Toyota guru helps a large enterprise.

How does a Toyota guru (i.e. Toyota manufacturing top executive) help a large enterprise to achieve its NEW goals?

1. First, a good dialogue over 2 days with the each of the enterprise's top 5 executives: on many subjects, a few of those subjects would include the 6 below:




2. Historically what are the Plans and achievements so far to date? How well is "Management By Objectives" (MBO) practiced over here?




3. What is the current level of understanding of (Dr.Deming's PDCA) Plan, Do, Check (and reflect), Act-Adjust? Reviews of progress are formal (written) or informal and at what frequency- weekly?, monthly?




4. Are all the 12 Corporate Base Elements being covered? Please see my earlier blog posts for QCDSMPTEFGIR. Q= Quality, C = Cost, D=Delivery, S=Safety, and so on.




5. How to describe "the culture of improvement" in this place(s).




6. What are the ''dynamics'', or driving forces, that exist to get new goals accomplished? Are these within the "culture" or the character of the leader?




7. What are the biggest roadblocks?




8. Secondly, the guru shall a) define their "management system" and present culture, and b) find THE NEW necessary amendment to that "management system".




9. This amendment takes the existing system and shoulders it with The Toyota Way (i.e. Lean Management Way).




10. A healthy understanding of this change is next. The 5 top executives wring out this change amongst themselves with the help of the guru.




11. Some questions amongst themselves will be "Are we prepared to make a change ourselves?" "How do we do this in bite-sized increments?" "Let's be sure we keep it simple!" "Which tools and techniques are we ready to deploy now?, and later?




12. Thirdly, a more widespread basic training begins for the Top Management levels. This can produce more fine tuning to the management system amendments as the guru and the Top-5 listen to the other executives and work to get it right for the entire enterprise.




13. Culture change will be evident and will need to be addressed as a major objective itself.




14. Fourthly, Plan the management system change implementation. Keep it simple!




15. Benefits: The Toyota Way management system gets objectives DONE.




16. More on that at http://www.mma.ca/

Thanks for reading,

Mike Davis; mike@mma.ca

Today's post promotes Dr.Deming's Management Cycle

PDCA is a fundamental base and principle of the Hoshin Planning & Control System. The PDCA Cycle is essentially a definer of what means "Management". Let me explain these 4 components:

P: --------------------------------------------------------------------
PLAN .. includes a number of things in the PDCA cycle:

• WHICH: The target area, say Quality, and it's subset of say 2 targets: Examples: Customer Rejects; Internal rejects.
• HOW MUCH: Each target's measurement basis and it's numbers: Example: PPM (bad parts per million good ones)
• WHY: = my target here is tied back to which major policy* of the company as a whole. (*policy- another discusion to come)
• REFLECTION: Analysis of how we ''managed'' last year; how did our PDCA go?
• 8-D: Analysis of the problem today (This can use Quality Control Analysis techniques/ tools)
• WHAT: This year's BOLD OBJECTIVE : target number(s) From 100 To 50 PPM
• HOW: Activities defined which we plan this year in order to succeed/ improve and meet the stated target. Say 2 or 3 and sometimes 5 or 6 activites. One of these may be very broad like acquire ISO/ AS9000 and such.
• WHO: will help me (I am the cross-functional leader). From which professional & functional disciplines.
• WHEN: the due date for completion of this particular stated activity and the frequency of PDCA follow-up/ formal review. (Project management techniques will aid this endeavour)

D: -------------------------------------------------------------------

DO .. means we get the activities and sub-activities and tasks etc etc done (via our cross-functional teams) within a short period of time before the next review.

• Mike's real experiences says review cycles should be monthly.

C: --------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHECK .. means that this is a control system. We check daily; and formally we review monthly.

• We measure the output and compare it to the plan (i.e. like a servo-mechanism or 'system')
• Post the today's numbers and compare to the target.
• Post the % done for each activity and compare to the % expected by this point in time.
• Evaluate our performance as good, so-so, poor
• Tip: use a circle: O for good, /// for so-so, X for poor, XX if even worse than last year !

A: ------------------------------------------------------------------------

ACT .. (( may be better understood as ADJUST )) means that we take action to get back on target.

• First step here is we REFLECT deeply on how/ why etc we came up short.
• 8-D further analysis of the problem
• Decide next steps/ activities re-energized that will get us back on track.

Keep this cycle going for ever and ever amen.

OK that's it for me this morning,

Please post a comment and let me know your thoughts and such.

:) Mike Davis ex-Toyota subsidiary VP.