The Lean Thinker - A Morning Market

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The Lean Thinker

A Morning Market
In past posts, I have referred to an organization that implemented a morning market as a way
to manage their problem solving efforts.
Synchronicity being what it is:
Barb, the driving force in the organization in my original story, wrote to tell me that their
morning market is going strong and remains the centerpiece of their problem solving culture.
In 2008, she reports, their morning market drove close to 2000 non-trivial problems to ground.
That is about 10/day. How well do you do?
Edited to add in March 2015: I heard from Barb again. It is still a core part of the
organizations culture.
So to organizations trying to implement a problem solving culture and anyone else who is
interested, I am going to get into some of the nuts and bolts of what we did there way back in
2003. (I am telling you when so that it sinks in that this is a change that has lasted and
fundamentally altered the culture there.)

What is A Morning Market?

The term comes from Masaaki Imais book Gemba Kaizen pages 114 118. It is a short
section, and does not give a lot of detail. The idea is to review defects first thing in the
morning when they are fresh thus the analogy to the early morning fish and produce
markets. (For those who like Japanese jargon, the term is asaichi, but in general, with an
English speaking audience, I prefer to use English terms.)
The concept is to display the actual defects, classified by what is known about them.
A problems: The cause is known. Countermeasures can be implemented immediately.
B problems: The cause is known, countermeasures are not known.
C problems: Cause is unknown.
Each morning the new defects are touched, felt, understood. (The actual objects). Then the
team organizes to solve the problem. The plant manager should visit all of the morning
markets so he can keep tabs on the kinds of problems they are seeing.
Simple, eh?

Putting It Into Practice

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Fortunately we were not the pioneers within the company. That honor goes to another part of
the company who was more than willing to share what they had learned, but their key lesson
was put two pieces of tape on a table, divide it into thirds, label them A, B and C and just try
it.
They were right as always, it is impossible to design a perfect process, but it is possible to
discover one. Some key points:
There is a meeting, and it is called the morning market but the meeting does not get the
problems solved. The difference between the organizations that made this work and the
ones that didnt was clear: To make it work it is vital to carve out dedicated time for the
problem solvers to work on solving problems. It cant be a when you get around to it
thing, it must be purposeful, organized work.
The meeting is not a place to work on solving problems. There is a huge temptation to
discuss details, ask questions, try to describe problems, make and take suggestions about
what it might be, or what might be tried. It took draconian facilitation to keep this from
happening.
The purpose of the meeting is to quickly review the status of what is being worked on,
quickly review new problems that have come up, and quickly manage who is working on
what for the next 24 hours. Thats it.
The morning market must be an integral part of an escalation process. The purpose is to
work on real problems that have actually happened. Work on them as they come up.

Just Getting Started

This was all done in the background of trying to implement a moving assembly line. There is a
long back story there, but suffice it to say that the idea of a line stop was just coming into
play. Everyone knew the principle of stopping the line for problems, but there was no real
experience with it. As the line was being developed, there were lots of stops just to determine
the work sequence and timing. But now it was in production.
The first point of confusion was the duration of a line stop. Some were under the impression
that the line would remain stopped until the root cause of the problem was understood. No,
the line remains stopped until the problem can be contained, meaning that safe operations that
assure quality are in place.
The escalation process evolved, and for the first time in a long time, manufacturing engineers
started getting involved in manufacturing.
The actual morning market meeting revolved around a whiteboard. At least at first. When they
started, they filled the board with problems in a day or two. They called and said they wanted
to start a computer database to track the problems. I told them get another board. In a few
days that board, too, filled up. It really made sense now to start a computer database. Nope.
Get another board. That board started to fill.
Then something interesting happened. They started clearing problems.

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PDCA Refining The Process

The tracking board evolved a little bit over time.
The first change was to add a discrete column that called out what immediate measures had
been taken to contain the problem and allow safe, quality production to resume. This was
important for two reasons.
First, it forced the team to distinguish between the temporary stop-gap measure that was put in
immediately and the true root-cause / countermeasure that could, and would, come later.
Previously the culture had been that once this initial action were taken, things were good. We
deliberately called these containments and reserved the word countermeasure for the thing
that actually addressed root cause. This was just to avoid confusion, there is no dogma about
it.
Second, it reminded the team of what (probably wasteful) activity they should be able to
remove from the process when / if the countermeasure actually works. This helped keep these
temporary fixes from growing roots.
You can get an idea of what a typical problem board looked like here:

The columns were:

Date (initial date the problem was encountered)
Owner
Model (the product)
Part Number (what part was involved)
Description (of the part)
Problem (description of the problem)
A/B/C (which of the above categories the problem was now. Note that it can change as
more is learned.
Containment Method
Root Cause (filled in when learned)
Countermeasure (best known being tried right now)
Due Date (when next action is due / reported)
Verified (how was the countermeasure verified as effective?)
A key point is that last column: Verified. The problem stays on the board until there is a

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verified countermeasure in place. That means they actually tested the countermeasure to make
sure it worked. This is, for a lot of organizations, a big, big change. All too many take some
action and call it good. Fire and forget. This little thing started shifting the culture of the
organization toward checking things to make sure they did what they were thought to do.

Refining The Meeting

While this particular shop floor was not excessively loud, it was too loud for an effective
meeting of more than 3-4 people. Rather than moving the meeting to a conference room, the
team spent $50 at Wally World and bought a karaoke machine. This provided a nice,
inexpensive P.A. system. It added the benefit that the microphone became a talking stick it
forced people to pay attention to one person at a time.

Developing Capability
The other gap in the process that emerged pretty quickly was the capability of the organization
to solve problems. While there had been a Six Sigma program in place for quite a while, most
of skill revolved around the kinds of problems that would classify as black belt projects. The
basic troubleshooting and physical investigation skills were lacking.
After exploring a lot of options, the organizations countermeasure was to adopt a standard
packaged training program, give it to the people involved in working the problems, then
expecting that they immediately start using the method. This, again, was a big change over
most organizations approach to training as interesting. In this case, the method was not only
taught, it was adopted as a standard. That was a big help. A key lesson learned was that, rather
than debate which method was better, just pick one and go. In the end, they are all pretty
much the same, only the vocabulary is different.

Spreading The Concept

In this organization, the two biggest hitters every day were supplier part quality and supplier
part shortages. This was pretty much a final-assembly and test only operation, so they were
pretty vulnerable to supplier issues. This process drove a systematic approach to understand
why the received part was defective vs. just replacing it. Eventually they started taking some
of their quality assurance tools upstream and teaching them to key suppliers. Questions were
asked such as How can we verify this is a good part before the supplier ships it? They also
started acknowledging design and supplier capability (vs. just price and capacity) issues.
On the materials side, the supply chain people started their own morning market to work on
the causes of shortages. I have covered their story here.
As they implemented their kanban system, morning markets sprang up in the warehouse to
address their process breakdowns. Another one addressed the pick-and-delivery process that
got kits to the line. Lost cards were addressed. Rather than just update a pick cart, there was
interest in why they got it wrong in the first place, which ended up addressing bill-of-material
issues, which, in turn, made the record more robust.

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Managing The Priorities

Of course, at some point, the number of problems encountered can overwhelm the problem
solvers. The next evolution replaced the white board with problem solving strips. These
were strips of paper, a few inches high, the width of the white board, with the same columns
on them (plus a little additional administrative information). This format let the team move
problems around on the wall, group them, categorize them, and manage them better. Related
issues could be grouped together and worked together. Supplier and internal workmanship
issues could be grouped on the wall, making a good visual indication of where the issues were.

Problem Strips at the meeting.

But those were all side effects. The key was managing the workload.
Any organization has a limited capacity to work on stuff. The previous method of assignment
had been that every problem was assigned to someone on the first day it was reviewed. It
became clear pretty quickly that the half a dozen people actually doing the work were getting a
little sick of being chided for not making any progress on problems 3, 4 and 5 because they
were working on 1 and 2. In effect, the organization was leaving the prioritization to the
problem solvers, and then second guessing their choices. This is not respectful of people.
The countermeasure developed by the shop floor production manager, was to put the
problems on the strips discussed above. The reason she did it was to be able to maintain an
unassigned queue.
Any problem which was not being worked on was in the unassigned queue on the wall. All of
the problems were captured, all were visible to everyone, but they recognized they couldnt
work on everything at once. As a technical person became available, he would pull the next
problem from the queue.
There were two great things about this. First, the production manager could reshuffle the
queue anytime she wanted. Thus the next one in line was always the one that she felt was the
most important. This could be discussed, but ultimately it was her decision. Second is that the
queue became a visual indicator that compared the rate of discovering problems (into the
queue) with the rate of solving problems (out of the queue). This was a great Check on the
capacity and capability of the organization vs. what they needed to do.
There were two, and only two, valid reasons for a problem to bypass this process.

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1. There was a safety issue.

2. A defect had escaped the factory and resulted in a customer complaint.
In these cases, someone would be assigned to work on it right away. The problem that had
been theirs was parked. This acknowledged the priority, rather than just giving him
something else to do and expecting everything else to get done too. (This is respect for
people.)

Incorporation of Other Tools

Later on, a quality inspection standard was adopted. Rather than making this something new, it
was incorporated into the problem solving process itself. When a defect was found, the first
step was to assess the process against the standard for the robustness of countermeasures. Not
surprisingly, there was always a pretty significant gap between the level of countermeasures
mandated by the standard and what was actually in place. The countermeasure was to bring the
process up to the standard.
The standard itself classified a potential defect based on its possible consequences. For each of
four levels, it specified how robust countermeasures should be for preventing error, detecting
defects, checking the process, secondary checks and overall process review. Because it called
out, not only technical countermeasures, but leadership standard work, this process began
driving other thinking into the organization.

Effect On Designs
As you might imagine, there were a fair number of issues that traced back to the design itself.
While it may have been necessary to live with some of these, there was an active product
development cycle ongoing for new models. Some of the design issues managed to get
addressed in subsequent designs, making them easier to get right in manufacturing.

What Was Left Out

The things that got onto the board generally required a technical professional to work them.
These were not trivial problems. In fact, at first, they didnt even bother with anything that
stopped the line for less than 10 minutes (meaning they could rework / repair the problem and
ship a good unit). But even though they turned this threshold down over time, there were
hundreds of little things that didnt get on the radar. And they shouldnt at least not onto this
radar.
The morning market should address the things that are outside the scope of the shop floor
work teams to address.
Another organization I know addressed these small problems really well with their organized
and directed daily kaizen activity. Every day they captured everything that delayed the work.
Five second stoppages were getting on to their radar. Time was dedicated every day at the end
of the shift for the Team Members to work on the little things that tripped them up. They had
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support and resources leadership that helped them, a work area to try out ideas, tools and
materials to make all of the little gadgets that helped them make things better. They didnt
waste their time painting the floor, making things pretty, etc. unless that had been a source of
confusion or other cause of delay. Although the engineers did work on problems as well, they
did not have the work structure described above.
I would love to see the effect in an organization that does all of this at once.
No A3s?
With the A3 as all the rage today, I am sure someone is asking this question while reading
this. No. We knew about A3s, but the problem solving strips served about 75% of the
purpose. Not everything, but they worked. Would a more formal A3 documentation have
worked better? Not sure. This isnt dogma. It is about applying sound, well thought out
methodology, then checking to see if it is working as expected.

Summary
Is all of this stuff in place today? Honestly? I dont know. [Update: As of the end of 2011, this
process is still going strong and is strongly embedded as the way we do things in their
culture.] And it was far from as perfect as I have described it. BUT organized problem solving
made a huge difference in their performance, both tangible and intangible. In spite of huge
pressure to source to low-labor areas, they are still in business. When I read Chasing The
Rabbit I have to say that, in this case, they were almost there.
And finally, an epilogue:
This organization had a sister organization just across an alley literally a 3 minute walk
away. The sister organization was a poster-child for a management by measurement culture.
The leader manager person in charge sincerely believed that, if only he could incorporate the
right measurements into his managers performance reviews, they would work together and do
the right things. You can guess the result, but might not guess that this management team
described themselves as dysfunctional. They tried to put in a morning market (as it was
actually mandated to have one something else that doesnt work, by the way). There were
some differences.
In the one that worked, top leaders showed up. They expected functional leaders to show up.
The people solving the problems showed up. The meeting was facilitated by the assembly
manager or the operations manager. After the meeting people stayed on the shop floor and
worked on problems. Calendars were blocked out (which worked because this was a calendar
driven culture) for shop floor problem solving. Over time the manufacturing engineers got to
know the assemblers pretty well.
In the one that didnt work, the meeting was facilitated conducted by a quality department
staffer. The manufacturing engineers had other priorities because they werent being
measured on solving problems. After the meeting, everyone went back to their desks and

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resumed what they had been doing.

There were a lot of other issues as well, but the bottom line is that problem solving took
hold as the way we do things in one organization, and was regarded as yet another task in
the other.
About 8 months into this, as they were trying, yet again, to get a kanban going, a group of
supervisors came across the alley to see what their neighbors were doing. What they saw was
not only the mechanics of moving cards and parts, but the process of managing problems. And
the result of managing problems was that they saw problems as pointing them to where they
needed to gain more understanding rather than problems as excuses. One of the supervisors
later came to me, visibly shaken, with the quote I now realize that these people work together
in a fundamentally different way. And that, in the end, was the result.
In the end? The organization in this story is still in business, still manufacturing things in a
high cost labor market. The other one was closed down and outsourced in 2005.
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Shortages - Part 3

Comments 5
1.

Sudharak wrote:
Very good posting. I had initiated morning meetings at about 35 locations on one
company where I worked. My experience was very similar to yours. Additional
advantage of such meetings was they brought out the leaders in various groups. People
learnt to communicate very well.

Posted 22 Jan 2009 at 6:39 am

2. Duke wrote:
Mark,

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Whats the key differences between the market meeting and a gemba walk? Maybe I
should ask what is the purpose of a gemba walk?
Duke
Posted 27 Jan 2009 at 1:16 pm
3. Mark wrote:
DING! We have a winner in the Inspire an entire post with a comment contest!
Walking The Gemba
Posted 28 Jan 2009 at 4:41 pm
4. Nicole wrote:
Mark,
Can you please give a more detailed explaination (pictures are always good too) of the
Problem solving strips? Sounds like and interesting approach.
Thank you,
Nicole
Posted 22 Feb 2010 at 11:33 am
5. Philip wrote:
pretty good way of creating leaders. Has worked for me in more than 5 years of Kaizen
implementation.
Posted 17 Mar 2015 at 5:49 am

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1. From act:ualise technology | Morning market in Lean manufacturing has certain
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[] this article is clearly specific to Lean in manufacturing processes what I find
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