![]() And, that keeping a leveled load helps people make it through the day (or conversely, the way many managers overload people and then have them wait idly is massively discouraging). Firstly, it makes sense to think that workload management is key to employee satisfaction. This is surprising but consistent with other learning theories. In the lean theory, employee satisfaction derives from heijunka (leveling, fractioning, mixing) to avoid variations in workload and overburden, standards so that there is a known way to do repeatable work, and kaizen to get involved with studying waste and looking for new ways of working. The next layer of the theory is that, on the basis of the mutual trust created by basic stability, customer satisfaction derives from employee satisfaction. Mutual trust between management and employees is a function of doing the following things well: 5S, problem solving, and enabling TPM. ![]() They privileged ownership of one’s workspace, autonomy in problem solving, and having enabling processes that work without second guessing. ![]() ![]() But the engineers who formulated the TPS house made a stark choice in where to look for mutual trust. I’m not discussing whether this is actually the case, and whether other variables should not be taken into consideration, such as hiring, training, commitment to values and so on and so forth – obviously they are important as well. These activities create the basic stability that teams need to work confidently. The function, the model, is that if employees are supported in taking control of their own workplace through 5S, if they are constantly developed in being more autonomous in problem solving – and thus more confident in their ability (and the company’s) to do so – and if, finally, all equipment works when needed and is available because management has set the enabling systems in place to make it so, then employees feel confident they can succeed in doing their job because management is doing its part. This output is achieved concretely by 1) 5S, 2) Problem Solving and 3) Total Productive Maintenance ( TPM). The logic is consistent with other research, and postulates that if you improve safety for both customer and employees, quality, delivery lead-time, cost, energy performance and connectivity, you’ll increase customer satisfaction.Īccording to this model, the basis for reaching customer satisfaction is… mutual trust between management and employees. I doubt we could ever go into the mathematics of it, but if you collate the various versions of the TPS house, the model is surprisingly clear.įirst, customer satisfaction is a function of safety, quality, delivery (through flexibility), cost, and more lately energy performance and connectivity. Toyota’s basic strategic assumption is “one time customer, lifelong customer” – the idea is that if you never lose a customer when they renew their purchase, you can build a stable, sustainable, profitable growth.īut how does that work? Ideally, a model should be expressed in the form Y= f(X1, X2, X3.), with a clear output (Y), various inputs (X1, X2, X3) and a function f, a mechanism that explains the causality. The Toyota Production System, really, is a concrete theory about how to satisfy customers so that they remain customers, and give us enough of their hard-earned cash so that we may live if we manage to keep our costs down by eliminating our own wasteful activities. So, although we don’t know all the answers, and all we have are temporary and local countermeasures, we have a way to look for better responses. But, if we seek to better formulate problems and study countermeasures and their results with the people doing the job themselves, we must understand problems more deeply, and discover hitherto unthought of ways of doing things and improving work, with the people themselves. All we have is countermeasures for problems as we understand them. The starting point of lean thinking sets the bar rather high: the CEO has to accept that although they know a lot (and I mean a lot) of things about their business, the correct answers to key, competitive problems remain unknown. Which begs the question: what is the theory of lean? How does it actually work? And why always go back to the TPS rather than a simpler version of lean thinking? I generally explain that what we mostly do is discuss the business current state, then draw the Toyota Production System(TPS) “house,” then go to the gemba to see what we get right and what we don’t, and observe new problems appear and then discuss with the people how they see things, what they think about the problems and what they could do about it. The CEOs I work with are curious about lean in the first place. People often ask me: how does one get CEOs to adopt lean? I honestly don’t know.
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