I was already working as a managing director, when the factory and the company group came under American ownership. New expectations, reports, SOX and lean soon arrived. There were things that we took over quite easily, but lean started with a handicap.
At that time, we had already gone through an unsuccessful lean implementation. Literally the whole PLANT, every single worker received basic training, and I was also able to participate in a longer training at an international lean academy, but there was enormous skepticism and resistance in all of us, which came from two sources. One is that the audits related to the introduction did not focus on the essence, but on the placement and form of the KPI graphs - "lean is when we draw colorful graphs to be good", and the other is that my PLANT was far from being mature enough for it. The thinking developed 35 years ago does not change overnight, but step by step, even though we had well-prepared Lean guys, their aspirations were crushed by the resistant crowd. And it didn't help that I was also skeptical and had a hard time dealing with new expectations.
One week, we couldn't deliver a large quantity on time, so I had to deal with the RCCM (root cause-countermeasure) report, including the five whys. In the first approximation, I asked the production, from which the answer came that there were too many orders compared to the capacity. I tried to figure out the reasons for this, of course it turned out that it was only the unfortunate alignment of the stars, and there was not much we could do. I sent it out, it came back at the speed of light that the analysis was wrong, let me do it again. A colleague assigned to help me by the company group sat down next to me and with infinite patience tried to steer me towards the data, initially with little success. The torture began on Tuesday afternoon, the report was sent back seven times by late evening, I was shaking with nerves and considered quitting.
But we went from "there were too many orders" to the point where, according to the DATA, we did not produce enough in the previous weeks because a certain machine did not have enough capacity due to the regular failure of a certain part. And this is already something manageable, something can be done to solve the exact issue to improve the delivery performance.
It was tough, I had to overcome all my internal resistance, but this afternoon I finally understood how to use what I had learned about lean so far in practice, and how it could help me achieve the goals I was given. We need the data because they give a real picture ,unlike human perception, and real solutions can be found for real problems.
I am very grateful to the two people who pushed me through this afternoon, gave me one of the most useful tools and changed my thinking.
A skeptic convinced, 149 left…
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