KHS&S reposted this
Membership Connections with Blake Tormey, Director of Process and Controls at KHS&S. In your opinion, what are the biggest benefits of applying Lean and how have they impacted your projects, your teams, or your organization? Creating a culture of trust and improvement has tremendous impacts not just on a person’s career, it can (and should) increase their total quality of life. If we can get workers to take less steps, less repetitions of lifting heavy objects, that can save literally thousands of miles of walking and thousands of hours of excess lifting that their body would have to endure. That is more energy and more time spent with their families and doing things they love. This leads to longer, more fulfilling careers and a decrease in serious chronic pain and injury. Everyone, including office staff, are fresher while working and more productive during those hours. A respectful environment where people feel heard and are less tired at the end of the day, that is the biggest impact Lean can make. How do you assess if your Lean game is strong; are there metrics or techniques you rely on and can share? We use a combination of coaching sheets and rubrics for running stand up meetings, metrics like Percent Plan Complete (PPC) for planning, and other internal KPIs around contracts and date completions. I’ve always found metrics to be important, but they are only one part of the story. I get much more out of small, continuous conversations with field leaders, workers, and office staff to see how strong of an impact our tools are making. Metrics cannot tell every story; they can only point you in the direction of what needs intervention. It is the conversation with the project teams that allow leadership to establish root causes of problems and take actionable steps to address these issues. If someone's just dipping their toes into Lean, what advice would you offer from lessons you’ve learned? Pick one, a few at most, simple tools and build the culture of trust and accountability around those tools. For all Lean tools to be effective, the people using them must feel respected and engaged. For example, the Last Planner System® is an incredible part of the Lean toolkit, but it depends entirely on reliable handoffs and commitments. If project teams aren’t bought in, if they don’t feel they can be vulnerable, this system falls apart. We started with 5S and Daily Huddles as it was a way to affect every employee in the company. They weren’t complicated meetings, they were simple check-ins. Eventually we added structure with Weekly Work Plans (WWP) and the other levels of LPS®. Take that first step and keep the wellbeing of others at the heart of everything one does. That will take you a long way. Want to become an LCI Corporate Member? Visit our website to learn more: https://lnkd.in/eM_En_vY