How we build lean manufacturing (Lean) in our company

About what?

As a manager, I became interested in lean manufacturing and after reading the book “Lean Thinking” I decided to transfer my vision from factory production to the IT industry.

What is economical and useful we do in our studio and what can be scaled to other companies is described in this article.

Analysis of statistics

Like many companies in the IT industry, we measure work on projects in man-hours and from this we form the cost of developing a particular project. We have a CRM system, where we track the hours spent on a particular task. At some point we decided to track statistics on hours spent in the following way:

• Hours spent on tasks inside the assessment
• Hours spent on tasks beyond evaluation
• Internal tasks of the company

Next, let's turn on lean manufacturing.
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As the theory says, we need to divide all processes in production into three types:

• Increase customer value for the product
• Not increasing value, but necessary for production (mud of the first kind)
• And processes that do not increase the value of the product, which are direct losses ( muda of the second kind)

The first point needs to be constantly improved, the second - to regulate and keep at a certain level, the third - to eradicate in the company at all.

And, it would seem, you need to grow two paragraphs and success, but ... not everything is so simple. After several iterations, we increased the number of groups. Here are some of the groups into which we divide tasks:

• Hours inside the project evaluation
• Hours out of project evaluation
• Warranty work
• Hours for selected areas (Tech. Support, Internet marketing, etc.)
• Internal tasks of the company
• Self-development + Planners + Standards + Retrospectives
• Project Evaluation (for potential customers)

Already from this kind of parameters we were able to collect more reliable statistics. According to it, it became clear that the guarantee is wise of the second kind. And you need to adjust the processes so as to reduce it to zero. If many evaluations of projects fall on you, then this process is probably worth even better regulation so that it does not grow much (mud of the first kind). As a result, only hours inside project ratings bring value. Their share needs to be maximized and at some point understand where your ceiling is of this parameter.

Today we are talking only about lean, but in general it is difficult to overestimate the benefits of collecting such statistics for a business. In the case of each company, the set of parameters may be different, but dividing it into three key types will help you understand what to do to increase profits.

Move the machines

In our company, frontend and backend-developers are in the same room, the rest of the staff, respectively, separately. Naturally, over time, a sufficient mutual understanding arose between them in which form it was better to transfer work from one stage to another. This understanding is deep enough and the guide for this has done nothing but determine them in one room. From here we conclude:

"If you plant all employees related to the production in the direction of the product creation flow, this will significantly strengthen communication at the junctions of the stages."

The opposite is also true if employees of the neighboring development stages do not sit in the immediate vicinity, it will be difficult to achieve a high level of understanding between them.

In all the histories of the company's transformation into lean manufacturing, the first thing that Japanese sensei did was to move the machines , rearranging them in the right order. Moreover, such permutations, with the change of technology, assumed a permanent character. In IT, you can find your analogue to this process. Even if you do not have the opportunity to form a continuous stream, even the temporary presence (1-2 months) of the presence of employees in an “alien” department will be useful. Although the neighborhood, of course, gives the results much higher.

In the specific situation of our company, designers must have a good understanding of designers, designers - frontend, frontend - backend. The circle can be closed because internet marketers are added at the beginning and at the end of the process.

We break cocoons

Have you ever heard the following phrase from the manager: “This employee just does his job well”? Lean industry seeks to remove the word “simple” from this phrase. The ideal lean manufacturing employee not only does his job well, but also understands how his work influences the increase in the value of the final product. This is a very important focus, because in the eyes of the company, the employee understands how it affects its profits. Here we need to explain a little, let's see how to expand the review of the employee.

Step 1

After deciding to move to lean manufacturing, you need to break the “cocoons” around all employees. First you need to achieve a situation where an employee will begin to better understand what his immediate superiors require, that is, the head of the unit and pm (let it be so). As a result, they should have excellent mutual understanding on working issues.

Step 2

Understanding the next stages of development. Here we are talking about the neighborhood, where machine movement helps a lot.

Step 3

Understanding of all stages of development. It is necessary that the employee had a clear idea of ​​how value is created at all stages to which he does not belong (design, prototyping, etc.). The magnitude of this stage depends on how much development steps you have.

Step 4

The final stage is an understanding of what the end client / user needs. Ideally, this is a comprehensive understanding of the result of the work and the generation of ideas for improving the product, due to which the sales department can get advantages relative to competitors.

If an employee understands all the steps in the value stream, its value to the company is difficult to assess. Looking at any task, he will understand how to make it so that the end user is most satisfied with the result.

What is the result

All the ideas of this article I built, modeling what I know about lean manufacturing, on the processes of the studio in which I work. Having introduced innovations and, striving to take the path of lean manufacturing, we received some interesting improvements. This is a more controllable development process and extensive training of employees. And the training of employees is 100% necessary.

Naturally, this is not all that can be done within the framework of lean production in your company. And if you have thoughts that can complement the article, write in comments. For my part, I will try to collect more of my observations and share with you.