FOUR PILLARS FOR EFFECTIVE LEAN TRAINING

Talan Products Inc. (Cleveland, OH) has 75 employees which, on one hand, is not so many people to train. Then again, this also means the company doesn?t have the resources to make any mistakes while learning. Teaching methods must be efficient and, most importantly, effective.

When Talan began its lean journey, this was of primary importance to chief executive officer Steve Peplin. ?We were committed to implementing lean manufacturing methods throughout the plant, but we had some concerns about training costs,? he says. ?Before hiring a consultant, one of the aspects we took a close look at was their approach to education. We knew we didn?t want a ?one-size-fits-all, train-the-masses? style because that often involves customization, which can raise the costs.?

Talan eventually selected Rick Bohan, principal of Chagrin River Consulting, LLC (Chagrin Falls, OH), to assist in their lean manufacturing initiative. ?His ?just-in-time, hands-on? approach integrated improvement actions into an overall plan for rolling out lean tools and methods,? notes Peplin. ?He showed us how training effectiveness isn?t simply a matter of having good class sessions, but of putting an active structure around the content that makes learning successful.?

THE FOUR PILLARS
Lean training can drain the resources of a small company if the process is not carried out well. Effective lean training is founded on four core principles:
(1) Planning
(2) Action Oriented Workshops
(3) Team Follow Through
(4) Leadership Oversight

Too often, training is carried out as a ?one shot? enterprise: train all the employees and hope something sticks. By adhering to these four principles, Talan has been able to assure that its lean training was value-added.

Planning
Pete Accorti, president of Talon, verifies the importance of leadership planning. ?We came to see the value of the planning phase. We all got involved in developing metrics for the success of the overall initiative, as well as constructing a calendar of workshops for the lean training,? he says. ?Most importantly, this allowed us the time to really understand how the training fit in with and supported the overall initiative.?

Pat Parziale, the vice president of manufacturing, was in charge of pulling the metrics together and charting them. ?We are a very results-driven company, so the idea of measuring what we do wasn?t exactly new to us.?

Accorti adds, ?We liked the idea that the metrics were tied directly to the effectiveness of the training. We learned that we don?t train people so that they die smart. We train people to make an impact on the enterprise.?

After the leadership team assembled the calendar for the lean training during the planning phase, senior leadership introduced the lean initiative to the employees themselves in a company-wide meeting. Using the calendar, the leaders were able to show the employees how and when they would begin to be involved with the initiative.

Action Oriented Workshops
Lean methods are most effectively conveyed in a ?learning by doing? format. When one is learning to throw a baseball or swing a golf club, there is no substitute for actually getting outside and practicing while learning. This same truth applies to lean methods: workshops that have a strong action component are the most effective for teaching lean techniques.

For example, employees learn 5S most effectively when they actually carry out a 5S initiative within a work area. They understand Value Stream Mapping best when they create an actual map. It is crucial to note that not only are lean methods best taught within action-oriented workshops, lean concepts are also best transmitted in this format. Few experiences create that ?a-ha!? experience for employees as well as participation in a 5S or Value Stream Mapping workshop.

Accorti describes the value of the action workshops for a small company like Talon. ?We were strongly against a purely ?classroom? approach to training,? he recalls. ?We have always been focused on training for our employees. We had already learned that scheduling training in a small company like ours can be a real challenge, so we liked the fact that change and improvement were both being accomplished in the workshops themselves.?

Parziale agrees. ?I got good feedback from the supervisors and employees who took part in the workshops,? he says. ?They liked the training focus being on the shop floor so they could apply what they were learning right away.?

?Action-oriented? simply means that classroom time is limited and shop floor, hands-on time is maximized. Five 5S workshops were conducted at Talon, each focusing on one of the presses. Each workshop was scheduled to take four hours: one in the classroom, three on the shop floor.

Parziale explains the format they used. ?The half-day workshop worked well for us. This was easy to schedule, meaning we were able to get our employees trained in a fairly short period of time. A half-day isn?t much time to get a lot done even in a small area, but we addressed that issue through team follow-up.?

Team Follow Through
Action-oriented workshops generate improvement ideas and action lists from the participants. During the workshops, employees are asked to volunteer for teams that will follow-up on those ideas. After the workshops are completed, more work remains to be done. One team was formed to schedule on-going 5S efforts and to assure follow-through on the ideas and actions developed during the initial workshops. Another team was formed to follow up on ideas generated during the setup reduction workshops. The teams met bi-weekly and were each lead by a supervisor.

Parziale explains the teams? roles. ?We let the employees know early on that they would be fully involved in the lean initiative, and that the teams were the channel for this involvement,? he says. ?Our supervisors acted as team leaders and did a good job of assuring that the teams met regularly and kept the action items developed in the workshops moving forward.?

Leadership Oversight
No training plan is carried out effectively unless there is ongoing support and commitment from senior leadership. In the case of Talan Products, this support came from the Steering Committee comprised of Peplin, Accorti, Parziale, and other department managers. This committee met twice a month to oversee the training calendar and the progress of the teams.

Peplin asserts the importance of the Steering Committee. ?Even as committed to the initiative as we are, it can be easy to let progress slow as we attend to other aspects of the business,? he noted. ?During our Steering Committee meetings, we were able to make sure the training and the team efforts stayed on track and that we sustained our own energy around the initiative.?

Effective training is possible, even in a small company. Good planning, an action oriented approach, and effective oversight and follow-through are essential to success.

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Rick Bohan is the principal of Chagrin River Consulting, LLC, Chagrin Falls, OH, www.chagrinriverconsulting.com.

Talan Products Inc., 18800 Cochran Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio USA 44110, 216-458-0170, Fax: 216-458-0153, www.talanproducts.com.