A lively discussion finishing with a shop tour marked a great networking and best practice sharing at Canvil/Anvil in Simcoe.

The topic was change management and culture change.   The discussion covered areas ranging from how does your company implement change in a union environment to how often do you communicate with your plant employees.

Change is and will never be an easy or quick process.   When looked at on a classic bell curve we discussed how 20% will adapt immediately; 60% will adapt within 12-18 months and 20% will never adapt.  

Jim Collins in his book 'Good to Great' talks about making sure you have the right people on your "bus" and gives 2 key questions to determine how you know if they are the right people:

1. Would you hire the person again?
2. If the person came to tell you that he or she is leaving to pursue an exciting new opportunity would you feel terribly disappointed or secretly relieved?

Some great suggestions came out of the event:

-        define metrics to measure and share with ALL employees (1 suggestion was to focus on downtime by work centre and defects per X units)

-        change needs to start with a strong leader at the top who believes in honest open communication and is visible on the shop floor

-        in a union environment some change has to be driven through the collective agreement

-        weekly town hall meetings are a great place to start where you mix management with shop floor and just ask what their questions and concerns are and then figure out a way to respond to them

-        a single shift operation will have less issues since there is administrative and engineering support immediately available and there won't be finger pointing between shifts

-        regardless of the size of your organization change will be a slow process but may be easier to implement in tougher times because people realize more that their jobs and company's long term viability is at stake

The new word for the day was 'nemawashi' which is a Japanese word that means:

·    Nemawashi (根回し) in Japanese culture is an informal process of quietly laying the foundation for some proposed change or project, by talking
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemawashi

·                                 to prepare a tree for transplanting; refers to the formal and informal method of gaining consensus prior to the implementation of a hoshin or plan.
www.leansystems.org/glossary.html

·                                 (Japanese) A process or technique of soliciting feedback and support informally, through serial one-on-one review of a proposal, idea, or initiative. ...
www.mgrush.com/content/view/70/33/

A link to some lean training suggested by one of our members: www.jphorizons.com

Thanks to all who attended for a great and very interactive session!   I look forward to your suggestions for other topics for our SIGs!