Lunch with Ken Kreafle of Toyota
I had lunch today with Ken Kreafle, General Manager of Vehicle Production Engineering for Toyota North America, while I was in Northern Kentucky this week. It was a great way to cap off the Association for Manufacturing Excellence’s annual conference.
He defined lean as, among other things, “workers improving their work within their teams.” In other words, lean is not something that someone can do from the outside. Those of us who support lean from the outside can only support the people on the inside as they improve the process.
He strives to remind people that it took sixty years for Toyota to get to the place where it is today (and it’s not perfect by any means). All the “stuff” - 4/5/6S, kanbans, work cells, etc, etc emerged from a process and a culture of relentlessly attacking problems so that they get solved permanently. We can improve our operations and product development by modeling our practices after the tools, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
It’s much easier to emulate specific tools and practices than it is to truly empower workers to improve their own work - to give them the tools, set the expectations, manage and reward them so that they come in every day willing and able to solve problems so that the problems don’t come back.
We have it a little easier in product development - after all, we come in to work every day prepared to solve customer problems, and figure out how to meet customer needs more effectively with the next products than we do with our current products.
Still, how many of us have problems that crop up over and over again - always at a time when we don’t have time to do anything more than place another bandaid over them? How many of us stumble at the same places in development over and over because there’s never any time to fix the problems permanently? How many of us spend a lot of energy innovating in areas like checkpoint meetings that add nothing to customer value, sucking time and energy away from the things that drive revenue growth and profitability?
What would we be capable of doing if we rigorously attacked those problems so that we could move on to better problems?
He defined lean as, among other things, “workers improving their work within their teams.” In other words, lean is not something that someone can do from the outside. Those of us who support lean from the outside can only support the people on the inside as they improve the process.
He strives to remind people that it took sixty years for Toyota to get to the place where it is today (and it’s not perfect by any means). All the “stuff” - 4/5/6S, kanbans, work cells, etc, etc emerged from a process and a culture of relentlessly attacking problems so that they get solved permanently. We can improve our operations and product development by modeling our practices after the tools, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
It’s much easier to emulate specific tools and practices than it is to truly empower workers to improve their own work - to give them the tools, set the expectations, manage and reward them so that they come in every day willing and able to solve problems so that the problems don’t come back.
We have it a little easier in product development - after all, we come in to work every day prepared to solve customer problems, and figure out how to meet customer needs more effectively with the next products than we do with our current products.
Still, how many of us have problems that crop up over and over again - always at a time when we don’t have time to do anything more than place another bandaid over them? How many of us stumble at the same places in development over and over because there’s never any time to fix the problems permanently? How many of us spend a lot of energy innovating in areas like checkpoint meetings that add nothing to customer value, sucking time and energy away from the things that drive revenue growth and profitability?
What would we be capable of doing if we rigorously attacked those problems so that we could move on to better problems?
Labels: lean thinking, Toyota
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9:54 AM
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