ImagesMagUK-July-2020

www.images-magazine.com JULY 2020 images 41 Will Pearson runs a small screen print shop and has been fanatical about the one-piece flow approach ever since he read two books 13 years ago: Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming; and The Machine that Changed the World by James Womack and Daniel Jones. Next issue, he’ll explain how to develop the habit of looking for problems that don’t appear to exist. www.phantomscreenprint.co.uk rhythm, versus the standard, inefficient batch-and-queue-style approach. Continuous improvement After a period of thought and rumination, you’ll come up with a consensus of what you might do to further improve the process, and so begins another PDCA cycle. This constant reassessment with small, incremental improvements goes on forever as part of the overarching principle of ‘continuous improvement’, or Kaizen as it is known at Toyota. Kaizen is one of the main pillars of the TPS, and as such is a very important concept to get to grips with. At this point, it’s worth mentioning that, as much as learning and deploying the various techniques and tools of the TPS, this is really about a cultural change. The people in your organisation have to be on-board with this philosophy in order for it to work. In the West, many companies have found this to be the most challenging part of TPS. On the whole, our culture seems to tend towards shifting blame, work-to-rule type behaviour and a prevailing ambition to get through the working day while getting away with doing as little as possible. In stark contrast – and again as a broad generalisation – in Japan and Asia the dominant culture is one of wanting to work hard and outdo one’s own personal best achievements. Each individual tends to have a high sense of personal responsibility, and workers tend to set the bar way higher than their western counterparts. How can you begin to build this type of culture? Well, that’s a big subject, but here are three practical ideas to get you started: ■ Build systems that people can easily operate autonomously. ■ Start each day with a very quick meeting to go over highlights and failures of the shop’s productivity as a whole (not targeting individuals publicly!). Team members should be encouraged to actively find faults with a part of the process they are involved in, and given responsibility to come up with an idea to fix it. Toyota tends to let a different member of its team host these discussions each day – they are not top-down style meetings. ■ Place a strong emphasis on producing quality and consistency, rather than continually making noises about how much money everything is costing or placing people under pressure to produce when their production conditions are not working well. BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Whether you’re a professional or a crafter, all you need is a heat press and Supacolour to brand from anywhere. Branding made easy. hello@supacolour.co.uk / +44 7951 770393 10 St Marks Road, Corby, Northants NN18 8AN, United Kingdom