UK Lean Summit 2014 – Workshop Descriptions

PLENARY SESSIONS

Beyond Legacy Assets and Mind-sets: Involving users in creating new Lean Solutions

by Daniel T Jones 

We all learnt about lean improving legacy assets – relics from the age of mass production. Practicing problem solving on a daily basis gives us deeper insights into customer value, our own work and leading with respect. At the same time the digital age opens up new opportunities for collaboration with users. We are learning how the insights form lean product and process development can change the way we develop software, hardware and systems for the future. Drawing on examples, can we distil the essential characteristics of solutions that are truly lean?


Spreading Lean Across Health and Government: The Saskatchewan Experiment

by Dan Florizone

The province of Saskatchewan is the first Canadian jurisdiction to adopt lean throughout its health system, education system and across all government departments.  In addition to being named Deputy Minister of Education, and previously serving five years as Deputy Minister of Health, Dan Florizone has also been named the Deputy Minister of the provincial Lean initiative.  The breadth and depth of this continuous improvement initiative – across all ministries – including social services, justice, corrections, labour, parks and the economy – is unprecedented.  This session will provide an overview of the scale of this ambition, provide insight into large scale change – and showcase the application of Lean across the human service and government sectors. Florizone will make the case that Lean thinking – while essential in a manufacturing session – has even more significance for creating value and eliminating waste in government services. 


Lean Retailing – Transforming Car Retail in South Africa

by Terry O’Donoghue

The story of journey in motor retail in Southern Africa.

The Halfway Group consists of 30 companies centred on motor retail dealerships in Southern Africa. Over the last 3 years we have been on a transformation journey in a number of these dealerships and supporting companies.

This is the story of that journey and the experiences we have had and the lessons we learnt along the way.  This has been a multi-site, multi-discipline experiment to shift the culture of a diverse group of companies and may be of interest to anyone grappling with transformation issues.



LEARNING SESSIONS

Developing Problem Solving Capability

by Mark Davies and Keith Edwards

Introduction: Stability is the bedrock of the Toyota Production System, without stable, reliable and repeatable processes it is difficult to implement standardised work. In order to eliminate sources of instability an organisation must be capable of solving problems.Many organisations often struggle with effective problem solving and find that the best they can achieve is to merely contain the existing problems by introducing more waste into the organisation.  Real problem solving countermeasures the root cause of an issue  preventing it from reoccurring and in doing so creates stability with the least amount of waste.

Moreover problem solving should not be a skill reserved for engineers and specialists, if you truly desire to harness the creativity and innovation of your employees then it should be seen as a fundamental skill possessed by everyone!

Objectives: The workshop will provide delegates with a simple yet effective overview of Toyota’s  8 step systematic tool for problem solving. They will understand how, when applied correctly, this tool can be used to improve Safety, Quality & Efficiency. They will also understand how problem solving in teams can create even greater benefits in terms of innovation and motivation.

Benefits:

  • Define the real problem
  • Use and present data to clarify the point of cause of the problem
  • Understand how to study the problem to ensure complete understanding
  • Select countermeasures and how to evaluate effectiveness
  • Monitor the results & gain greater benefits through effective yokoten

Creating and Managing Successful Projects using Oobeya and Visual Management

by Sandrine Olvencia

Orignally conceived by Toyota, Oobeya rooms are used to visually manage product development projects in a highly collaborative environment. It is a place where professionals with different skills and managerial responsibilities meet daily to assess project health and launch/follow corrective action plans.

Oobeya rooms are designed to reveal operational problems and risks as they arise during the life of a project, so teams can together pinpoint and learn to solve these problems the right way: one by one, where and when they occur.

During this workshop, you will visit an Oobeya based on a simulated case study set in an Information Technology context. The workshop will alternate between theory and hands-on exercises. You will be able to take home some concrete techniques for building an Oobeya suitable for your own projects and context, as soon as you get back to work.

Workshop description: 

  1. Introduction: What are problems commonly found in project managmeent? What are the consequences for customers, teams, the enterprise? What does Lean have to offer, how does Lean solve these problems?
  2. Visit the Obeya: Description of the components and their objectives + hands-on exercises:
    • Discover the Voice of the customer
    • Define the target product
    • Manage performance
    • Keep project action plans under control
    • Solve problems together
  3. Conclusion

Developing Lean Leaders

by Peter Watkins and David Marriott

Introduction: Failure of Leadership to understanding the change required from “traditional management thinking and structure” to a “Lean Management system” is the probably the largest  contributor to a failed lean culture . Helping your leadership to redesign their own Management System is key ,their Lean activities,  behaviours and capabilities are needed to ensure PDCA  on strategy,  daily performance and people/process development.

Objectives: 

  • Learn practical methods for developing  a “Lean Management System” with your Leadership team.
  • Understand how to develop Lean Leadership capabilities in your organisation
  • Understand the importance of “learning by doing” through Operational Excellence Team Working

Benefits: Interactive blended learning to explain leadership principles , backed up with practical exercises and real life case studies explained by operational leadership from GKN.  Adaptive approach  to ensure learning can be applied within your organisation.  


Saskatchewan Experiment – Health, Education, 3P and the Role of the Lean Team

by Daniel T Jones and Dan Florizone

This will be an unique opportunity to discuss many more aspects of one of the most ambitious experiments in using lean across all aspects of government. It will also show how they are using the 3P process to design new ways of delivering services in many fields from healthcare and education to policing and social services. Daniel Jones will moderate the discussion and draw out the lessons we can draw from this example.


Developing and Deploying Hoshin Kanri at Jæger Toyota

by John Kiff and Torgeir Halvorsen

Introduction: Traditionally, strategy is something that is:

  • Developed in the board room by a small team
  • Written up in lengthy reports which have too many objectives and are rarely fully-read (and even more rarely referred to afterwards) 
  • Communicated usually only down to senior and middle management and mainly in a ‘broad-brush’ way with budgets and some vaguely defined high-level objectives
  • Measured primarily by reference to financial budgets – which themselves are the main basis of the strategy – rather than to customer-purpose
  • Not subsequently reviewed to consider how well it was developed and implemented and so there is no learning about how to improve

This approach is wasteful because it consumes a great deal of resource yet is limited in its effectiveness in guiding the company to its goals and in aligning and involving everyone in the company to those goals. The reliance only on financial measures (and linked rewards) typically drives behaviour to ‘make the numbers’ at all costs.

Lean thinking takes the view that the work of management is to align and engage employees to create, sustain and steadily improve value-creating processes to solve customer problems – thereby achieving the financial and other goals of the organisation for stakeholders. Management needs to define purpose, develop and improve the processes using the people within the organisation to eliminate waste (muda, muri and mura) by solving problems in a structured way.

Hoshin Kanri is the Lean approach to developing and, more importantly, deploying strategy effectively. It is based on the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) Methodology – often using A3 Thinking – and involves a ‘catch-ball’ process down and back up the various layers of management to establish the strategy and goals at every level combined with Visual Management throughout the business to monitor the progress of the plan on an ongoing basis.

Objectives: This learning session will explore the case of Jaeger Toyota – a car dealer group in Bergen, Norway. The objectives of the session are to explain:

  • How Jaeger started policy deployment, 
  • The benefits for Jaeger 
  • What Jaeger have learned. 

Benefits:

  • To give you an insight into the Hoshin Kanri process using A3 thinking and Visual Managment – and the considerable benefits it gives for daily management
  • To inspire you to do your own Hoshin
  • To give you an opportunity to ask questions about the Hoshin process

Building a Management System System for Health and the Public Sector

by Marc Baker and Ian Taylor

Introduction: We’ve been applying lean in healthcare for the past ten years. Over that time we have discovered two things.
First, the good news. Lean works in healthcare. In experiments where lean thinking has been applied properly, the results – in terms of patient care, costs and quality – have been extraordinary.

Now for the bad news. Our second lesson is that lean will never take root in healthcare as it stands. That’s not because the ideas are wrong or the principles don’t apply, but because lean contradicts the way healthcare is currently managed: when healthcare managers come across lean they cannot and do not create the conditions for its benefits to be maintained.

Objectives: In successful businesses, managers focus their time and attention on operational realities – on how to help staff solve problems and improve day-to-day operational performance. This is the ‘machine’ that implements management decisions: focused, dedicated operational skill and understanding. The objective of this workshop is to help public sector management teams evaluate their current management approaches against these criteria and how to design and practice better ways of achieving these criteria

Benefits: Through instruction, small group discussions and exercises, the workshop will show the participants how to think differently, enabling them to come up with and implement their own, carefully planned, successful solutions to their biggest problems.


The Role of the Lean Team in Transformation?

by Ken Andrew and Brendan Harley

Introduction: The RBS Group launched an ambitious Lean Transformation programme after it’s very public collapse in 2008. This involved large scale deployment of lean teams delivering a series of rapid transformations. Ken Andrew and Brendan Harley discuss the launch of the RBS Lean programme, what it set out to achieve and what the results of that lean team deployment was. They will share the learnings from the RBS experience and how RBS improved it’s lean methodology.

Objectives: To walk the delegates step by step through the RBS Lean Journey; to share and discuss the results of the PDCA process for that large scale team deployment; to share the learnings, successes and pitfalls that the lean team experienced and how the programme methods, capability and outcomes were improved. The delegates will be able to participate, pose questions and discuss the RBS experience.

Benefits: For any organisation embarked on, or considering launching, a lean programme of medium to large scale deployments of Lean transformation teams, the RBS Lean Programme represents an intriguing lean “experiment” from which much can be learned. The guest speakers will share a frank appraisal of the RBS Lean programme, it’s outcomes, and how the PDCA approach improved the 


Where does lean go next? Discussion with the Founders

by Daniel T Jones and Jim Womack 

The only time to see Daniel T Jones and Jim Womack together again in Europe this year! They will summarise what we learnt so far and the current questions and challenges facing the lean movement. There will also be ample time to answer questions and issues raised by participants. 


Back to UK Lean Summit 2014 – Lean Transformation: Practical Next steps