How to Implement Daily Work Management System For Business Sustenance

We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence then, is not an act but a habit – Aristotle

There are two important roles of leaders in every organization. The first role is to run the day to day business smoothly and the second role is to work on strategic goals to achieve organization’s vision. The first role is called Daily Management or Nichijo Kanri and the second role is called Policy deployment or Hoshin Kanri.  Both originated from Japan and adapted across the world. 

These two roles can be related to Chinese Yin and Yang which explains the relationship between two opposite and complementing principles from which this world is made.  Like light and dark, fire and water etc…  The purpose of daily Management is to sustain the improvements or ensuring the routine works done as per the standards already established and keep improving; whereas Policy deployment focuses on Break-through improvements or strategic objectives.  In other words Daily Management is focusing on short term and Policy deployment on long term.  They complement each other and we cannot ignore either of them.  Lack of Daily Management causes firefighting and Lack of Policy deployment causes stagnant business growth.

Another way of defining these two roles is Daily Management is running of SDCA (Standardise-Do- Check-Act) Cycle and Policy deployment is running of PDCA (Plan-Do –Check-Act) cycle 

Related Article– How to create an effective Lean Daily Work Management System

Relationship between PDCA and SDCA cycles

From our decades of experience in implementing both the concepts, we have seen three types of organizations

1. Organisations implemented both the concepts with its true spirit and successful 
2. Organizations partially implemented these concepts and able to reap certain benefits
3. Organizations superficially implemented these concepts and failed

The focus of this article is on Daily Management. Because it is the pre-requisite for Policy Deployment.

For details on Policy deployment please refer to Our Blogs

To begin with let us understand the definition of Daily Management.

“Daily Management (also called as Lean Daily Management, Daily Work Management) is the system that provides the ability to manage departments, functions, and processes, wherein processes are defined, standardized, controlled, and improved by the process owners. The important aspect is that the management should be done on a day-to-day basis”

According to Mike Rother, the author of TOYOTA KATA,

“Everything deteriorates over time; there is no stable condition that can be maintained. The only solution is to improve constantly” – he relates this to the second Law of thermodynamics.

The Ingredients of Daily Management System

The reason why many organizations failed to implement Daily Management systems is, they either not understand the concept completely or tried to implement the concepts in bits and pieces.

Daily management system is compared to a giant elephant and its components are shown as parts of the elephant’s body.  In fact the list is so big that we have not added other ingredients like 5S, Visual Management, ISO, SPC etc… These components need to be implemented in a concerted way to get maximum benefits from Daily Management Systems. Each component of daily management will be explained in detail in the subsequent parts of this article.

7 questions to all functions

These questions are related to daily management implementation

1. Do you know your Dept Mission, Goals, KPIs and established Key processes to achieve Mission. ( there should be clear linkage between organization Vision , Mission, Goals and Dept Goals)
2. Is organization structure available and roles and responsibilities of each position is clearly defined. Resources like competent team members and infrastructure are available?
3. Is Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) available to implement each process effectively and efficiently? 
4. Is everyone in the dept knows about their Job Description, SOP, Goals , KPIs, abnormal conditions and response mechanism
5. Do you established the frequency and monitor the same? – Dash Boards / SPC Charts 
6. Do you take actions when you are not meeting targets (abnormal conditions)  
7. Are you working on continual improvements

If the answer is NO to any of the questions, the leaders should act and ensure the gap is addressed.

Once the Daily Management systems are established, the gemba walks, Reviews, audits should happen on time to ensure the compliance.  We should remember one of the key principles of Daily Management

“Time for everything and everything in its time”