work, not everyone understands it well.
Kaizen involves small, cross-functional
teams of employees, and perhaps an outsider or two, who are empowered to
tackle a problem and make improvements in the business, usually in one
week. The team receives several hours of
training in the principles of Lean manufacturing, and then turns its full attention to solving a problem and fixing
it—immediately.
The real result of using kaizen teams—
even more important than discovering
why the cottage cheese dispenser is spraying small curds on the wall—is that operators, engineers and supervisors all begin
to own the process. They look for ways to
improve. It becomes a way of life.
Those employees who let the cottage
cheese fly weren’t bad people. They had
gotten used to seeing stuff fall on the
floor. They knew it was the job of a
cleaning crew to pick it up eventually.
In a truly Lean factory, every employee sees “food on the floor” as an abnormality that must be addressed. A
spotless environment should be the
norm. It’s what the consumer expects.
And they are starting to look carefully,
which is another reason to use Lean
principles and kaizen teams, to improve
yield—an immediate driver of bottom-
line improvement. Lean companies
often utilize the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control)
process to make significant improvements in raw-material utilization. Often,
food and beverage manufacturers collect
and archive mountains of process data
but do not analyze them or use them to
improve their processes. By effectively
applying the DMAIC process and Six
Sigma tools, significant financial
benefits—often 1–2% of annual sales—
can be realized through improvements
in yield.
Not long ago, I was asked to perform
a statistical analysis of the yield loss in a
Getting Started
The best solution to any problem is best derived from understanding the root cause. There’s nothing worse than
spending a lot of time developing a solution only to learn
that you fixed the wrong thing. In Lean we have a term, go
to Gemba. Literally translated, it means go to the source.
Don’t assign it to someone else. Go see for yourself.
If you’re looking for a place to start, go to Gemba and
find at least one occurrence of each of the seven wastes.
Each waste consumes costly resources that can affect
safety, cash flow and profitability.
The seven wastes of any process include the following:
• Defective parts: These consume resources and increase the cost of finished goods. They are wasteful because they consume time and material used to produce
something you can neither use nor sell. Not only have
you wasted time and materials, but you must now inspect, rework, repair and rebuild. Defects result in scrap,
rework and returns.
• Inventory: Once we overproduce, inventory must be
stored in the warehouse, retrieved for shipping, people
must move it and computers must count it. This consumes valuable cash that could be otherwise deployed
for more productive means.
• Motion: Excess motion is a wasteful activity—
consuming time and resources that are not value added and/or
causing harm to an operator due to poor ergonomic
conditions.
• Overprocessing: This occurs when you make a product
or service better than the customer wants it or is willing
to pay for it. This type of waste may mean that you are
giving away valuable products and/or consuming time
and energy that could be spent on other products required to meet customer demand.
• Transportation: This involves excessively moving the
product or material through the workplace—risking
damage or delays and utilizing non-value-added resources to move items from one location to the next.
• Waiting: This involves any delay between one activity
and the next. Machines, materials and people end up
waiting, thus causing excess labor costs or delays in
meeting customer demand requirements.
While the improvement priorities are specific to each
site, the places to go hunting for waste are very consistent.
When food safety is involved, the best plan of attack is to
start with the manufacturing activities that are most likely to
affect the end-user. You can start by observing the sanitation cycle. While it may be difficult to see defects in the
sanitation process, keep in mind that defects in quality or
safety can be your most egregious waste. Why? Because
quality and safety defects can affect your customers—
either retailers who sell your product or the consumers who
eat or drink what you manufacture.
Focus on areas that are difficult to clean and therefore
less likely to be thoroughly clean. One example is a food
manufacturer who detected an odor in its finished products. While the odor had no impact on the quality of the
food for consumption, it was unpleasant and therefore unacceptable to the customer. It was imperative for the kaizen
team to quickly identify the root cause, eliminate the problem and sustain the results. Repetitive sanitization of the
food processing equipment was not the solution. By digging deeper, the team identified equipment design as the
root cause. Instead of rounded corners that are easy to
wash and sanitize, the metal equipment had squared corners that twisted and turned—making it virtually impossible
to thoroughly sanitize the deep crevices inside the processing equipment. A quick modification corrected the problem
and allowed the team to get back on track. Standard work
was established for equipment design and sanitization, and
the problem was permanently eradicated.
These key steps are part of a process we call PDCA or
Plan, Do, Check and Act. It is a simple process that is effective in creating sustainable change. Create a plan of attack, execute the plan, check your results and take action.
This cycle never ends. Lean companies that effectively deploy the PDCA approach are among the best at solving
problems and sustaining results. If you’re a food manufacturer, that means you’ll proactively identify issues, fix them
and keep them from happening again and again—
ultimately improving quality and safety.
