Interview With Rick Malik

Using an assessment to create the “pull” for Lean within your organization

Q: Our readers have heard a lot about Lean. But what does it take to get the ball rolling? What steps do you take when you want to move forward?

A: The first step is to educate your senior management and develop internal support. You want to create a “pull” for this change at all levels. Your next step is to create a business case for moving forward.

Q: And how do you do that?

A: The best approach is to assess your operation using Lean tools. You can’t deploy Lean everywhere, so you want to determine what is your best first project. Where can you start to create an initial success? Typically, we conduct a Lean assessment in the area where you do 80% of your business, or where 80% of your volume or cost is. The goal is to identify what types of waste are present in the environment and to determine what will give you the most gain in a relatively short time.

Q: Isn’t this already the beginning of the Lean project?

A: We haven’t signed a contract yet. This is a preliminary step that lets you say, "Here is the project scope, here is what it would cost to implement Lean for that project, and here’s what the potential gains might be in terms of cost savings, cost avoidance, revenue generation, inventory reduction and space savings." This is really the first step in an organization’s cultural change: starting with data-driven project selection.

Q: How long does an assessment take?

A: It’s typically a two-day on-site process, followed by a week off-site, putting all the information together. Once that’s completed, we come back and present the results to senior management. This shows them where they are today and where they could be after we implement Lean.

Q: Wouldn’t it be enough just to make a rough estimate?

A: We’ve learned from experience that you can talk to a small operation and think that this will be a simple, 12-week project. But then you get on-site and find that it’s an old facility. It needs more structural change than you may have thought. You have to get into the environment and look at it from a Lean perspective to understand how much time it will take to reach a successful outcome.

You also want to take the time to learn what the drivers are in the organization. You want to insure that your project will achieve outcomes that drive those business metrics the organization is really concerned about.

Excerpted from the Fall 2005 issue of PEx Advantage, our newsletter