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| A Visitor's Perspective
By Elliot Fishman, Habañero Consulting Group
May 4, 2009
Last Friday afternoon I visited Garibaldi Glass Industries with Cat, Peter John and Lars. Garibaldi is one of our clients but this wasn’t a BD call or project update. The purpose of our visit was to get an inside look at how this amazing company has reinvented itself over the past six years using the principles of Lean manufacturing. The afternoon that included a spirited history of the company told by one of its owners Chris Mobius, a tour of their factory where we got to see Lean in action, a shift change huddle, a review of their Ops dashboard, and a deep dive into Lean orientation and learning models. The experience was both inspiring and humbling.
Lean is yielding numerous benefits for Garibaldi Glass including streamlined process flows, a safe work environment, innovation, superior quality and customer satisfaction. Garibaldi makes a high end custom product that is used in some of the most advanced applications worldwide (e.g., YVR, Shangri-La, etc.). Although this sounds really sexy, Garibaldi’s work ends when the delivery trucks roll away from the job site empty – installers get the glory of putting the pieces together. All the glamour and glitz of creating the glass in some of western Canada’s most amazing structures happens on a factory floor, albeit a very well organized and managed one. In some ways not the kind of environment where I expected to find employees’ so completely focused on one simple concept: delivering value to the customer. Steven talked at last week’s MMM about the Golden Orb rock and how important it is for Habañero to develop a system for defining the impact our solutions have on the customer. After the experience at GG last Friday I feel super confident that having this often missing puzzle piece in hand will bring tremendous clarity and renewed passion in the work we do.
I was really struck by the incredible degree of alignment among the Garibaldi team. From the front desk and administrative offices to the factory floor and maintenance department, it was evident that everyone knew exactly what the top priorities are (not just the big company rocks but the day-to-day priorities as well), the plan for achieving them, and their accountability. The sense of employee pride was really something to behold. Before the huddle began, Chris introduced us and asked the crews if they had any words of wisdom for us. We got some great input and what really struck us was the degree of awareness that was shared from shift supervisors right down to cutters, temperers, silk-screeners, shippers and equipment maintainers. They all had a Lean lesson to share and expressed their almost cultish devotion to the principles. Their huddle lasted all of 5 minutes – the data was crisp and the focus completely on communicating important elements of process flow.
Lean is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, "value" is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. Basically, lean is centered around creating more value with less work.
“Getting Lean” centers on tweaking the flow of value delivery so it can run as smoothly as possible. If production flows perfectly then there is no inventory (or in our case, wasted effort); if features the customer values are the only ones produced, then product design is simplified and effort is only expended on what impacts the customer directly. The other pillar is to automate so that the machines/tools/systems are designed to aid humans in focusing on what the humans do best. Lean implementation is therefore focused on getting the right things to the right place at the right time in the right quantity to achieve perfect work flow, while minimizing waste and being flexible and able to change.
Lean is not prescriptive methodology. There are no specific artifacts or practices companies have to adopt to become Lean. We learned last week that it’s critical to adapt Lean to company culture (e.g., the Garibaldi Way). Some aspects of Garibaldi’s Lean implementation include:
- A common lens/framework to view/interpret the business
- Application of scientific principles to business domain – remove subjectivity
- Focus on making customer, employee, partner, and vendor experiences as easy as possible
- Finding innovative ways to utilize inventory
- Nobody owns their job
- Leaving nothing to chance
Over the next little while we will be investigating Lean in other organizations and looking to get some training going for our Lean champions. We are becoming increasingly convinced that Lean is the right framework for Habañero to re-engineer engagement and delivery.
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