The Lean Guy's First Post

This is the first blog posting for us at Genoa Design so let's start with a very brief history of our lean journey. We've been working towards creating a lean operation for a number of years now and have many successes to boast of for our efforts. We have created value for our customer by removing waste from our processes. We've been committed to getting there (pursuit of perfection) and have recently been able to begin some analysis that we've been wanting to do for a long time.

At Genoa, we believe ..scratch that...we know that there are relationships between type of ship, type of unit (bow, stern, midbody, superstructure etc.), number of parts, weight, volume of unit, and hours required to model, assemble, etc..

Knowing that these relationships exist, we've been able to collect data from previous and ongoing projects that will help us analyze how they are related. We have 16 projects under analysis with others to add, and we're capturing information on volume, no. of parts, projects hours, type of unit etc. Thousands and thousands of points of data to analyze.

What to do with all of this data? Let's get back to lean...the first question in developing a lean future state in a production environment is ..What is the takt time? ...ie: the relationship between customer demand and available working time. This information will help us get toward establishing customer demand in our environment...no small feat I assure you because in our world, you can't see widgets go down the production line, but we still want to be able to establish a sense of "flow of product" and visual indicators of pace of production.

What we will know for example, is that to model a part in a midbody on a barge it will take (on average) a certain amount of time...as it will also take a certain amount of time to do other types of units for other types of ships. This will bring us ever closer to the establishing the elusive takt time for our operation.

What else will this give us? Among other known and yet to be determined benefits this data will give us;

• the ability to accelerate the bidding process by using models to estimate cost
  improvements in project management
• a basis to create a visual tracking system for projects based on takt time
  and a base to build upon and add to as we move ahead.

This is not rocket science ( or as Don Cherry says "rocket surgery" ) but it's tedious and necessary to achieve our end. Later we'll share the results of our analysis.

Ken Hogan
Lean guy at Genoa

The First Post - The Background

Welcome to the new blog.

This is a blog about Lean and Genoa Design International Ltd.

I plan to post my thoughts, insights, failures, successes, frustrations and celebrations surrounding the implementation of Lean in our company.

I will not bore you with a definition of Lean. Go look it up. www.google.com

I will not bore you with what Genoa Design does. Go look it up. www.genoadesign.com

I will, however, bore you with a brief history of Genoa and Lean as the intro to this whole blogging exercise.

I believe that Genoa Design is one of the first companies in Canada, and possibly the United States, that is trying to implement Lean in a marine and shipbuilding engineering service environment. Dave Hogg has mentioned to us that we are generally the first ones to try to tackle engineering activites.....we'll see.

We started this whole Lean stuff in 2002 with a simple introduction to Lean. This was through one, then another, then another, workshop and conference and industry conference. I believe one of the first was the Ship Production Symposium held in Ann Arbor, Michigan. CME also provided a number of workshops here in Newfoundland that introduced me to Lean. Basically, I was the only person from Genoa Design to attend and learn at this point. This was mostly a financial restriction.

In 2003, I attended a Technology visit program in Toronto, where a number of individuals representing different companies and industries in Newfoundland, visited a series of companies in the greater Toronto area, all of who were members of the HPM Consortium. I also attended various other workshops, which were mostly sponsored by the local CME branch, and attended the "Measure Up For Success" conference in Toronto...a major annual Lean conference held in Canada.

Within Genoa Design, we formed a Continuous Improvement Team, and loaded all staff on "Lean 101". We joined CME (Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters) and helped to form a brand new Lean Consortium in Newfoundland and Labrador. The Fluent Consortium.

Since then, we have been through numerous Kaizens and internal continuous improvement intiatives. We have tried to sustain our lean improvements, and have failed. However, we keep trying.

I think we have the right formula to start again and properly sustain this time.

We have not abandoned our improvements to date. We have not started over completely. But we have made one major change, and that change is....we have hired a Lean Consultant. Ken Hogan used to be a part of our Consortium as an employee of Canada Post until his position was terminated. (A not-so-nice and short-sighted effect of Lean implemented by companies that don't quite have the concepts of Lean straight). We met with Ken shortly after his departure from Canada Post, and now Ken has decided to operate as a consultant. He spends two days per week in our shop.

Ken has been working on analyzing gobs of data we have been collecting for years, concerning all the hours we spend toward the various tasks required to complete our projects. So far it has managed to cross his eyes and keep him awake at night, however he is getting close to understanding what might constitute a TAKT Time. Ken believes that TAKT time is the secret to our success. But TAKT time has eluded us through the years.

Good place for the cliff-hanger....stay tuned for the next entry.

I think that about does it for the first entry.

I am also going to have Ken post entries.

Together, we may be able to provide some insight into our efforts and how confused we manage to get when trying to Lean out our complicated little process...

Good night all,

Leonard