This is an excerpt from the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable. You can get the whole book on Amazon here and enjoy your own copy.
Go to the Gemba
Now that we know what brings our customer value from chapter one, we can use the following tools to map out the process of creating that value so everyone can see it clearly and use it to move forward. For this reason, the Lean Enterprise Institute calls this step “Map”, and a good map will also reveal opportunities, problems and “waste” (3.1) in a process. We will go through all of these in this chapter.
We also started this book by saying that most businesses don’t have an existing standard, repeatable process for their work. Mapping the process is an easy way to articulate the current way of working, to use as a makeshift standard process before you start improving it. After all, you can’t improve something you don’t have.
First, in order for us to truly know a process we have to go to where the work is done. In Lean this is called going to the “Gemba”, and Gemba is the Japanese word for “Actual Place”.
In a Lean transformation, getting reports on a situation or hearing it from someone else (like a team-mate or a manager reporting to you) is not good enough. To find out the true situation we must go and experience it first-hand, preferably every day.
This could mean:
- Walking the Gemba (going directly to where the work is done), spending time with the people and asking questions or mapping the process as you go.
- Involving people from the front lines in a Kaizen Event (2.2) as you map a process and get to the root cause of problems, and;
- To a lesser degree, using an LCA Board (5.2) to track metrics of front-line processes.
But it doesn’t just mean going to where the work is done. It also means that we “go and see” as soon as a problem occurs, so we can get our team-mates’ consensus on what the problem might be before we try and solve it. While this may seem like more work initially, it will save you many hours of wasted effort in the future as a problem gets older or becomes embedded in the workplace culture.
If you are an employee like Lisa, you will already be very familiar with your process, and this book will give you a great way to visualise problems and the tools you need to solve them. If you are a manager or an owner like Steve, you may be more removed from the front-line process during the course of your daily work, which is another reason why learning to regularly go to the Gemba to see and experience for yourself is worth many times its weight in gold.
If you are not sure of a problem, or even a solution, nothing can replace the experience of actually going to where the work is done.
This is an excerpt from the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable. You can get the whole book on Amazon here and enjoy your own copy.
Selected chapters from the story within Five minute Lean:
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Makes a Change
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Discovers a New Way
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Performs a Balancing Act
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Pulls the Trigger
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Sets a New Standard
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Becomes a Leader
Check out these selected chapters from the teachings within Five Minute Lean:
- Five Minute Lean – Introduction
- Five Minute Lean – Implement With Agile for Fast Iterations and Feedback
- Five Minute Lean – Create a New Standard Procedure and Checklist for Quality Control
- Five Minute Lean – Gather Direct Feedback and Indirect Feedback
- Five Minute Lean – Eliminate the Eight Wastes to Improve Flow
- Five Minute Lean – Use Kaizen and Kaizen Events to Help Stakeholder Buy-In
- Five Minute Lean – Create a Future State Value Stream Map
- Five Minute Lean – Go to the Gemba
- Five Minute Lean – Add Important Data to Your Map
- Five Minute Lean – Create a Pull System with FIFO, Kanban Triggers and Visual Management
- Five Minute Lean – Build in Quality with Error-Proofing and Autonomation
- The Five Minute Catch-up
- Five Minute Lean – Heijunka: Level the Workload when Demand Fluctuates
- Five Minute Lean – Present and Manage Your Change Using an A3 and LCA
- Five Minute Lean – The Power of Incentives – What is Measured and Rewarded Improves
- Five Minute Lean – Use Pareto to Find Where to Start
- Five Minute Lean – Put it Together With Design for Ease of Use
- Five Minute Lean – Value is Determined by the Customer
- Five Minute Lean – Make Feedback Meaningful with Kano Analysis
- Five Minute Lean Summary