Demystifying Lean with FOCUS

Thursday, 08 April 2010 09:10

Articles - Articles by Debbie

Imagine a world where you could take the Lean Tools and simplify them for the common man. So many Lean Practioners are quick to tell you how many years they have studied Lean and how important it is to only utilize experienced consultants.  But what if you don’t work for a company that is rolling out an Enterprise Wide Lean Deployment? What if your business doesn’t have a culture or philosophy of improvement? Can you still implement the principles of Lean?
The answer is YES YES and YES if you FOCUS.  This article will demonstrate how to experience pockets of excellence using the FOCUS methodology for Lean. A method aimed at simplifying lean and making it palatable to the new practioner.

None of us operate in a perfect environment. As we have seen from the latest crisis, even Toyota makes mistakes. It doesn’t mean that as an individual or an organisation you should miss out on the power of utilizing lean to streamline your business processes.

Remember the 4 keys to unlock even the most tainted and hardened hearts against Lean and Business Improvement.
Here are the key elements to implementing Lean on a small scale.
1.    Find Pockets of Excellence: Find the golden nuggets of opportunity, where people are frustrated with the way things are working. Value Stream Map the High Level Process and identify the constraints and areas requiring improvement. Demonstrate Results and soon you will have people wanting what you have created.
2.    Get the Leadership Involved: Work with the Leaders to Value Stream the business. They will be so shocked and impressed at this novel view of their business that it will create buy in. Where it does not create buy in or gain support of the Leaders – MOVE ON. You will be banging your head against a brick wall the solutions will not be sustainable without the Leaders involvement.
3.    Manage the Change: Spend your time engaging people. Do not go for the big bang, organization wide communication strategy, where you blanket every wall and toilet door with a change poster but rather implement a low key change management approach where you get results first and then convert people along the way.
4.    Focus on the biggest problems using the FOCUS methodology. Use your Lean Experts to Value Stream the Business, but train the Lean Project Managers in FOCUS. A structured approach to Lean that takes the Lean Tools and simplifies them for the regular project manager. Let your Project Managers run Lean FOCUS projects to solve the problems identified within the Value Stream.

In the FOCUS method the acronym stands for Focus, Operate, Create, Utilize, and Sustain.
Based on your working knowledge of the problem you begin in Focus where you initiate your charter and business case. Then you move into Operate where you go to the source of the problem and collect relevant information, map the current state and diagnose the problem. In Create you look for opportunities to reduce waste and develop the future state and in UTILIZE, you utilize the solution, assessing the risks, and tweaking the process.  SUSTAIN is about sustaining the gains, error proofing the process and managing process performance.

One Lean Practioner, Cwyita Sihele, who had attended several Lean Courses, said, “This FOCUS methodology has finally made everything clear for me. I have been practicing lean for years, and the structure has given me a roadmap and confidence that I did not have before.”

To demonstrate these four principles let me tell you about implementing Lean in a huge Parastatal.  A company with many challenges yet they were able to achieve results in pockets of the business where the conditions were right.

The approach was to find pockets of excellence. The Lean Team ran Value Stream Mapping Exercises in the business to identify the areas of greatest need and opportunity. Certain Leaders were amazed at the results and engaged in the process. The Lean Project Managers were trained first on Change Management and then on the FOCUS Methodology for Lean.  This enabled them to approach the projects in a structured and effective manner. In the first 3 months, the company realized over $3 M of savings.

Lean is to Business what the Internet is computing. If you are not on it, you are missing the boat. So you may not be Henry Ford or Edwards Deming but you can get results with Lean FOCUS.
Debbie McCarthy