Productivity | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Truth Hardware’s Lean Journey

The second speaker at the Lean seminar I described here was Jim Wheeler from Truth Hardware, a company with 1,000 employees in Owatonna, Minn. They make parts for window manufacurers like Andersen, Marvin and others.

They didn’t think Lean could work for them because they have 10,000 saleable part numbers, adding 10 new ones each day. How could they possibly do just-in-time manufacturing with that many unique part numbers?

Jim says Lean is not a cost-cutting strategy … it’s a growth strategy. In the current housing downturn, the productivity gains they have made have enabled Truth to maintain and even grow market share, even against competitors that have moved their manufacturing to China. When the housing market comes back, Truth will be poised for significant growth. And because they have eliminated waste, they will be able to add capacity without huge investments in additional facilities or equipment.

Truth holds one week-long Kaizen event per month. Instead of analyzing to death, they say getting things 60 percent right is good enough. They develop prototypes, then make the changes and continually iterate. Jim says “Don’t just think about it, do it and then find out what the problems are, so you can fix them.”

My kind of guy.

Jim also described a literal breakthrough Truth achieved through one of its Kaizen events. I may be getting some of the details wrong, but in essence they had one big piece of equipment that was used for metal fabrication, and after that step the parts would be loaded into bins and put on a fork lift to be hauled through the plant to the painting and finishing area. As they looked at the process, they realized that the finishing area was just on the other side of the wall from the fabrication equipment…so they cut a hole in the wall to enable the parts to flow through to be painted.

This saved hours from the start-to-finish process, and also eliminated the need for storage bins to hold the half-done parts waiting to be painted.

Through Jim’s presentation, I learned something else about system engineering that I thought was really interesting: in the airplane cockpit all of the instruments are arranged so that if all of the indicators point straight up, it’s normal. Then you can tell at a glance when something is wrong, because the abnormal readings really stand out.

Jim Wheeler is a Lean evangelist in much the same way as I’m a social media evangelist. Here was his list of recommended reading:

If you want to reach Jim, based on what I heard in this seminar, I’m sure he’d be glad to share his experience.

How about you? Have you looked at your work to see what delays are introduced into your processes, that don’t add value from your customers’ perspectives? What prototypes can you develop easily (perhaps using free social media tools) to eliminate both wasted effort and wasted time?

Finding Profit through Lean

A couple of weeks ago I took several members of my work team to a seminar, which was sponsored by Minnesota Technology, called Finding Profit through Lean Enterprise. Social Media University, Global students may not find this post intuitively relevant, but Lean is about rethinking processes to provide great value to customers at the lowest cost. And social media may be among the tools that can help make that happen.

So please bear with me. I may have another couple of Lean posts, but we’ll be back into the regular SMUG curriculum soon.

Here are the five essential principles of Lean (you’ll also find this history helpful):

Specify the value desired by the customer
Identify the value stream for each product providing that value and challenge all of the wasted steps (generally nine out of ten) currently necessary to provide it
Make the product flow continuously through the remaining, value-added steps
Introduce pull between all steps where continuous flow is possible
Manage toward perfection so that the number of steps and the amount of time and information needed to serve the customer continually falls

One of the interesting commonalities among the three presenters we heard at the seminar was that they all had gone into Lean with serious doubts about whether it could really apply to their business. Likewise, those of us working in communications or public affairs may wonder whether Lean, which is normally considered a manufacturing concept, is applicable for services like PR or corporate communications.

But even though we’re not cranking out widgets, I firmly believe Lean can help us identify steps in our processes that don’t add value for our customers (however we define them), and that by finding new methods and tools (some of which may involve harnessing social media) we can create new value streams.

The morning’s first presentation was from Denny Dotson, President of Dotson Iron Castings, a foundry in Mankato, Minn. Among the lessons his company learned in its Lean journey:

Culture change is everything – you need to become comfortable with being uncomfortable in an uncomfortable environment.
Getting buy-in from the whole team has made the decisions take longer, but the implementation moves much faster.
Give users the tools. For example, they gave shop floor people Photoshop and ability to create their own parts catalogue/user manual. They had it completed within days, and in a way that was most useful to them. Think how much easier it would have been if they had been given a really great tool like an internal blog?
Dotson uses touch-screen kiosks on the shop floor for communicating with employees, and one of the interesting elements is an opportunity for employees to upload personal and family pictures. This is sort of like Facebook without a computer, and it shows the value of enabling employees to get to know each other as whole people instead of just as what they do.
More than half of their shop-floor employees went to visit customers in the last year, so they could see first-hand what the customer needs are. Interestingly, the biggest concerns about this originally came from sales staff, who didn’t want others “interfering” in their client relationships. But the customers loved it.
Continual education is crucial. Dotson will pay half of any continuing education for its employees, up to $1,500 per year. (And if they enroll in SMUG, Dotson can pay 100 percent of the costs!)
When you’re forming a project team to consider Lean improvement projects, don’t staff the team with cost accountants, and ignore the “tool conversion” costs for new technology. (Again, a non-manufacturing business actually has an advantage in making a Lean transition if it can use social media tools, because the costs for those tools often approximate zero.)

Mr. Dotson recommended a book by Dean Spitzer called Transforming Performance Measurement. I recommend another book, The Toyota Way, which was what got me interested in having my work team attend this seminar in the first place. Meanwhile, if you want to read further about Lean but don’t want to wait to get the book, you can start with the Wikipedia article.

I see Lean as a way to free up capacity that is being wasted by inefficiently providing current products and services, so that energy can be released to explore creation of new offerings. And if social media tools can be used creatively to meet business needs, which is one of the major premises behind SMUG, using those tools in conjunction with Lean thinking can be even more powerful.

In my next post (or two) I will share some additional highlights from that Lean seminar. I hope it will help you think creatively about applying lessons from the manufacturing world (and the company that is on the verge of becoming the top automaker in the world, in terms of sales) to improve the way you and your company work.

Facebook: Importing Blog Posts

I recently got a good question from Aruni Gunasegaram, asking how to import posts from her blog into her Facebook profile.

I look forward to learning more about facebook from your blog. I really need a crash course. The problem for me and the social networking sites is that there is so much information out there that trying to learn it all while at the same time launching a high-tech business is not proving to be very effective. I guess I’ll just learn as I use it! Some things about facebook are intuitive and others are not. For instance, how do I add my RSS feed for this blog to my profile? I’ve seen a few other people who have done it, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to do it myself yet!

It’s pretty simple, and I actually do it in two ways. The first is through the WordPress application for Facebook (since my blog is on WordPress.com), but here is the more generally applicable method that will work for you, no matter what blogging platform you’re using.

Here’s the full explanation for how you do it; the shortcut version is in the next paragraph. In your Facebook provile, in the left navigation, click more to see all of your applications, then click the Notes application, and in the right side click “Edit import settings” under Notes settings, and you will be able to choose an RSS feed to import into your Facebook mini-feed.

Or, if you want just the direct shortcut, click this link: http://www.facebook.com/editnotes.php?import

This is where you enter the RSS feed from your blog so it will be automatically imported. (Or if you’d rather just automatically import my blog posts, you can use the feed URL pictured above.)

Then, in your Mini-Feed you will see something like this:

The top half is what is imported directly by the method I describe above, while the lower half is what the WordPress application does.

This is a really helpful way to keep your Facebook profile fresh with a minimum of effort. You can focus on writing for your blog, and let Facebook’s automatic import feature post it to your profile. The beauty of Facebook is that it makes connecting with people easier. The last thing you need is to have to take time to enter the same information in multiple places, or to remember to post a new blog post to your Facebook profile. Hopefully having this tip will help you automate what you can, which will free you for the more interesting and higher-level interactions you can have in Facebook.

Technorati: Facebook, blog, wordpress, wordpress.com, importing

Peninsula to Favor Telecommuting?

I just returned from a few days in California, including the last day or so in Los Angeles. While I was there, the Texas Transportation Insitute issued its annual study of traffic congestion, which led to this story in the Los Angeles Times:

The Texas report says motorists in Los Angeles and Orange counties spent an average of 72 extra hours in rush-hour traffic in 2005, the subject of the current study. That’s one day shy of two full workweeks a year and is 20 hours more than in 1985. The delay represents the difference between how long it takes to travel during peak periods compared with hours when traffic flows freely.

Unlike last week’s bogus “study” that alleged Facebook was costing British firms “dear,” this traffic study is being criticized for underestimating the actual time lost in traffic.

(Note: Despite requesting a copy of the study from Peninsula, I still haven’t received it. And Dennis Howlett has a great analysis of the ludicrous math behind Peninsula’s headline-chasing. Where are the professional journalists when you need them? Why do they uncritically repeat these allegations without doing a quick calculation, as Dennis did, of whether such a figure is even possible, to say nothing of its plausibility? Thanks to Neville Hobson for pointing out Dennis’ post on his For Immediate Release podcast with Shel Holtz. And Shel read this humorous take on the issue, how employers are infringing on employees’ free time.)

In the reporting on the traffic study, by contrast, the LA Times does something novel: it reports the assumptions behind the study findings and quotes someone who challenges them.

The study “does a great disservice to the state and the region,” said Hasan Ikhrata, the organization’s director of planning and policy. “I would not make policy decisions based on their data, period.”

Ikhrata contends that the new method used by the institute mistakenly assumes that traffic in Los Angeles County, Orange County, the Inland Empire and Oxnard-Ventura is moving much faster during rush hours than it actually is.

Texas researchers assumed that traffic is traveling at an average of 35 mph during peak travel times. However, SCAG planners say that sensors buried in the pavement of major freeways in the Los Angeles area show that the average speed during rush hours is closer to 20 mph. By this measurement, Ikhrata said the extra delay is roughly 100 hours per year, nearly 40% worse than the Texas estimate.

Ikhrata said the actual data, collected from the sensors by the state Department of Transportation, indicate that all of the Los Angeles region’s major freeways have segments moving at less than 10 mph during the most heavily traveled part of the long morning and evening peak periods.

Having just been in LA and the OC, I’m with Hasan on this one. Going from downtown LA to Angels Stadium in Anaheim took about 80 minutes, or a full hour longer than if traffic had been moving.

I wonder whether the next headline from Peninsula will be a call for firms to initiate telecommuting policies to reclaim lost productivity. Might we a good way for this UK-based firm to expand into the US market.

Technorati: Peninsula, Facebook, traffic, congestion, LA, Los Angeles, Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson, Dennis Howlett, Texas Transportation Institute

Let’s just ban email too

An article published by BBC News yesterday about the business costs of Facebook and other social networking platforms says more about the myopic, risk-averse mindsets of some lawyers conducting “studies” than it does about Facebook. Here’s an excerpt:

According to employment law firm Peninsula, 233 million hours are lost every month as a result of employees “wasting time” on social networking.

The study – based on a survey of 3,500 UK companies – concluded that businesses need to take firm action on the use of social networks at work.

Some firms have already banned employees from accessing Facebook.

Mike Huss, director of employment law at Peninsula called on all firms to block access to sites such as Facebook.

He asked: “Why should employers allow their workers to waste two hours a day on Facebook when they are being paid to do a job?”

He said that loss of productivity was proving a “major headache” for firms.

This is the all-too-typical reflexive response to a perceived problem: ban it or block access. Typically their analyses to justify such reactions inflate costs, and rarely include any benefits in their calculations.

I wanted to be fair about this criticism, so I tried to find out where this Peninsula law firm is, or who Mike Huss is. I wanted to get a copy of the study so I could look at the methodology.

Unfortunately, Mike and Peninsula are hard to find on the web. I Googled “Peninsula employment law firm” and his company didn’t show up on the first 10 pages of results. There were six matches for Mike Huss in LinkedIn, and there were something like 87 in Facebook. None of them were matches for the Mike Huss with Peninsula law firm. Maybe if they were engaged in social media they would be easier to locate. Ironically, a Facebook group just started that is called “Ban Peninsula Employment Law Firm“… (click the link to join it.)

I did eventually find the name of the company, called Peninsula Business Services, when I Googled “Mike Huss Peninsula” and read a few previous news articles. I requested a copy of the study from Peninsula’s PR office. If I receive it, I will share analysis here.

(There’s a related point I could make here about why BBC didn’t post a copy of the Peninsula study with its story so readers could judge its validity, but I’ll leave that for another post.)

Of course, like any technology, social media sites can be abused. But if the concern is “wasting” time at work and lost productivity, why would they stop at Facebook? Let’s look at some other major office time drains:

How about email? How much time does the average office worker spend on email each day? Should we ban that, too? After all, there’s lots of spam from Nigerian princes offering to share their wealth.
Or how about blocking news sites (like maybe BBC news?) People who are reading the news at the office aren’t getting their work done.
Maybe they should block Yahoo and AOL. After all, there are all sorts of games and other pointless diversions on those sites.
And the telephone, too. Far too much potential for chit-cha t instead of buckling down to work.

If productivity is an issue, companies should deal with the real problem, which is lack of employee engagement. Happy, satisfied, engaged employees exert discretionary effort, going above and beyond what’s required. They essentially “volunteer” to meet the needs of customers.

An arbitrary and unilateral blocking of Facebook or MySpace tells employees you don’t trust them. Because you don’t. And a social networking ban contributes to an atmosphere of distrust that turns your workforce into Hessians. That’s a major reason why General Washington defeated General Cornwallis: volunteers usually beat mercenaries.

Businesses depend on this volunteer effort from employees. Sometimes when unions want to make a point to management they tell their members to follow work rules to the letter, doing exactly what the union contract requires: no more, and no faster. The Peninsula-proposed policies seem likely to provoke this kind of workforce response.

Employers generally provide email access for employees (instead of barring it) and don’t block general access to the web because they see productivity gains from such access. Email consumes a lot of time, but it also is a highly efficient means of completing some work projects.

Networking sites like Facebook are just different means of electronic communication. To say that all firms should block access to them is extreme. As Facebook evolves (particularly by adding a professional associate category of friends), companies will better understand how it can contribute to business goals, and they will be less likely to heed these headline-grabbing studies.

Technorati: Facebook, MySpace, email, AOL, Mike Huss, Peninsula, BBC News, social networking, business, ban, Yahoo, unions, law firm, lawyers