KZN Lean Congress

Melanie Veness:  PCB CEO

The KZN Lean Congress certainly exceeded all my expectations, and to my knowledge, that of the delegates as well. I can say this with confidence, because of the incredibly positive feedback that I have received. It was a wonderful mix of presentations and practical applications and our keynote speaker, Dr. Michael Ballé, didn’t disappoint. He produced thought-provoking presentations  and offered sound and learned advice and some very challenging perspectives.

According to the founder of the Lean Institute, Jim Womack, the lean manager has a “restless desire to continually rethink the organization’s problems, probe their root causes, and lead experiments to test the best currently known countermeasures”. It is this probing and testing that we came to understand better.

Dr. Ballé is a “sensei” who usually works exclusively with company CEOs. His job is to take the chief executive to the “gemba” or “real place”, to the place where value is created and where value-creating work is done. When we discussed the planned factory “gemba” walks, he asked whether we wanted a pat on the back for what we had achieved so far on our lean journeys or real “gemba” walks. We opted for the real “gembas”, because we wanted to learn from him (however painful the process) and because, quite frankly, we’re capable of patting ourselves on the back if we even needed to.

To have him go through our local factories was a privilege. He is insightful and direct, paying little attention to sensitivities, which is often quite painful, but it allows effective learning - the “sensei “was teaching. I owe a debt of gratitude to Eddels and Ramsay Engineering  for bravely opening up their factories and allowing all of us to learn.

The thing that stands out for me most from the “gembas” is the focus that we should be placing on quality at the coal face. Lean philosophy involves empowering people to manage process, and what we do very effectively is to train them to manage flow without sufficient emphasis on managing quality as part of the process. We are inclined to manage quality independently using quality examiners, as opposed to inculcating quality management into our workforce. In traditional quality management the workforce tend to try and push production through and generally fear reprisal from quality managers, but in lean quality management, people are encouraged to “red bin” questionable quality. According to Dr. Ballé, if you halve your inventory and manage your quality effectively, you are almost guaranteed to improve turnover by at least 40%.

The other important learning for me was about effectively creating “pull” from the dispatch. Traditional manufacturing methodology involves pushing production into the factory according to schedules. Dr. Ballé suggested that we should in fact be creating pull from shipping. He emphasized the need to create virtual trucks in dispatch, to display the “score”, and then to get the dispatch manager to put pressure on the factory to see dispatch as the customer, and to deliver to them on time – not once a day, but every hour on the hour. This is what he calls “takt” and it relates to what you should be producing over time in order to meet actual customer demand. This rhythmic pressure to meet demand creates the desired “pull”.

And by far the most insightful comment that he made, was that the rest of the world thinks that Africa is “cool”. He questioned why it is that we don’t add a touch of “African cool” to our products in order to differentiate them? I think that it is time for us to apply our minds to how we go about doing this.

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