Story of Scientific Management Guru: Back to the Roots of Scientific Management with Frederick Winslow Taylor

While his name is not known to most people, his impact on the 20th century was quite profound. He is Frederick Winslow Taylor, a management theorist that focus on the labor process. He is the backbone of today’s management by the use of science. His works started blooming in an era after companies have become more than a mere limited project, but unlimited by the boundary of time and that in this time, industrialization is on the move.

Companies were growing in scope and racing to reap the benefits of industrialization. They were so starving in harvesting benefits of industrialization. In that time, companies need much more labor than ever to be able to produce products that made possible by the industrialization.However, even labor is many, a fundamental problem is emerging that needs an answer, how do we get labor to work more to ensure maximum output?

His works begin with many writings in the theory of work that mainly focusing on  finding the way of controlling the motion of workers to obtain highest maximum output for what company pay for wages.

Even all that he has created  is not fully acceptable in todays modern era but many of his concepts become a root for current management practice. His controversial concept such as the concept of soldiering that workers didn’t work hard enough is totally rejected by lean thinking that fundamentally held a strong believe that worker is good and therefore most of error come from engineer or the architect of the system that most of the time have to put to blame.

Soldiering held a believe that in a majority of cases the man deliberately plant to do as little as he possibly can to turn out far less work than he is well able to do in may instances to do not more than 1/3 or 1/2 of a proper day’s work. ~ Taylor

Proper day’s work is a maximum level of output humanly possible or  a fair day’s work. when worker is not physically possible to reach this, he fired them. He argued that soldiering was possible because company management does not even know how much work can be extracted from workers. once to make a stubborn man who refuse to make any improvement to achieve this fair days work he cut his wages.

Taylor’s goal was to take knowledge work from the worker and put it in the hands of management to be used as control of workers. He himself called this method as Scientific Management. However, his method on full reliance solely on management let to the born of shopfloor expert which is industrial engineer. However, as people said that too much is never good, the role of management in shopfloor is too dominating that even in the development of work instruction, management get a majority of decision on the content and organization of it which is fundamentally different than now

But his famous real contribution besides of his many controversial concept is his management theories and the concept of time study.

There are many and different ways for come at doing the same things, there is always one method and one implement which is better than any of the rest. and this one best method and one best implement can only be discovered through a scientific study of an analysis of all the methods in use.

He stated that no job is to simple or to complex. In fact, in he has spent 26 years only for figuring out the best way to cut metal. but in other examples, many simple works can be rationalized as well.

Some of his wise words are never more appropriate now compare to at his time:

We can see our forest vanishing, our water-powers going to waste.. the end of our coal and iron is in sight. But the larger waste of human effort, which go on everyday through such of our acts as are blundering, ill-directed or inefficient are less-visible, less tangible and all but vaguely appreciated.. ~ Frederick Taylor

Related articles

• Scientific Management (laborstudiesqueens.wordpress.com)
• 5 Principles of Creativity (creativitypost.com)

Small Changes, Big Achievement!

I just read a blog by Beyond Lean that is so insightful. In his post, with the title Small Change vs. Large Change, he highlighted about how Paul Akers at FastCap often talks about 2 seconds kaizen.

I have read Paul Akers’ Book about 2 Second Kaizen which describes his personal journey on creating kaizen culture in his small to medium size business (at that time). Following my current reading on Workplace Management by Taiichi Ohno, this post really spark a light for me to set out this post about small changes.

Company has been the center of all attention for decades. But scaling further to a level of personal kaizen, big achievement by means of doing small changes can definitely be a roadmap to improvement. I would imagine if we are not only focus on doing productive works but in addition to that, we apply 2 seconds kaizen on how we went throughout our day.

It has been acknowledged that doing the right things before doing things right will elevate productivity in our lives by preventing doing the wrong things. But truly I said that bigger achievement is attainable by performing small changes in doing things right. Now I invite you, my fellow travellers, let us set for ourselves to do everyday at least 2 achievements (productivity) but as complementary also do 2 seconds of kaizen ( improvement in method of doing things).

Related articles

• “But in Kaizen, the immediate cause of a problem is only the beginning of the analysis, not the end….” (timoni.org)
• Backstage pass…kaizen shooting (emmamiranda.com)

Supermarket Stocktaking, Happiness in Working and a Lesson of Variation

I am considered myself as a kind of person who is so interested on listening more than speaking. For me, being able to listen to ideas, a glimpse of someone else’s life experiences or a feeling of someone about something is so inspiring. I can learn from the story and get an idea of things that I had not realize before because I just never thought it would be possible, never experienced it myself, or simply didn’t know that such a thing could exist. By listening more, I can open myself to the presumption world that I previously held  to a new perception of the world as I listen to the story of people around me.

This post is referring to my comment on my dialogue with one of my friends. He has an interesting experience in which I had not any experience on  being employed in the type of industry he was in. It was all begin in a totally normal day. After lunch, we had a normal afternoon chat that suddenly led to a story of his previous employment in Supermarket Industry. Due to my curiosity, I started to ask probing questions that led him to tell his own experience working in a supermarket with a role as an assistant store manager with most activities that deal with audits.

What caught my attention was when he talked about his experience in stock taking procedure and penalty that he did in his time (and I believe still many also have the same principles even until this time). He told me that in his company, stock deviation from the ideal value of difference between beginning of month and end of the month in comparison with actual reality value of difference between beginning of month and end of the month difference will be assigned to store employees. It means that, if beginning of month stock minus sold product in that month ( which this become ideal end of month stock) is not the same as actual counting at the end of month stock, then the difference between ideal and actual counting in the form of amount of money will be paid together by employees from their salary to substitute lost products .

When he told this, I quickly recalled a wise words from Dr.Deming. Then, I found the exact same story that happen in Deming’s book titled “Out of The Crisis” in 1982. Deming has already elaborated what is wrong with this kind of system setup and why management not only in manufacturing industry but in all industry, even government, education, and any systems that has management on top of it has to learn the knowledge of variation.

Stock counting at the end of the month, if deviated from the ideal amount, can cause from many factors. the accuracy of inventory system, security of store from thieves, logistics in store, and still many other factors. It is indeed easy to directly attributing lost of stocks to employees for replacing the money that lost with the assumption that all lost rooted in the negligence of employees to prevent it from lost without looking into details about the root cause. However, by doing this, it is also easy to get trap into a bad system where everyone is dissatisfied, work is stressful, and at the end surviving will be impossible if not very difficult without sacrificing employees.

Imagine a staff that start to work in a company with a good pride. He and the company both have an expectation on both sides. The employee starts with a willingness to contribute to the company maybe even thinking that this company that he will start to work will be even better, fun and fulfilling. It is also the same good expectation that come from the company that hired this employee, because after all resources available in company’s labor pool has been filtered, this man has the best fit with the company to help reaching for the company’s goal. The new employee is ready to grow with the company and contributing the best effort possible. Isn’t that exactly what we feel when we want to start working in a new company? Excited! Happy! Want to prove ourselves! and having better a time? Sadly, this man so shocked to find the fact that even though he begin his job by working as hard as he can with the will of contributing his maximum effort and with their own heart and soul trying to be nice to every customers coming to the shop, he finds himself at the end of the month getting paid with less salary than promised and that they ought to receive it due to stocks lost that they don’t have any ideas at all of  how it could be lost, why they have to be the one who take the risk of something they just don’t have any idea about, and the fact that he cannot improve or doing anything about it.

Drawing from the world of manufacturing, this could be seen as assigning defect of products to the workers that works in assembly line. Whenever there are defects, put the blame on workers with the reason that workers are the one who actually works assembling all parts into a product. This obsolete philosophy have proven to be a downfall of manufacturing industries before Japan could set the pace again and followed by a reparation to systems of managing manufacturing in other countries and companies.

People in management should as Deming urge long time ago and yet still valid, realize that there are two types of variation (natural/normal variation and assignable/special variation) Classifying defects in case of lost product in supermarket into these two kinds of variation classification will give us more insights. If a defect/lost product happen, manager should be able to determine if this will attributable to workers/store employees or to system that managed by management. The action directly blaming workers for a system problem then is not a wise act of management because normal variation and special variation should be handled in different ways. .To learn more about differentiating this, I would suggest reading “Out of The Crisis” or “The New Economics” by Deming.

As we came to know that those defects or lost of products are caused by system, then improvement to a system could reduce the lost of product. In relation with supermarket system, let’s take one defect example of lost product. Previous assumption is that employees should watch closely everyone on the store so that no product is lost, but employees indeed can be forget or not paying attention to someone stealing because fatigue which so normal. What is not normal is to assign tasks that obviously normal people with normal capability cannot do and give them penalty for it.  In fact, lost product happen also because the environment provided thieves to steal some products despite of the hardworking that employees have done in preventing it. This environment setup is management job. A system should be setup by management to prevent lost from happening by creating a better environment for employees to work and a better system to prevent lost of products. Usual flow is that mistakes that management makes is attributed that should be management responsibilities (system design and improvement) are all assigned to employees.

Related articles

• Jobs to be Done – Explained by Dr. Deming in 1950 (customerthink.com)
• My best year yet or stocktaking for beginners (skybluepinkish.wordpress.com)

What can we learn from Indonesia’s Governor Jokowi : Leadership and System

Jokowi is a name that is probably unknown for people that lives outside Indonesia. It not uncommon that his name was not being heard, because even in Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, his name could only be heard for first time in the late of 2012 where people started to get awareness of him. Currently, he is a newly elected Indonesia’s Governor which for many people sparks a new light of hope in Jakarta City.

 

I am not interested to discuss about government or the best ways to manage a city. Instead, we will use him as an example of how a high velocity organization could arise not only in manufacturing, service industry, or military, but also in public administration system. Yes, yes,  I know that Jokowi has just been elected as a Governor of Jakarta around fourth quarter of year 2012. But we will later see, as I elaborate later, why I think that his management system will end successfully.

Watching people managing any systems is the same as watching a football match, you knew already who will win the match before the match over by watching both teams play. But you will still wait ‘till the end of the game to make sure that there is no coincidence that the other team unexpectedly win. Good managed team will win 90 % of the time while the rest of 10% is attributable to special variation.

In football game, those persons that often watch football match will know that a particular team will win against another before the game is ended. The way strategy is being executed in the football field will shows how the players play together, using each persons’ skills and combining strength to reach synergy that collectively create a good play. A good team come from a good manager. A good manager might not be the best player in the field. He could be the best player, but for sure he is at best at managing system. A good system will triumph most of the time, with some special minor exception of good system that failed to succeed. 

Companies in any industries has a role of managing its system. The unique things is that they all have different products as well as customers. Hospital, Manufacturing, Tourism, Public Administration. Thus, there are different ways to deal with managing system in each of these industries. However, managing a system is always have the same principal across industries, with some modifications to the industry we are trying to apply it in.  Here, I will present some facts across industries that mainly drawn out from my main industry of expertise which is automobile and try to show you how Jokowi acts matches with what has been a successful and proven philosophy in the world of automobile.

1. To change a system, you cannot be inside it.

Jokowi know this very well. He is not trying to change the system by being inside it, but he directly go “on top of it”. Unless we have one person that can changed the system on the top of organization’s pyramid, we cannot changed it by entering into it. We have to be above it. There is no use if you have an idea that could significantly changed the system when you are down below pyramid in a bad system. It is because in a bad system, your good idea considered as bad. because bad system nurtured bad ideas. Thus, only bad ideas goes into the top of the pyramid and got heard.

Jokowi is not trying to be hired as an employee, but he aimed for the top. He knew that if he want to changed the system, it has to be from the top. Many times good and diligent people got into a bad system and in no time these people tired of challenging bad inertia in the bad culture that has already ingrained and these good and diligent people become adapted to a bad system by producing bad ideas and doing unproductive activities.

Many cases that geniuses that have great academic records, or good carrier in foreign country, when they tried to come back to build their own country, they are shocked that they found their brilliant ideas are not working. People do not agree, not supporting it, or maybe no one believes it.

Mr. Habibie is so great at anything about airplane. He foretold “I want to make an airplane for my country”. He is more than a genius. But again,  in a bad system, he just not fit. He successfully created PT.Dirgantara, but it wasn’t successful because that time he has to interact with a bad system that exist in the country. Bad system is like a disease, it spreads to others around it so quick.

 

2. Create a system perspective for everyone

Everyone could work hard and do their best but still at the end the result is failed. As Dr.Deming said, it is no use to do your work as best as possible. We have to do the right things before we do our best. To make people able to evaluate themselves that they have already do the right things, people has to understand their position within a system and hence they know how to contribute to it.

In Toyota and in high velocity organization such as Pratt & Whitney’s, Southwest, Alcoa, and other leader in their own industries, knowledge of how a particular section or job fit into a whole system is very important to know for all the people inside the system. Toyota have always explained and educated a new employee about his role and responsibility. But in addition to that, Toyota makes sure that this new employee also know about how his role and responsibility will impact the whole system by explaining the whole system from manufacturing, quality , engineering ,design and so on.

Taking complex system, then divided it into parts, try to manage each part as best as possible is absolutely false. Because it tries to improve each part taken separately and destroyed the system. It is like taking a big mirror from store and you break the mirror into parts for optimization in carrying it to your house and when you reach your house, you reassemble the mirror again, and you are then shock that the mirror looks different, it do not work when you want to look at yourself and the parts seems not fit together as it was in the store. Because It simply have broken.

Jokowi tries to fit everyone to the whole picture by not only making everyone realizes their role and responsibility within a system of public administration, but also that he shows to all employees about the whole system. For example, he put out a YouTube channel that could be seen by all employees so that employees know what really governor do and what really happening in other sections of public administration so that they can really contribute by doing the right things at their best.

3. Going to “Gemba” and “Genchi Genbutsu”

Gemba is a Japanese term that means real place while Genchi Genbutsu means to look by yourself the particular physical things that being a concern. People in automobile always use this concept of management extensively. Managing from office is not enough because paper based management neglect real concerns. By the time the problem is translated into paper and travel to office as a report, many things has already been happened and information may also lost in the way or got distorted by the time it reached office. Additionally, information, if not getting distorted it will somehow go perish and by the time people from the office try to reconstruct the problem, all people connected to it has forgot about it or the environment has already simply changed. It is because Information has a characteristic of sensitive to distortion and perishable. 

Thus, going to Gemba will means getting problem found from the right persons in timely manner, isolate as quickly as possible before spreading, and solve as soon as it arise. Going to Gemba also means Genchi genbutsu or seeing the real thing as it is.

Jokowi really knows the values of going to Gemba and Genchi Genbutsu. He first of all realizes that civilian in Jakarta is his customers and the success of his organization is the satisfaction of customers. Therefore, getting the customers’ concern is a top priority. He knows very well that customers is where he could really get the real problem on time without distortion and therefore despite of all the accusation that he is wasting time, he still do go to Gemba.

 

In addition, Jokowi’s success in Solo city where he lead for several years as Governor before he became governor of Jakarta is not merely because of he is a superpower person or a very genius person. He might be one of them, but alone, only destructive change that could result ( firing, hiring, penalty, force procedures). Instead, he manages the system with constructive change that can only be achieved through collaboration and cooperation that obviously not a work of a single hero. Thus, those leader that could really turn the situation is good at managing collaboration and cooperation as a vehicle to constructive change. Instead of using power to generate policy that is destructive to system. These leaders can use it to create collaboration that will be fruitful as these leaders believe that change should come from collaboration that arise from a system management. This will make a lasting change even after the leader is not anymore responsible for the system because the system has already built, run, and improve itself.

Leader’s Job is to lead not merely giving orders.

One fun and Inspiring Night with Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) Community

I currently lived in Brussels for sometime and it now feels like going to work and back home again has already become pretty much ordinary for me. First of all, because I get to know well the transportation network, traffic situation and could adapt well to a very significant different climate than my home country. In addition to that, I can now better managed the work load in a company that I am in now. Not that it is less work there, but even also with some new problems it just feels I could managed it better due to having done many tasks and did learn things quite regularly and thus becoming common with procedures and culture.

This stability situation makes me uncomfortable. In Lean philosophy, we believe that achieving stability is a priority. However, there is another superior aim that is larger than that. Challenging stability with improvement. Lean philosophy believe that to increase the standards/stability that we have now in our lives, an improvement has to be made. This philosophy has a divine logical reason behind that a stability/standards situation, if it has already been achieved and not being challenge in order to improve it, it will without a doubt decrease and deteriorate or in simple words, making your life actually little by little below your actual standards/stable condition.

With this concept at hand, I am searching for new things to improve myself. One night, after work, I came across a website called Meetup. It is the world’s largest network of local groups. it makes it easy for anyone to organize a local group or find one of the thousands already meeting up face-to-face. More than 9,000 groups get together in local communities each day, each one with the goal of improving themselves or their communities. So, I registered as a member and look for recent events.

As I stumble in this new website, I encounter an interesting even about NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming. Remarkably, this is a very affordable NLP event and it just happen to be around me. I love to learn psychology by reading some books because I love to learn and understand about people around me. So, then I went to this event and put myself out there to see how NLP workshop is.

I went there and I was exceptionally amazed on what I saw and experienced. Both from the participant, the ambience, the event and the coachers (I use coach as they weren’t really speakers but actively engaging us with activities). I met a various kind of person there and what inspired me is that all these people has different background than me both either in their working life and their family life and they all gather to improve themselves. There was a musician, a painter, a consultant, an IT security guy, a factory management employee (me!), and a bunch other interesting people that I will never meet outside of this event simple because our world is too far apart from being able to meet each other.

My experience in attending this event was wonderful. Mainly because the positive ambience that build up by everyone of us that have spirit of making ourselves better that projected toward helping others be better.  there is also a time where we make a circle and shout a loud with fun. The coach taught us some NLP method and at the end,each and everyone of us has to perform a short practical presentation that basically utilizing all the tools we learned that day.

For you who do not really know what NLP could bring you, below is the video of how significant NLP could change a mind of a person by injecting ideas to subconscious mind.

I definitely will attend the next NLP workshop again and may also some useful and practical techniques to enhance our performance in daily life or business.

Quality or Quantity ? Recurring Mistakes…

Quality sometimes undermined by productivity. Even in this era, many factories in developing country focused more on the target of production per day rather than its quality. quality was always pitted against productivity, and productivity always won. Managers knew about quality problems and wanted to fix them, but pressure was always on to meet production quotas, and their jobs were measured by that. increasing quality means increasing quality of product and process.

When being asked why it seems that small to medium factories just seems to focus on productivity to meet production quota, many give reasons that the current quality has been satisfying for them. Customers also typically not so skeptical to the defects that they received and thus quality is not really a big issue.

However, this way of thinking reflect they way of Americans Manufacturers in the age of Fordism. In which, on a practical day-to-day level, quality was always pitted against productivity, and productivity always won. In ford era, according to Quality Management Demystified by Sid Kemp,there was no reward for solving quality problems. At best, some time was allowed for QA when the factory wasn’t busy. At worst, workers and managers were pressured to deliver defective products to meet quota, figuring that they could always be fixed later.

It seems still many of factories do not see the fundamental relationship taught by Shewhart and Deming

Improving the quality of the process increased both productivity—quantity of product—and product quality at the same time.

Now it is clear, that whenever we neglect the quality of the process, the harder we will chase our productivity to meet production quota. On the other side, focusing on quality will increase the process that will later improve the quantity of the product that could be produced.

ISO 9000 Standards and TQM

Sometimes looking out to advance statistical methods or trying to create a suggestion systems and other detail project will draw us further from the fundamental philosophy of what quality is in general. Thus, I bought a book about Quality Management that is good as an introduction to Quality for those who is just learning about Quality but also a reminder for those who deals with Quality for quite a long time. Because I believe it is true, that someone who works in Quality engineering will sometimes get carried out in their job and forget about the meaning of Quality from bird’s eye view and from customer point of view. I currently read Quality Management Demystified by Sid Kemp that is published by Mc Graw Hill.

As I going through the pages of the book, it reopens knowledge that is long buried and I can refresh my memory and gain new insight. One thing that really catch my attention is the sentence below. 

Meeting ISO 9000 requirements is like doing the first year of Deming’s five year approach to transformation through TQM.

Both ISO 9000 and TQM is different but like TQM, ISO 9000 can only succeeds if it is integrated with organizational management and resolves the conflict between productivity and product quality.

A company that truly wants to transform through quality management would do well to begin with ISO 9000.  In one way, ISO 9000 does move in a direction that is different from TQM. The emphasis on auditing—both internal and external—is greater.  But ISO 9000 is helping a company toward achieving better quality system with less cost compare because the company do not have to reinvent the wheel by starting from zero.

ISO 9000 can certainly be adapted to a TQM company because for a TQM company they have already had a system in place that works. So for example  TQM quality engineer can easily qualify to be an ISO 9000 quality auditor. But for a new company that is not ready with TQM or just want to begin with TQM, ISO 9000 could really help them  begin with their journey to a better quality system just like doing the first year of Deming’s five year approach.

Corporate Culture… ( from the book )

In TQM, the way a culture of quality spreads through a company is through the influence and guidance of leadership. This is supported by high levels of training and by recruitment and indoctrination practices that select people who fit in well with corporate culture and values. As long as people who are committed to the company and to quality are selected, they can be included in the TQM company somewhere,and can move to a job that is a good fit if necessary. This fits very well with Theory Y management.

ISO 9000 is possibly more compatible with Theory X management. It relies more on independent validation proving that good work is being done, and less on influencing each worker to evoke a commitment to quality. It puts more resources into independent checking, and less into training.

Kaizen : Through the Lens of Sociological Perspective

Kaizen is all about making a continuous improvement. At a glance, it seems the definition could really easy to catch and understandable. Lean and Quality is apart of Kaizen and both can be sustain if the culture of Kaizen is inside the organization. In plain words, whether it is for a person, a group of people, an organization, or a global company, achieving high quality with low cost, increasing delivery capability ( response and speed ),  and gaining the right level of flexibility ( in terms of variety and volume ) together with an increase of productivity, Kaizen is the answer. It is the root that could make Lean and Quality living in the system.

In this post, I would like to point out that understanding Kaizen philosophy will help us to get started with Lean and/or Quality. However, as experts have warned us against all the too much simplification of Lean and/or Quality, the danger of viewing Lean and/or Quality by neglecting people’s interest and dynamic can lead to catastrophic result. We, both beginners or experts tend sometimes to focus on technical stuff. In Lean Management, this disease is called concentrating only to the methods and not the philosophy. In Quality, this is called the disease of dealing with quality as a product/engineered product quality only and not dealing with the whole quality as perceive by the customer.

This tells us that in Lean as well as in Quality, the involvement of Human side adds value to the success of it’s movement. Practitioners in Lean have clearly stressed out that culture of providing customers with value by means of eliminating waste has to be begin by a cultural change. On the other side in Quality movement, it is also have been said that Quality engineering is not a complete Quality, and the Culture of Quality First for customers come with the involvement of workers. Both have point out the importance of workers and not just methods or tools or engineering calculation. Thus, it is safe to say that Kaizen needs to take care both Social and Technical perspective for it to success. Both methods and human is technical and social that forms  a sociotechnical systems which refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organization. Thus, in my opinion it is important to think in terms of sociotechnical systems when we want to move forward with Lean and/or Quality.

5 Steps to Personal Kaizen

Kaizen consists of the word Kai which means “change/make better” and Zen which means “good”. But when we put together the words into Kaizen, it expresses a deep meaning of continuous improvement or improving continuously that when applied to our daily life would have developed an increase of our productivity as well as quality of our daily result.

The secret of boosting our quality and productivity lies in the way Deming’s Circle or Continuous Improvement Circle is implemented in our daily life. Great companies have gained favor from using this philosophy and in this post, you will gain advantage by applying the concept of  Continuous Improvement Circle in your daily life.

Continuous Improvement Circle consists of the Circle of PDCA ( Plan – Do – Check – Act ). Here, the 5 key steps to your personal kaizen are uncovered:

1. Plan Your Activities

To begin with doing a Personal Kaizen in our daily life, planning activities is a very important step. In many Time Management concept, planning your activities has been the most crucial concept. One should try to plan yearly, monthly, weekly and daily. Yearly and monthly planning will comprise the most important events of the year and/or month, whereas weekly and daily planning will deal most of the time with operational issues and projects that we undergo at works or at home.

Thus, it is important to set at least 15 minutes everyday before you sleep to get to know your next day activities so that you can make sure that the following day will be filled with the activities that are actually meaningful not only for your boss or family but also to you.

2. Set Apart Things That You Do Regularly

Getting all the activities is just your first step to enter your personal kaizen circle. having acknowledged your activities, now you can separate those activities that happen most of the time either daily, weekly, monthly or yearly and those activities that are sporadically or spontaneously appear in your calendar.

Kaizen is continuous improvement. Thus the activities that appear regularly will subject to your Personal Kaizen. Setting apart these activities from others will make you focus on doing it effectively with more quality.

3. Create A Way to Make It Better and Standardize

The focus of Personal Kaizen is on small continuous improvement of life processes. Thus, after we know the activities that we do regularly, it is now time for us to seek for a way to do it more efficiently with the help of either doing it differently by using another methods or using technologies to enhance the time to finish the activities.

It is also important to set target for yourself to try to reach 3 activities accomplishment that is not regularly done and try to get it done everyday. This is for the purpose of evaluating your kaizen effort that will be explain in step 5 later.

4. Standardize

The Continuous Improvement Circle cannot be separated from Standardization in which it means that the improvement that we have done will be our current standard and will become a challenge for us to improve to a new and better state. In the future, our challenge is to beat the current standard that we set so that we progressively making improvement to the same activities that we do. Without standard, it is very easy to feel satisfy and perform below standard.

5. Evaluate yourself and back again to point 1 

Evaluating is an ultimate importance and since it is a circle of improvement, I will not call step 5 as the last step, but a precursor to step 1. Your effort now might have been paid off. You can prove if you have done the right and on the right track doing your Personal Kaizen by meeting one or more of these:

• There are more activities that you can tackle in one day compare to before you apply personal kaizen
• You become last stressful due to available slot time you have in your day for family, leisure, or your kids
• You basically feel that you own your life and not your boss or your tasks

How we could increase the number of accomplishment of irregular and regular tasks everyday directly related with how good we are at kaizen. The better kaizen that we do to our regular tasks, the more we can tackle unpredictable tasks with the better quality result and with more freedom of time to do personal purpose activity such as leisure or go out with kids.

One final concern is that even you have already achieved and know the benefits of personal kaizen, I encourage you to do a circle of continuous improvement and not to stop only until step 5 or else the improvement that you have already done will be deteriorate.

Living in Lean Culture: Seeing is Believing

I have remembered how I have been amazed by a discovery in my own country Indonesia. I have gone so long to my reflective side of me after I have witnessed things that I couldn’t imagine to be exist in my country. Considering about the status of my country which categorized as a developing countries and the experience that I have on visiting several factories, I have been startled by a visitation to a factory in which the culture of Lean is very apparent.

In April 2011, I accompanied colleague students of my University to have a field trip to the automotive manufacturer plant which handle the assembly of medium and low trucks. I have had an experience for six months of internship in a quite famous automotive manufacturer overseas in Germany. Therefore, I presumed that the plant that we were going to visit was not possible to have a better management and/or technology than in Germany.

By the time we got there, I verify my assumption with the fact. It turns out at the first sight this plant which located in my country have nothing extra worth to be noted as better when compared to the technology with what the Germans have. It was a very conventional plant. At the site, we gathered together to a short briefing and quickly we were divided into several group and being arranged into route of travel around factory.

We make a start to the first process and go until the latest process in the plant. The tour guide which happens to be the supervisor and a foreman assisting us and generously share their experience about the working procedure, process, and experience. The workers in some areas are very kindly and proudly explaining the things that they are responsible of. I was astonished after we have come to an end. It was amazing to be there that  day and I felt very fortunate to be there.

I saw that  lean management in the factory that actually work. In that moment I totally changed my paradigm when I see with my own eyes that there is a factory runs smoothly by using no automation and high-tech and rely on the management of lean. They are many of lean concept use to manage the system. By concept I didn’t mean just methodology, but people actions and the the artifact of boards that daily updated, and the acknowledgement of suggestion of workers for all factory members. Besides of the Japanese auditor from Japan that always came to the factory to maintain the performance, many interesting facts have surprised me.

Previously I am very disappointed with labor from my country. It is because in my view, labor in my country is lazy and unproductive. However, what I saw that day at the factory could really make me realize the power of Lean. Lean could changed people behavior and culture to the desired one. I felt really happy to be there.