NOVEMBER 20188 MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY INSIGHTS"The buck stops here" was a phrase made popular by former U.S. President Harry Truman. It means that the responsibility for something rests with you and not someone else, and this is what our leadership team at GE Appliances took to heart as we were struggling in our Lean journey. It wasn't until we proactively embraced this philosophy that we realized how our own lack of Lean IQ or knowledge was holding us back.GE Appliances began implementing Lean in 2005 at our cooking products facility in LaFayette, Georgia. Over the next several years, it spread to our other satellite plants and headquarters location in Louisville, Kentucky. After some initial overview training for all manufacturing employees, we focused on training production roles such as team leaders and Kaizen Promotion Officers (KPOs). These team members were taught the Lean tools and became predominantly responsible for the implementation of standardized work on the manufacturing floor.In 2016, we re-evaluated our progress in each of our plants, and what we found was quite disappointing as many of our operations were struggling with sustainability issues with very little evidence of standardized work within our assembly operations. We also weren't moving the needle on many of our key internal and financial metrics. On our GEMBA walks around the plants, to see and learn where the work is taking place, we found our leaders had a low Lean IQ.We kept asking ourselves how could our leadership team truly lead and sustain the change we needed in our factories if they didn'thave a deeper understanding of the core elements and tools of Lean. The conclusion was they couldn't, and they never would unless we did something drastically different.After debating several potential approaches, we decided we needed intense, hands-on leadership training to bridge this important gap, and thus the Appliances Production System (APS) Immersion was created. The course, designed for everyone from the top leaders of our supply chain to frontline leaders, has dramatically changed the performance of our plants. The course is designed with three weeks on the shop floor where each leader must improve the job or line they are assigned, thus demonstrating their standardized work and problem-solving skills. Next, each leader participates in a week-long Total Productive Maintenance Humility and Openness at the Heart of GE Appliances' Lean TransformationBy Bill Good, Vice President of Supply Chain, GE AppliancesIN MY OPINION
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