Many years ago, a group from our company visited a world-class manufacturing facility where we witnessed a highly choreographed operational dance that was smooth, simple, and effective. The people at this facility employed a variety of principles and tools to manage this impressive operational environment. The management tools utilized at this facility included both high-tech and simple solutions that enabled production teams to make several thousand improvements to the business per year. Our group left the facility that day in awe and had a strong desire to replicate the high-performing environment we'd just witnessed.
This was our first introduction to the tools of the Toyota Production System (TPS). As our management team began to explore TPS in more depth, we discovered numerous stories of success utilizing the tools of Kanban, Just-In-Time (JIT), Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), standard work, 5S, and more. Again, we wanted what these other companies had achieved, and the tools of TPS were clearly the way to move forward.
During our quest to improve, we learned that the pathway to TPS success was different than one might think. We quickly realized that it was not a game of how many tools a few experts could deploy; the real focus was on how big of a problem-solving community you could build. The world-class facility we had initially visited taught us this important principle by asking a simple question. They said, "What is your problem-finder to problem-solver ratio?" What we had witnessed during our visit was the result of an army of problem-solvers — using and adapting TPS tools — rather than a group of experts using the tools to solve other people's problems. We saw that this facility's objective was always to enable a bigger community of people to see and solve operational problems by understanding and adopting the appropriate TPS tools.
Fast forward 15 years; I'm experiencing a déjà vu moment. It seems like every operational excellence conference is introducing and discussing technology tools for business improvement. The Internet of Things (IoT) and all its innovative new technologies, applications, and possibilities is very exciting. With IoT, companies are experiencing success story after success story, and much like my introduction to TPS years ago, I naturally have the desire to do it all. To help with this emerging trend, there are numerous consultants and experts willing, able, and available to solve all of my problems with the latest IoT solutions. But I must be patient in my desire to do it all — and pause to remember the lessons learned from the TPS tool-deployment journey of the past.
Lesson #1 — IoT technologies are just tools
Tools are only as powerful as the users who use them. It's also true that the fewer users you have, the less powerful your tool actually is. When organizations rely on a few experts to solve their problems, sustainable solutions become the challenge. Expert-driven solutions may initially succeed, but most worksites are variable and evolve with the ever-changing dynamics of the business. The variability and evolution of the organization will result in tool failure over time — until the tool ultimately becomes obsolete. IoT tools are often technical in nature and may naturally reduce an organization's problem-finder to problem-solver ratio. This reduction will result in a bottleneck in an organization's improvement capacity. Leaders within a world-class organization must deploy these new IoT tools with the mindset of expanding the problem-finder to problem-solver ratio.
Lesson #2 — Introduce tools through joint problem-solving
Long-term success occurs when organizations deploy tools as part of the process of building a problem-solving culture. The process includes clearly framing a strategic problem to a cross-functional team, teaching the team a principle or tool, and then facilitating the joint experimentation needed to solve the problem. Once the problem is solved, the team fulfills the responsibility of teaching peers, monitoring success, and continuously improving the solution. Joint problem-solving is as much a skill-development process as it is an internal improvement process. People become experts through participation in problem-solving over time. Doing so provides the foundation for people to continuously improve and adapt the tools over time as the business requires.
Lesson #3 — Leaders must manage change
Problem-solving is the work of changing the business to an improved state. Change does not automatically happen. People tend to resist new things — especially when the reality is that the new solution will be imperfect, have failures, and need to be debugged. When failure occurs, people find comfort by returning to the old and safe way of doing things. Leaders must take responsibility for and systematically manage the change. The leaders' management of the change must include a few key elements, including a pathway to voice concerns, failures, and ideas relative to the new way of working. Leaders must also encourage visual systems that highlight the effects of the change relative to the desired outcomes. They must provide critical support for failures and debugging. And, lastly, leaders and support personnel must have the discipline to work at a set cadence to engage and support the new work. The leader and their standard work will guide the change during its fragile beginning.
The IoT journey must be rooted in an organization's ability to build and develop a problem-solving culture. Organizational leaders must deploy these tools into the culture at the right time and in the right way. Organizations must introduce IoT concepts with a mindset of empowering and enabling many to see and to solve. Success of an organization's IoT technology deployment will be measured by its operational results and by how much the problem-finder to problem-solver ratio is increased. Increase your problem-solver ratio, and you will increase your results and sustainability.