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Training within Industry – TWI – Oldies but Goldies

April 5, 2021January 16, 2018 by Christoph Roser

Training within Industry – or TWI for short – was a US program during World War II. It significantly improved industrial production and helped the Allies to win the war. While the ideas date to the 1940s, they are still very relevant. In my view, they are pure gold if you have to manage a shop floor. It is to me the best overarching system for training and managing workers, and it significantly influenced Toyota.

While technology has changed a lot since 1945, people have not. The methods of TWI still work, and can really help you to improve. Even better, the original US government documents from 1945 are all in public domain. Let me introduce you to TWI. This is the first in a series of five posts on TWI.

Heroes, Firefighting, and Corporate Culture

October 18, 2022January 9, 2018 by Christoph Roser

Heroes save the day. Heroes turn around the disaster and rescue the puppy from the burning building. Heroes are admired, and everybody wants to be one. Everybody wants a hero when they need one.

But what about the people who prevent the need of a hero? What about the people that make sure the disaster never happens? What kind of people do you really need in your company?

Different Ways to Establish a Pull System – Part 2

April 5, 2021August 8, 2017 by Christoph Roser

This is the second post on different types of pull production. It features the less commonly known approaches of triangle kanban, drum-buffer-rope, reorder point (surprise, yes, it is a pull system), reorder period (also a pull system), and FIFO lanes. In my previous post I showed you the kanban system and its variant, the two-bin system, as well as CONWIP and the kanban-CONWIP hybrid.

Employee Motivation and Lean Implementation – Part 4: Respect for People

April 5, 2021July 18, 2017 by Christoph Roser

Motivating employees is not easy. In previous posts I described that the carrot and the stick approaches don’t work very well. What in my experience works best to improve the system is Respect for People!

This is actually a very important aspect of the Toyota Production System, and Toyota puts in lots of effort to show respect to all people. This includes not only employees (the focus of this post), but also customers, suppliers, neighbors, and pretty much everybody else it comes in contact with. At Toyota, it is actually called Respect for Humanity (人間性尊重, ningenseisoncho). Unfortunately, all too often I find this lacking in Western lean implementations.

Employee Motivation and Lean Implementation – Part 3: Lack of Respect

April 5, 2021July 11, 2017 by Christoph Roser

Motivating employees for change is tricky. What often helps is respect, but in reality the opposite is common. While managers claim that of course they respect their people, the employees feel very differently, and quite often there is a lack of respect. In this post I want to talk about this lack of respect and why it happens, before showing how to do it better in the next post.

Employee Motivation and Lean Implementation – Part 2: Money

April 5, 2021July 4, 2017 by Christoph Roser

Lean improvements often fail in implementation, meaning the employees do not follow the new standards. In my last post we already saw that pressure (“the stick”) doesn’t work very well. The second option is the carrot. In this post I will show different “carrots” that are sometimes used to get employees to follow the new standard. However, most of them won’t work very well either. What often works best is actually simply treating people with respect – but I will talk about this in my next post.

Employee Motivation and Lean Implementation – Part 1: Carrot and Stick

April 5, 2021June 27, 2017 by Christoph Roser

All too often, good ideas for a lean implementation fail because workers won’t use the new ideas. They simply stick to their old habits. And, no matter how good the ideas are, if they are not used, then the improvement project is a failure. In this post I want to talk about this common problem in industry. The solution is – in theory – easy: Get your people motivated! Doing this in reality, however, is an extremely challenging task with an often-unknown outcome.

Where Lean Went Wrong – A Historical Perspective

March 3, 2022May 16, 2017 by Christoph Roser

The Toyota Production System is widely considered to be the best production system for any larger company. Achieving similar performance is the vision (or dream?) of many companies. Pretty much all of lean manufacturing is the attempt to copy the approach of Toyota in the hope of a similar stellar performance. Yet most lean transformations fall way short of the goal. In this blog post I would like to give some insights, from a historical perspective, on why lean so often fails.