If my assumption is correct, then we should be a bit careful about which measurements we apply at each stage of the lean journey. As change agents, if we’re trying to change the culture of the people on the Gemba, some of the measures proposed, no matter how well-intentioned, may be counterproductive and may lead to unexpected consequences.

I am no great fan of suggestion schemes: they are usually badly designed and discourage rather than encourage. When the Japanese were being benchmarked in the 70s and 80s, one measure was the number of suggestions submitted by each employee. The company I work for (which shall remain anonymous) experienced one suggestion (I repeat one) for every 200 employees annually. This was not because we lacked experience, intelligence or imagination. You were not allowed to submit any suggestions about your own job: it was assumed that you would make these suggestions as a matter of course, even though there was no encouragement and no process to assess and implement them. You can imagine the reaction of the department which received your suggestion.

I’m also no great fan of focusing on hard savings particularly at the start of any Lean journey. “Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas”, because the easiest hard saving is showing people the door. We are still in awe of the black art of accountancy which has proved so reliable that companies like Enron were allowed to flourish. In the early stages of a cultural change, I would recommend any savings, be they hard or soft, should be valued; no matter how small or even if they are difficult to estimate: success breeds success. As experience grows across the work force, and they get better at seeing and tackling waste, the savings will grow. When I was a Black Belt, Green Belts were only allowed to tackle projects if they realised savings of more than $10,000. One Green Belt I had trained came to me in frustration saying her supervisor would not allow her to work on her proposal because it would only save an estimated $7,000! Can you think of a better way to discourage people from getting involved in kaizen?

Be it Lean or Six Sigma or any combination of the two, the really hard work is to create kaizen momentum and to see that that momentum remains through succeeding generations of managers. Unfortunately, this requires a clear sense of (Strategic) direction, stamina, patience, a sense of humour, and more patience. All too often, success is declared when the first green shoots of a “kaizen spring” are detected. The trainers/coaches/sensei are dispensed with, and the whole façade goes downhill to a place often worse that the starting point. You now also have disgruntled people in the Gemba. Always remember you are fighting a corrosive form of entropy, and that any system will degrade over time even if it does reach “World Class”.

I have a suspicion (no more) that the Balanced Scorecard was designed to make MBAs comfortable in leadership positions. This allows them to travel back in time to one of their idols, Alfred Sloan, who developed “management by numbers”. It also allows them to avoid visits to the Gemba where their ignorance of how value is added, could be exposed.

My apologies if this sounds like a rant, but I hope it helps.

I use 12 months sliding scale to even out monthly variances and total hours worked divided by 1700 to get headcount. These hours include office personnel as well as management in addition to production.

Not necessarily lean metric, but something that I find gives good overall picture on our direction.

I am new to Lean and work for a public TAFE here in Melbourne, Australia. I am extremely interested in how you measure the success of Lean. I am a project leader in charge of implementing Lean Prinicples. We commenced our journey early this year and I have been given the task of writing an evaluation strategy and evaluating our success to be delivered to our Executive Team.

I was not sure where to start, thanks for your measures it is a good place to start. Do you have any suggestions on how to present this information effectively? eg. A3 or Graphs

Another Question, I am in the process of writing an organizational story about Lean. Any suggestions?, it will be used to ’sell’ the idea to over 1000 employees.

All the best from Down Under.