This chapter provides guidance on how to create a center of excellence capability, a subsystem and an integral part of our Lean Business System Reference Model™. A center of excellence is the core competency and capability center for a Lean Business System. It can be either a physical or virtual center of knowledge that concentrates existing expertise and resources in a discipline to attain and achieve continuity of purpose and optimize value contribution throughout the enterprise. This function promotes collaboration, guidance, shared learning, homogeneity, and best practices for enterprisewide adaptive systematic improvement. The purpose, scope and content, organization, and service delivery are driven by business requirements, talent development needs, and the degree of special support required throughout the enterprise. There is not much published about the design and architecture of an improvement Kata center of excellence. We share insights from our reference model as a guide for your progressing with your own Lean Business System. Keep in mind that it is a reference model and always evolving as new information is discovered. It is very possible and acceptable that organizations add to this reference model based on their own special requirements.
In our reference model, a center of excellence is a hybrid entity that provides thought leadership, technical improvement applications knowledge, education and talent development, implementation support, benchmarking and best practices information, and uniform integration of the Lean Business System across the enterprise. This last point is important because it means that there is a uniform architecture and systematic process of improvement across the organization. The other element of integration is cross-pollination: making sure that best-practice successes and lessons learned are leveraged to the max across various business units and other key processes. It is important that the center of excellence function as a resource center and not a direct responsibility center for improvement. Its resources are usually the most highly skilled and experienced, crème de la crème improvement resources in the company. A center of excellence provides a terrific professional development and career exposure stop for the organization. Working alongside other professionals in the center of excellence expedites learning and development and facilitates continuity when individuals return to their business units.
The roles of a center of excellence are designed around business requirements, priorities, and cultural needs. The purpose of this entity is to take advantage of scale and scope in terms of developing, supporting, and nurturing a common Lean Business System across many business units or divisions. These roles can be fulfilled through a combination of internal and external resources, through a corporate functional role, or through a Lean Business System leader role in smaller organizations. We mention earlier that the right proven external experts can add significant value early on in designing, integrating, adapting, and systematizing a true, enterprisewide Lean Business System. The remainder of this section outlines the typical roles found in a center of excellence.
A center of excellence includes highly skilled, well-versed, and experienced improvement leaders. Sometimes these individuals are called lead architects, an appropriate name for their role. They act as the lead architects and implementation experts of a holistic, enterprisewide Lean Business System. These individuals have significant implementation experience in a variety of industries, global business units, operating environments, and cultural settings. They are highly experienced in executive mentoring and development, change leadership, and all of the subprocesses in our Lean Business System Reference Model. They are well versed in Kaizen, Lean, Six Sigma, ERP (enterprise resource planning), enterprise cloud architectures, and all other improvement methodologies. They understand how to adapt various improvement methodologies to special operating environments, and they innovate their way through wilderness improvement situations by developing new approaches to improvement. They are experts at anticipating obstacles and barriers to success and proactively preventing them before they occur. This is the lead role for designing, integrating, adapting, and systematizing the organization’s Lean Business System and building out the support roles of the center of excellence to support and ensure its success.
Developing a strong core competency of improvement is not as easy as getting a black belt or Lean Sensei certificate. It requires years of experiences and hundreds of improvement activities before an individual gains expertise in all the various improvement methodologies. This role provides technical support to business units and/or improvement teams on how best to approach their improvement activity. Ideally, this is accomplished through the local improvement team. The reality is that teams get stuck and become very discouraged if left in that state for too long. This is the “go-to” role relative to any complex, subject matter questions that cannot be resolved by resident improvement resources. Technical applications support is more of a help-desk function for improvement. This type of support is usually responsive and incident-based. It can involve very senior mentoring support to help teams through their assignments, working with business units and teams to remove obstacles and provide assistance about how to use a particular improvement methodology. Lead architects are often requested to help business unit executives increase the momentum of their local Lean Business System efforts. They may also be requested for their technical expertise in problem solving, such as how to set up and run a design of experiments (DOE), or how to adapt the right concepts and methodologies to unique, nonstandard applications. Sometimes, the lead architect does not have the answers but has the competency to pioneer his or her way to a solution to the problem as well as a more defined approach for continuing on with improvement. Technical applications support is often needed in the complex interconnected network of transactional processes. These efforts are often improvement forensics efforts, trying to replicate (through historical sampling plans, modeling, and analysis) the conditions that generated the problems. Often it is difficult to define the problem and differentiate the multiple causes from the multiple effects. One cannot see these types of problems. It’s much more complicated than constructing a value stream map or a visual board.
In a Center of Excellence the role of professional education and talent development involves developing and delivering relevant and uniform educational materials to build the core competency of improvement. The specific content and scope is not a standard curriculum, nor is it modules of generic improvement tools. Lead architects tailor education to the specific needs and applications of the organization, including the applicable improvement concepts, company examples with real data, tailored participation exercises and instruction, and specific guidance and instruction about how to apply these methodologies to the business. Generic education on basic manufacturing improvement tools is out. Education and talent development are definitely about designing, integrating, adapting, and systematizing. Herein lies a very challenging issue: The labels of Kaizen, Lean, TPS, theory of constraints, Six Sigma, ERP, emerging technology, and the respected approaches and tools are no longer stand-alone initiatives. Training the masses in a batch mode is also out. It must all be viewed as adaptive systematic improvement. This is another good example that underscores the importance of a Lean Business System as an integrated architecture. It will require significant thought to design and construct an educational curriculum and its content. It will require significant communication for it to gain acceptance. And it will require robust implementation best practices to transform the educational knowledge into results and positive cultural experiences.
A center of excellence plays an important role in developing the improvement competencies of an organization. The scope often includes improvement-related education on change leadership, manager and supervisor development, the body of knowledge of various improvement methodologies, team and group dynamics, how to define and quantify benefits, performance management, basic improvement skills (local Kaizen activities), training within industry (TWI), training in safety and environmental (green), and specific job skills development. Other important considerations of education and talent development include:
Adaptive. Custom-tailored education to an organization’s requirements and operating environment (e.g., job shop, hospital, defense contractor, automotive, utilities, oil refining, services provider, etc.).
Application-directed. Education that is delivered in smaller just-in-time increments and directly applied to an improvement activity (learn-apply-succeed-believe).
Achievement-based, not attendance-based. Education followed by a requirement to implement a successful improvement activity while demonstrating the proper use of the methodology and tools.
Refresher and reinforcement. Creating the means to strengthen talent competencies with existing improvement knowledge or new developments. Other means might include boot camp time at the center of excellence, or an instructor or mentoring assignment where individuals sharpen their improvement and change leadership skills.
Successful execution is dependent upon active learning and talent development through a combination of personal and group development planning, tailored education, instructional delivery, coaching and mentoring, technology, and a wide variety of work experiences. The ultimate goal is to become self-sufficient with your own education and talent management offerings, and also to be capable of expanding and continuously internalizing the improvement body of knowledge. Later in this chapter we discuss the possible scope and content of improvement education as well as alternative delivery and reinforcement approaches. While it may be obvious, it is worth mention that a center of excellence is a resource, facilitation, and integration center and not a command and control center for all improvement activities in the organization.
Implementation support is similar to technical applications support, but it entails a broader and longer duration of support to a business unit. This might include mentoring business unit lead resources through the planning and early stages of their Lean Business System start-up. Lead architects help business units and divisions with the details of how to install the capabilities of the subprocesses of Lean Business System architecture. Examples include:
How to launch and communicate the vision and strategy
How to conduct a business diagnostic
How to define, prioritize, and align specific business unit improvement needs
How to organize and staff the resident Lean Business System
How to prioritize and initiate improvement activities and teams
How to define the right metrics
How to provide local education and talent development
How to apply basic project management
In smaller and midsized organizations, lead architects are more involved in supporting implementation within the business units. The organization is not large enough to justify a dedicated resident staff of improvement resources, but the need for improvement still exists. In these situations it makes sense to appoint a site improvement leader and leverage the center of excellence and lead architect resources. I know of several organizations in which the lead architects work out of their home and travel to where they are needed at a specific time. Very large organizations can justify their own business unit improvement leaders and a small staff of improvement resources. In these situations a corporate lead architect is less involved in longer-term implementation support.
Another important role held in a center of excellence is the integrator of adaptive systematic improvement. From a business perspective, it is the bringing together of all the critical success factors of systematic improvement. It is the enterprisewide quality assurance function, making sure that all business units are concurrently and collectively improving with constancy of purpose and continuity. In essence it is the integration of the Lean Business System to produce breakthroughs in corporate performance and evolve culture to higher standards of excellence.
From a process perspective, the integrator role involves knowledge sharing of improvements at the process level with other business units and divisions of the organization. In the transactional processes, for example, the experiences and successes of a team improvement activity are easily leveraged to other business units with the same or similar process issues. An effective way to accomplish this is through a scheduled monthly meeting of company business improvement leaders. During this meeting, information is exchanged about improvement activities through a formal peer review session. These sessions include questions and answers and often have requests for a team leader to assist a team in another business unit that is just getting started on the same improvement activity. Effective exchanges around new product development and supply chain management can generate megasavings quickly while adding standardization to these complex processes.
From a technology perspective, this involves the integration of systematic improvement and technology. Organizations should plan for technology competencies to exist in the center of excellence. Organizations have talked about this idea for decades, especially in the realm of business process improvement (BPI) and business process reengineering (BPR). Historically technology has been viewed more from an information technology (IT) perspective than a business integration perspective. In practice these two elements have functioned independently in many organizations. Y2K and ERP implementations are two examples—organizations signed up to implement their ERP architecture and business process improvement (BPI) at the same time. Then in the interest of time they focused more on implementing the software while pledging to come back to BPI at a later date. Many organizations never found the time to come back. People quickly found nonstandard work-arounds, kluge spreadsheets and databases, shortcuts, and other means to perform their work. Because these large architectures are so integrated, organizations flooded themselves with hidden, non-value-added work everywhere!
Today the need for technology integration is critical because technology is evolving at a faster rate than organizations can assimilate and benefit from. Technology can enable or disable organizations exponentially. Data warehousing, mobility, virtualization and the cloud, business analytics, visualization, and other emerging technologies are pushing decision makers toward immediate reason and instant gratification and away from root-cause problem solving. Life was simple when organizations had their conference room war rooms of manually maintained metrics. Today technology can instantly display a thousand times more information on the walls of people’s minds. Technology by itself undermines systematic improvement. The integrator role of a center of excellence must accomplish the proper balance between improvement and technology and ensure that there is a seamless integration of improvement and technology. In this economy, each enables the other.
Benchmarking and best practices research have been a legitimate means of improvement in the past, especially the within-industry scans. A center of excellence needs to continuously scan competitor and industry best practices and also the outside-industry best practices. Benchmarking is an asset to adaptive systematic improvement if conducted and used correctly: to scan, learn, stimulate thinking, adapt, and improve best practices to the organization’s business requirements. Benchmarking can create the temptation to blindly copy, and this practice must be avoided. The cycle of scan, learn, think, adapt, improve is critical to the purpose and ultimate success of benchmarking.
Here is a bit of caution regarding benchmarking: Many benchmarking activities tend to be treated as one-time events rather than as a continual journey for excellence. Other benchmarking efforts have expanded their scope and inadvertently replaced the original objective of improvement. Best in class is a moving target in this global economy. It is a fact that the organizations that gain the most are those that continue to innovate and adapt best practices before their competitors do. In other words, they are the inventors and leaders of best practices. The problem with searching for and copying the best practices of others is that the practices are often dated, commoditized (already copied by others), misinterpreted, oversimplified, or obsolete by definition.
Best practices are typically conceived via the following approaches:
Radical discovery. These are best practices that are discovered when executives of organizations open their minds to new possibilities that enable them to redefine their traditional business models. Visioneering and mind mapping about how a hospital might operate like Amazon, FedEx, Boeing, or Toyota and no waiting rooms are sure to create a lively discussion of potential healthcare innovations with the right people in the room.
Adaptive. These are best practices that represent a departure from known customer and market needs by adapting an existing or new process to a new prospective but unproven/unknown market need. The ideas may come from benchmarking, customer collaboration, or internal process innovation. Many retailers are implementing adaptive best practices to get closer to customer and market opportunities, reduce fulfillment cycles, and improve cash to cash.
Technology. This involves creating new processes and practices through evolving technology solutions plus process rationalization that have not been previously feasible or possible. Many organizations are creating new best practices through the correct deployment of technology.
Incremental. These are best practices that continue to build upon an organization’s best practices and continuously improve how we improve current processes to higher levels of achievement and benchmark performance. This is the most common approach to sustaining existing best practices in many organizations.
One final word of advice is to find the right balance in benchmarking. Benchmarking is not improvement. Benchmarking time takes away from improvement time. Remember that from the customer and market perspectives, “best” is relative in time and space and at any transactional or reputational moment in time. The only way to deal with this challenge is to continuously strive to be the best through innovation and origination. Unexpected circumstances happen even to the best-of-the-best practice organizations, but their recovery is superior because they are always on their best game.
A center for excellence is a resource and competency. It is not a centralized command and control center for improvement, nor is it a central group of resources that assumes the responsibility for improvement from other business unit and/or functional managers. The most recent example is Six Sigma. One of the objectives of Six Sigma was to create a structure and tsunami of dedicated master black belts, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts throughout organizations. In all fairness, sometimes it takes a tsunami to create momentum for change in organizations. They used an unofficial center of excellence way of thinking and built this competency through a large, centralized education function that acted as the traveling certification center within companies. Six Sigma advanced the science and discipline of improvement with its mandated leadership engagement, structured DMAIC gate-keeping process, fact-based and data-driven approach, deep-core root-cause problem solving, achievement-based (rather than attendance-based) education, technology (Minitab), and a strong focus on execution. It attempted to introduce many attributes of the Lean Business System Reference Model into improvement, but in retrospect it became an immersion strategy and a ritual of belts. There were several executives like Jack Welch of GE, Larry Bossidy of Honeywell, Jim Owens of Caterpillar, and Anne Mulcahy of Xerox who kept their organizations on a path of success with Six Sigma. Most organizations ended up with large, dedicated corporate groups of black belts that supported the organization’s Six Sigma needs. We visited with several of these organizations that were concerned about not enough getting done for the investment. We observed a common practice among all these organizations. When managers were asked about problems, they always responded, “I have a black belt working on it.” By creating these large, centralized Six Sigma departments, organizations allowed their management to throw the responsibility and ownership for improvement over the wall to an outside corporate group. Then these managers went back to business as usual. They would often reject the recommendations of these large central groups unless they coincided with what the managers had already decided to do. There was a perpetual problem of an outsider recommending changes that people did not understand or were not engaged in. Eventually these large central black belt departments were dismantled and decentralized into functional areas where they belong.
A center of excellence is a resource and competency center. It is also the innovation center and constancy of purpose center for a Lean Business System. A center of excellence is always evolving; there are always emerging needs that require adjustments to the roles and scope of a center of excellence. Organizations want to avoid the mistake of allowing the scope of a center of excellence to include responsibilities that should be within the realm of other functions within the organizations.
The Lean Business System Reference Model is a composition of concepts, an architecture of integrated processes, best practices, metrics that stimulate thinking, and an organization-specific architecture for adaptive systematic improvement. Since the reference model is enterprisewide in scope, organizations need to rethink the concept of Lean and improvement in general. This is a prerequisite for proceeding further with the design of a center of excellence. The reference model can be used as a foundation on which the professional development competencies will be configured and delivered to the organization.
With respect to education and talent development, the past decades of improvement have been full of well-intentioned efforts, but also full of unintended consequences. Let’s look at the ground that many organizations have covered with improvement: SPC, IE, OR, MTM, MODAPTS, SIS, ZBB, QCC, TQM, PDCA, little mrp, MRPII, ERP, CEDAC, GT, QFD, TPM, SMED, TOC, JIT, PACE, ME, Kanban, WCM, QRM, Pull, SCOR, ECR, BPI, BPR, BPM, TPS, 5S, ABC, 4Ms, 3Ms, OEE, Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma, VSM, operational excellence, hoshin kanri, TRIZ, DMAIC, and a few others that I missed. Now think about all the next level of terminology and acronyms behind each initiative. (The key to all these acronyms is at the end of this chapter.) Have a look at your own organization’s experiences, and then put yourself in the shoes of associates who have been exposed to these improvement initiatives for the past 20 years. What’s wrong with this picture? Is there any question that this wonks-and-wizards approach to improvement might have caused a little confusion? All these initiatives incorporate improvement philosophies, methodologies, tools, and terminology for improvement. They also represent advances in the principles of scientific management, and their specifics are very relevant to the entire spectrum of improvement challenges in organizations today. The problem is that all of these initiatives have been pursued as single-point improvement programs. A closer look reveals the overlap in philosophies and methodologies of improvement repackaged and rebranded under a different name. Organizations have been on a journey of continuous improvement via a box with a different colored ribbon strategy, where the content of the box remains basically the same. In retrospect, this is a fragmented, suboptimization strategy of improvement. The journey has not been a holistic, constancy-of-purpose strategy like that of Toyota. No single-point improvement program or fragmented set of tools is all inclusive or all exclusionary. In Western organizations, for example, the Toyota Production System (TPS) is the current popular methodology of choice. A continuation of a mimic the tools strategy is limiting the potential of Lean in these organizations.
Lean is at a crossroads. It’s time for organizations to put the Aristotle spin on Lean and think very deeply about how to evolve Lean manufacturing into a true, holistic Lean Business System. Over 2,000 years ago Aristotle spoke of actual versus potential motion (improvement), reasons for causality (root-cause analysis), criticizing regimes with their empty words and poetic metaphors (tools), and giving greater weight to empirical observation (experimentation and evidence-based practices) than pure theories (canned approaches). The reference to Aristotle is not an accident, for his wisdom is very relevant today. A Lean Business System represents a defrag of individual improvement principles and methodologies. Organizations must now expand the notion of Lean beyond the Toyota Production System tools. A Lean business is about improvement, regardless of the principles and tools. From a center of excellence strategy, organizations need to think about consolidating all these methodologies into a unified body of knowledge and powerhouse version of Lean. Additionally, organizations need to increase their competency efforts significantly on behaviors and cultural development. The Lean Business System Reference Model essentially suggests that organizations need to evolve to a Lean strategy where there is one all-inclusive box of competencies and capabilities, well thought through, and customized for the organizations’ specific business requirements and cultural development needs. A good name for the box is the XYZ business system because it implies a broader and more holistic model of adaptive systematic improvement.
A center of excellence is always driven by business requirements and cultural development needs. This is also true for all of the resources and services offered within a center of excellence. One area worth discussing is education related to talent development. In the past, education has been structured in a vanilla batch, train the masses mode with generic content in many organizations. Beyond all of the maladaptive dynamics in organizations, this throw it at the wall and see what sticks approach to education and talent development is not the right approach for a Lean Business System. Adaptive systematic improvement requires precision; so too does the education that creates the talent inventory to keep the best practices best. The following points provide guidance about how to customize education and talent development in a Lean Business System. When developing the specific education content, organizations should keep the following best practices in mind:
Cascading. Education designed to deliver a uniform base of skills and knowledge to people at different levels in the organization and to deliver specific injections of skills needed for success in their specific organizational roles.
Integrated. Replacing single-point tools thinking with a “toolbox and master craftsman” approach to improvement. This is the integration of Kaizen, Lean, Six Sigma, and all other methodologies and a means of improvement that contributes to success. This also involves integrating other factors into continuous improvement, such as enabling IT, the human elements of change, regulatory and compliance considerations, communication, and performance and rewards.
Needs driven. Curriculum design based on the organization’s business improvement requirements. The goal is to provide education that goes deep into the true needs of specific organizational areas and avoids unnecessary and confusing education that is unlikely to be used in an operating environment.
Environment specific. Infusing education with real-life pilots, examples, and data from the client’s environment. The availability of real-life examples connects theory and practice and reinforces the feasibility and applicability of improvement.
Holistic. Recognizing that all improvement properties are not addressed by the tools alone. Education may be required in soft skills development such as leadership development, teaming fundamentals, team dynamics, change management, project management, cost/benefit analysis, implementation planning, selling, support-building skills, and performance management.
Participative. Incorporating hands-on participatory exercises with relevance to real-life issues. This may include waste walks, role playing, and custom-designed simulation exercises. Participants learn how to apply the improvement tools with success and see an immediate connection to their workplace.
Achievement based. Educating followed by successful application to a real improvement opportunity, followed by teaching and mentoring others. This was one of the best characteristics of Six Sigma because black belt certification required that candidates demonstrate their new knowledge and expertise through successful completion of a large and successful project.
Concurrent. Learning in small doses, immediately applied to a real situation with specific goals and expectations. The objective of concurrent education is to tighten up the “learn-apply-improve-realize success” cycle.
The benefits of incorporating these customization attributes into education and talent development offerings are obvious. The ability to apply, learn from the experiences, acquire new knowledge, coach and mentor others, and continuously strive for professional growth is extremely valuable in terms of developing natural behaviors and a superior cultural code of conduct.
We mention earlier that a major role of a center of excellence is that it act as the professional and talent development resource for a Lean Business System. This role enables the acquisition of associates’ skills and knowledge for personal development, career advancement, and organizational development. When architecting a Lean Business System, this is a good time to think through various professional development options and how best to provide different types of facilitated learning opportunities to the members of the organization. It is also a good time to scan the organization for its current skills inventory and needs. There is a variety of approaches to professional development, including classroom study; mentoring and coaching; individual and teaming implementation experiences; associate shadowing; simulations and participative exercises; self-study; on demand, Internet-based communities of interest; communities of practice; consultation and technical assistance; conferences, professional society participation; formal education (college courses); and many other approaches. The traditional approach of training the masses and mandating compliance is not recommended. A solid professional development strategy integrates a tailored combination of these approaches that is customized to an organization’s specific needs and requirements. Another effective approach is just-in-time, achievement-based education in small increments that can be directly applied rather than the plain vanilla, batch-all inclusive workshops. Smaller increments can be structured easily to accommodate specific education and talent development needs, and they are less disruptive than a consecutive five-day workshop. In practice this may include basic essentials offerings, followed by additional intermediate and advanced education based on situational needs. These practices enable associates to accelerate the connection between concepts and execution.
The following discussions present a suggested outline or checklist of educational content in the professional development center role of a center for excellence.
Leadership Development
Executive roles in a Lean Business System
Change leadership
Behavioral alignment and culture change
Management and supervisory skills development
Mentoring and coaching
Organizational infrastructure and key business processes
Performance management essentials
Basics of financial management and cost
Executive coaching and instructor development
Management and peer coaching development
Facilitating communities of excellence
Lean
Basic Lean principles (deeper “how-to” instruction on value stream mapping, pull and kanban methods, one-piece flow, quick changeover analysis, visual management, waste elimination, synchronization, 5S, work cell design, structured gemba walks, A3s, rate-based scheduling, POU stocking/replenishment techniques, five whys, 8 wastes checksheets, etc.)
Kaizen
Toyota Production System (TPS) structure
Theory of constraints (TOC)
Factory physics/production analytics
Training within industry (TWI)
Lean services and transactional process improvement
Transactional stream mapping
Lean product development
Lean supply chain
Six Sigma/Analytics
Basic quality fundamentals
Root-cause problem solving
Basic analytics (graphs and plots, Pareto, checksheets, cause and effect diagrams, FMEAs, sampling plan design, control charts, SIPOC, MSA, Cp & Cpk)
Intermediate analytics (multi-vari, regression and correlation, hypothesis tests, ANOVA)
Advanced analytics (DOE, Taguchi, EVOP, reliability/MTTF/MTBF, simulation modeling, game theory, risk analysis)
Teaming and Engagement
Standard structured problem solving (e.g., PDCA, DMAIC, SIDAM)
Project management, PMI body of knowledge
Leveraged mentoring, coaching, and facilitation
Team leader development
Principles of high-performance teaming
Group dynamics
Barrier reduction practices
Communication for teams
Understanding X&Y metrics
Packaging and selling improvement
Finance/Accounting
Basics of cost accounting
Baselining current performance
Calculating financial value contribution of improvement (growth, cost reduction, avoidance, cash flow)
Budgeting for improvement
Technology Essentials
ERP architecture fundamentals
Business analytics
Digital visualization
Technology-enabled improvement
Complex, Nonlinear Improvement (Innovation)
Mind mapping
Affinity diagrams
Freestyle mapping
Worth factor analysis
Prioritization grids
Dialogue mapping
Abstraction factor analysis
Risk analysis
Miscellaneous (On Demand, Need)
Microsoft Office basics
Basic ERP architecture skills, user education (APICS body of knowledge)
Root-cause analysis
Hoshin kanri
Management and supervisory development
Quality, ASQ body of knowledge
Minitab education and quantitative analysis
Compliance and regulatory (FDA, DOD MIL-STD, AHRQ, EPA, OSHA, etc.)
Specialized refresher, reinforcement, and advanced education
This is not an all-inclusive list of concepts by any means, but it provides an effective starting point. Additionally, the list is displayed as is for communication and creativity, and organizations will need to evolve this list of content offerings over time. In practice an organization should give thought to, and pick and choose from, the core topics. Then it should customize the content to the organization’s requirements and deliver education under the broader name of XYZ business system. For example, an organization may need to develop additional depth around how to implement work cells. There are all types of design options for work cells depending on the characteristics of the manufacturing environment. Work cells can be repetitive, job shop, mixed model, reconfigurable, one-off, universal, adaptive to changes in volume and mix, engineered configurations, virtual, or transactional in nature. The education around this topic should be customized to the intended end use, with real company data and relevant examples.
One important point related to creating a center of excellence is to allow the offerings to be driven by business requirements and cultural development needs. This seems so obvious, but it is easy to lose sight of these parameters when a group of practitioners begins developing PowerPoint decks for education. Six Sigma certification was notorious for this, taking candidates through four grueling months of statistical engineering techniques. Most black belts will openly admit that they have never needed to use 80 percent of what they learned through the certification process. There is some intrinsic value to “nice to know, nice to have experienced” development, but it wastes valuable limited resources. As our friend Monsieur Tallpole points out, a center of excellence should not attempt to do everything provided in the guidelines of this chapter. Organizations that attempt to do it all spread their critical resources too thin, and it becomes difficult to offer services and construct professional development offerings with the levels of excellence they deserve. A center of excellence should focus on the core requirements that can be delivered to the organization with economies of scale. Those working in the center of excellence should consider engaging outside resources for both initial development needs and specialty or advanced development needs that evolve over time. This is not a discrete boilerplate education project but a longer-term collaborative relationship to provide uniform and custom-tailored specialty education and other service needs. Proven external resources can accelerate the design and development of a center of excellence. The goal is to develop talent on demand, build the right mix of development competencies internally, and deliver these development competencies in as much of a distributed and localized means as possible.
A center of excellence is a resource and support center, but it should never become the doer center. Responsibility, accountability, and ownership for improvement has not worked well when managers of organizational units can throw their problems over the wall to a detached central organization and then sit in meetings saying that they have a Lean sensei or black belt working on their problem. Responsibility, accountability, and ownership for improvement belong within a business unit or department. The center of excellence role is to support talent development and improvement Kata needs throughout the enterprise by integrating the right improvement skills and behavioral competencies throughout the organization.
Coaching and mentoring are important competencies in a successful Lean Business System. Yet organizations have viewed these as more of an osmosis skill of improvement or an on-the-job phenomenon. In sports, coaches and players have very well-defined roles, and all are needed for success. The same is true in a Lean Business System. These skills take years of diversified experience to develop and do not come with a black belt or a Lean sensei certificate. Many people in organizations are mentoring teams with a narrow Lean manufacturing tools focus, a “one company deep” experience level, undeveloped leadership skills, light business and process knowledge, and a “within industry” perspective. This is in addition to their stretched workloads. These factors combined with constantly changing priorities are often the reason why structured and disciplined improvement becomes either suboptimized or the first casualty. Organizations cannot expect to turn systematic improvement on with weak coaching. Continuous improvement simply does not work that way.
The coaching process itself must be backed up by clearly defined and shared talent development objectives. We are not insinuating long-term goals here but an on-the-spot, clear understanding of what the coach and coachee are trying to accomplish. The other half of coaching is keeping the coachees focused on their initiatives, and also to keep the coachees accountable for results through formal measurement and feedback. Too many organizations have treated coaching and mentoring competency development with much less attention than it deserves. This is a good time to share an executive’s quote that has always stuck with me. He said, “You can’t just throw a group of people in a room with a little training on a tool, a pad of sticky notes, an easel and markers, and expect them to be a high-performance team.” Fact is, all employees can benefit from a higher level of structured and disciplined coaching. One of the best practices of our reference model involves the development of super-coaches. These individuals are highly skilled coaching and mentoring resources who also develop the coaching and mentoring capabilities in organizations. We refer to this as leveraged mentoring because these resources have much broader and deeper coaching skills, and they facilitate coaching and mentoring skills within other associates. The whole idea behind Kata is widespread coaching and knowledge sharing.
One of the best practices in our Lean Business System Reference Model is called leveraged mentoring, an advancement of traditional individual/team coaching and facilitation. The idea behind leveraged mentoring is to accelerate adaptive systematic improvement through a more seasoned and deliberately developed coaching and mentoring resource. Leveraged mentoring includes five important core competencies that accelerate improvement and internal talent development. These include:
1. Proven continuous improvement implementation expertise. This includes mentoring on the specific structure, disciplines, and methodologies of improvement (e.g., DMAIC, Kaizen, Lean, TPS, Six Sigma, technology-enabled improvement, etc.). An important factor in this area is the ability to help improvement teams understand opportunities well enough to evaluate various options and make the right data-driven and fact-based recommendations. Improvement teams waste valuable time and resources in their inexperienced journey through some structured problem-solving process with an inexperienced mentor or trainer limited to the mechanics of the tools themselves. Knowledge and proven expertise of the methodologies and tools are essential, but the more important ability in mentoring is adapting and deploying the right improvement approaches to the highest-impact opportunities. Exposing mentoring and coaching resources to a wide variety of experiences over time is the best way to develop this element of leveraged mentoring.
2. Business process improvement knowledge. This includes deep expertise and knowledge of the integrated ERP architecture and key business process knowledge and experience in analyzing and improving these complex, integrated transactional process networks. This includes areas such as supply chain management, new product development, marketing and advertising, IT and software development, distribution and logistics, finance and cash-to-cash management, warranty and returns, sales and operations planning, and other key business processes. This experience is invaluable in mentoring and managing associates and teams to a successful conclusion while understanding the upstream, downstream, and interrelationship impacts on other parts of the organization. In fact, this competency of leveraged mentoring ensures that residual improvements will actually be realized in other process areas. In a Lean Business System the professional, knowledge-based transactional process offers significant opportunities for improvement. These opportunities will never be realized by creating blind–value stream-map wallpaper, a dash of 5S, and confusing terminology. Leveraged mentoring involves adapting the philosophies of improvement to these highly complex integrated process networks.
3. Knowledge of best practices. Expertise in the knowledge of best practices also helps to avoid wheel spinning and accelerate improvement down a proven positive path. Competitive benchmarking—especially outside of one’s own industry—is a great approach to learning more about best practices. Often, the right seasoned outside experts have gained voluminous and continuously evolving knowledge and experiences through working in a variety of organizations. They are familiar with best practices and are often the architects of best practices in other client organizations. Best practice knowledge can also be acquired over time via professional societies or firms that specialize in providing subscription-based benchmarking data. Today best practices are relative and temporary; the best Lean organizations use benchmarking as a learning channel but adapt and innovate their own best practices. By the time an organization identifies and copies a best practice in this economy, the practice may well be obsolete. As we suggest earlier, find the balance between benchmarking and execution.
4. Multi-industry executive experience. The most important competency of leveraged mentoring is multi-industry executive leadership and implementation experience. When an organization embarks on developing a true, enterprisewide Lean Business System, there is always the false sense of executive confidence in deciding how best to proceed with the effort. It’s the don’t know what we don’t know attribute of improvement at play. Our Lean Business System Reference Model reveals many potential issues and details in adaptive systematic planning. Architects, coaches, and mentors who have successful experience by doing from other environments can add significant value to executives and their organizations in terms of powering up the learning curve quickly.
5. Technology-enabled improvement expertise. This competency has to do with new and emerging technology that can frame improvement in more of a near real-time mode. We have presented this structured thinking as SIDAM (sense, interpret, decide, act, monitor). It is predicted that 50 percent of the workforce will be virtual in the next 10–20 years. Associates need to become familiar with, and not fear, technology. Data warehousing (a single version of the facts), predictive and preventive business analytics, digital multilayered performance dashboards (production, quality, improvements in progress, etc.), virtualization, mobility, cloud technology, data visualization, and so on, will have a significant impact on the speed and quality of improvement in the future. Technology is a huge game changer for a Lean Business System because it transforms the traditional wave (batch), project-based linear waterfall approaches of improvement activities of the past into living, real-time rapid execution improvement.
Embedded in the Lean Business System Reference Model is a philosophy that states, “If you are not improving, then you are falling behind.” There is a lot of truth behind this statement. It is a huge challenge to build a culture that can improve systematically and continuously—and autonomously. It is much easier to lose progress when organizations allow their improvement resources to remain in hit the wall mode, fail to integrate all potential resources and methodologies of improvement, or push aside improvement altogether for more important priorities.
Figure 6.1 is an illustration of leveraged mentoring. In practice, improvement activities are nurtured through coaching and mentoring. Frequently, mentors and their mentees hit the wall in practice. This is a common condition, and some obstacles cannot be managed solely by an immediate coach. In fact, if an organization is improving without the presence of these larger complex obstacles, then it is leaving many improvement opportunities on the table.
Figure 6.1 Leveraged Mentoring
Copyright © 2015, The Center for Excellence in Operations, Inc.
When improvement hits the wall, a leveling in progress begins to occur. Another condition is an opportunity to introduce breakthroughs in performance through the injections of additional talent and skills beyond the capabilities of an individual coach (e.g., technology-enabled improvement, broader cross-functional improvements, adapting an external best practice, adapting Lean to very complex, nonstandard situations, etc.). Failure to act on these conditions puts improvement in a flatline mode and often leads to a slippery slope of declining progress. Leveraged mentoring views these conditions as new opportunities for improvement through positive intervention. These conditions not only boost improvement, but they act as mentor the mentor experiences.
The big plus of leveraged mentoring is that it provides the ability to accelerate an organization’s progress with a Lean Business System, not only in sharpening Lean technical skills but particularly in the areas of behavioral alignment and cultural development. We use the words structured and deliberate throughout the book. These are the differentiators in leveraged mentoring. Coaches and mentors must also improve how they improve through deliberate means and structured talent development.
Another best practice that works well is creating a community of practice composed of coaches and mentors in the organization. These resources may meet monthly on a peer review basis and exchange information about their own experiences, successes, and challenges. A community of practice forum is an effective way of sharpening the saw of coaches and mentors. The next generation of Lean requires that coaches and mentors expand their bandwidth of knowledge and support. Working within a true, enterprisewide Lean Business System is much more challenging and complex than working just on Lean manufacturing. This is not a lessening of Lean manufacturing or TPS as it is an integral part of a Lean Business System. The fundamental purpose of our reference model is to get executives and practitioners thinking about the larger potential of Lean through expanding the existing body of knowledge and evolving Lean to a higher adaptive systematic improvement state in all organizations.
The collective works of the great Mark Twain teach us many profound lessons about humanity, morality, and courage. One of my personal favorites is The Damned Human Race, a collection of essays and topical writings, mainly and most eloquently concerned with the themes of American civilization and social justice. In his wisdom, Twain talks about the behaviors of dogs, cats, birds, and many other animals and then draws comparisons to human beings. He also draws the distinction in morals between these animals and humans in his witty, humorous style. Mark Twain’s underlying message is that from birth, animals all understand and assume their natural role in life. Humans on the other hand possess intellectual capacity at birth but are totally unaware of their natural role in life. Humans spend their entire lifetime searching for who they are, who they want to become, and how to evolve this potential into a higher role in life. Mark Twain’s wisdom is timeless; therefore, it provides one of many elements of the different kinds of talent development needed today and into the future.
In a Lean Business System this journey is a partnership. One thing with a Lean Business System that must be avoided at all costs is when practitioners and associates gain a defined set of improvement skills and then live out the same routine. If improvement is continuous, then talent development also needs to be continuous. The approach to professional development in our reference model is to become more holistic and driven by business requirements and cultural development needs. The interpretation of Twain’s message is that one trains animals because that is what works for animals. One must continuously educate, mentor, and develop the talent, the intellectual capacity, and full potential of people. It is both a moral responsibility and a business requirement to fully develop the intellectual capacity and talent in organizations so that the collective entity reaches new levels of achievement and superior performance over and over again. All organizations are entitled to and must make a profit. The largest opportunity to become best in class is through behavioral alignment, talent development, and cultural evolution.
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SPC: statistical process control
IE: industrial engineering
OR: operations research
MTM: methods time measurement
MODAPTS: modular arrangement of predetermined time standards
SIS: short interval scheduling (a pull and TOC approach)
QCC: quality control circle
TQM: total quality management
PDCA: (Deming’s) plan-do-check-act cycle
little mrp: material requirements planning
MRPII: manufacturing resource planning
ERP: enterprise resource planning
CEDAC: cause and effects with the addition of cards
GT: group technology
QFD: quality function deployment
TPM: total preventive maintenance
SMED: single minute exchange of die
TOC: theory of constraints
JIT: just in time
PACE: product and cycle time excellence
ME: manufacturing excellence
WCM: world-class manufacturing
QRM: quick response manufacturing
SCOR: supply chain operations reference model
ECR: efficient customer response
BPI: business process improvement
BPR: business process reengineering
BPM: business process management
TPS: Toyota Production System
5S: short-straighten-shine-standardize-sustain
ABC: activity-based costing
4Ms: man-machine-material-methods
3Ms: muda mura muri
OEE: overall equipment effectiveness
TRIZ: theory of inventive problem solving
DMAIC: define-measure-analyze-improve-control
Burton, T. T., and Boeder, S. M. 2003. The Lean Extended Enterprise: Moving Beyond the Four Walls to Value Stream Excellence. J. Ross Publishing, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Twain, Mark, 1962. The Damned Human Race. Hill & Wang Publishing, New York. Originally published in 1905.
