Ok so what's the question?
I'd like you to close your eyes and think about the most important things in your housebuilding business right now.
I can't imagine for one moment that reading this article would be that important, so my guess is that many of you thought about that land deal that's close to completion, or that planning issue that's driving you nuts, or your next big marketing campaign, or the dreaded year end that's looming ever closer with all its deadlines and targets.
How many of you thought about the actual workplace? And in particular how many of you thought about the production that is currently happening on your sites?
Surely one of the most important issues, if not the most important right now, is that the people working on site are doing their jobs correctly and with the right materials.
If one brick is not being placed properly on the next, if the pipework isn't being properly finished, if the kitchen is missing some parts, if the electrics aren't being properly tested or if the previous trade is late finishing or leaves the production area in a mess, or if the materials aren't available so that the next trade can't begin on time and has less time to finish before the next trade arrives you have some serious cost burning, quality sapping, people demotivating issues.
The potential end result of this is that you hand over an unfinished home to a customer with very high expectations. The customer becomes very angry, takes out the magnifying glass, finds hundreds of faults, ties up your customer care department for months and possibly sees you in court.
What's brought this on all of a sudden? Well, I've recently been revisiting a favourite book - Gemba Kaizen by Masaaki Imai and it's brought back memories of my time at Honda (see factfile below).
Kaizen is a word that many will already be familiar with. It is the philosophy of continuous improvement in business processes to achieve high productivity, quality and profit.
Gemba may be less familiar. As Masaaki Imai puts it Gemba means real place - the place where real action occurs, the place where products and services are formed, for example your sites where you are building houses.
Many managers overlook this workplace, or Gemba, in their daily lives and tend to concentrate more on long-term strategy, financial management, product design and development, sales and marketing.
In the context of housebuilding I would summarise this as management supporting the activities of tomorrow.
But what about management supporting the activities of today, the activities in the Gemba itself? In many western companies management appears almost afraid of the production area and spends little time within it. The Gemba is considered a place where things always go wrong, a source of failure and customer complaints.
At the extreme managers will sit in their offices, miles from the Gemba. They come into contact with events taking place there only through their daily, weekly, monthly reports or meetings.
In short the Gemba way is to go to the place of action and collect the facts. The traditional way is to remain in the office and discuss opinions.
As Masaaki puts it, staying in close contact with and understanding Gemba is the first step in managing a production site effectively.
When a problem occurs
When a problem occurs consider the four actuals of Gemba, go to the actual workplace, look at the actual process, observe what is actually happening and collect the actual data. When at the problem area keep asking why? until the root cause of the problem is reached (five whys should do the trick). Once you've found the root cause, find a solution and standardise it to prevent recurrence.
In housebuilding this represents an enormous challenge. Sites are spread all over the countryside and most tasks are undertaken by contract labour which itself is in short supply.
Well my argument is this. You are not suddenly going to see an increase in labour availability and you are unlikely to be able to change to other build practices fast enough to cope with your demand - even if you want to change your build processes.
Therefore you have to get the maximum productivity out of the resources you have. You cannot afford waste of any kind. And the only way you as a manager will effectively improve things is for you to spend the maximum amount of time in the Gemba, watching, listening and working with the teams to constantly improve working practices, team relationships and motivation.
You means you!
I am observing a worrying trend both here and in the US for what I call the men in white coats approach. The thinking goes like this: "We're fed up with the quality problems we have, our site managers are overworked, we can't trust the contractors to do their job properly and the quality of our homes is suffering. We need a whole new stratum of managers who will check and test the homes throughout production. They will have the power to stop the line and get things put right".
I'm not for one moment suggesting that the white coats approach will not work but I personally feel it is a shame that we are prepared to give up on the resources we already have.
If a site manager cannot manage and a contractor cannot deliver quality then we should be asking some serious questions in the Gemba. I do believe that no one goes to work intent on doing a bad job. I also believe that a workplace in which people are obviously respected and problems are solved quickly is one where quality has a chance to shine through.
So why do we have so many quality problems on site? Are we guilty of not going to Gemba to find out for ourselves? And is a man in a white coat not an abdication of your role and responsibility?
Malcolm Pitcher is a director of PCL and In-house Research. He specialises in marketing strategy, brand strategy, culture change, change management, marketing research and customer satisfaction monitoring. He has been marketing director for Wimpey Homes and held senior posts with Volkswagen and Honda. He can be contacted on 01793 848455, e-mail: info@pitcherco.com
What really mattered at Honda was the Gemba...
I have been thinking back to my time at Honda. I might have been marketing manager for Europe but it was made very clear what was really important to the company. The Gemba. Production associates are given all the support they need to build quality of the highest standard. A meeting would stop immediately if a problem was found in the Gemba and managers would race to the scene. To ensure that I understood its importance I worked on the line for a period of time in the die casting area. It was hot, hard work. There was nowhere to sit, nowhere to hide and nowhere to put waste. All except one on the die casting team were ex-construction workers and their pursuit of quality and continuous improvement will remain with me forever. The team was totally responsible for its own quality, the general maintenance of the machinery used and any tool changes required. There was not one white coated, clip boarded man to be seen anywhere in the plant I don’t believe that this has anything to do with the fact that these workers were inside in a nice dry factory. They all said the work was as hard as any other work they had done. The real issue is that they were totally supported by the management from the president down. At least once a day the top managers would walk the plant, observing, asking questions and seeking feedback. I even saw the president stoop to pick up a sweet wrapper - which was a message in itself.Source
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