The best results in kaizen happen when the highest level hands on leader is not only engaged, but is leading the charge.
A few years back when I was in a Director of Manufacturing role, I had full responsibility for all of the production in the shop. After being in my position for 3 months, it was highly evident from all of the metric data I had been observing and the day to day activities on the shop floor that heat treat was the largest delay in the system for all of the value streams. The lead-time was 3.5 weeks! There were numerous shop floor control workers who wasted a lot of their time during the day searching for their parts in the heat treat cell and interrupting the production of the heat treat personnel by continually asking for assistance in locating their parts.
I assembled my team for a one hour training session on the Toyota Production System. At the end of the training, I announced that we would be using this knowledge to conduct a kaizen event in the heat treat cell.
I assigned the supervisor of that area to be the team leader for the kaizen event and gave him one on one training and coaching prior to and during the event. I assigned all of the operators that work in the heat treat cell, the manufacturing engineer that supports the cell and one set of outside eyes to be team members.
In order to have all of the people who worked in that area participate on the kaizen event, I had to strategically shut down production in that cell for 5 days. When I announced to my peers that I was planning to shut our bottleneck cell down for 5 days, I received a lot of negative press and backlash. I had confidence and faith that the team would deliver big results with my teaching and coaching, but I also knew that no one would believe me until it happened.
On day one of the event, I joined the team to come up with the overall strategy. Using existing racks in the building, we organized a train schedule for the parts. I worked with the team to set up 5 lanes. I challenged them to come up with a method to group the parts into 5 lanes and told them I would check in on them once a day. Their solution at the end of day 1 was 20 lanes, I held up my hand showing 5 fingers and sent them back to the drawing board. On day 2, they got it down to 10 lanes, my hand went up again to send them back to try again, they shook their heads thinking it was impossible. On day 3, the manufacturing engineer smiled with pride that he had found a way to group the heat treat codes into 5.
Days 4 and 5 were spent running the new cell. We measured the leadtime on day 5 using a very simple method. The lead-time was 3 days. The team continued to make improvements while operating the cell on a day to day basis.
When the official lead-time metric came in the next month, it was down to 1.5 days. It maintained this performance the entire time I worked there and from what I have heard in recent years, it continues to operate this way.
A new paradigm had replaced the old one by incorporating Innovative Breakthrough kaizen.