When a Chinese factory is in crisis and its boss is open to new ideas, it is possible to make a lot of changes quickly. These improvements are usually driven by consultants or by a strong and experienced manager. And the problem is, once they are gone, the whole organization goes bad to old habits very quickly.
What Chinese companies really lack is the discipline to keep moving in the right direction, day in and day out, after the initial excitement is gone.
To be fair, this is not a challenge unique to China. Mike Rother applies the entropy rule (straight out of a physics textbook) to describe the natural trend of any organization to slide back after improvement efforts.
Why are improvements so hard to maintain?
There are always urgencies in a factory. A supplier delivers late, the customer can’t wait, and production needs to be expedited. A couple of key employees in a workshop leave at the same time. The local government is trying to extract more money. A shipment is rejected and needs to be reworked. A big customer is coming and needs to be entertained. And so on.
When a deadline is looming and there is not enough time to do everything correctly, something has to give. Maybe the supervisor is away and the workers take a shortcut, even though they know the rules very well. Or maybe it’s the manager who makes an exception, “just one time”. And the exceptional becomes normal.
More often than not, the real reason is a lack of training. Employees rarely understand the whole system. They might not even have noticed that cycle times have gone from 50 days to 30 days and that quality issues have been reduced by 80%. To them “improvements” were just “changes”. So they are not committed to keeping the new way in place.
Are there ways to avoid sliding back?
Yes, and the solution is twofold:
- A management system that makes any deviation from targets both obvious and visual to all
- Regular surveillance from the top of the organization, in order to maintain discipline
The management system is not very hard to put in place. Once regularly scheduled meetings take place, and if the boss is happy to have a “dashboard” (composed of meaningful KPIs), there is a chance the management system stays in place in the long term.
By contrast, the second element (regular surveillance) doesn’t come easily to the typical manager. As I wrote before, Chinese managers tend to stay in their office or in meeting rooms, while they should be where the action is taking place.
Regular surveillance is known in the lean literature as Leader Standard Work. It is composed of the following elements:
- “Gemba walks” (managers walking daily on the shop floor)
- Rapid detection of, and response to, abnormalities
- Constant mentoring of middle managers and team leaders, who should be able to detect and solve most issues by themselves
This is why smart consultants sell improvement projects but also include a few training sessions and a follow up period for “maintenance”.
Do you see other effective ways to sustain changes?