Implementing TPM in the west Requires knowledge and care The classic TPM, based on the work of Seiichi

Nakajima, was developed in Japan after the Second World War. It was TPM that created the Japanese Economic Miracle and in that sense was also Leans parent. Western companies started implementing these types of continuous improvement programs at the start of the 1990s, but TMPs implementation in the West did not appear to run as smoothly as it did in Japan. We asked the TPM expert, Mario Marchena, about the reasons for this and whether this characterization is in fact true. Mario Marchena is Owner/ Senior Consultant of SeeMoreConsult bv, in The Netherlands. Marchena worked 21 years for Unilever, in different manufacturing management positions, and as operations manager at Calv in Delft (NL) and 4 years as a senior consultant at Blom Consultancy. 'Calv was part of Unilever Nederland, which formed part of Unilever Foods Europe. On an European level we had already been working to increase the factories efficiency. The margarine factories were leading the way. In the factory in Delft, we tried to apply the MANS and Sociotech philosophies. MANS stands for Management en Arbeid Nieuwe Stijl (New Style Management and Labor), which was inspired by the Sociotech and was especially successful in the USA and Scandinavia. The MANS Foundation, established in 1983, had as a goal, making W.E. Deming and J. Jurans way of thinking available to Dutch businesses. As part of all these new initiatives, Calv experimented with Autonomous Task Groups and Self-Directing Teams. And despite us doing our very best to convert this knowledge into practical measures, says Marchena, the effect on our utilization and our efficiency was barely noticeable. At the same time, their Japanese colleagues at Nippon Lever were having success. Three factories for Foods, Home and Personal Care had successfully made significant improvements with what they called TPM. They were supported in the process by specialists from JIPM, the Japanese Institute of Plant Maintenance (nowadays JIPMSolutions). How did Mario Marchena find out that his colleagues at Nippon Lever seemed to have found the right answer? Unilever is a multinational in which knowledge sharing happens at an international level. JTG (Japan Technology Group), a Unilever department in Japan keeping track of and evaluating new Japanese developments, was responsible for this exchange. Unilever Europe Group was rather preoccupied with the Make or Buy Question - should we produce all of the products we sell ourselves? That was rather a threatening question for Unilever Nederlands factories. It awoke our drive to survive, which meant we were ready to start looking outside for help. What I retained from our search for improvement methods and tools was a deep-rooted faith in ideas and movements like Empowerment of people on all levels, specially on the shop floor. When we came into contact with TPM through JTG, I felt the click immediately. The philosophy appealed to me, plus the program also offered a pragmatic implementation plan. This is really something we could implement! I said to myself. The rest of Unilever reacted very positively to Japans success. So positively, in fact, they decided at the corporate level to start working with JIPM. Kunio Shirose himself, one of JIPMs vice presidents, became our leading person and it was him who led Unilevers worldwide support team. In the course of that job he also paid a visit to the Netherlands. In the mean time I was given the opportunity to transfer to the Unilever TPM Promotion and Implementation Team and so I moved from Calv Delft to the Central Manufacturing and Engineering Group. In the beginning I was pretty much a pioneer, but we also learned a lot from JIPM like: how to build up TPM capabilities within Unilever, how to give TPM training courses, how to guide the current management in the implementation process and how to implement TPM on the shop floor. These actions lead to dozens of Unilever factories winning TPM Awards between 1996 and 2006. Two factories in Europe have even reached the World Class level: the Lipton Tea factory in Brussels and the ice cream factory in Naples. According to Mario Marchena, how has TPM developed these past ten years?

TPM itself has stayed the same at its core but the environment in which we need to implement TPM has changed dramatically. Nowadays, people get a lot less time to run through the learning curves. A consequence of high pressure on financial performances is that everything must go faster, which presents a great danger. I have learned in the past 12 years that you must walk three paths when implementing TPM, says 57-year old Marchena. The first is improving the technical performance of the production process, resulting in a higher Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). Second, you must invest in the individual employees knowledge, skills and attitude if you want to hang onto these results. An if you want to hang on to these results and want employees to the develop, also the quality of the organization must improve significantly. In Japanese factories the disciplined, team-oriented, harmonious culture provided enough basis. According to Marchena, In this system, colleagues work together as a team, which automatically improves mutual cooperation. The production teams also have closer contact with each other, which then improves cooperation bit by bit. Eventually the entire organization improves as a whole and, as happened in Japan, in a quite autonomous fashion, due in part to their long history using Quality Circles. So it is therefore simply a question of starting TPM and the rest will follow? Well, if only that were true. This is exactly where we find the greatest differences between the East and the West, Marchena admits. In Japan, the team and organizational improvements took shape in an organic way, but that approach simply wont fly in more individually-oriented cultures such as ours. In Europe, explicit attention must be paid to points 2 (investment in knowledge, skills and attitude) and 3 (the quality of the organization). Especially to point 3. This has been done in all Unilever factories that have received an award. I didnt check it afterwards, but I dont mind stating the following: in every factory where this did not happen we have not achieved sustainable success. it goes without saying that implementing tools and techniques is quicker than improving peoples knowledge, skills and attitudes. Its just as logical to say that individual employee improvement is easier to realize than improvements for an entire organization. But it is precisely that last point, improving the quality of an organization, that is the most important when dealing with the speed with which the permanent improvement of results is realized. The following quote from Seiichi Nakajima illustrates the point: TPM is the making of products through the making of people. He expands this position with his Five Satisfactions, referring to the customer, shareholder, employee, social and global satisfaction. If a modern company wants to guarantee its existence, then it is not sufficient to merely keep the customers and shareholders happy. According to Nakajima, it is just as important to give serious attention to personnel, the direct environment and societal themes This leads Europe into a very dangerous situation, warns Marchena. Be-cause if you choose speed, then you only reach for the low-hanging fruits leaving other great opportunities untouched. This leads to great losses in the long term. If you want to get the maximum amount of profit over the long term, then you need to invest in your organization and your people right at the very start. This is the kind of talk you would expect from some soft improvement guru, not a hard operations man. Marchena explains, It might sound a bit soft, but its not, because you also need the hard TPM tools. Plus, the intended organizational development will result in a much more common focus on results. This is why it is essential in my current role as an external consultant that I teach my client how he himself can actualize his own continued improvement processes. Naturally I can offer quick help by teaching him a trick such as SMED, for example, but thats not going to teach him the essence of TPM, and any results achieved will disappear once the external expert has disappeared. TPM in Europe has, along with the content of TPM, mostly to do with the explicit development of people and organization. Yes, thats right. And thats why for me personally TPM, Empowerment, Autonomous Task Groups and Self Directing Teams overlap each other. In essence its about using the TPM methods, techniques and tools in combination with a common focus on the results. In practice this means: working with multidisciplinary

improvement teams according to the Overlapping Small Group and the Kaizen Teams method. Because management will deal more with the creation of the right conditions, than the content of these methods, they must focus on their management tasks and qualities. The operators and maintenance engineers will then learn to take responsibility for their own solutions. This will entail a re-shuffling of tasks and responsibilities throughout the entire organization. The external advisors role here is always to make people aware of their current way of working as compared to the ideal way. Moreover, the advisor must guarantee a safe environment to experiment with new behavior. He must also encourage and maintain mutual communication and, last but not least, he must always let people experience for themselves the link between results and the new way of cooperating. SeeMoreConsult plays an active role in the development and promotion of TPM and provides consulting and implementation support based on classic Nakajima TPM. The goal is to make TPM in Europe just as successful as it is in Japan using the method described above. SeeMoreConsult works in intensive cooperation with JIPM-Solutions and TPM Solutions International supporting big international customer with factories in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. This client intends to win a JIPM Award for its factories within a few years. In my view, this all guarantees TPMs continued development, whereby the power and value stays at the Japanese level while it is made easier to apply in factories in our part of the world. Different People doing Different Things in a Different Way

Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people cant buy more hours. Scientists cant invent new minutes. And you cant save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time youve wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow. -Denis Waitley Time is making fools of us again. -J.K. Rowling Time is the most important commodity in the world. In the business world, technology has vastly improved processes to the point that we often feel that we can sit back and let technology do the work. We think that technology saves us time and energy. Technology can do processes for us (save our energy), but not actually save us time. With all these new and improved processes, work is much more complicated, and many companies have lost sight of the basic idea of time.

What is Really Inside?

Todays modern offices appear to be streamlined and efficient but look past the seemingly sleek exterior and what do you find? Cluttered back rooms full of boxes holding old files, a closet full of disorganized

and hard-to-find office supplies, obsolete and broken equipment, and office layouts that are a maze of cubicles which are obstacles in the path of the flow of the paperwork. The flow of paperwork is what suffers the most in a disorganized office. Step back and look at your companys offices with a critical eye. What do you see?

-Complicated office layouts. -Customer orders taking too long to be filled. -Full in-baskets that never get emptied in a day. -Poorly planned meetings. -Teams with incomplete or no direction. -Duplication of work. -Proposals not completed in time for the bid. -Payments not made on time. -Extra signatures needed that hold up completion. -Documents that are unnecessarily handled many times by too many workers.
Can you answer true to any of these questions:

-Does your paperwork or phone calls get misplaced or lost before being resolved? -When trying to improve a process or procedure, does it usually fail and the workers become demotivated? -Do you often hear, This is the way we have always done it so why change?? -Is your department held hostage by the companys computer system? -Do you not have enough time to meet deadlines? -When someone comes up with a good idea for an improvement, does it get shot down?
If the answer is true to at least one of these questions, then Lean Office Kaizen is the solution. Lean Office Kaizen can break through all of the time-wasters and increase productivity while improving the workflow and enhancing the motivation and attitude of all involved. Lean Office Kaizen focuses on eliminating waste. Waste is defined as the result of non-value-added activities.

A Non-value-added activity is an action that does not contribute to the creation or transformation of the product or service that the final customer is willing to pay for or which is necessary to complete the product or service. For example, if a customers order needs to go to three different departments and takes many days to process because of this, we can say this slowdown is non-value-added. The customer does not want to pay for the additional processing or wait the additional time for the product. The concepts of Lean are tried and tested throughout industry with considerable success. These concepts can be applied to any business process or service. They increase office productivity by improving the administrative support and customer service functions which add value to every product or service. Lean Office Kaizen is a total package that consists of "the Path," "the Philosophy," and "the Leadership Structure," all concepts that are necessary for success. Lean Office Kaizen provides the tools for implementation that you can customize for your own Company or Organization, by helping to create micro-processes using a hands-on approach. A Lean Culture creates buy-in for the workers because it teaches them to use their knowledge and creativity for improvement. It promotes team efforts and individual involvement to reach goals. Management should encourage these ideas because they are vital to the success of the project. After all, who would know better what improvements should be made than the workers who do the process every day? Kaizen is a Japanese word meaning little improvement. It means taking small steps to a larger goal. Taking one process or procedure and breaking it down into small steps and looking at each step objectively are the beginnings of a kaizen. By doing this analysis, you will be able to see which steps can be eliminated and which steps can be improved for a result of a better workflow.

Implementing a Lean Office Kaizen

It requires every participant to be very hands-on and involved in all aspects of the process. This process involves rules:

-Everyone should keep an open mind to new ideas. -Positive attitudes are a must! -No excuses, only solutions. -Ask Why? Then ask it again, and again, and again. -Dont think too hard just do. Be action minded and learn from the mistakes. -Take advantage of everyones expertise and knowledge. -Leave the titles outside everyone is equal and should have no fear of contributing their ideas.

6/4/12 Kaizen www.climate.unc.edu/lean/kaizen 1/2 Kaizen Kaizen can be used to focus talent and resources to quickly improve a process or service. Kaizen is a learning process intended to improve a process or service, eliminating waste while creating more value. When done correctly, it eliminates hard work and teaches people how to see and eliminate waste in their own business processes. In Japanese, Kaizen derives from two characters meaning something like "change" and "good." The Kaizen philosophy focuses on processes and results in a systematic way, understanding how each piece fits into the "big picture." Driven by respect for people, Kaizen is a non-judgemental and nonblaming way for stakeholders to improve a process together. UNC used a Kaizen workshop to generate carbon saving ideas for the supply chain. The Universitys supply chain,

from procurement through recycling, is an important part of the campus carbon footprint, but it is difficult to assess the impact of carbon reduction programs as they filter through a population of 40,000 faculty, students and staff. Instead of simply mandating policies from the top, the Kaizen tapped into employee creativity for savings. But where to focus in a complex supply chain? The EPA estimates that over two metric tons of CO2 are emitted in the harvesting, processing, and disposal of one ton of paper. UNC consumes an estimated 100,000,000 sheets per year, or roughly 500 tons a meaningful target for emission reductions. The carbon emissions for a computers life cycle top 15 metric tons per ton of equipment, and with over 80,000 computers on campus, these also became a focus for reduction. As the team explored these two seemingly disparate parts of the supply chain, exciting synergies began to emerge. Stakeholders representing the purchasing department, computer labs, students, the recycling office, and others were invited for a two-day Kaizen workshop. The goal was to understand the true value of paper and computer use to the campus community, and to identify wasted time, resources, or energy that could be eliminated without reducing that value. The group recognized that faculty, staff, students, vendors, and alumni are customers of the IT department. These

customers value reliability, information security, storage space, uptime, speed, support, low cost, etc. Any carbon reduction or sustainability goals must take these values into account, so that the program doesnt accidentally decrease quality or satisfaction. For instance, we could eliminate our backup file storage system to save material, money, and energy, but this would violate the customers desire for reliability. With a firm sense of customer value, the groups moved to an interactive Value Stream Mapping exercise. The value stream map describes the people, materials and activities involved at each phase of a process, from start to finish.

6/4/12 Kaizen www.climate.unc.edu/lean/kaizen 2/2 Once the entire process was visualized on the wall, it became easier to see the waste, errors, and problems. For example, the team members noticed that when placing an order from a local vendor, it automatically came with a copy of the vendors catalog an unnecessary use of paper. At another step, the group realized that students choose to print more documents because their laptops are cumbersome, or because some professors forbid laptops in class. Each source of waste was addressed with ideas to solve the problem, and all told, the group came up with almost 100 improvement opportunities in just one afternoon. For example, paper-saving ideas ranged from the common (double-sided printing) to the unusual and unique (use the monitor settings employed by journalists to ease eye strain when reading from a screen). These ideas were ranked by their impact on the campus carbon footprint, and on the difficulty of implementation, resulting in a helpful list of high-impact, lowdifficulty options for the Climate Action Plan. By engaging a diverse group of stakeholders in the planning phase, each idea was reviewed with scrutiny and

creativity, allowing only the viable options to surface. With such broad understanding and buy-in, these carbon abatement opportunities have a strong potential for adoption and success.