Sunday, November 11, 2012

TBP vs Systems Thinking

Toyota's famous problem solving technique is called the TBP, or Toyota Business Practice.  It encompasses several very practical and exhaustive steps to solve problems.  The principles behind it are very similar to the McKinsey's method (MECE).  One thing to note is: You can tell from the name that ultimately, the goal is to improve the business.

The key to TBP is step2 of the process: breaking down the problem.  Without clearly understanding the characteristics of your problem, the process will lead you to the wrong path.  After the nature of the problem and its Point of Occurrence have been identified, step4, the Root Cause Analysis (the "Whys?") will help determine the real reason causing your problem, and then step5 of Developing the countermeasures will help eliminate the root cause.

As you can see, the principle of TBP is to try to discover the real cause-and-effect relationship between the problem (effect) and root cause (cause).  In TBP, there is the belief that there is always a cause inducing an effect. 

I have to admit I am a fond admirer of this problem solving technique.  Since I've started applying it daily at work and at home, I've found that it has really provided me a very clean framework to deal with problems I encounter.  The key I found is that it forces me to not jump to fixing a problem before really understand the nature of the problem.  In addition, it has provided a very structured, concise, and easy-to-follow way of explaining my ideas to people.  

My admiration to TBP grows as I continue to be an Advisor to various QC Circle groups in the company.

However, recently, I've had several instances when I started to feel some uneasiness of the results I get from using TBP.  For example, we were troubleshooting a problem related to an oven, and found that the wear and tear from normal usage of a very long chain is the root cause of the jamming problem we were seeing.  The countermeasure developed was to replaced this chain on a regular interval.  This has eliminated the problem since.  However, 2 months later, when the department budget was reviewed, we were stunned at how much we were over-budgeted.  

Two things I've observed from this case: 1) although chain wear (cause) has been addressed to fix the jamming problem (effect),  however, the countermeasure of replacing the chain has become ANOTHER cause that has created ANOTHER effect: over-budget! 2) we did not see this actual effect immediately, i.e. there is a DELAY in the effect!

This prompted me to consider whether there is actually some limitations to TBP.  And immediately, the 2 observations above triggered me think whether Systems Thinking is a better problem solving technique than TBP, when the problem is more complex.  At least, should we be using Systems Thinking at the end of a TBP process, so that we do not get too detailed into one specific aspect of the whole problem, without zooming out to examine how a countermeasure could have an effect on the overall bigger picture of the problem?  I need to think about this more deeply!