Week 1: 09/03-09/07 – Look for the Waste of Defects

Muda Walk for a Month
This is your first week to do a Muda Walk. The theme is the Waste of Defects. Most of the other wastes are compounded by moving, storing and installing defective products. A defect is any work that does not function as designed or intended. Defective work includes: rework, wrong installations, weld defects, punch lists, missing material on a bill of material and change orders caused by incorrect design or installation. This waste is redoing a bid proposal, recopying a report, redoing a time sheet or dealing with an out of code compliance issue. In fact, if it has a “re” at the start of the word it is probably a type of defect.  Workarounds are usually indicators of defects.

Go to the shop, office or a job site and look for signs of defects.
o      How do you know it is a defect?
o      What should it look like if done right the first time?
o      How do the workers know when it is done right?
o      Do the workers get feedback on when they have made a defect?
o      How do you get feedback about defects?
o      Look for scrap or piles of rejected material.
o      Watch for workers doing work over.
o      Ordering excess material is a symptom of poor quality.
o      Ask the workers if the part, drawing, material or install is right coming to them. How do they know?
o      Are there workarounds? If you have a project that is wrapping up look for material left over, it usually indicates defective ordering or rework.  Look at punch lists for jobs completed, what is usually found on every list?

Once you find a defect, analyze it to find the root cause. Ask the workers how to eliminate the defect. Listen and ask them what they can do to prevent errors. Let them do it. A root cause of many quality problems may be that the worker does not know how to do it right the first time or even what ‘right’ looks like. Provide training. The worker may not have the right tools to make it right consistently.  Discussing the cause of the defects with the workers, while not placing blame will help identify the root cause. There are no defects when we do it right the first time.

Go watch for Muda. Record your improvements.
Go and See – Ask Why – Show Respect – Do No Harm

My Muda Walk Story #3
Doing a Muda walk through a shop I saw this:

This is common in many shops – boxes with no labeling and other stuff on shelves with no labeling. This is a treasure hunt waiting to happen. Next I saw a worker at this table:

He was constantly searching for things - not doing much value added work.
That’s my Muda Walk story – what is yours? 

Participating in the Muda Walk for a Month is free, but YOU must sign up by Aug 28, 2012. The first week of the Muda walk will start on Sept 3, 2012.  To register, just email your request to dennis@YourQSS.com 

Muda Walk 2012

**************** The 2012 Muda Walk for a Month is Coming

The 6th Annual Muda Walk for a Month is coming this September. 

A basic principle of Lean is “Go and See”.  We all know this, but don’t practice it enough. The Muda Walk for a Month is a unique opportunity to do put “Go & See” into practice.  During September I will email participants the weekly theme to use while doing a Muda (waste) walk in their company. The walk may be at a job site, in the shop, office or even a service truck. During the walk, participants will look for ways to eliminate waste and improve operations. The Muda Walk challenge is to do a walk at least one hour a week and best if it is one hour each day.  That may sound like a hard commitment to make, but those who invested the time in past years have reaped useful rewards.  I do ask that participants log problems and improvements, and share them with me at the end of the month.

Read about Muda walks in Contractor Magazine  - http://contractormag.com/columns/sowards/muda_walk_find/index.html

This is a free service, but participants must sign up by Aug 28, 2012. The first week of the Muda walk will start on Sept 3, 2012.  To register, just email your request to dennis@YourQSS.com

Help Stamp Out Muda – Go and SEE the Waste

Muda Walk for a Month has Ended

The Muda Walk for a Month for 2011 ended Sept 30th.  Based on the feedback already received it was a great success for those who participated. Thanks for trying. This years event included participants from Canada, Russia, South Africa and the USA.

And the winners are:
Glenn Lamb of Dee Cramer, Inc. wins Lean Thinking by James Womack
Mark Kleist of Bassett Mechanical wins Gemba Kaizen by Masaaki Imai

As I compile the results from the Muda Walk logs and feedback I will post it on this blog. But just because the Muda Walk for a Month has ended does not mean we should stop doing Muda walks. Many of the participants said they plan to continue on their own because it was so valuable. It's never too late to start looking for and driving out waste. Feel free to contact me with your Lean questions and ideas.

Feedback from a Muda Walk for a Month Participant

The last couple of years we have tried to do this with just myself and my shop foreman and to be honest, we didn't do well with it, as we kept forgetting to do this or could not get the uninterrupted time to do it right. This year I have taken a different approach and it is providing real value for the effort. 

I recruited 5 key people from the shop office and production floor to be the observers and left myself out of that role (having the boss watch seems to make people nervous anyway). I shared with them what the goal was of this exercise and my counterpart from last year supported the idea, but reinforced how poorly he and I had done in the past. We then decided on our format and set up our process. I gave them some chalk (got it from you a few years ago) and we set up two circles on the fabrication floor. One in our Square production area and one in our round production area. Each team member was to spend 1/2 hour in each circle once a week. They were coached using your guidelines and asked to just write down what they observed. They could make a suggestion on their notes about a better way or a fix, but not to stop the observation until the 1/2 hour was up. 

After two weeks it was voted on by the team to move the circle in the square production area, which we did last Friday. So now we will get a new perspective for that area, which is exactly what we need. 

My thoughts when I set this up was to find a way to get the observations done with the least impact to daily activity. Also, since my foreman and I did not seem able to make the time last year, I needed people that we could just make it a part of their job for the week, no excuses. The real benefit I knew I would get (which is proving to be true) was the different perspectives by each of the people. Each of the team members is being given the weekly information that you send, we do a brief meeting on Friday to gather the notes for the week and you would enjoy the enthusiasm as we discuss the next weeks goal. 

My plan is to compile all of the observations/notes, looking for the common ones first. Then I will meet with the team to see if these are items that need addressed or not, look at any suggestions, then decide if they are simple adjustments/fixes or long term tasks. We will then put them on our agenda for our normal weekly shop lean meeting. The team has agreed that we should carry this activity on after this month is over, so we are trying to determine the format, but agree we will continue to do this. 

It has proven to be a real benefit having the people that are so busy that they do not get to just watch what is going on around them, observe. They really do see, understand the movements and are providing very good comments. Also, a couple of minor adjustments to a process or tool location were done already, by the lead person that observed the need. My only regret is that I didn't do it this way last year. Thanks  

Muda Walk for a month - Week 3: 09/19 to 09/23

The theme this week is: Reduce the Waste of Movement of people and the transportation of material & tools

This is going to be a great week – if you make it so!

Your Muda walk this week is to look for treasure hunts AKA the waste of motion.   Moving around is not work! Value is not being added while people are walking around. Watch for people looking for things; ask why and why and why again. Why is this happening? Why are the tools, equipment, forms, etc. not located closer to the work area? Or where the tools are needed?  Go to the shop or a job site at the start or end of a shift and watch for wasted motion. Watch how much time is spent in getting ready or cleaning up? How much time should be spent? Look for ways to reduce this time.  Look for workers making trips to the yard, or for people walking around the shop, or even look for when someone has to go to a hardware store to buy material or tools. Look at how often the crews run out of small supplies or consumables.  Look for tools that are missing or broken causing people to find new ones.

Look too for the Waste of transportation of goods.  This is related to treasure hunts. Any time anyone is moving material, tools or things this is waste. Unless something changes the material or product to add value while it is moving, it is waste. Ask yourself and the workers how to change or reduce the movement or the distance moved.  If you can’t change the distance moved – try changing how it is moved to make it safer, easier and faster.  Don’t blame anyone but look for systems, policies or old layouts that causes transportation waste.

Go watch for Muda. Record your improvements. Implementing visual controls and the 5S’s can help eliminate these wastes.

Go and See – Ask Why – Show Respect – Do No Harm

My Muda Walk Story #2

While walk through a job site I observed workers coming to this table looking for stuff. They would spend sometimes 10 minutes searching through the boxes.  I did not see it on this walk, but I am sure at some point soon after my walk the general contractor demanded that they move this table.  How much time do you think they would spend moving it?  This is the Muda of inventory, movement (treasure hunts) and if they have to move the table it will also be the Muda of transportation. It uses resources but produces not value -  that’s Muda.

This is my Muda Walk story – what is yours?