VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [140]
“But we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” Wayne argued. “After all, we – or I should say, the company – has made the investment. Why not capitalize on it?”
“The employees at Oakton, I have to say,” said Murphy, “love Lean. It helps them feel more in control, empowered, engaged – whatever the current buzzword. They like it.”
“In Rockville,” said Sarah, “it’s the same way. The trouble in Maryland is that a small contingent – the Lean Greenies, who have idealistic and wonderful reasons that I personally sympathize with – was allowed to hijack the LSS program. Before it got off track, LSS was doing at least a few things of real value… . Well, actually, no, I take that back. Or maybe I don’t.”
“Make up your mind,” said Elaine.
“The standardization of report formats,” said Sarah. “That was worthwhile. But did it increase throughput for the business? Did it reduce our project backlog – which for us is our inventory – or lower our expenses? Not significantly, if at all. There were – and are – too many other factors that outweigh that little improvement.”
“Like the analysts,” said Murphy.
“Here is what I feel did not work with Lean Six Sigma,” said Amy, “and what I do not want to revisit: the ‘N over ten’ ratio of activities that we are supposed to have going on to bring on the Lean culture. The obsessive-compulsive need to have the orthodox proportion of black belts to green belts – and the long list of LSS projects that we are supposed to have going to certify people as having Lean and Six Sigma training. And, above all, trying to make reality fit Lean, rather than the other way around.”
Wayne, who had been taking in all of this with a sober and poker face, now said, “I understand what you’re saying, and I agree with most of it. But don’t you remember the fourth round of the dice game that Tom Dawson showed us? In the fourth round, we simulated what would happen if we elevated the performance of the constraint, and that was when we got our best numbers.”
Amy shifted her gaze to Murphy, as if to coax a comment from him.
“The main reason we halted LSS at Oakton,” he said, “was because we needed to stabilize the production system. Until you have a stable system, it makes no point to try to improve it. But we are now very close to having that stability, and I think that as soon as we put in place the things we were talking about today, we will have achieved it. And that will be the time to start improving what we have with Lean and Six Sigma and any other means at our disposal.”
Pursing her lips as she considered this, Amy then said, “So much depends upon the choice of what to improve. Where do we focus? What are we going to change? What are we going to change to? How do we identify the changes that truly will accelerate the velocity of the business?”
“Logically, the place to focus would be the constraint,” said Wayne.
“The performance of the constraint,” Murphy emphasized, “and the system overall. It’s the flow that matters – the flow to, through, and away from the constraint. If you just keep improving the constraint, then it’s no longer a constraint, and you’ve lost your control point. And you’ve probably got a bottleneck somewhere else where you don’t want it.”
“Okay, I get your point,” said Wayne. “But as far as evaluating improvement candidates, we have to take into account their effect on the constraint. It could be a quality issue upstream from Godzilla that affects the overall performance – like the cracking problem in the Navy components.”
“Absolutely,” said Murphy.
“Throughput, investment, inventory, and operating expense,” said Amy. “What if we evaluated all proposed improvements based on how they influence those measurements? Instead of evaluating based on waste elimination or doing something just because it seems like a good thing to do, we choose the improvements that really are going to accelerate the velocity