The Art of Seeing

ENNA and PCS Press published a “new” Dr. Shingo book titled Kaizen and The Art of Creative Management – The Scientific Thinking Mechanism.  It is a gem.  Dr. Shingo was one of the creators of the Toyota Production System and a masterful teacher.  One of his great talents was to teach us how to see and discover opportunities for improvement.

I remember, one day he was looking at “burrs” attached to parts that were just formed by a plastic injection-molding machine.  After the injection process the burrs had to be removed during the subsequent process.  Dr. Shingo’s reaction was to ask, “Why do you create burrs in the first place?”

I visited a local plating company and saw an operator picking up with small pliers, one-by-one, very small brass buttons and separately polishing each one. The worker had hundreds of buttons in front of him.  After polishing each one he placed them onto a tray.

I said to the president of the company, standing near me, “This is costing you a lot of money.  I can’t imagine you making anything on this job.  It is too labor intensive.”  I then turned to the worker and asked him if there was an easier way to do the job.  The worker immediately, stopped polishing and took us over to another part of the machine shop and showed us a metal plate fixture with over 100 holes in it. He said, “On another job, I place the buttons into the fixture and polish all the buttons at the same time.”  I then asked, “Why can’t you do the same thing with these buttons?”  “Because these buttons are a smaller size then the other job and I do not have a similar fixture for it,” he said.

Unfortunately, even though the average worker is highly skilled on their job, they do not initiate new ideas to make their work easier.  They just follow what their supervisor tells them to do.  And rarely, does the supervisor ask for the workers input to solve problems.  The supervisor feels that they are paid to do the thinking and be innovative.

But, learning further from Dr. Shingo let us look and discover why we are polishing these buttons in the first place.  Obviously, we are polishing these buttons for some of them come in scratched from the manufacturer.  “Why are some of them received with scratches.’  If we went upstream, and went back to the manufacturer of the brass buttons, we might discover that the buttons are not scratched when formed.  The operator when removing the buttons instead of placing them into a fixture and placing some cotton or other protective material around them, just dumps them into a bucket and sends the bucket to the platter. Maybe, during transportation some of the buttons get scratched.

In this example, just stopping and watching workers, we might discover that the operation cannot only be done better but that the operation might not be needed at all.

“This book is great. It will be another feather in your cap (if indeed there is place for any more!). Shingo's earlier books were real masterpieces that described in details the techniques and the principles behind each revolutionary practice of the Toyota Production System. They were a real boon to practitioners of Lean as they distilled decades of knowledge and presented it with a large number of actual examples making it easy to assimilate and apply.  This book goes a step further as it deals with the thinking process that underlies Shingo's genius. I think this is just what the Lean movement needs to help it spread beyond manufacturing into other sectors like services and business processes like strategy.” - T.V. Suresh, President, Tao Consulting, Chenai, India