TLS - TOC, Lean & Six Sigma

When googling Hoshin Kanri, you will sooner or later come across an X-Matrix. It is a visually very impressive tool, but I am in serious doubt about its usefulness. It focuses on the creation of the Hoshin items, but to me this approach is overkill, and – even worse – may distract the user from actually following the PDCA, especially the Check and Act parts. While the article is highly critical, I hope reading it and understanding the shortcomings help you better understand how Toyota thinks.

The Toyota Way has revolutionized the industrial world. This approach has often been copied through the deployment of certain principles such as waste reduction, one piece flow, standardization of tasks, 5S, 5 whys, etc. However, the stable long term relationship that Toyota has been able to build with its network of suppliers remains unique. To date this practice is rarely adopted, even in the automotive industry. This is the subject of this webinar recording by Reynald Debaut-Henocque, ex-Vice-President Production of Toyota Motor Manufacturing France (TMMF).
If Toyota does this why don't you?

Explains how to apply the Theory of Constraints to your agile/Scrum task board. You will learn how to improve the flow of your work via improved visualisation and most importantly by identifying your constraint and doing something about it.

What does Toyota find the most difficult in applying the Toyota Way!? Reynald Debaut-Henocque, ex-Vice-President of Manufacturing in Toyota Motor Manufacturing France, shares his 20 year experience of the elements he considers required the most efforts to maintain. He underlines 3 elements in particular: 5S, 5 Whys and Standardized Work. He is interviewed by Philip Marris, CEO of Marris Consulting, who has extensive experience in implementing "Good Lean" (Toyota Way) in a wide variety of industries throughout the world.

[...] Combining Lean Thinking with the Theory of Constraints. Can the Theory of Constraints be used as a catalyst for lean implementation? This author says yes! TOC methods fit nicely into the lean thinking five-step change framework, between steps two and three. Using TOC can help lean change agents to improve performance in processes where it is infeasible to eliminate bottlenecks. Specifically, after creating the ideal future value stream map, how do you achieve it? As you divide your value stream into loops and determine improvement objectives for each, as described in Learning to See, incorporating TOC methods can give the following benefits:
• Determining Where to Begin ...

“What do we mean by ‘Standard Work’?” […] I saw it as whatever you do to ensure that same work is done the same way every time, regardless of time of day, production line, or factory; 96 comments later, my perspective has changed somewhat. Ensuring consistency is, of course, essential but the tool to do it is Job Instruction (JI) rather than Standard Work. […] Standard Work builds on these instructions by specifying how these tasks are sequenced and combined to make effective use of people and equipment. The main contributors to this post and ensuing discussion are : Sid Joynson, […] The discussion also cited publications by Mike Rother, Art Smalley, John Shook, and Taiichi Ohno. If you want to see the whole discussion, please check it out on LinkedIn. This post is a synthesis , organized by topic and with illustrations added.

For low labour costs reasons, most industries choose to offshore their operations. Invited by Philip Marris, Founder and CEO of Marris Consulting, Reynald Debaut-Henocque, ex-Vice-President of Manufacturing at Toyota Motor Manufacturing France, presents his point of view on this topic.
He explains how Toyota successfully built a Toyota car assembly factory in expensive France in 1999. Currently, in 2021, the factory has 5,000 employees, they produce one third of all cars in France, it is a small low margin Segment-B car (Yaris), it won the car of the year award in 2021, etc.
Excuses for why companies do off-shoring are numerous. Few people talk about the counter examples that prove that you can compensate for high labour costs in many ways.

Reynald Debaut-Henocque regularly gives a training course online ""Lean: the keys to Good Lean and traps of Bad Lean" if you wish to learn more: https://www.marris-consulting.com/en/training/lean-good-vs-bad-lean-training-description

In this short video, Philip Marris explains how to manage the production flow with Drum-Buffer-Rope (DBR). This methodology was created by Eli Goldratt and presented in his best-selling book The Goal.

Back in May, Bob Sproull and Matt Hutcheson published a book entitled The New Beginning: A Business Novel on How to Successfully Implement the Combination of The Theory of Constraints, Lean, and Six Sigma to Drive Profit Margins. Essentially, this book teaches the reader how to successfully combine and implement the Theory of Constraints, Lean, and Six Sigma to produce results that many companies only dream of having. It covers a variety of different company types including manufacturing and healthcare.

When I spoke with Bob in July, I asked him: "What is the main purpose for combining and implementing the Theory of Constraints, Lean, and Six Sigma?" Here is his full answer:

The main purpose for combining and implementing the Theory of Constraints, Lean, and Six Sigma is quite simply to maximize a company’s profitability.  Each of the three individual components serves a completely different purpose, but ...

An 18 minute extract of the conference "Using TOC to boost a Lean organization" presented at the TOCICO Annual conference in Chicago by Philip Marris…