When Even Government Adopts Your Competitor's Tactics…
…You know you’re in some trouble. The AP reports that local governments are adopting the kaizen principles that launched Toyota to the production efficiency monster it is today. And the bureaucratic nightmares which once defined government inefficiency are being massively reduced. For those who are not familiar with “the five whys,” the AP describes kaizen as “a way of thinking that diagrams a job step by step, puts workers at the center, gives them a sense of the total process they’re involved in, and then frees them to think of ways to best do their jobs.” Or, as the quality services director at the Ohio Department of Administrative Services puts it,”You cannot filibuster, you cannot stall. You look at this thing and say ‘OK, justify that.'” The concept has become the hot thing in local government the nation over. As one strangely-picked example goes, the average time to process death certificates in Maine recently dropped from 95 days to five after the state introduced kaizen principles. “We got calls from people saying they want to die in Maine now because they can get the death records so quickly,” claims a Maine HHS honcho. Any of those calls come from Detroit?
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Deming does indeed get much of the credit, but Toyota and many Japanese industry claim they were doing many of these things in the early 1930s. Toyota defend their TPS as totally theirs. I know many in the US would like it to be so, but transfer of this information is never as simple as "The US Showed Them How To Do It". For an interesting insight into Deming's frustration with American business leaders it's worth a read of Dr. Deming: The American Who Taught the Japanese About Quality. It's required reading at our company. The Toyota Way by Linker is also an interesting insight into the visits to Toyota by American automotive companies. Also, for those that keeping mentioning the war, there was not much magnanimous about the US and Germany. It was a race with the Soviets to grab as much industry and technology as possible.
From the AP article: "In Maine, it occurred to someone during a kaizen session that death certificates could be issued months faster if copies, instead of the originals, were sent to be copied to microfiche archives. That way, vital records employees, who can't release a death certificate without the original in hand, could speed up the process." The supervisors who tolerated this outrageous snafu were brain-dead. They just hadn't gotten their death certificates yet. Such chowderheads remind me of when I moved to another state. The phone in our new home could be used to call out, but I couldn't receive calls. I called the phone company to get my account activated. The lady said it would take several days, until a repair tech could get to my house and hook up the phone -- the very phone I was using to talk to her! Well, the lady was right about one thing: it did take several days. Eventually, someone at the central office took a minute to get my inbound service activated.
The federal employees I have dealt with while selling software would simply reject this as against union rules. So would at least one of the auto company call center unions.