Read the target box on the A3s in most plants. “Improve Line 3.” “Reduce downtime.” “Get back to plan.” None of them tells the Team Leader what to watch tomorrow at seven.
A line is forty units a shift behind plan. The supervisor writes “recover 40 units” on the board, calls it the target, and the team goes after everything at once. Three weeks later the line is thirty-five behind, nobody can say which effort moved the number, and the A3 goes in the drawer. The effort was fine. The target was set before anyone knew what the problem was.
Why the usual approach fails.
Two mistakes recur. The first is setting the target before the problem is broken down. Forty units behind plan is not a problem. It is a gap, and underneath it are several problems, each with its own cause. Attach the target to the gap and the team chases a number no single countermeasure can move, so every countermeasure looks like it failed.
The second is setting a target the team cannot measure where the work happens. “Reduce downtime ten percent this quarter” sounds precise, but downtime is calculated in the office, from a system, at month end. The Team Leader learns whether she is winning six weeks after her last chance to do anything about it.
The principle.
Toyota Business Practices lays out problem solving in eight steps, and setting the target is the third, not the first. It comes after the problem has been clarified and broken down into the pieces that produce the gap, because only then is there something specific enough to aim at.
A target in that method has three parts: what, how much, by when. What names the prioritized problem, the piece you chose to go after first. How much says how far you intend to move it, in the units of that piece. By when sets a date the team can hold itself to. Leave out any one of the three and the work stalls, quietly.
The discipline is in the what. If the breakdown found that the line loses most of its cycles at one station after breaks and changeovers, the target is about lost cycles at that station, not about the forty units. Cutting them in half by the end of next month, counted on the hourly board, is a target. It will not close the whole gap, and it says so; the rest belongs to the next problem.
Written this way, the Team Leader can see it. She knows at eight o’clock whether the first hour went the way the target needs, and she can act on it at a quarter past. That is a target that is managed, not reported on.
What to do this week.
Take the improvement item that has been on the board longest and rewrite its target in three lines.
What: the specific problem, narrowed to a place, a time and a condition. If the best you can write is the name of the line, go back and break the problem down. The target will wait.
How much: a number in the units of that problem, not the units of the plant’s pain. Pick something the team already counts, or can start counting tomorrow with a tally sheet.
By when: a date close enough that the team will still remember why it mattered. A month is usually right. A quarter is a wish with a longer runway.
Then ask the Team Leader where she will see this number tomorrow. If the answer is a report, the target is not finished; move the measure to the board. If the answer is slow to come, let it. That pause is the subject of the silence after the question.
What leadership has to do to make it last.
A target that can be seen at the line creates an obligation above the line, and this is where most plants let it slip. First, stop accepting wishes. When a target arrives as “improve” or “reduce,” hand it back and ask for the three parts. Do it every time, and the fifth A3 will arrive in the right form unasked.
Second, go to the board where the target is measured. A target the plant manager sees only in a monthly deck has been outsourced. Asking at the hourly board how yesterday went against the target, as part of leader standardized work, tells the floor the number is real. It is also where coaching happens, because a question about cause only works when both people are looking at the same count.
Third, protect the small target from the big gap. Somebody will point out that halving lost cycles at one station does not recover forty units. They are right, and that is the method working. The gap closes one located problem at a time, and the leader’s job is to keep that moving. It is the patience behind the order in which comes first, the management system or kaizen: stabilize, standardize, manage, then improve.
A target with three parts is a small thing to ask for. It is also where a complaint turns into a problem somebody can own. Write it so the person who has to hit it can see it, then go look at the board with her.
Monte Mitchell is President & CEO of Fourtre Consulting, which helps manufacturers install the authentic Toyota Production System — the management system, not just the tools. If the targets on your floor read like wishes, let’s walk it together.