Lean Supply Chain and Logistics Management, page 17
Case Studies
Case studies are useful in showing trainees things that may happen in the workplace and allow them to develop and use “critical thinking” skills, as well as develop teamwork skills. It is not only a useful tool in the university setting, but also in the workplace as it allows the trainees, while guided by a facilitator, to see how other companies deal with business issues like theirs and then transfer some of that thinking to their own workplace.
Role Playing
Role play involves trainees acting out characters that are assigned to them in a specific scenario. The idea is to focus on responses of participants and how to deal with different situations. This can be especially useful and fun when doing simulation training games.
Behavioral Modeling
Finally (and probably least used) is behavioral modeling, in which trainees are presented with a model with specific behaviors that they attempt to repeat. This works better for learning skills and behavior more than information or facts.
Group-Building Methods
Group-building methods are used to improve team or group effectiveness. The trainees share ideas and experiences, build a group identity, and grow to understand their teammates’ strengths and weaknesses.
There are a number of group-building methods. There are more adventure-type methods, such as Outward Bound, where the team goes through wilderness or outdoor training to develop teamwork and leadership skills. These methods are especially effective for improving problem-solving and conflict-management skills. The key to this type of training is a wrap-up at the end, where the results and how to apply them in the workplace are discussed.
Team Training
Team training, discussed in Chap. 10, involves getting the members to work together to reach a common goal. The optimal result of teamwork is that members learn to identify and resolve issues together. In order to be successful, the team members must be properly trained and supported by management.
Action Learning
In action learning, the team or group works together on a real issue or problem and creates an action plan to resolve it. This type of group method can be used to make changes to processes, improve use of technology, or improve customer satisfaction for example.
Selecting the Training Delivery Method
In order to determine which method is right for your company, you need to decide what type of outcome you want and, based upon that, decide which method(s) better supports that desired outcome and at what cost. Once you have that information, you can develop a training plan to support your training needs.
Consultants
While we all know the saying about consultants “borrowing your watch to tell you what time it is,” we also know that they can contribute to change (sometimes radical) to a business. Most of the successful consultants these days try to get their clients heavily involved in the process in order to ensure success. If employees do not feel like they were involved and listened to, they will tend to not follow the recommendations of the consultant. Many consultants will try to get consensus by having validation of findings with executives, followed by workshops with key employees to both confirm findings and build support for implementation.
If a consultant expects to be around for the long haul, he or she will still need to do some training and facilitation of events as well. Of course, it is important to have management support (e.g., steering committee) and the assignment of Lean champions, a kaizen agenda, etc.
A consultant can help to solidify the opportunities, put together a rough plan, and identify the potential payoff. To really make things happen, and stick, you need your people trained and involved in the change process.
Training: Key Management Team (Seminars, Certifications, etc.)
There will need to be some level of experienced leadership with Lean to be successful. As Lean is relatively new to SCM, there are not that many people who have experienced it in this area. For the most part, a company will need to develop its leaders, or agents of change, on their own (or use employees with Lean Manufacturing experience to help in the process). The best path in this case is to select and develop key employees in your supply chain and logistics functions via external training (or possibly use external trainers brought in-house) for very specific training that can, in some cases, lead to some kind of certification or educational credit. There are many programs available by traditional methods (attending outside training programs and seminars) as well as via the Web.
As an introduction, there are many off-site (and on-site) seminars for a variety of Lean training in manufacturing, distribution, and services. These are typically good starting points to get everyone to a basic understanding of Lean concepts and can be offered to the entire company in some cases (e.g., introduction to Lean).
To truly move things forward, it can help to have key employees take courses that may involve a certification process having levels of accomplishment, such as a “green belt, black belt, etc.” in Lean, Six Sigma or even Lean Six Sigma. One of the most well known is www.villanovau.com, which is a more traditional university offering various levels of Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma certification programs. Just do a search online for “Lean training” or “Lean certification,” and you will find an almost endless list of possibilities.
Once these key employees have been trained they can work with the executive team to establish training and kaizen event schedules for the company’s SCM function.
Training: General Workforce
Just look up “workforce training grants” for your state on a Web browser, and you will find that most states have some kind of grant program for free training (typically, you will still need to pay your workers while in training). The purpose of these types of grants are to improve the skills and knowledge of the workforce and at the same time help goods and service companies to grow and prosper so that they hire more people in your state. It is really one of the best things a state can do to help businesses survive in today’s competitive environment.
Most of these programs use trainers and consultants from the private sector to deliver the “free” training, but in many cases also allow for OJT delivered by qualified company employees. The grant application process and deciding which training to include can sometimes be more challenging than the actual training itself. To help with this, in many cases, there are nonprofit and for-profit companies that will assist with the grant application and management process (beware: some, but not all, of them will charge for this service).
From my experience, doing Lean training via a grant can have various outcomes. Many business owners look at this as free training and do not really have a plan to implement it. This is a big mistake and usually results in some temporary improvements but no long-term results. The management must, of course, commit to Lean transformation as mentioned earlier in the book, but also develop a plan for its successful implementation and assign responsibility for its results.
So while the trainer is both a trainer and facilitator, the company is responsible to make sure that the proper people are involved and responsible with clear goals and objectives for outcomes.
In the area of Lean SCM, especially in the retail distribution side, I have noticed that there is such an emphasis on productivity (cases per hour for example), that there is little time available for training for operators. It is critical that time is allocated in the annual budgeting process for training of this type, otherwise you will end up training small groups of people for very short bursts, which is not very effective for the long term. Again, from my experience doing Lean in the warehouse/distribution environment, it seems that very little time had been put in the annual budget for training purposes, especially training of this nature.
Obviously, you can bring in outside trainers on a self-pay basis, instead of using some kind of workforce training grant as they are not hard to find (type “Lean trainers” on any search engine). The advantage of this method is that you can have more control over the content and do not have to worry about minimum class-size, number of training hours and other restrictions that may be required by your state.
Training: Tools and Tips
Having attended a fair number of courses and seminars on presentation skills over the years has been a great help to me when teaching and training both in a university and in a business setting. One of the important things that you discover is that people learn through a variety of their senses—visual, auditory, and touch or feel. Most people learn best through a combination of all three but depending on a combination of things like education level, interest, and job requirements, the balance may vary.
Games
If you are training an executive group, you may be okay with mostly visual presentations (e.g., slide shows and some video examples). If you are working with front-line operators, who are hands-on types of people, then you will need to either have some training simulation games or actually go out into the workplace and implement change.
When you are doing an introductory-type course, it may not be possible to actually go out on the floor, so you are best suited to using a Lean simulation game. If time is limited, then something like the “paper airplane” simulation may be good enough as well as cost-effective and a great team-building exercise (e.g., flow simulation found at www.enna.com). In many cases, it may be best (especially with operations people) to use a more specific type of training simulation tool, such as the one that I specifically developed for Lean supply chain and logistics management (http://www.enna.com/lean_supplychain/).
The train-do method is very effective as it uses a combination of classroom and “on the floor” training allowing for a blended mix of visual, auditory, and touch types of learning.
Handouts and Forms
It is also helpful to never give handouts to the audience before the presentation. If you do, they tend to look down and read it while you are talking, which can distract from the learning process. You can always make handouts available to them afterwards as the handouts may include another learning tool, forms, which may be needed for the hands-on part of the training.
There are many types of forms in Lean including those used for:
Planning—team charter and value stream map implementation plan
Gathering data—VSM data collection form, checklists, activity and process charts
Assessing the current state of an area—Lean opportunity assessment and 5S audits
Language Barriers
A challenge that is becoming more common these days is the barrier of language. In both manufacturing and supply chain and logistics in the United States, we find a variety of languages spoken other than English, primarily Spanish. Unless the trainer is bilingual, it is best to find someone in the audience who is bilingual and can act as a translator of sorts. It is also helpful to be able to have your handouts available in Spanish. If that is not the case, there are some Lean videos (especially on the subject of introduction to Lean and 5S) and handbooks available in Spanish (e.g., The Lean Manufacturing Handbook by Kenneth W. Dailey found at www.amazon.com).
In many cases, companies have a fairly large part-time workforce, which again, may be made up of many foreign language-speaking people (in the United States, Spanish is most common, of course), and detailed training may not be feasible or practical in this case. The use of the previously mentioned videos as a kind of orientation for new hires and temporary employees is helpful. The other thing you can do in this type of situation is to have plenty of standardized work, such as laminated job instructions (in English and Spanish), as well as a very visual workplace right down to marked floor assignments to make sure that work is easily understood and followed.
All of the mentioned tools and methods must be explored in order to make sure that everyone is properly trained and involved in the Lean transformation process. It may vary in each company based upon that company’s specific goals and objectives.
Measuring Success
From the pure training perspective, it is always useful to survey the participants in terms of the course and trainer. I have also had clients ask that participants be tested in order to make sure that there was a clear understanding of the concepts and applications, which is not a bad idea. You can use standard quizzes or, for more fun, make a game of it. There is a Lean Jeopardy game available on www.amazon.com as well as www.theleanstore.com, which can be modified to meet your particular needs (e.g., manufacturing, office, or supply chain), as it is in slide show format. Playing a game such as this is fun and a great way to reinforce participant learning and retention.
The benefit of the train-do method is that no matter which method or methods you use for the classroom training, you still end up applying the concepts out on the shop floor to reinforce the classroom learning and get real results with greater enthusiasm through team-building exercises like simulations and games.
Employee training (and how you go about it) is one of the keys to success in your Lean journey. It shouldn’t be taken lightly and should always be part of an ongoing process, not just a onetime occurrence.
In our final chapter, we will examine the future of Lean in supply chain and logistics management in terms of people, process, and technology.
CHAPTER 16
Future Thoughts: Lean Times Ahead
The future of supply chain and logistics management as a discipline and a career is bright with ever-shortening product life cycles, continued outsourcing, growth of supply chain technology, ongoing economic challenges, and the consumer need for everything “now.” However, in order to continuously improve the process by applying the Lean concepts and tools that we have discussed in this book, many things need to happen.
Lessons Learned
Some good Lean SCM lessons can be learned from the supply chain management leader’s feedback in the SCMR 2007 Review discussed in Chap. 13. [www.scmr.com, 2007] Among them are:
Try to make SCM an integral part of the overall business strategy.
Put someone high level in charge of your supply chain, for example, a chief supply chain officer (CSCO) reporting to the CEO, to ensure top-down support.
Take down any remaining bottlenecks that are hindering your supply chain advancement (both literally using VSM and figuratively by changing the culture).
Intensify the focus on customer needs. Move your system from push to pull and eventually to on-demand, if possible.
Use S&OP to better match supply with demand and reduce reliance on forecasts and their inherent uncertainty.
Establish economic targets for supply chain improvement that match corporate goals and objectives.
Create a plan for developing and including trusted business allies in building the innovative supply chain model—and share the risk.
Barriers to Supply Chain Integration
In his APICs Magazine article “The Chain of Alignment,” John van Veen points out that “current literature focuses on five types of barriers to effective supply chain integration: technological, relationship, structure, human resource and alignment.” [van Veen, 2011] Those same barriers can also apply to the successful effort for a “leaner” supply chain and logistics function.
Let’s discuss some thoughts on what needs to happen on a going-forward basis within each of those categories.
Human Resources
Perhaps foremost is having capable people needed to support the function and the never ending mission to identify and eliminate waste. In the years since graduating from The Pennsylvania State University with a degree in business logistics (now “supply chain and information systems”), many other schools have added a SCM major. It is important, of course, to continue to refine the programs and make sure that students attain some level of education in Lean within the SCM context. Some universities now offer online Lean and/or Six Sigma training and certification (e.g., Villanova University offers an online Lean Six Sigma certification program). Others, such as The Penn State offer shorter executive programs, such as “Applying Lean Principles across the Supply Chain.”
It is also important for companies to provide education and training “on the job” in terms of using Lean tools for continuous improvement. Some states, such as New Jersey, offer state-funded workforce training. Whether it’ is supported internally or externally, it needs to happen.
In the article “Taking a Global Approach to Education,” Brigit McCrea, points to a 2010 survey by The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business of domestic and international supply chain executives found that executives are looking for “not only excellent tacticians that are good with numbers, but also are skilled at offering and executing solutions in a fast-paced, international environment. Soft skills, including those centered on communication and presentation, are also in high demand, as is the ability to function in a team atmosphere.” [McCrea, 2011]
Structure
As we mentioned earlier, it is very important to have a high-level position, such as a chief supply chain officer (CSCO), give visibility to the importance of both SCM and its efficiency.
