How the CEO Sees It

Our Lean Leadership Boot Camps

In this regular feature, CEO Steve Loranger takes a closer look at the components that comprise the ITT Management System and define our way of doing business.  This month, he explores the Lean Leadership Boot Camps that are helping Lean become part of the ITT culture.

We are moving quickly to instill a robust and comprehensive Lean culture at ITT. Just three months ago, I used this column to announce the launch of Lean Leadership Boot Camps. Today, I'm happy to report that nearly all of our value centers have conducted at least one, and the remaining few are in progress or scheduled to begin shortly.

You already know the basics about these Boot Camps. As a reminder, here's what I wrote in July: 

"From now through mid-summer, the presidents and senior staff at every value center will attend five-day "boot camp" sessions, with a day and a half dedicated to classroom training, followed by three and half days of kaizens. Kaizens are an integral part of Lean. This Japanese word means "to take apart and put back together in a better way," and prior to these bootcamps, every value center identified kaizens that tie in with their breakthrough improvement priorities or daily management priorities, as outlined in their Value-Based Goal Deployment process."

And that's exactly how it happened. Along with John Williamson, our director of operational excellence, I kicked off every Boot Camp session via a teleconference with the participants and then got regular reports about key kaizen projects and feedback about the process. 

From all reports, it's clear that these intense Boot Camps achieved our goal of injecting Lean directly into the bloodstreams of all our businesses. That's good. We don't want to ease our way toward a Lean culture. Why wait any longer than necessary to experience the benefits of being a Lean enterprise where there is little or no waste -- of time, materials, money and employee effort -- and all work processes have a highly specified content, sequence, timing and outcome. 

The Boot Camps showed our business leaders that Lean can produce big results very quickly. With guidance and training from Nori Morimoto, our director of VBSS, and Ralph Contursi, our corporate Lean master, all the value centers completed their kaizens by the end of the week. I heard from more than one value center president that they were energized by the immediate bottom-line improvements. One business performed a two-day kaizen that moved out $1 million dollars of finished goods sitting in storage. Here are some other good examples:

• In Sweden, our Flygt business installed an on-site printer for manuals and parts lists.  This print-on-demand solution is saving substantial printing costs and reduced scrapping of obsolete manuals by 99 percent.

• In New York, our Industrial & BioPharm Group reduced parts movement from 1.5 miles to .2 miles, allowing the business to take on a significantly higher volume of orders.

• In North Carolina, our Advanced Water Treatment business reduced cycle time, work-in-progress and floor space by 50 percent for production and assembly of its ultraviolet module.

But Lean is not just for the factory floor. It can and should be applied to all business transactions and processes. Our Systems Division business performed a kaizen to accelerate their export compliance licensing process, and other businesses improved their order entry and payroll processes.

To build on this momentum, Nori and Ralph conducted train-the-trainer sessions with the local Lean masters at each value center. These Lean masters are now conducting similar Lean bootcamps with employees at lower levels of the company. You do not have to be a VBSS black belt to take part. After the bootcamp, our businesses should be performing at least two kaizen events a month, and I expect that in the next year, nearly everyone at our company will be able to say they were involved in a kaizen that helped their value center become more efficient and more competitive in the marketplace. 

We also integrated Lean and the Value-Based Goal Deployment process. At their monthly VBGD meeting, each value center now reviews the results of recent kaizens and uses the VBGD process to identify opportunities for new kaizens. If a business is getting "red" scores for a certain goal, the next step is to develop countermeasures which may include kaizen projects to get the effort back on track.

By tying Lean to VBGD, we are keeping our leaders engaged in the process. This is one of the big keys to success. I've said in the past that if our leaders can't teach Lean, they don't know Lean. The Boot Camps got our leaders on board, and the VBGD process will keep them involved in identifying projects and allocating the resources needed to get the projects done. I also expect them to serve as team members on kaizen projects where it makes sense, because there is no substitute for hands-on experience and real-time decision making. 

Nearly all of our value centers have conducted a Lean Leadership Boot Camp, like the one here held in Sweden for ITT's Flygt business.