurgy, casting, forging, heat treating, welding, testing, and traceability. How about rolling 17-ton seamless rings more than 7 meters across.What about forging 18-ton shafts?
Know how to make castings? A wind turbine can use 10- to 25 tons of ductile iron castings, from less than 100 to more than 50,000 lbs each. A rotor hub can weigh 36,000 lbs and measure 15 ft in diameter. I don’t have to give you details of the extreme attention to metallurgy and casting quality required here. Forming parts from specialized alloys is not easy.
Castings large and not-so-large will need machining. What turbine parts are about the size of a vehicle engine block? Just asking.
Fasteners. 500 bolts per turbine, then pins, washers, studs—you name it. Need I say more?
The publicized call for suppliers doesn’t say they should understand lean, TPS, kaizen, continuous improvement, or six sigma. However, you can bet the companies with the strongest grasp of lean will be able to gain the edge. They should be able to make parts with lower cost and higher quality. They should be a source of manufacturability knowledge. They should be able to innovate in the area of materials and methods, transferring them from other industries. They should be able to deliver on time. They should be able to galvanize a workforce to achieve great things.
Money. OK. You need to invest in new capital equipment, make sure your software aligns with that of customers and vendors in the industry, redouble your training efforts, enter an industry that you don’t already feel comfortable in. And you’re tapped out. That’s where the AWEA conference and workshop comes in. It involves bringing the latest news from Washington, state economic development agencies, sources of information about tax credits. You can get a big gulp of information about the industry. You can meet potential customers and learn how they see their needs evolving.
In more news from Detroit, it looks like Zug Island (if you ever lived here, you’ll chuckle now) will clean itself up and become the home of a research center that could change the game. The vision is to develop a 15-20 mw turbine (current turbines are more like 1.5 mw). NextEnergy and a flock of companies, agencies, governments, universities and other organizations are looking for mega-money, and might just get it.
Crain’s Detroit Business says NextEnergy has talked with more than 1,000 auto suppliers about getting into the wind industry. I wish I knew what the outcomes have been.
States like Michigan are not going to be able to turn a switch and “retool” the economy. You’re going to do that. Innovative and adaptive manufacturing leaders are going to move up and build an industry. Question is, will you be with them?
There should be a special place in Hades for software engineers who believe users think just like they do. (Did you ever think "user" has a disdainful ring to it -- like somebody who uses drugs or uses people?)
If you found the culprit, I can imagine the conversation, "Oh, it doesn't work? Just do this thing with that. Did you..." Like you're supposed to know. Online help writers are no better.
If you're not making things simple enough for your mom or grandmother to understand, you don't know how to communicate. There's an app for that. Bring in a usability expert to review your work and teach you about how non-engineers think.
If you're not testing things to the bulletproof stage, you're not testing enough. There's an app for that. Bring in a reliability engineer to test your work and teach you about the principles of reliability.
Right now I'm in a sync Twilight Zone, trying to get my calendars to agree using PocketMac for BlackBerry. I uninstalled it and reinstalled it and it still churns on and on. Google Sync won't work either. It thinks my radio connection is turned off.
Software developers take note! I'll be Tweeting error messages that I either like or find incomprehensible. Try to learn something about ordinary people.
Are you thinking about getting a flu shot to protect against the ordinary seasonal flu, or are you distracted by all the talk about H1N1? People with flu symptoms in the coming months are going to test the capacity of the healthcare system. And why, if it's so easy to prevent? Not only do you protect yourself from being sick, but you eliminate yourself as an infection vector with the potential to geometrically increase the number of flu victims.
Last year was the first time I got a flu shot. It's inconvenient. You have to find out where to get one. You have to let someone hurt you. It's easy to procrastinate.
You don't know if you have to make an appointment with your doctor to get your shot. Do you go to the county health department immunization clinic? Can you get one at the drugstore or the grocery store.
What day is flu shot day? What time? What will it cost?
This year, Target created capacity and customer service by offering flu and pneumonia shots at their pharmacies. I called to ask when they'd be giving them, and the pharmacist said, "Whenever you want."
So today I went there, not wanting to trade viruses with hundreds of people at the AME conference next week. It was mid-morning and no other customers were waiting at the pharmacy counter. An associate responded to my request right away. It did take time -- I don't know how value-added it was -- to fill in a customer health questionnaire and for the associate to put the data into the computer. (You get to pick your own color container for any prescription medications so they don't get mixed up with those of other family members at home -- poka yoke.)
Once that was done, a fellow came around the counter to a little alcove partitioned off and we sat down on the two chairs that were there. He asked what arm I wanted to get the shot in, or if I wanted one in each arm. He talked very approvingly of me for getting the immunizations. It cost about $30 for each shot.
Yes, Target is accepting that they are paying a qualified person (nurse?) to stand around when there are no other customers for the shots. (Excess capacity) But by making them available at any time Target is better matching demand and leveling work than a site that is open once or twice a month. Target is providing a public health service that will keep more poeple well throughout the winter.
Do you think of capacity as something to minimize in every instance? Maybe some excess capacity would be an advantage in ensuring flow in your office or factory. Especially when it comes to people. Wrong-headed layoffs may be hurting companies more than they know.
We know that organizations have silos that hamper the development of a leaner enterprise, but is there a way to quantify and understand what's happening within and across divisions and subgroups?
Harvard Business School postdoctoral fellow Adam M. Kleinbaum, and professors Toby E. Stuart and Michael L. Tushman took on the challenge by analyzing server logs of e-mails and calendars, publishing their findings in a working paper, "Communication (and Coordination?) in a Modern, Complex Organization."
They analyzed more than 100 million e-mails and 60 million electronic calendar entries over a three-month period in a 100,000-employee company--studying what Stuart calls the "soft wiring" of invisible social networks--and found that people tended to communicate within their own groups. "We were surprised by how little interaction occurs across three major boundaries: the strategic business unit, the organizational function, and the geographic office location," Stuart told Sara Jane Gilbert of the HBS Working Knowledge e-newsletter.
"Two people who are in the same SBU, function, and office interact about 1,000 times more frequently than two people at the company who are in different business units, functions, and offices, but are otherwise similar. Practically speaking, this means that there is very little interaction across these boundaries," said Stuart.
He also said that people tended to interact with others at the same level in the organization, making me think that higher management didn't communicate with operational managers much, which would happen in a leaner company. They also found that people mostly e-mail people they already talk to, supplementing personal relationships that already exist.
The exceptions: junior executives, women, and members of the salesforce were active in bridging silos. Stuart and his colleagues will be doing more work to try to learn why those people—and not others—play such important bridging roles.
Although the research doesn't try to answer why corporate silos are so difficult to tear down, Stuart hopes the data will help managers understand, pinpoint, and remove bottlenecks within their own organizations.
I pruned shrubs today--they'd gotten so scary looking I probably should have left it until after Halloween. It got me thinking about root cause analysis. My shrubs are junipers, and I like them to look feathery and natural, so you can't just swipe them with electric shears. The goal is thinning. Ideally you analyze the growth of a branch, find where a leader and a smaller younger shoot is coming from and cut the long one. My goal was to make the shrubs smaller but preserve their natural look.
To do that, you have to be able to see the overgrown problem areas, then find what to cut. In this case, the juniper needles were so dense that I couldn't follow the overgrown tip of a branch back to where I should cut it, like I would if I were pruning lilacs.
What I had to do is cut the bits I knew I wanted to subtract and gradually expose the branch they were coming from. When I cut that, I got rid of a lot excess greenery and shorter, younger branches hid the cut.
I realized what I was doing was like continuous improvement. Sometimes in the workplace you can see where there is a problem, but you can't see its cause. How often is it a case where you also find clutter, dirt, and debris there? So the first action is to remove everything that is not needed and is just obscuring the problem. Maybe you realize you need more 5S workplace organization work.
With the continuous improvement attitude, you keep coming back and taking more and more stuff away, or eliminating obvious problems, knowing you're looking for the root cause. Each action gets you closer. Then you find it, correct it, and you're done.
But are you really done? Like yard work, you discover more problems at the worksite as you solve each one. You see the weeds. You see the tree seedlings that have taken root over the summer. You know that if you don't get them now, you'll have real problems next year. You see the small bare spots in the lawn that ought to have some grass seed. Gee, what was that endlessly repeated commercial about feeding your lawn in the fall? Would that produce an improvement you'd value?
So if you see a problem, but the reason for it -- its root cause -- is eluding you, you might try to clip away at the effects until you find it. That's not the only, or even the best way to find root causes, but it might fit a situation you're struggling with right now.
This year, workshops and seminars all over are being cancelled because not enough people are signing up for them. At the same time, companies are trying to economize by issuing “no travel, no training” orders to employees. Think there’s a connection?
Case in point—Last week the Association for Manufacturing Excellence Northeast Region offered a 2 day workshop at the Toyota Parts Distribution Center, a program that’s had a good turnout in years past. Only four people registered, so it was cancelled.
I was lucky enough to get a couple of hours with AME Northeast Region leaders Bob Gallagher of Toyota and Scott Gauvin of Macrescoedge that included a tour of the parts distribution facility.
You could have spent a couple of days there. What did you miss?
Kaizen the Toyota way was the topic. The first day you would have heard an overview of kaizen at Toyota. Perhaps you’re new to kaizen thinking. Perhaps you think you know about kaizen but haven’t experienced the Toyota way. Toyota does things their own way, and you would have found out how.
That evening you missed a networking session with Toyota representatives and a chance to meet a group of peers interested in kaizen and Toyota.
The second day, you missed a comprehensive and idea-packed presentation about how Toyota does things.You missed the tour I took. Bob Gallagher showed me how the warehouse was organized for optimal flow. He showed me how packaging changes were saving space and reducing damage of parts. I saw the results of years of employee improvements—low cost changes that made work more effective. I learned how Toyota associates had conducted kaizens with drivers from the facility’s contract trucking company, integrating and strengthening relationships through the supply chain. I learned how parts suppliers continuously improved at their end of the chain.
Most importantly, I learned how the distribution center worked with the Toyota dealers--the facility’s customers. They get parts next day. Trucks go out every afternoon to the farthest dealers and through the evening to the nearer ones. Drivers have keys to the dealers’ receiving areas and leave the parts there.
Damage claims are infinitesimal. Bob Gallagher answered all my questions. Your group would have asked much better questions and opened up many more learning opportunities than I did.
In addition to the tour, you would have practiced a kaizen activity with your colleagues.
You would have used THE SAME WORKBOOKS AS TOYOTA USES! You would have been able to take them home with you. You would have learned from the report-outs from the breakout teams in your group.
I missed something too. If the event had gone on as planned, I would have been there for the whole thing, learning right next to you. I would have learned what you are doing and what you’d like to learn from AME’s publications and other sources.
You’re probably as disappointed as I am, and just as frustrated with your company’s decision, as desperate as it may be to cut costs.
Just to give you a contrast, DTE Energy (which I wrote about in the most recent issue of AME’s Target magazine) needed to cut $150 million in cost this year. But they told employees to think about travel and make only those trips that were really worthwhile. They are sinking a lot of dough into training. They trust that employees will work together to make those investments pay off in sustainable continuous improvements. They demonstrate respect for people.
Making a workshop worthwhile to your company takes some structure. We’ve all gone to an inspiring event and come back with workshop euphoria that evaporates within a week. That’s not going to pay off.
Your company could bite the bullet and send a big enough team to create a critical mass when you return. Your team could go with detailed expectations, and outcomes. Your team could start work before the trip, and determine how you will share what you learned and where you want to apply it. When you come back, your team could revisit those expectations and outcomes, see how your experiences fit, and discuss any unexpected epiphanies. You’ll be ready to bring others up to speed, and get started making change for the better.
Looking at budgets for next year? Make a case for training, on site or at a distance. If you can’t do that, make a case for benchmarking tours. Use organizations like AME to network with people who can open doors to opportunities for you to learn. Slack time is perfect for learning.
I look for stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
I find them often in places where lean manufacturing--continuous process improvement--are being practiced, but really you see them everywhere. It's a joy to have the opportunity to write about them.
I also edit other people's work. Long years of discovery and learning have helped me understand what lean practitioners want to say, and I love working with people who have done more working than writing. While I can rewrite--preserving their voice as much as possible, I really enjoy coaching people to apply lean to writing and improve their skills.
Sometimes stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things are found far outside my usual beat in manufacturing. Last year, AJ O'Neil asked me about writing a book about a crazy and beautiful happening at his coffee house. That resulted in my book, "In Sunlight or in Shadow." Get information about it at www.ajsmusiccafe.com.
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