ASSESS: Listen to the Voice of the Customer
This is a phase where we can help you find your direction towards your True North Goals and establish a roadmap for success!
Many companies embark on the Lean journey by focusing on fundamentals like 5S, Visual management and a few kaizen events and with good success. While this could be a good approach to get the engagement and visibility across the organization, sustaining the momentum will be a challenge, unless the leadership in the company makes a firm commitment to use Lean as a strategic weapon for long-term and sustained transformation.
Many times, personally, in our experience, we have seen companies often ‘search’ for the next project to undertake as they need to fulfill a corporate directive of conducting a minimum number of kaizen events. Such companies practice what we called as ‘fake’ Lean; doing lean for the sake of it.
The only way a forward-looking organization can avoid such a trap is by achieving the clarity of purpose driven by leadership and adopted by all across the organization. In this phase, we would like to help you achieve precisely that.
With a successful AWAKEN phase, where the employees not only understand the Lean fundamentals/relevant digital technologies but also have a taste of what success would look like with the pilot study of a selected Value stream, an organization would be typically motivated and ready for an enterprise-wide adoption of Lean approach and transformation.
An activity that involves closely working with the company leadership to define the True North Goals, typically for the next 3-year horizon. This activity could also be tailor-made, depending on the company, to have a cross-functional session in which a SWOT analysis can be performed to aid in establishing the True North goals. This activity will typically mean a 1-day session with the team that the senior leadership identifies.
At a high level, a Hoshin X-Matrix is a tool that expands the true north goals to specific initiatives, Kaizen projects, metrics, owners. In essence, it connects the True North goals to specific Kaizen focus areas that the company needs to embark for the defined horizon. Working with the company leadership, we help facilitate the creation of this matrix, which is an important element to provide the required clarity of purpose to the organization.
An A3 plan is the next logical activity that translates the high-level initiatives to specific PDCA(Plan-Do-Check-Adjust) plans on an A3 size paper. It clearly defines the Why, What, How along with the risks/contingency actions that need to be addressed to meet the desired goals for that initiative. In this activity, we will help your team come up with the individual A3s and help ‘sharpen the pencil’ to focus on the ‘vital few’ essentials required for translating strategy into execution.
We will send a questionnaire to the client upon business award. The client would send the completed questionnaire, preferably, 2 weeks before the start of the work. This will help us to understand (a) details of the business, (b) unique challenges and (c) the current exposure/maturity of Lean understanding within the organization.
Note: An NDA would be signed upfront, the timing of which could be during the initial consultation visit.