As with everything else, in the lean production system too, change management determines how much of your targets you will achieve. It is clear that a change process that is not applied correctly will cause resistance to lean production techniques to form in the company. You then also become unable to carry out many applications that you could carry out. For example, one of the things we encountered at a company we have recently been consulting is that, although they had carried out 5S work for a long time, they had been unable to make any progress. The answer to the question "Does the lean production system fit your company?", which I ask in many seminars, is in fact very important because it shows people's basic approach. What needs to change? This is what determines how much of the lean production system will be applied.
Many managers, company owners, and engineers think that the lean production system can be adapted to their companies. That is, they think the main elements of the company's current state will be preserved, and that they can use some lean production techniques in a number of side applications. They believe the current state must be preserved to a large extent. As the basic reason for this, they say that their production and their products are very different, and that applying the lean production system as a whole is impossible. A manager from headquarters even came to the Turkey branch of one of our customers (German-owned) in order to explain that the lean production system could not be applied. He explained at length that their products were very special, that they did not do serial production, and that the lean production system, and Kanban in particular, could never be put into practice, and then he left. As a result, we put Kanban and the pull system into practice and brought the delivery time down from 35 days to 3 days. The basic reason for this condition of managers, especially if they have worked for many years, is that they have come to believe they were somehow the best at their work and that they think they are now at the limit of improvement. How much of a priority change is, is also proved here. In this form the company will gradually lose the market and fall behind. It is necessary to change and develop as soon as possible, and to put innovations into practice.
In such a situation it is impossible for change to start by itself. A spark is required to trigger change. It is very difficult for people to get moving, to accept change, and to move into the position of the one who changes things. For this it is necessary to really use mathematics, and to show the incredible difference between what it brings in and what it costs. In the passage from an old, non-lean system of production to a lean system, many problems that exist and are somehow covered over by inventory will come into the open. This strengthens the hand of those who resist, and causes them to keep resisting. Yet it is necessary to know that the problems which stayed hidden were in fact always there. Again, at one of our customers, while production on the assembly lines was being done on a batch basis, problems of missing material came out when they moved to one-piece flow. Formerly, while one part of the products being assembled was being mounted, there was still procurement time for the missing part; in the new system, because all the parts have to come together (Just In Time), problems that were not visible before became clear. The planning and production managers claimed that they were losing capacity. Yet while they were producing on a batch basis they had stretched the lead time to periods as long as 2 months, and the energy of people walking back and forth among products standing side by side, carrying materials and tools, was already wasting half of the capacity. These problems were being ignored. As a result, despite all the problems, production increased by 40%.
The beginning of a change process is always chaos. You can carry out a great deal of work beforehand, you can inform everyone, and you can take measures for possible situations, but there will still always be people who do not want the change, who do not understand what will happen, who have not grasped the new order, and who think it will be temporary. As a result, it must not be forgotten that these people will cause chaos for a short time at the beginning. It is necessary to stand behind the change and to keep the change going. Of course, what I am talking about is not being stubborn. But it is necessary to stand firm, to be prepared for possible problems, and not to forget that people will show resistance and that this is normal. In this way, after a while, the change will settle into its normal state.
The picture shows Sweden changing the direction of traffic from the left to the right in 1967. This picture shows that change always begins with confusion.